She Walks in Darkness (15 page)

Once Prince Mino said to Floriano, “As a child you brought laughter between these old walls that have known too little laughter.” Maybe we have lessened even his darkness a little, lessening theirs. Between those walls our first child was conceived, Richard’s son and mine. Soon he will be fathering his own children; all that terror was long ago.

I have done enough thinking, enough remembering. It is still my time to live.

In one of the many non-fiction books written about the “Mysterious Etruscans,” I found mention of a villa on top of a cliff into which ancient tombs had been built. Hence this book, which is fiction.

The goddess Mania is, if anything, even more mysterious than her own Etruscans. But we do know that human sacrifice was offered to her, and that Mantua, Dante’s birthplace, was named for her consort Mantus, Lord of the Underworld. Underground temples did exist, and ancient writers, notably Pausanias, tell of the queer customs of chthonian sanctuaries, such as their being opened only once a year, entered only by dream-summoned worshippers, etc. And where could such weird rites have been more at home than among the Etruscans?

“The Island of Refuge” is a genuine tradition. For Prince Mino’s theories, I take no responsibility, but
some scholars have connected the Etruscans with both Atlantis and the American Indians. Hardly anybody agrees with them, but it would be nice to have some explanation for the peculiar fact that the Maya calendar dates back to a time thousands of years before any Maya cities were built.

—Evangeline Walton

At the time of her death in 1996 at age eighty-eight, Evangeline Walton’s papers were found in great disorder. Those who have worked on the sorting and organizing of the archive—Walton’s literary heir, Debra L. Hammond; her mother, Louise Hammond; and I—have been delighted by the various finds we have made, including unpublished short stories, plays, and novels. These manuscripts date from the 1920s through the early 1990s. Although Walton frequently had difficult relations with publishers, and although she was often diffident about offering her work for publication, she published seven novels during her lifetime.

According to a letter Walton wrote in 1974,
She Walks in Darkness
(originally titled
She Who Goes Winged
) was written in the 1960s, subsequent to some of her worst experiences with a publisher. In 1956, Thomas Bouregy of the New York firm Bouregy & Curl had severely edited her novel of the conflict between the Norsemen and the English in the early eleventh century,
Dark Runs the Road
, cutting pages and sections while rewriting it, shortening it, and retitling it
The Cross and the Sword
—all of which was done against the author’s wishes. The contract Walton had signed required that she offer Bouregy & Curl her next completed novel, and after the rude treatment she had received from Bouregy personally, she simply held onto this next completed manuscript and didn’t offer it anywhere.

Then, in 1970, her first published novel,
The Virgin and the Swine
(1936), based on the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion, was rediscovered and republished as
The Island of the Mighty
in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. Betty Ballantine and Lin Carter (the editorial consultant for the series) were happy to learn that Walton had existing versions of other branches of the Mabinogion, and Walton felt free to publish them with Ballantine because they had originally been written long before her contract with Bouregy. These three books include
The Children of Llyr
(1971),
The Song of Rhiannon
(1972), and
Prince of Annwn
(1974).

After submitting the final manuscript of
Prince of Annwn
, Walton turned her attention back to
She Walks in Darkness
, and with the assistance of a lawyer, she cleared away her contractual obligation to Bouregy. In the meantime, Ballantine Books had been sold and the Adult Fantasy series closed down. Walton submitted the manuscript to her new literary agent, who told her that the market for Gothic had dried up, so Walton stored the manuscript in her files and returned to her trilogy of novels about Theseus, which she had first written in the mid-1940s and rewritten in the mid-1950s but set aside when Mary Renault’s
The King Must Die
became a bestseller in 1958. Walton managed to rewrite and publish the first Theseus novel,
The Sword Is Forged
, in 1983, and she worked on revising the two subsequent novels, but they remained unpublished at her death.

In an interview in September 1985, Walton noted: “I had a Gothic novel ready just when the Gothic craze expired, and I’d like to get that out someday. And there’s a children’s story I once wrote for a young cousin,
The Forest That Would Not Be Cut Down
. That’s the only title that expresses it, and yet it’s too long to be used, I’m afraid. This forest has a magical ability to protect itself which, unfortunately, real forests lack.”

It is good that
She Walks in Darkness
is finally seeing publication, and we hope that further manuscripts from her archive may see print in the future.

—Douglas A. Anderson