‘Yes, Pa, of course I will,’ I whispered, as he stroked my hair just as he used to when I was sick as a little girl. I closed my eyes once more, knowing that I was safe in his arms.
When I woke up again, I felt someone lifting me from the ground. I searched around for Pa, but all I saw above me was Cal’s panicked features as he struggled to carry me to safety. As I turned my head back towards the cluster of trees, I saw the prone body of a white stag, blood-red drops spattering the snow around him.
And I knew he had gone.
Author’s note
The joy of writing the Seven Sisters series is that each sister – and subsequently their journey – is totally different from the last. And this has never been more apparent than when I finished Star’s story and began to think about CeCe’s story. I realised that I was as fearful about embarking on it as she is. I too was reticent about travelling to Australia – one of the only large land masses in the world I had never visited, mainly due to its infamous huge and dangerous spiders. However, just like CeCe and her other sisters, I had to overcome my fears, so I got on that plane and traversed Australia to find the research detail I needed. And in the process, fell in love with this incredible, complex country. Especially the ‘Never Never’ – the vast area around Alice Springs, colloquially known as ‘The Alice’ – which, to my utter delight, I discovered is the High Temple of The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades myths and legends. Learning not only about the beauty, but also the pure practicality, of a belief system and culture that kept the indigenous Aboriginal population alive for over fifty thousand years in the unforgiving landscape was perhaps the most humbling moment of my many research journeys across the globe.
I am a fiction novelist, but I take the background research to my novels as seriously as any historian, because history – and the effect it has on the lives of not only my sisters, but us in the present too – is my passion. Both the stories of the sinking of the Koombana and the Roseate Pearl are taken from historical accounts, although the last sighting of the pearl was on the fated Koombana’s last journey up the coast to Broome and I added a possible fictional outcome from there.
Even though every detail in the books is checked and triple-checked, what I have come to understand is that every account of an historical event is subjective, simply because every written or spoken view is a human one. Therefore, any mistakes in my interpretation of the facts in The Pearl Sister are totally my own.
Q & A with Lucinda Riley
1. How does the fourth sister, CeCe, relate to her mythological counterpart?
Celaeno’s mythological story and personality, as CeCe points out herself, is the least well-documented of all the Seven Sisters. So I took the bones of CeCe’s legend, then set her free to create her own destiny in Australia – not only the land of new possibilities but, ironically, the high temple of The Seven Sisters legends themselves, where the girls are revered in Aboriginal culture.
2. CeCe is in many ways the polar opposite to her sister Star – how did you find her voice?
To begin with, CeCe was definitely the sister I was most nervous about writing. I was worried that readers would have a negative view of her before they came to read The Pearl Sister, as she seems controlling and abrupt. In The Shadow Sister we see the breakdown of Star and CeCe’s relationship from Star’s perspective. But as CeCe points out, there are always two sides to every story and The Pearl Sister is hers. Writing CeCe was a total revelation. She has such a unique and interesting perspective on life. She’s always calling herself a ‘dunce’, but that’s because she struggled at school due to her dyslexia. In reality CeCe is seriously bright, funny, talented and very, very real. When we meet her, she is so vulnerable and full of self-doubt and I don’t think I have ever felt as protective about a character as I feel about CeCe.
3. What drew you to write about Australia?
Just like CeCe, it was the only place I had never visited before, perhaps for the same subconscious reason – I too hate spiders! Yet when I arrived, I was absolutely captivated by the landscape, especially the Never Never area around Alice Springs, the history and the people. In The Pearl Sister I have only written about a tiny portion of this vast and incredible continent. There is so much more to discover and I hope to visit again.
4. You have written about Thailand before in Hothouse Flower. How did you feel about revisiting it in The Pearl Sister?
Thailand is one of my favourite places in the world, and I visit every year with my family. Our favourite place is Phra Nang Beach and I was walking along the shore early one morning when I came up with the character of Ace and why he is hiding out on the beach. People travel to this magical peninsula to ‘find themselves’ and it also seemed apt for CeCe to begin her journey there whilst she gathers the courage to continue to Australia. I stayed on in Thailand to write the first draft of The Pearl Sister, with a one-legged mynah bird called Colin for company!
5. How did you approach the research for this book?
The research was like the country of Australia itself – vast! I always begin by reading everything that I can get my hands on, and whilst I was in Australia I found a number of out-of-print historical books, which provided the detail I needed on the pearling industry in Broome. Sadly, Aboriginal history has largely been documented by white men, from their subjective view rather than the Aboriginal people themselves. Their culture has always been passed down to the next generation by word of mouth. Luckily, I was able to find several online resources, such as a community website of the Yawuru people (whom I write about in Broome) which contained a dictionary of their language and information on their traditions and their Dreamtime stories.
The sinking of the Koombana was one of the greatest maritime disasters in Australia’s history. I then discovered that whenever the Koombana or Broome are mentioned in historical texts, the Roseate Pearl makes a cameo appearance. The rumours of its curse were written down in Forty Fathoms Deep, a book published in 1937 about pearl divers in Broome. There are many different legends surrounding the pearl, perhaps the most well-known is this one: it was found by a white pearling master, but stolen by a diver. Two Chinese burglars then stole the pearl and it was sold on to a man who then died of a heart attack. The next owner committed suicide when it was stolen from him, and in 1905, a pearl trader was murdered over it. Finally Abraham De Vahl Davis, a wealthy pearl dealer, is thought to have purchased it for ￡20,000 before boarding the Koombana, and that is the last we heard about it. Unless of course, it wasn’t on the ship at all . . .