Back in 2016, I wrote a post about Alfonso XI and his lady love, Leonor de Guzmán. The consequences of this liaison were to be painful for the people of Castile, resulting in over a decade of civil war, but when Alfonso first met Leonor he was around seventeen, she a year or so older. Neither of them were probably thinking beyond a flare of attraction; after all, Alfonso was a king required to marry dynastically, and Leonor might be gorgeous, witty, high-born and rich, but he needed more in a wife. Which is why he married Maria of Portugal.
But Alfonso just couldn’t forget Leonor. He needed her, loved her. And so Leonor became the beloved mistress while Maria became the spurned wife.
The post I wrote stayed with me. Here was a very juicy story, and I wanted to tell it. So, since 2016, I have been working on the story of Alfonso, Leonor and Maria, but it has been a tortuous journey—especially because of my POV challenges.
POV – point of view – characters are the drivers of the story. They offer the subjective perspectives on the unfolding narrative, and a smart writer ensures the POV characters see things from different perspectives. In romance, there is often a he and she POV character, to ensure the reader experiences both sides of the love story.
In my case, I started writing with Alfonso and Leonor as POV characters. 12 000 words in, I realised this wouldn’t work. Not that they saw eye to eye on everything, but Alfonso and Leonor were essentially on the same side. Then I tried using Leonor and Maria as my POV characters, but it made me lose the overall historical context. Gah! I left Alfonso, Leonor and Maria to stew and wrote other stuff instead, but all the time, they were in the back of my head.
Some years ago, I sat down in front of my laptop and wrote :
The first time Alma saw Doña Leonor de Guzmán, the woman was half-naked and screaming invectives to the high heavens
“Normal,” Cesaria, Alma’s mother, said. “It hurts to give birth.”
Alma stared at the woman squirming on the bed and decided there and then to never, ever have any children.
And just like that, I had a new POV character that came with the added benefit of being invented and very observant. After eight years of wrestling with the story, the pieces began fitting together, with the equally invented Rodrigo becoming as close an observer to the king as Alma was of Leonor.
In Queen of Shadows, both Leonor and Maria get a voice—but it is Alma and Rodrigo that carry the story, all the way from that December day in 1332 to an August day in 1351.
“It’s not fair,” Don Alfonso grumbles. “Surely I should have had a voice in my own story?”
I pat his hand (figuratively: the man is dead since like seven hundred years!) “It still gets told,” I say. And what a messy story it is…
Anna Belfrage
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