Rewriting...

I've realised one of the things that gets me going is finding a historical story and wishing it had turned out differently.

That's one reason my Wife of Bath found her sixth husband. I just loved her and wanted her to go on and find the right man after five who so obviously weren't.

Now, I'm working on an interesting menage. I know quite a lot about Horace Walpole; I used to eat many of my meals in front of a picture of him, aged about eighteen, a dewy-eyed, fresh-faced, intelligent looking boy in a light blue velvet coat. (If memory is accurate, which sometimes it isn't, quite.) I've read many of his letters - vivacious, gossipy, well observed (he was probably the first real art historian in England, and one of the prime movers behind the rise of the Gothick).

Now, Horace went off on the Grand Tour, with his friend Thomas Gray. (Yes, that Gray - Elegy in a Country Churchyard.) Both of them are historical figures who might have been gay; then again, they may just not have been keen on the expense and hassle of eighteenth-century marriage (and Gray, as an academic, would have quite likely have been unable to marry anyway). Something happened in Florence. Maybe they found the social distance between them had become unbridgeable - Walpole was the Prime Minister's son, Gray came from much more humble roots. Maybe Walpole was partying too much and Gray couldn't find enough antiquities and romantic ruins. Or maybe - and I do actually think this may well have been the case - maybe the two lovers had a falling out...

Nothing can be proved. So much for history. But imagine, if you will, two boys of nineteen or so, off on the Grand Tour. Innocents abroad. Like so many English boys of the time, they run a little wild - they visit courtesans in Venice, as well as looking at the Titians and Tintorettos; they visit the Forum in Rome, but they also marvel at the flashers of the Via Appia (I'm sure that tradition must go back a couple of centuries at least!) and find some interesting 'private salons'... And then in Florence, things come to a head when Horace finds a girl ... and Gray realises he's jealous.

Now I know I've transgressed the boundaries of history here. I'm going to have to rename one of my characters, and I'm going to have to give them slightly different backgrounds. But I'm going to make Horace and Gray have a happy ending; because I always wanted them to live happily ever after.

Now, what was the other interesting little snippet of history I've read in the last week or so? Oh yes - Peter the Great and Menshikov. Peter appears to have been - to pinch a word from Russell T Davies - 'omnisexual'; he certainly had some interesting enthusiasms and friendships, falling in love with a Lithuanian peasant and later making her his empress. Several biographers note, of rumours that Peter had an affair with Menshikov, that though Peter wasn't obviously gay, he wasn't one to deny himself any experience that might be interesting or pleasurable. And Menshikov was regularly allowed to get away with murder - well, with fairly extensive corruption and some innovative approaches to taxation - that other crown servants weren't. So I wonder... perhaps there's the germ of a plot there, too?