I felt the need to write Kate’s Letter to chase a single dangerous possibility: that in a life warped by rumour and accusation, one single tale might prove true, and that lone truth could unmake everything that came before it.
It is a meditation on chance and consequence, on how memory and love survive beneath fear, and on whether a second path might exist where history seemed already sealed.
At the same time, it is a deliberate turning aside from another narrative thread, a reclaiming of voice and direction, allowing the lost truth to breathe on its own terms again, shaped not by what was once told, but by what might yet be revealed if one dares to ask, what if?
In doing so, Kate’s Letter stands beside my novels When Secrets Bloom and Beneath the Snow (the first two in Blood of Kings, Heart of Shadows historical fiction series), by extending their quiet excavation of the heart. Of those unseen chambers where grief, loyalty, but also forbidden love take root.
At the same time, it reaches into the silences left by history — especially in the life of Vlad III Dracula. Chronicles record deeds in stark, often blood-dark lines — perhaps truth, perhaps the victor’s version of it. My stories dare to imagine the truthful breath between them: those missing years, those private reckonings of the man beneath the legend.
Together, my books and stories seek not to absolve or condemn, but to restore depth to a figure flattened by myth and therefore removed from reality, and to ask whether - beneath the stain of blood and gossiped history - something human still endures—and might yet be remembered
What if?
read a snippet from
Kate's Letter by Patricia Furstenberg
Transylvania, Kingdom of
Hungary, 1478
One letter, sealed in dragon’s wax.
In the winter-bitten heart of
Transylvania, where the Carpathians brood over every village and old faiths
walk beside the cross, a young woman named Kate returns to the land that once
condemned her. She carries little - only a healer’s hands, a coat drenched in
memory, and a courage cracked thin by loss. But when a beggar woman unearths a
letter, one sealed with the mark of a prince long thought dead, the past stirs
like a creature waking from beneath snow. Bargains tighten, old ghosts rise
from earth and oath alike, and a thread of hope dares bloom. What follows is
the reckoning of a woman who once walked beside a man the world would name
monster, and loved him too quietly to admit.
Kate held out the coat with both hands
– courage she could no longer deny herself.
“Take this,” she
said. “Please. Here.” She settled it around the old woman’s shoulders, the
weight of it heavy as confession. “It remembers how to be warm.”
About Patricia:
Patricia Furstenberg is a Romanian-born, South Africa-based author of character-driven historical fiction set in medieval Eastern Europe. Her latest novel, When Secrets Bloom, part of the Blood of Kings, Heart of Shadows saga, explores the turbulent world of Vlad the Impaler, weaving meticulous research with moral complexity, faith, and the quiet resilience of women navigating power and peril. Her short stories, poetry, and travel features have appeared in anthologies and online publications. Patricia blogs about overlooked corners of history and cultural heritage on her
"One Morning in Provence by Lorna Fergusson unfolds not as a single journey, but as a series of moments — glimpses, really — where lives tilt, however slightly, toward revelation. Her Provence is not merely a setting but a quiet conspirator..." Patricia Ferstenburg
Lorna Fergusson is an award-winning short story writer and novelist. Founder of Fictionfire Literary Consultancy, she is an experienced editor, speaker and writing coach, and has taught on various Oxford University writing programmes for over twenty years. Her latest book is ‘One Morning in Provence’, a collection of short stories set in France. She has won an Ian St James Award and the Historical Novel Society’s Short Story Award, as well as being shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, Pan Macmillan’s Write Now Prize for children’s fiction, the Mogford Prize (twice) and the Historical Novel Society’s First Chapters prize.
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