A Novel Conversation with Kimberley Jordan Reeman and Colonel the Honourable Aeneas Bancroft

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To be a little different from the usual 
'meet the author' 

let's meet a 
character...

A slight deviation from the usual format for Novel Conversations. Kimberley found herself talking to her character and wrote the entire interview down. As authors we are well aware that sometimes characters like to do things their way ...

Kimberley Jordan Reeman
in conversation with

COLONEL THE HONOURABLE AENEAS BANCROFT

from

Colonel Bancroft:  Madam.

KJR: Thank you for accepting my invitation.

Bancroft: It is very much my pleasure.

KJR: Would you care to introduce yourself?

Bancroft: My name is Aeneas Bancroft, and I am a supporting player in Coronach.  To you it is a novel about the ʼ45 and its aftermath. For us, it is the record of our lives.  At the time of which we speak I was lieutenant-colonel of the 4^th Regiment of Foot, also known as The King’s Own. I was thirty-eight years old then; I am homosexual; and I was addicted to opium.

KJR: How did you become an addict?

Bancroft: My right hand was severed at Culloden. I took opium for the pain. It had other effects, which I enjoyed.

KJR: You said in one of our previous conversations that you had “known many drugs”, promiscuity among them. And religion.

Bancroft: Yes.

Bancroft's commission

 KJR: You flirted with Roman Catholicism in Venice.

 Bancroft: I was not ‘flirting’. I would have committed myself to it, had not life intervened.

KJR: You would have given up your commission.

Bancroft: Yes. One was not, in my time, permitted to hold a commission in His Majesty’s forces if one was a Roman Catholic.

KJR: What would you have done with your life?

Bancroft: Lived with my lover. In peace, I hoped. It was not allowed to happen.

KJR: This is another story.

Bancroft:Yes. You intend to tell it some time. But not yet.

KJR: I have other stories to write first. But as you trusted me with yours, I do intend to write it. Its tragedy lies at the very heart of who you are.

 BancroftYes.

KJR: I am required to ask you: are you a ‘goodie’ or a ‘baddie’ in my novel?

Bancroft: I am a catalyst. Without me, it would not have happened. We were there, we were required to carry out orders, we behaved as we behaved because of who we were, and because of what the past had made us, and certain events were set in train which had devastating consequences.  I would not have had that happen for the world.

KJR: You speak of Mordaunt.

Bancroft: Yes.

KJR: How could you allow yourself to fall in love with a straight man?

Bancroft: Why did you fall in love with a married man? A man nearly thirty years older than yourself? When the odds were so impossibly against you? It was a coup de foudre. I can’t explain it. It simply happened, and I was powerless against it.

KJR: But you knew it was impossible. You must have known Mordaunt wasn’t gay.

Bancroft: I knew only that I would have given him my very soul. As for one’s sexuality, in my time, my dear, you must understand that one could never be known for what one was. Sodomy was punishable by death in the armed forces, at least in theory. Three homosexual men were hanged in London in 1732. You cannot imagine the effect on us. The fear of discovery. The blackmail. The secrecy. It was a measure of my trust in Mordaunt that I ‘came out’ to him, as you call it. And I could not have done otherwise. I loved the man.

KJR: You are a practising Anglican. How do you reconcile your sexuality with your faith?

Bancroft: I am as my God made me. He knows my heart, my mind, my soul, my mortal body. I have no secrets from Him. And I trust that He has no contempt for what He Himself created.

KJR: What happened in Glen Sian at the beginning of our story nearly destroyed you both. Can you tell us about it?

Bancroft: I can say only that we were professional soldiers, inured to war. I held my first commission at the age of eighteen: I had been at Oxford.  Mordaunt was commissioned at fifteen: his father was a general, he sent him straight to the army. Despite that... despite the way we are portrayed... we were not barbarians, we were not insensitive.  Mordaunt, particularly. His music... my God, the beauty... the divine gift in his hands. The  Austrian  war was a sewer: we were nothing but blood and bone and gristle. And then they sent us to Scotland. I was able to distance myself from it. He couldn’t. He drank too much, but he couldn’t detach himself, and his was always a harsher nature than mine, stricter,  far more moral, more honourable. I knew what was happening to him, his mind, his spirit, but I couldn’t reach him; I revolted him; he hated me. And when one sees the man one loves in such torment, such moral anguish, the instinct becomes desperate. He was on the very edge of the abyss. I thought I could save him. I broke him. I blame it on the opium. He was never the same. Nor was I.

KJR: If you lived in my time, would you be a soldier?

Bancroft: Yes, without a doubt. I live to serve my country, even if, in my own time, I was dishonoured in that service.

KJR: On a lighter note, if you were to give a dinner party, who would be your guests? They can be from your time or mine.

Colonel: Ah. I love parties. I should certainly ask Mordaunt. And the girl, Margaret, who meant so much to him. And her lover, the smuggler. I should like to meet him. And James Wolfe. Mordaunt always admired him.  And Lord Nelson. Wolfe was his hero. And you, my author. And your Douglas Reeman, because I should like to meet the man who was your soulmate, and who taught you to understand love. As I came to understand it in your book: love and loneliness, and what they do to the human spirit.

James Wolfe

Admiral Lord Nelson

KJR: Thank you for that, Aeneas.

Bancroft: Thank you, my dear, for giving me a voice. Although when I first came into your mind you were too young to understand what it was between Mordaunt and me. I fear I shocked you. But I thank you for your courage. I am not quite a villain: only a flawed human being. As we all are. And therein lies our tragedy, and our humanity, and, possibly, our redemption. 

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Kimberley Jordan Reeman was born in Toronto, graduating from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Arts (hons.) in English literature in 1976. She worked in Canadian radio and publishing before marrying the author Douglas Reeman (Alexander Kent) in 1985, and until his death in 2017 was his editor, muse and literary partner, while pursuing her own career as a novelist. She has always been a spinner of tales, telling stories before she could write, reading voraciously from childhood, and citing Shakespeare, Hardy, Winston Graham and the novels of Douglas Reeman and Alexander Kent as her most profound influences. From Graham, who became a friend, she learned to write conversation, to eavesdrop as the characters spoke; from the seafaring novels of Reeman and Kent, which she read years before meeting the author, she came to understand the experience of men at war.

It is not necessary to look further than the history of Canada, and Toronto itself, for the genesis of Coronach: a vast country explored, settled, and governed by Scots, and a city, incorporated in 1834, whose first mayor was the gadfly journalist and political agitator William Lyon Mackenzie, a rebel in his own right, and the grandson of Highlanders who had fought in the `45. The Vietnam War, also, burned into the Canadian consciousness the issues of collateral damage and the morality of war; and from this emerged one character, a soldier with a conscience. In unravelling the complexity of his story, Coronach was born.

https://douglasreeman.com 

(Kimberley and Douglas's website)

https://douglasreeman.com/onward/   (blog)

Coronach was reviewed by
Discovering Diamonds

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