The Robber Bride

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following for their help: my agents Phoebe Larmore and Vivienne Schuster; my editors Ellen Seligman, Nan A. Talese, and Liz Calder; David Kimmel, for helping with some of the historical details; Barbara Czarnecki, Judi Levita, Marly Rusoff Sarah Beale, and Claudia Hill-Norton; Joan Sheppard, Donya Peroff, and Sarah Cooper; Michael Bradley, Garry Foster, Kathy Minialoff; Gene Goldberg, and Alison Parker; Rose Tornato. Thanks also to Charles and Julie Woodsworth, to Dorris Heffron, and to John and Christine O’Keefle, for premises rendered.

John Keegan’s The Face of Battle and The Mask of Command were most useful for background, as were None Is Too Many by Irving Abella and Harold Troper and The War Against the Jews, by Lucy S. Dawidowicz; and also for specific battles and events, Richard Erdoes’s A.D. 1000 and The Unknown South of France by Henry and Margaret Reuss. The assassination of ballistics expert Gerald Bull is dealt with in Bull’s Eye, by James Adams, and in Wilderness of Mirrors, by Dale Grant.

The image of the body as a lampshade is courtesy Lenore Mendelson Atwood; the expression “brain snot” is courtesy E J.A. Gibson. The red-and-white footprints recall a story told to me by Earle Birney; the toboggan incident and the black-painted apartment from Graeme Gibson; the ghost as dry rice was suggested by an episode recounted by P K. Page; the notion of a flesh dress came from James Reaney’s poem “Doomsday, or the Red-Headed Woodpecker”; the tale of the heroic German aunt was suggested partly by Thomas Karl Maria Schwarz; and the professor who disallowed military essay topics for women from an anecdote related by Susan Crean.

Zenia is pronounced with a long e, as in seen; Charis with a hard c as in karma. The Teutones (second century B.C.) are distinct from the Teutons (tenth century A.D.).