A Letter to the Reader
Since Jane fell in love and married Dr. Carey McKinnon, the surgeon she had met when they were undergraduate students, she has wanted to have a baby.
In spite of her unusual courage, intelligence, and willingness to make sacrifices, she wishes for the same things many other women want—a stable, secure life with her husband and a family.
The way I kept Jane at work was to deny her wish.
Jane and Carey were afflicted with the frustration and heartbreak of unexplained infertility.
They endured years of tests and procedures, and shared some times of hope, always followed by disappointment.
Eventually Jane accepted the overwhelming evidence that the baby would never come.
As her life went on and she saved more people, her adversaries became more numerous and more frightening.
The worst and most powerful of them had realized that the most valuable prize was Jane herself.
She knew where her many runners were living, who they were now, and who might pay well to know, too.
The lives of those runners depended on Jane’s promise that she would die rather than reveal to anyone how to find them.
To keep her promise from being a lie, she carried with her an extract of the poison water hemlock plant, her Seneca ancestors’ preferred method of suicide.
Jane Whitefield books only happen when two conditions are met. First, I begin to miss her and wonder what she would be doing right now, and second, I realize that I’ve learned something about her that the reader doesn’t know yet.
At the end of the ninth book, I had left Jane realizing she was pregnant.
That book was published four years ago, surely a world-record for human pregnancies.
It was time to make a decision. I wanted to give her what she’d wanted for so long, but I also felt that Jane would not be the sort of parent who would put a child in jeopardy or risk leaving a baby motherless.
As I was pondering the issue, I remembered something we all learn from living.
We are only in charge of what we do, not what happens to us.
Most often, people don’t go out to find trouble.
Trouble finds us. What does a mother do when she and her family are in mortal danger?
Whatever she has to, whatever she can. If you’d like to know what Jane can do, I hope you’ll read The Tree of Light and Flowers.
Sincerely,
Thomas Perry