Ottawa author Kate Heartfield, whose 2026 novels are Mercutio and The Swordmaster.
Photo credit: Robert de Wit
On the guest list for the Capulets’ party in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare names a brother of Mercutio whom audiences never meet. Valentine is invited to the feast, but he has no lines and takes no part in the events that follow. Even after Mercutio is killed, the brother receives no further mention. For Ottawa novelist Kate Heartfield, this fleeting reference was precisely the sort of detail worth pursuing.
“What makes Valentine interesting to me is his half-existence, as a character, so I leaned into that in the book,” Heartfield says in an interview. In Mercutio, published in Canada by HarperVoyager in August, she gives Shakespeare’s quick-witted, doomed friend a history that reaches back before his friendship with Romeo. Her new novel, The Swordmaster, takes her into the France of Catherine de’ Medici and the fiction of Alexandre Dumas, with a young swordswoman confronting an aristocracy populated by vampires. Its Canadian paperback is scheduled for November 3, following printing delays, although the ebook and audiobook are already available.
Mercutio had been in Heartfield’s imagination for decades. She recalls being fascinated as a child by John McEnery’s performance in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film of Romeo and Juliet, especially his interpretation of Mercutio’s relationship with Tybalt. By 2015, she was publicly talking about wanting to write the character. A December 2016 email she sent to herself contained three words: “Mercutio origin story”.
“Most of my novels brew for many years before I write them,” she says. Her habit of emailing herself possible book ideas provides a record of how the project developed. In March 2022, another note introduced the battle and Dante Alighieri, after she encountered a reference in The Divine Comedy to the Montecchi and Cappelletti, names associated with the families that later became the Montagues and Capulets.
In the sixth canto of Purgatorio, Dante names the Montecchi and Cappelletti amid references to rival Italian factions. Heartfield places her imagined Mercutio in the turbulent Italy of the late thirteenth century, when the Battle of Campaldino was fought in 1289. In her novel, he meets Dante on a battlefield, and their actions open a passage between the human world and Faerie. The story gives Shakespeare’s character a history rooted in the political and literary world of an earlier Italy.
Her attention to small details extends beyond Shakespeare. In stories of Romeo and Juliet that preceded the play, including versions by Luigi da Porto and Arthur Brooke, Mercutio’s hands are unnaturally cold. In Brooke’s poem, his cold touch helps establish a contrast with Romeo when Juliet encounters the two men. Shakespeare retained Mercutio but omitted the detail; Heartfield found its unexplained oddity useful for a novel in which the supernatural is present from the beginning. “I’m often looking for the things that feel like loose ends, or choices that lead to questions,” she says.
Heartfield was equally interested in what Mercutio’s behaviour suggests about his relationships. He jokes aggressively, speaks with considerable freedom and challenges Tybalt after Romeo refuses to fight, a confrontation that ends with Mercutio’s death. Romeo has not taken him into his confidence about Juliet, and Mercutio belongs fully to neither of the feuding households. Heartfield sees fierce affection and estrangement existing together in him.
“I wanted to explore the homosocial relationships in the play and what it says about male friendship,” she says. She cites the queer-coded interpretation of Mercutio in Harold Perrineau’s performance in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film, as well as McEnery’s portrayal of the character’s respect and affection for Tybalt in the earlier production. Those readings informed her interest in Mercutio’s love for Romeo, Benvolio and his wider circle of friends. Her novel offers possible reasons for his attachments and estrangement while leaving room for the range of interpretations the play has invited.
Physical confrontation presents another challenge. Heartfield practises historical swordplay when she can, though she describes herself as a beginner and says she cannot always tell how that experience affects her writing. “I am not a very good visualizer, so fight scenes are always a challenge for me,” she says. To work out movement, she has sometimes had her child act out scenes with her.
That interest carried into The Swordmaster through Henri de Sainct Didier, a French fencing master whose treatise on the single sword was published in 1573. The historical manual describes guards, steps and exchanges through illustrated instructions. Heartfield has made Sainct Didier a character in the novel and included references to his teaching. She suspects some of the training she describes has been coloured by her own experience trying to learn the techniques.
The Swordmaster follows Françoise de Montesquiou d’Artagnan, a young noblewoman whose prolonged supernatural sleep leaves her presumed dead and buried. She escapes, heads to Paris and discovers the Benandanti, people who enter a spirit realm through dreams, while vampires exercise power in the waking world. The novel is the second instalment of the Vampires of Dumas project, following Emma Newman’s The Vengeance. The books share a supernatural framework but follow separate protagonists in different periods and can be read independently.
Solaris’s editorial team commissioned The Swordmaster and established broad guidelines for its supernatural world. When Profile Books acquired Solaris from Rebellion in 2026, The Swordmaster remained with Rebellion, although, as Heartfield explained in October, its editorial team did not. She had considerable freedom to develop her own characters within the shared rules for vampires and their world.
For the Benandanti, Heartfield turned to historian Carlo Ginzburg’s The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Drawing on Inquisition records, Ginzburg examined people in the Friuli region of northeastern Italy who believed their spirits left their sleeping bodies to fight on behalf of crops and communities. Heartfield adapts those accounts of nocturnal spiritual battles for Françoise’s encounters in the supernatural world of The Swordmaster.
Françoise’s surname creates a further encounter between literature and history. Dumas’s d’Artagnan was loosely inspired by a historical musketeer, and Heartfield was intrigued by his mother, Françoise. The dates do not comfortably allow that woman to be young in the era of Catherine de’ Medici. Heartfield found the discrepancy inviting in a novel where supernatural events can interfere with ordinary chronology.
She also took an apparently small detail from The Three Musketeers: d’Artagnan possesses a healing balm associated with his mother. That reference gave her a link to the nature-based witchcraft she was developing for Françoise. Heartfield had no difficulty imagining a young woman leaving home, learning to fight and making her way into the society of sixteenth-century Paris. She points to Milady de Winter in Dumas’s fiction and, from later French history, the swordswoman Julie d’Aubigny and women drawn into the seventeenth-century Affair of the Poisons, some of whom claimed magical abilities that helped them gain access to the nobility.
Her literary model also posed a choice that historical research alone could not resolve. Dumas frequently rearranged or embellished the past to serve his novels. Heartfield had to decide whether to follow modern accounts of sixteenth-century France or preserve the version of that world readers encounter in his work. She decided to treat Dumas as her fictional canon when his version conflicted with history. The choice affects her Catherine de’ Medici in particular: “If I were writing about the historical Catherine de’ Medici as I see her, it would have been a very different book.”
Dumas’s Queen Catherine, Heartfield says, is “a very delicious villain.” She chose that fictional Catherine as her model for the novel, drawing on Dumas’s stories about the Valois court rather than attempting a portrayal based entirely on historical accounts of the queen. The distinction gave her a recognizable figure from the novelist’s world to place among the political intrigue and supernatural threats of her own story.
As The Swordmaster developed, Heartfield began to see a theme connecting its monsters to the society in which they operate. She had placed vampires near political power during the French Wars of Religion, including the period of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572. Their appetites provided a way to write about wealth, coercion and the disproportionate suffering of people outside ruling families.
“I wasn’t aware of this thematic thread until I was partway through the draft,” she says. Vampirism became a means of examining “the ways in which the rich almost literally fed off the blood of the poor.” She links the French Wars of Religion to rivalries among powerful families whose decisions could encourage bloodshed or bring a temporary truce. Heartfield points to the royal wedding between Catholic and Protestant families that preceded the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre as an occasion when a possible reconciliation gave way to violence.
Heartfield sees the same dynamic in Verona, where the Montagues and Capulets perpetuate a feud that draws in friends, servants and people around them. Mercutio belongs to neither family, yet he dies in their conflict. In The Swordmaster, Heartfield makes the appetite of the ruling class literal through vampires operating near the royal court. She says she recognized the connection as she was writing the second book, long after the idea of giving Mercutio a history of his own had first occurred to her.
