Seeking Ferret

The single most interesting thing I read while researching for this story was a book created to collate the memories of the congregants and friends of an early 18th century New Orleans Protestant preacher who had recently died. The account of him leaving New Orleans proper for the countryside for a whole summer to avoid a yellow fever epidemic (and then the epidemic hitting the countryside too, of course, so that he ended up right near where most of the people who died were anyway) certainly influenced my plotting. It was incredible how dangerous New Orleans was back then in ways we can barely comprehend because science has done such a good job of mitigating the dangers.