Creating Nesta

A few reflections on how I developed the character of Nesta for The Siren’s Daughter, based on the life of Princess Nest of Deheubarth.

Starting with the silences in history

We know nothing about Princess Nest’s real personality. In the chronicles, her character, her likes and dislikes, and how she felt about the tumultuous events of her life, are all a blank. Nothing remains of her but one single, iconic, twelfth-century painting of Nest – in bed with the king of England, naked but for her crown, her golden hair spread over their shared pillow. Even this is more a stylised medieval representation than any pretence at accuracy.

Almost everything else about Nest - except her marriages, the names of some of her children, and the life stories of the men in her family - is lost to history.

So where did I start?

Royal blood, captivity and ghosts

Nest was brought up as a princess, but she suffered a devastating loss in her childhood when her kingdom fell, and she became a hostage overnight. She later rose to prominence as the mistress of the King, but as she got older, she was forced into marriages with various men of ever-decreasing status. This inspired me to have the Nesta in my novel be fixated with social hierarchy and her royal lineage – clinging to the memory of her glorious ancestors, dismissive and rude to her social inferiors.

Many of the important people in Nest’s life were dead by the time she was forty years old, when the novel is set. By 1126, she had already lost her parents; most of her childhood household; at least one of her brothers; and two of her husbands to war. So, I had an image of her haunted by ghosts– I imagined her walking around the castle with spectres at her shoulder (see Louis MacNeice’s poem The Taxis). When you are talking to Nesta, sometimes you get the sensation that she is in fact directing her remarks at someone invisible standing behind you.

Control, charm and suppressed rage

Nest spent many years as a captive, being married off to first one man, then another, with little control over her life. I therefore decided that the Nesta in my book would love things over which she could exercise power – making her obsessed with her hawks and hounds (wild beings, forced to submit to her will) and giving her an unusual relationship with one of her slaves.

I also imagined Nest as having passive aggressive traits. Nest would have been unable to openly express her feelings about the men to whom she was married. In the misogynistic Norman society of the twelfth century, she would even have been unable to speak in public without her husbands’ permission. In my novel, therefore, Nesta lives a life of little sarcastic barbs, smirks and raised eyebrows, feigned illnesses, being late, ‘accidentally’ causing offence, and sudden bouts of spitefulness which represent occasional overflows of an inner rage which would have had no safe outlet.

The only aspect of Nest which is preserved in the annals is, of course, her spectacular personal beauty. Being so beautiful, I decided to make Nesta extremely vain – as well as seductive, funny, and magnetically charismatic. Not ‘nice’ in the classic sense, but when Nesta decides to exercise her charm, mere mortals cannot look away.

Violence, trauma and divided loyalties

Princess Nest also lived a life marred by outbursts of brutal violence. In the book, Nesta is personally courageous and calm in a crisis, as well as comfortable with violence (and, at one point in the novel, quite capable of using it herself). I imagine that all the unresolved trauma would, however, have taken a heavy toll on her mental state– which is why Nesta suffers from night terrors, depressive periods, and odd habits like (in a reaction to her years of hunger) stealing and hiding food from the dinner table whenever she is drunk. One of the governing dynamics in Nesta’s relationship with Angharad is how much Angharad pities her.

One remarkable thing about Princess Nest was the fact that she was intimately related to both sides in the brutal conquest of Wales. At one point, she lived through a three-way battle between her brother (leading the rebels), her husband (attempting to suppress them) and her mother’s cousin who was also her past lover (representing the King, another ex-lover of hers). This fact has allowed me to inject layers of ambiguity into Nesta’s closest relationships. The Nesta of my novel hides her own thoughts whilst she flatters and ensnares those around her, constantly trying to plan contingencies and manipulate whoever she needs to help her survive, never sure which of her close relations is going to triumph or be killed at any given moment. She is good at saying the right thing; she understands how to appeal to men (and how to provoke and torture them).

A mysterious and unreliable narrator

Finally, and most importantly, there are far too many things that we do not know about Princess Nest. Historians have no idea what happened to Nest’s mother when Deheubarth was conquered – she simply vanishes from the record. Both the Prince of Powys and the Sheriff of Pembroke had sons of whom Nest was the alleged mother – but the truth of their parentage is shrouded by time. So, I decided to make the Nesta in my novel a mysterious figure. If I, despite my immense curiosity, cannot discover the missing facts about Princess Nest – well then, my readers cannot know either. In the book, Nesta is an unreliable narrator – she drops hints, but she also tells lies. Many key things which Angharad would love to know about her mother are obscured by gossip and rumour, scandal and accusation. Like Angharad, I wish they weren’t.

So, there we have it – this is how the character of Nesta was born, a woman who, as Angharad says, is ‘a riddle … mercurial, as fickle and elusive as a roe deer, sometimes happy beyond reason, often plunged into sorrow with no apparent cause’.

I would have enjoyed knowing Princess Nest. I am not sure I would have liked her much – and vice versa – but she was undoubtedly a remarkable woman: the type for whom people willingly surrender their lives.