In my last post, I discussed the wonderful presentation of my novel, Catherine’ Cross, by Beaufort County Sheriff, P.J. Tanner. After the program was over, a lady met me in the hallway with a question. She had read Catherine’s Cross and while in Charleston had visited the Gibbes Museum to see the portrait of Miss Iris Elliot. She also enlisted the help of a museum guide to help her locate the painting. For those of you who have read the novel, the 18 carat gold cross with rubies is owned by Iris’s family at the outbreak of the American Civil War. Her father had purchased it on a grand tour of Europe in the late 1850s and it had belonged to Empress Catherine the Great.

I explained to the lady that Iris’s painting was fictional as well as the cross. I was sorry to disappointment her, but I felt delighted that my fiction seemed so real that she had gone in search of the portrait!