Sharon Virts is the author of the new novels Masque of Honor and Bargains of Fate, the first two books in her Fields of Honor series. She is also an entrepreneur, and she lives in Virginia.
Q: What inspired you to write Masque of Honor, the first in your new series?
A: It began with a house. Some years ago, my husband, Scott Miller, and I bought an abandoned, dilapidated manor north of Leesburg, Virginia, off the Old Carolina Road—now US Route 15—called Selma.
As we worked to bring the place back from the brink, I found myself drawn less to the plaster and the joinery than to the people who had lived there, and especially to the man who built it: General Armistead Thomson Mason.
The more I learned about him, the more I wanted to know, and at the urging of Scott and my friend, the screenwriter Anthony McCarten, I set out to turn what I was uncovering into historical fiction.
What I found surprised me. Most of the accounts of the Mason-McCarty duel cast Armistead as a shining hero cut down by a rogue named John Mason McCarty, and so when I started, I was certain Armistead was my protagonist and that I was writing the tragedy of his hero’s journey.
But when I went back to the original sources—the letters, the newspaper notices, the pamphlets the two men published about each other—a very different story emerged. Both men escalated the quarrel between them, but it was Armistead who was the aggressor, and Armistead who, even after truces had been negotiated, refused to let the matter rest.
That discovery turned the whole project on its head. I put Armistead down as my hero and went looking, instead, for Jack McCarty.
Q: How did you research the novel, and how did you balance history and fiction as you were writing it?
A: I believe historical facts should never be incidental to a story—a blurry backdrop that distracts the reader—but woven deep into its fabric: into the characters, the scenes, the settings, the customs, even the cut of a coat. Done well, the history doesn’t weigh the story down; it lifts it and carries it forward.
So I cast a wide net. I researched not only Armistead and Jack but the people around them—their fathers and brothers, the families of their mothers, the men their sisters married.
I looked at birth order, and at how old each man was when he lost his father and his siblings. I found out where they went to school and who their teachers and mentors were.
I read what they wrote and what was written about them, from letters and newspaper articles in the Genius of Liberty, the Leesburg Washingtonian, the Winchester Gazette, the Richmond Enquirer, and the Alexandria Gazette, to the dueling pamphlets Jack and Armistead each published in the summer of 1818.
From all of it I built two things at once: a timeline of events that became the backbone of my plot, and psychological profiles of my characters. I even consulted a psychologist who helped me “diagnose” them and test whether my instincts about their inner lives held up.
Then, once I had those profiles in hand, I set the index cards aside. Working from the historical timeline, I set out to capture the essence of the events and the spirit of the people, while also telling a story that would reach beyond devoted readers of historical fiction.
To do that I altered some events, combined others, removed a few, and in places invented outright. That is where the discipline comes in. The key to writing good historical fiction is staying true to the spirit of the story—which is not the same as making every detail accurate.
Strict accuracy is the job of nonfiction. My job is to write a page-turner that brings the past to life. And I’ll say this plainly: there is more truth in Masque of Honor than there is fiction. But it is, in the end, a work of fiction.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Jack McCarty and Armistead Mason?
A: They were cousins, which is the first thing to understand. Both descended from the Masons of Virginia—Jack was a grandson of George Mason IV, Armistead a grandnephew—and they moved through the same small, intermarried world of Loudoun County gentry, where everyone knew everyone and a man’s reputation was the most valuable thing he owned.
They were not strangers who fell out. They were family, and that is what makes the story a tragedy rather than merely a quarrel.
But they were opposites in temperament. Armistead was the second eldest son of a United States senator, a decorated officer of the War of 1812, a man who believed power was his birthright and who could not bear to be contradicted or criticized.
Underneath the bluster of his writing I sense enormous insecurity—a man at war with his own self-doubt and unable to control what others thought and said about him.
Jack was the second youngest in a large, fatherless brood of boys, just 21 when the trouble began, still trying to find his footing in the world. He had a temper too, and a hard time governing it, but the difference between the two men is everything: Jack tried, again and again, to walk away. Armistead wouldn’t let him.
So the dynamic is really one of pursuit. One man wants the conflict over; the other cannot stop feeding it. Jack negotiates a truce and means it; Armistead, after the truce, takes up the matter again.
What I came to see is that the two of them were caught in the same machine—a code of honor that demanded satisfaction and punished any man who refused to play—and that the machine ground them both.
It would be easy to make one a villain and the other a saint, but I didn’t find that in the sources, and I didn’t want to write it. I wanted readers to feel the awful logic that put two cousins on a field at a distance of barely a dozen feet, facing each other, and to understand how it could happen. By the end I felt real empathy for both of them.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: Although the novel builds toward the quarrel and the duel between Jack and Armistead, the book isn’t really about the fight at all. At its heart it is a story about forgiveness and shame.
Lucinda has to learn to forgive her father and let go of her own shame before she can ever forgive Jack. Jack has to find a way to forgive himself in order to survive what he has done. And Armistead—Armistead is the warning. He could not forgive anyone, and that inability is what ultimately destroyed him.
If readers carry anything away from the story, I hope it is that—the meaning of honor in a time when life was fragile and a name was everything, and the quiet, difficult, life-saving power of forgiveness. I hope Jack and Armistead stay with readers the way they have stayed with me.
Q: What can you tell us about the rest of the series?
A: Masque of Honor is the first of the Fields of Honor series, and while the duel is the pivot the whole series turns on, the books that follow are really about how a man lives with what he has done—and how a family lives inside the same code of honor and expectation that nearly broke it.
It is Jack’s journey across roughly three decades, but it is just as much the story of his wife, Lucinda; her sister, Fanny; and his brother, William, all of whom struggle within the same family and the same unforgiving system.
The second book, Bargains of Fate, releases on June 23, 2026. It grew out of another extraordinary coincidence of history and place.
On the night before Christmas in 1824, Jack’s cousin Dennis McCarty killed his brother-in-law after a turkey shoot in Aldie, and Jack—with the help of the attorney Thomas Mason, a close relative of Armistead’s—defended Dennis at trial.
Thomas Mason once lived at Chestnut Hill, a house Scott and I also came to own, so once again the history was almost literally on my doorstep.
The novel braids that murder trial together with affairs of honor, family loyalty, and the widening rivalry between Jack and his brother William.
The third book, Swamp of Lies, will release in March 2027. By the late 1820s, America is at a crossroads—its territories expanding, its dearest-held ideals challenged in the name of progress—and the two oldest of the remaining McCarty brothers, William and Jack, are divided, their bond fractured by a stinging betrayal.
The ever-ambitious William strikes out for the swamplands of Florida, a territory that refuses to follow any of the rules he lives by, and the harder he struggles against its corruption and its vicious political schemes, the deeper he sinks.
Back in Virginia, Jack shoulders crushing family responsibility while learning to navigate Washington’s rooms of power, only to discover how shaky the foundations are beneath relationships he had thought were set in stone—and he finds himself bound once more for the dueling ground, this time to save a life rather than to take one.
From the lawless Florida Keys to the poisonous parlors of Washington, both brothers face old flames and new fires, and each must decide which stands he will take and which lines he is unwilling to cross.
At its core it is a story about brothers—about what we owe to blood, to conscience, and to the work in front of us when those three things refuse to align.
Three more books are planned to close out the series, carrying Jack and William through the 1830s and the early 1840s.
Without giving too much away, the through-line is Jack himself—a man who cannot stand down, who plays to win at almost any cost, and who simply cannot abide a bully or swallow what he knows to be unjust. And then there’s his temper.
Those instincts are the making of him and the ruin of him both; he suffers most in the moments the world forces him to accept the unreasonable. And by the end, that same refusal to back down turns outward—he sets himself against the dueling culture, determined to break the cycle that has cost his world so much.
Across all six books, my hope is to watch honor itself change shape: from a code these men live by, to a burden they carry, to an obstacle they must finally break. It costs them dearly, and it costs the women and children around them even more, which is the truest thing I can say about the age they lived in.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Only that I write the kind of books I love to read—stories built on real lives and real records, but shaped to keep you turning pages well past the hour you meant to put the light out.
Scott and I still live at Selma, the house that started all of this, and there is something humbling about writing late into the night under the same roof Armistead Mason built two centuries ago.
These people were not abstractions to me. They walked the same roads I drive, worshipped in the same county, and are buried in ground I visit. I hope readers come away not only entertained, but with a sense of how close the past really is—and how the questions these men and women wrestled with about pride, loyalty, shame, and forgiveness are not so different from our own.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Sharon Virts.
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