Once upon a time, I was an Ellie.
I walked into my grandmother’s room at an Alzheimer’s care facility, praying she would know me just once more. After telling her who I was a few times, the scene you read in this book unfolded brilliantly. Like Lady Vi Carver, my grandmother, too, had been a college professor and could still claim a spark of the elegant woman I’d looked up to in my youth. As is the story with so many who battle Alzheimer’s—whether patient, family, friends, or caregivers—this disease steals indiscriminately. This book gifted me an opportunity to take something back and write about such loss from a place of deep understanding. It’s why the dedication goes to the grandmothers in my life, for the legacy of our generation is first written in the indelible ink of theirs.
Several accounts in this book come from historical fact—the first of which provided loose inspiration for Ellie’s lost castle. Château de la Mothe-Chandeniers is an abandoned thirteenth-century–castle–turned-storybook château, surrounded by a moat and nestled in the heart of French wine country. It’s not open to the public, but at the time of this novel’s publication, restoration discussions continue. It felt right that a mix of fairy-tale inspiration and childhood memories should turn into a main character that, surprisingly, had no lines in this book. A lost castle emerged with a hint of French romance, and a beauty that was forced to unfold alongside the grim realities of war.
June 5, 1944—the date on the back of Vi’s vineyard photo—was the calm before the great storm of Allied forces who would invade the beaches of Normandy the very next day. Known as D-Day, June 6, 1944, became the largest sea, air, and land invasion in history—and one of the bloodiest battles of World War II. It shed light on the endurance of the French Resistance fighters who had already survived years of war-ravaged landscape in Nazi-occupied France. While the “longest day” was unfolding with some ten thousand servicemen killed or wounded on beaches code-named Omaha, Utah, Gold, Juno, and Sword, Julien’s fictional army prepared for a battle of their own—an unlikely family who’d come together to defend their home and cling to hope around the ruins of a castle.
Vi’s journey from Cambridge and London to working as an operative with the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) organization in France weaves a fictional story with many well-known historical facts and figures. London addresses like 64 Baker Street (where the infamous “Baker Street Irregulars” originated) and the direct-hit Blitz bombing of the Royal Empire Society at 25 Northumberland Avenue lend heartbreaking realism to fictional characters’ worlds during the Second World War.
German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s headquarters at Château de La Roche-Guyon became infamous as the location of the ill-fated attempt to prevent the Allied D-Day invasion, and as the place where a plot was hatched (with Rommel’s involvement still debated by historians) to assassinate Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944. And though not mentioned by name, Operation Bodyguard—the elaborate ruse to fool the Nazi leadership and provide intelligence cover for the D-Day invasion—was alluded to with the fictional story of Clémence and the other double agents who lost their lives at La Roche-Guyon.
To aid our story, we’ve bent history just a bit by adjusting the French duc to duke, and the time a coach and four could travel from Paris in a single day. Also figments of the author’s imagination were the Cathédrale Espoir Sacré chapel in Loudun, the centuries-old Vivay family vineyard, and a deep wood named Fox Grove, which worked to keep our castle ruins hemmed in from the outside world. And while the Tennis Court Oath, Rose Bertin’s Le Grand Mogol shop in Paris, and the July 1789 storming of the Bastille are all true to history, Aveline and Robert’s story in the world of a budding French Revolution is purely fictional. (Though who wouldn’t wish a lady who gave away her lavish trousseau to instead feed starving women and children to have been a real person?)
Portions of this novel also rooted in truth remain some of the most precious to me. The light strumming of “Blackbird” on an acoustic guitar is the soundtrack of my youth, thanks to the guitar playing of my own father. And the quiet, 3:00 a.m. moments in an ICU room, holding the hand of a loved one, reminding myself, Remember this . . . remember this . . . , were some of the last moments my dad and I spent together on this earth. It ministered to my heart to make them a part of Vi and Julien’s heartfelt “good-bye for now” at the chapel in Loudun.
A common thread in both history and fiction, at the intersection of fantasy and fact, is the enduring power of stories. God’s story for us doesn’t end with a good-bye or the crumbling of stone walls on this earth. His faithfulness lasts through the generations, lavishing hope on a fallen world and love on the most broken of hearts. I’m delighted that you met Ellie and Quinn as they embark on a new journey in this series. It’s my hope that to them, and to each of us, God would become the Repairer of Broken Walls as we walk our own story roads.