The first time I saw Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole light up the silver screen in How to Steal a Million, I think I fell as much in love with them as their characters did with each other. Witty dialogue, a storied European cityscape, brilliant chemistry between the main characters, and fashion from famed icon Givenchy combined to create a pitch-perfect setting for a love story about the high-end world of fine art.
Imagine a would-be art thief falling for a girl locked in a high-society world, only to find out they’re both keeping a secret, or twenty. What if the suave gentleman really was an art thief? And what if the fine art in question really was a forgery? That spark of tension between main characters became the inspiration behind Emory and Keira’s story, and the mystery behind a forgotten library and a lost portrait became the intrigue that brings them together.
Though Franz Xaver Winterhalter was a much-sought-after portrait artist in the throne rooms of nineteenth-century Europe, little is known about his private life. While this story takes artistic liberties to imagine his character with jovial eccentricity, history does confirm Queen Victoria entrusted Winterhalter with the commission of her “secret picture” in 1843 (as she would refer to it in her journal on July 13 of that year). With the queen’s hair unbound, wearing a plain pendant containing a lock of Albert’s hair instead of stately jewels, and with an unceremonious posture and intense longing in her features, the portrait was considered an intimate look at the behind-the-scenes lives of the royal couple. Though a common practice was for copies to be made of Winterhalter’s royal paintings (especially later in his career, when apprentices worked in studio to mass-produce copies of paintings for a larger public audience), the portrait in question had but a select few miniatures made, and no formal copy is known to exist.
The gift was presented to Prince Albert on 18 August 1843, for his twenty-fourth birthday. We’ve fictionalized parts of the queen’s journal entry to add Franz’s “little bee” into the storyline, but the queen did refer to the portrait as “my darling Albert’s favourite picture” and wrote of the secret picture: “he thought it so like, & so beautifully painted. I felt so happy and proud to have found something that gave him so much pleasure.” The prince is said to have indeed dubbed it his favorite portrait of his bride, but found the image too private for public display and instead hung the portrait in his personal study at Windsor Castle. While not shown publicly until 1977, the secret picture was more recently included in a royal exhibition at Buckingham Palace in 2010, in conjunction with preservation by the Royal Collection Trust, United Kingdom.
Like Victoria and Albert, history is still painted over by the stories—in portraits, photographs, and letters—that connect our own yesterdays to the present.
My grandfather served as a B-17 copilot in the 390th Bombardment Group, his 571st Squadron having been stationed in Framlingham during WWII. While I wish he were still here to share his firsthand accounts of those years, one poignant line in this book is directly from him. He once told me what he remembered most about the war—a sobering reality of the WWII generation: “You don’t make friends, because the moment you do, the next day they’re gone.”
While D-day had darkened the skies over Framlingham with planes headed to the Normandy coast in June 1944, the 390th embarked on more than three hundred combat missions of its own between 1943 and 1945. Most were supply drops over a war-weary France and bombing raids on strategic targets in the lifeblood of Nazi industrial resources, such as marshaling yards, train depots, railroad bridges, ports, aircraft factories, and oil refineries across Germany, Belgium, Holland, and Czechoslovakia. While fictional for Wyatt’s crew, mission #243 was a real combat mission to bomb oil storage units at Derben, Germany, on 14 January 1945. Flying Fortresses saw an attack from some one hundred single-engine fighters that tore through the skies over Berlin, becoming one of the group’s greatest battles of the war.
The mission would cost the 390th nine planes.
Though the bombing of St. Michaels Church was also fictionalized for our story, a Pathfinder wreck did occur in February 1944. A German Ju 88 combat plane managed to evade detection and sneak into the airfield on its tail, resulting in a crash landing into the brick wall surrounding Glenham Church. Despite carrying a heavy bomb load, members of the 390th flocked to the crash site in an attempt to save those on board—rolling live bombs away from the wreckage and pulling both the pilot and copilot to safety.
Of the thirteen crew members, all but three were saved.
The Battle of the Bulge was hitting a fever pitch in December 1944. The Eighth Air Force had sent a dispatch for two thousand bombers to respond, but on the return, thick fog along the coast prevented many from landing safely at their own airfields, leaving hundreds of servicemen stranded with no place to stay on Christmas Eve. It was noted that someone had seen the 1944 film The Canterville Ghost—about a group of servicemen who were bivouacked at a country manor during a similar situation. Owners of a nearby manor house—aptly named Parham Hall—were contacted in the middle of the night and opened their doors to some two hundred displaced servicemen from the Allied armed forces, hosting them for an impromptu Christmas holiday.
At the writing of this novel, the restoration of the lost castle that inspired the series—Château de la Mothe-Chandeniers—is now becoming reality. Just as our Foley family walks the road to their castle restoration, you and I can now do the same at the castle that sparked this series years ago. The concept of history as a witness to the stories of people living in vastly different times, places, and cultures became the heartbeat of this series. To end it in any setting but the fairy tale–inspired “Sleeping Beauty” castle from The Lost Castle wouldn’t have felt right. Weaving the Foley family’s story through castle stones spread across France, Ireland, and now England added the perfect punctuation to the legacy of stories and how we live them. From Victorian England to Churchill’s war-torn world, and from those years until the modern day, the absolute, constant, ever-flowing current to the human experience is that our Creator is the same yesterday, today . . . and for all eternity.
Like weathered castle stones, His story—God’s story for each one of us—lives on in the journeys we tread with Him.