“This is too risky, even for you. I’m not certain it’s worth your sacrifice,” Nelson had remarked in his office.
She’d been so quick, so sure in her reply. “Of course it is. It’s the right thing to do, an absolute, and it’s worth any sacrifice. I knew the dangers the day I walked in your door.”
But had she? She wondered now what was true and what was bravado. She pushed herself upright in the car’s back seat.
Yes.
Confirmation and a deep conviction settled within her. Peace flooded in behind it. A peace so enveloping Caro felt her emotions shift. The small smile she felt curve her lips surprised her, as did the change in her tears. No longer crying from pain or fear, she felt them trail down her cheeks in what felt close to joy.
It was enough. She had done well. And someday, she thought, the truth would come out, and that would be enough too.
More than enough.
Author’s Note
I hope you enjoyed The London House. I thoroughly loved the research and the writing and want to pull back the curtain on a little of that for you here. First of all, a lot of fiction is wrapped within fact throughout this story and I encourage you to dig in to anything that interests you—SOE memos, the Munich Agreement, the Phoney War (spelled in the UK with an “e” and in the US either with or without one), and especially the fantastic couture creations of Elsa Schiaparelli. Also, please check out my social media or my website to see pictures of several of the SOE documents I reviewed—because, yes, I was tempted to run my “greasy fingers” over Churchill’s penciled signature. It’s also true that only about ten percent of those documents remain due to a fire, but it is fiction that they are a mess. One will not find Egypt SOE files interspersed among France’s, yet one will find that “slothful” memo that made me laugh and had to be quoted in the book, along with the “marriage” memo that added a nice twist to Caro and George’s romance.
Additionally, other small stories are true. According to one recorded account, Elisabeth de Rothschild did offend Nazi Ambassador H. Otto Abetz’s wife at a Schiaparelli showing and was subsequently arrested and sent to Ravensbrück, where she died in 1945. The stories of Dali and the Lobster Dress are also true. There really was a large jar of mayonnaise and a great yelling match. The Lewis radio talks were also real, wildly popular, and occurred between 1941 and 1944. Many of them were renamed and placed as chapters within his classic Mere Christianity. Lewis’s speech “Common Decency”—found in Caro’s letter—became “Right and Wrong: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe.”
All that said, this is a work of fiction and sometimes I changed details to fit the story . . . Paul Arnim is fiction. German citizens living abroad were called home in 1935 then again in 1938, but I wondered what might happen if a few private citizens were strategically left in positions of potential usefulness—so Arnim and his factories were kept operational in Paris for a time. Additionally, the “private officer notes” that Caroline and Mat found in Paris are also fiction. But I’d like to think such notes might exist—that some French officers pushed back by recording the truth behind the atrocities so that someday it could come to light. Caro’s prisoner number from Ravensbrück is also fiction. I wanted to make sure she had no real person’s number, so I went outside the entire series; 202,499 was the highest number employed before the Nazis began using letter prefixes to keep the numbers from going higher.
And when I needed results fast, I took a cue from television—where lab results always come back immediately. So, while the Arolsen Archives and the US National Archives are very complete, I didn’t want you all to wait months for the results. Hence, a “friend in the tech department” got them to us in a day.
There is so much more to share of the rich history and brave men and women of this time, and I hope you’ll enjoy learning more. Please visit my website www.katherinereay.com where I have listed many of the books I read for research. I recommend each and every one of them.