The family story described on the opening page of this book belongs to my husband’s grandfather, the Mr. Henry Elliott caught in Europe with his extraordinary mother when the First World War broke out. The German government really did send him an unsolicited check for their lost luggage forty years later, though naturally my sense of drama required the actual suitcase to be delivered to Manhattan for the purposes of this narrative. Needless to say, neither Henry nor his mother were spies—at least as far as we know—and had nothing whatever to do with either murder or atomic physics.
I took even further liberties with the historical record in my description of the coterie of individuals who forged our understanding of the interior of the atom, and let me hurry to assure you that Dr. Walter Grant never existed, nor did any such scandal ever touch the legendary Cavendish Institute at Cambridge University, on which I based my fictional Devonshire Institute at Oxford. Credit for Dr. Grant’s breakthrough in determining the existence of a solid atomic nucleus properly belongs to the great Dr. Ernest Rutherford and his team at the Cavendish. Since my own years of studying physics are far behind me, I relied on Brian Cathcart’s The Fly in the Cathedral, a gripping (yes, gripping!) layman’s account of the race to split the atom, both for its insight into the scientific process and for its memorable opening scene in the darkness of the experimental laboratory. As for the unprecedented gathering of scientific genius at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut in the years before the war, I can only say that I wish I might have been a fly on the wall of Max Planck’s drawing room during those musical evenings.
While Lionel Richardson and his race to Zurich are figments of my own imagination, that last-minute Alsatian solution to the July Crisis was, in fact, reported to have been proposed by an unnamed colleague of German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, as Barbara Tuchman discusses in her monumental account of the war’s outbreak, The Guns of August. “But,” as she explains, “to seize it required boldness, and Bethmann . . . was a man, as Theodore Roosevelt said of Taft, ‘who means well feebly.’” Nothing ever came of it, and war was declared on August 1.
I’m sorry to say that Dr. Walter Grant and his appalling journal were likewise inspired by a real-life counterpart. While researching Victorian bedroom habits, I came across the most staggering of sex memoirs: My Secret Life, by the pseudonymous “Walter,” which spans over forty years of explicit antics by a garrulous and remorseless nineteeth-century sex addict. The read is not for the faint of heart, but as a window into the mind and methods of the compulsive seducer, into the fatal tendency of even the most intelligent and independent women to fall under the spell of his psychological control, and into the everyday details of life in Victorian London, it has few equals.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With every book, my appreciation deepens for the extraordinary group of people who take my raw manuscripts and land them on readers’ shelves, both actual and virtual. My heartfelt thanks are always and forever due to my matchless literary agent, Alexandra Machinist, and her crack team of professionals at Janklow & Nesbit, who open doors and smooth paths and allow me to concentrate on what I do best. I’m also deeply grateful for the support and talent of my editor, Chris Pepe, and all the marvelous people at Putnam Books: Ivan Held, Meaghan Wagner, Katie McKee, Mary Stone, Lydia Hirt, and Kate Stark, to name a few, and to say nothing of the copyeditors, proofreaders, and others who work all the magic behind the scenes. I owe special thanks to the Putnam art department, who gave me such a blindingly gorgeous cover for A Hundred Summers, and who possess an uncanny skill for capturing the heart of a story in a single image.
I’m fortunate to have the support of so many wonderful people in my writing career. Sydney and Caroline Williams, Christopher Chantrill, Vonnie Chantrill, Renée Chantrill Reffreger, Bill and Caroline Featherston, Edward and Melissa Williams, Chris and Elizabeth Fuller, Deborah Royce, David and Anne Juge, and the entire mom team at Julian Curtiss School: you’re the best. Karen White, Lauren Willig, Mary Bly, Sarah MacLean, Linda Francis Lee, Bee Ridgway, Susanna Kearsley, and my other dear friends from the writing world (you know who you are!): there are no words to describe how much you’ve enriched my life.
Finally, and most importantly, I thank my husband, Sydney, and our four precious children, for the love and commitment that make everything possible.