Code Name Hélène

by Ariel Lawhon

“You have my word.” He slides the pillbox across the counter, puts it into his pocket, and gives me a small bow. “Can I get you a brandy?” I think for a second but shake my head. “No. A French Seventy-Five, please.”

“You will never know that for sure,” Hubert tells me, and I love him for not dismissing the possibility out of hand. I love him for blinking back tears and clearing his throat as he leans across the table and says, “But I do know that there are thousands of people—literally thousands, Nance—who wouldn’t be alive right now if you’d stayed out of it.”

We are British agents for the Special Operations Executive but we are being sent back into Nazi-occupied France.

“Your mother told you everything you need to know in order to survive this,” he tells me once our balloon is hovering five thousand feet above the earth. “I doubt that,” I tell him. “Elbows in, legs together.” My mother never once told me to keep my legs together. But then again, she never tossed me out of a hot-air balloon in the middle of the night over the English countryside

I’d never read any story like it—much less a true one!—in which it was a woman who went off to war while her husband stayed behind to hold down the fort. A woman who stepped onto a battlefield and was not only treated as an equal, but was revered and respected as a fearless leader. A woman who killed a Nazi with her bare hands. In all my years researching and writing historical fiction, I have never come across such a bold, bawdy, brazen woman. The fact that she really lived, and I had the honor of telling her story, is something for which I will always be grateful.

This is a novel about marriage. Yes, of course it’s also about war and friendship and bravery and tragedy and one of the most important conflicts of the twentieth century. Yes, to all of that. Particularly the friendship. But to me, at its heart, this is a novel about a woman and her husband and the sacrifices made by both in the midst of extraordinary circumstances.

My holy book says, “Greater love has no man than this, that he would lay his life down for his friends.” I believe that Henri Fiocca displayed the greatest love possible.

The thing is, books are never really done. They are only due.