Curious about what’s behind Illusion of a Boar? Explore my author notes about the historical details behind the book.
These notes do contain some plot spoilers! Otherwise, they’re as shared at the end of the book, with edits only to share the most useful links and cleaning up some formatting for the web. Posted May 2026.
Thank you so much for joining me – and our four protagonists – on a journey into a very particular part of history. My thanks go out to Kiya Nicoll, as always, who particularly improved this book by commenting on a number of Orion’s aspects.
If you’d like to read more about Claudio and Orion as students, they’re in Eclipse, which takes place during the 1924-1925 school year and includes Thesan and Isembard’s romance. Cammie first appears in Magician’s Hoard, her mother Pross’s romance with Ibis. She and Hypatia appear briefly in Chasing Legends, a novella that takes place over the winter hols at Schola in 1926 found in the Winter’s Charms collection.
Other connections and places characters appear can be found at my public wiki. It also has timelines, maps, and other useful ways to find characters in the various books where they appear.
The more I learned about the history behind Operation Fortitude, the more fascinated I got. To the extent that information was relevant (and available), I’ve used the historical details, some of which involve some odd coincidences. I’ll start with the general notes, and then talk about specific chapter details or characters as they appear.
Starting with the actual history, Operation Fortitude was a deception operation aimed at confusing the German army (and Axis powers generally) about where the invasion that would be D-Day might happen. The people running the operation wanted to draw attention away from Normandy and toward Calais, and they used a wide variety of methods to get there.
Joshua Levine’s book Operation Fortitude: The Story of the Spies and Spy Operation that Saved D-Day is a great overview, with so many fascinating stories, a number of them so unbelievable I felt I couldn’t reference them briefly and have anyone take the fiction seriously. As Junior Commander Roberts mentions, most of the people behind that were public school (Eton, with a few from other places) and Oxford men.
There were actually two Operation Fortitude projects, one in the north (based in Edinburgh, where Claudio started out) and one in the south, mostly coordinated out of London but with various pieces taking place across the south coast. By this point, they were fairly confident there weren’t German agents on the loose in England (they kept walking into pubs and trying to order beer at the wrong time of day – or just plain turning themselves in). A number of them agreed to be double agents, using their radio transmitters to convey information, including whole networks of fictional people they’d recruited in key locations. Levine’s book describes all of this if you want more detail.
It made sense to me in Albion’s context that someone, eventually (it was a very secret project, but there was, of necessity, some coordination with other people), would realise there should be a magical component. Which is where our four come in. There aren’t a lot of resources, similar to the non-magical operation, which seems to have been running off of typewriter paper, attendance at dinner parties where someone could have a quiet word with key figures, and someone keeping the details of all the cover stories straight.
As Orion notes, one of the key aspects of the plan was to talk about the movement of the Fourth Army, which did not exist as a functional force in World War 2, but which was notable for its actions in the Great War, twenty years earlier. They did indeed use a white boar as their badge, a symbol also strongly associated with King Richard III, who has a very specific role in Albion’s magical history.
The Auxiliary Territorial Service was staffed by a tremendous number of young women. Cammie and Hypatia’s experience with their fellows in that service are drawn from a variety of memoir sources, especially Barbara Green’s Girls in Khaki: A History of the ATS in the Second World War. If you’ve heard about the ATS recently, the late Queen Elizabeth II served as a mechanic in the ATS during the war. Women might be despatch drivers or mechanics, or many took on a wide range of secretarial and clerk roles. Some also took on much more technical roles like signals work. Others took dangerous ones, like staffing artillery batteries and anti-aircraft fire.
You can find a range of footage on YouTube. The 1943 feature-length film The Gentle Sex: the great film story of life in the A.T.S. was the last film directed by Leslie Howard before his death. It follows a number of ATS girls through their training and work, with some romantic storylines. Many of the extras were ATS members.
As Cammie notes, first, they were often referred to as “ATS girls” regardless of age. Most of them were between 18 and 29, depending on the year of the war, with some older women involved in training and supervision. Besides all their own work, they were expected to spruce themselves out and turn out to be sociable and friendly at dances to keep morale up. The comments about the beige uniform underthings being called “passion killers” come from multiple memories in Green’s book, as do Cammie’s comments about the issued mattresses.
The historical battles are pretty much all as mentioned in the text. All of them have other history attached to them, none of their stories are simple. The geology is also as mentioned, helped by the fact that the chalk and limestone cliffs at Dover are in fact the same geologic formation as the coast around Calais, part of a massive much older ridge that has since been worn down by water. D-Day itself has of course had extensive coverage in books, documentaries, and memoirs. What various characters discuss about the RAF Bomber Command (both statistics and flight information) is drawn from various historic sources.
Finally, I’ll talk about specific parts of the camp in individual chapters, but Camp 020 was the main camp holding German and German double agents. By 1944, there was not much active interrogation going on routinely, and most of the people there had been there for some time. It turns out to be quite difficult to get a map of a camp the British government kept secret throughout the war and well after, so I have taken a few liberties with placement of items like our protagonists’ living space. It does explain some of the unusual arrangements, where you might want people isolated in different ways than the usual setup for the huts, or have slightly more private sleeping and living space for people there briefly.
Other details – the main house, the garden space, the recreation spaces – are drawn from memoirs about the camp, including extensive notes from Lieutenant Colonel Robin “Tin Eye” Stephens, who ran the camp. He vocally refused to use physical torture (though there’s some counter-evidence), but there is documentation in multiple sources about psychological methods (including having the lights on all the time and sound isolation) used to convince prisoners to talk. By 1944, a number of the longer term residents did have some of the freedoms described – garden patches, time in the recreation rooms – but it was still a highly secret camp.
Our four are based there because they couldn’t be in London, and this was the other main location for information key to Operation Fortitude. The camp was also located a modest walk from General Eisenhower’s residence while planning the D-Day invasions, and 3 miles from Camp Griffiss, headquarters for that planning. Richmond Park is a historical park, and the Old Sheen Palace no longer exists, but would almost certainly have had its own portal for transportation.
Onward to the specifics!
Chapter 1: There were a wide variety of huts in use by this point in the war. I’m deeply grateful for a dissertation by Karey Lee Draper, Wartime Huts: the development, typology, and identification of temporary military buildings in Britain 1914-1945 (University of Cambridge, 2017), which gives detailed information including dimensions and materials. Having plumbing in the hut is the unusual part, but not entirely unheard of. They were generally heated by wood stoves, with an ablutions hut nearby for toilets, washing, and showers.
Chapter 3: As Orion mentions, he was fighting in the Dodecanese campaign in the Greek islands, which was about to get rather worse. His younger brother is in the campaign in North Africa, which had a number of challenges around communication, supplies, and the natural environment.
Chapter 5: While doing the early research for the book, I came across a fascinating photograph from English Heritage in one of their articles about Operation Fortitude. It shows a group of eight men – and one woman – sitting around a large wooden table in their workspace. The floor is covered with overlapping Persian rugs, and everyone is in uniform. The image lists the names, and the key figures of Operation Fortitude are all there.
It meant I got very curious about the woman, who is labelled Junior Commander Lady Jane Pleydall-Bouvier. When I went looking for more information about her, I discovered she was the daughter of the Earl of Radnor, from a very long aristocratic line indeed. She was in her early 20s at this point, one of three ATS women mentioned associated with the project at different stages. Her name comes up twice in a thousand-page history of the project, which I think rather entirely unfair.
I’m not saying Junior Commander Roberts is her, but she’s certainly the inspiration. The book’s Junior Commander Roberts is however also very young for that rank, with the same sort of bearing. Roberts, of course, does come from a family with some magic. She has enough to make the Pact and be aware of magical society, but not enough to have it trained (or she may have chosen other options, as her family seems to). It did make her the best go-between of the two parts of the project.
Chapter 12: The main house on the property that became Camp 020 is Latchmere House, built in the Victorian era and turned over to the British government during the Great War. Very early in the Second World War, it was requisitioned for dealing with spies (and housing them after questioning), since the location was reasonably convenient to London, but remote enough to allow separation and reduce the risks of escape.
The house itself is still standing, though there’s now a modern property development around it. During this period, an addition was built on the back, as isolation housing for prisoners, with camp huts and other spaces throughout a significant area. The memoirs I read suggested that the main house was kept very quiet, but that some rooms were used by officers and other staff for quiet conversations, such as the one Claudio is invited to.
Chapter 13: Shapeshifting has a number of possible mechanisms in Albion (as Cammie explains). The one she and Ibis both use is learned, with techniques for bringing clothing and carried items along with you if you learn that part. (You can read more about Ibis’s experiences with shifting, including the trouble with Orion’s great-uncle, in Magician’s Hoard and Chasing Legends.)
When Cammie shows up in earlier books, she is inquisitive and sharp witted. When I started thinking about what she was like as an adult, I knew she shifted into some sort of mammal with teeth and a hunting instinct. Stoats have a number of fascinating aspects. First, there’s the winter coat (when they’re known as ermine and highly valued for their fur) versus the summer brown coat.
Second, they have a specific hunting technique when going after prey like rabbits (who can be ten times their size and weight). They will bounce around energetically, getting closer and closer to the rabbit. The rabbit watches, fascinated and entranced. Suddenly, surprise stoat, who has over a few minutes moved close enough to pounce. There are videos on YouTube (though many do involve actual hunting behaviour, some do not, and those are often labelled).
I was looking at videos of 1944 dancing, and what would have been common in the intersection of American and British troops, when I suddenly stared at some of the fantastic moves of swing dance in the period. The flips, leaps, and other movements made me immediately think of the stoat videos I’d been watching. Of course Cammie is also a swing dancer. She’s made for it.
Chapter 17: I mentioned Camp Griffiss earlier, but it was in fact one of the main camps for the planning and some of the training for D-Day, in a wide range of huts in Bushy Park. Very little of the original camp remains, but there’s some information online with maps and other details. There were about 8,000 men living at the camp by April 1944.
Cammie’s friend mentions ‘going northwest‘, which is a very general reference (there’s a lot of possible northwest from Richmond), but that includes Bletchley Hall, where a lot of the most cutting edge cryptography and signals work was going on, including breaking the Enigma code. Cammie, as she mentions, is in fact a trained cryptographer. Giles, her apprentice master, has his romance in Wards of the Roses and also appears in Country Manners (also in the Winter’s Charms collection).
Chapter 24: I did quite a lot of digging into the historical forms of the puzzle that’s often called Knights and Knaves. If you’ve seen the movie Labyrinth, you’ve seen one well-known version of it, about who is telling the truth and who is lying. I couldn’t quite date this version back far enough, but I’m taking a slight liberty and saying the magical community uses it.
Chapter 34: The various fae creatures that Hypatia is thinking about – like the ech-goblins – are drawn from common folklore in the various places. The names are rather suggestively similar, though.
Chapter 35: Paperfolding became extremely common in the 1850s, both as an art or craft form, and to teach small children better manual dexterity. This was the time of the growing kindergarten movement, and the idea of learning through play and experience of the world. Bellflowers or campanula are one of many different flowers I found folding instructions for. There are a number of varieties for the language of flower meanings, but bellflowers generally have to do with gratitude, constancy, support, and romance. The different colours can also mean different things, with magenta being romantic love.
Chapter 36: Punch Magazine was the venerable British humour magazine that ran for many years. Like a number of similar publications, it had topical cartoons with often clever captions.
Chapter 37: Given the presence of a stoat, I couldn’t quite resist a reference to (probably) Leonardo da Vinci‘s famous painting of Lady with an Ermine. The pose is charming, and of course it’s one that Cammie would want to make use of. I suspect that paintings with similar subjects might have been more common in Albion.
Chapter 38: At this point, I have a running joke that whenever I look up the historical weather (and can get the information, which of course varies by year and location), it’s doing what I want it to do. In this case, there was a significant heatwave in the London area at the end of May 1944, followed by storms and flooding.
Thank you again for reading! If you’d like to know more about when new books are coming out and all sorts of other fun details, my newsletter is the place to be. I do have some extensive extras planned for Illusion of a Boar. I do plan to come back to these four down the road, with a romance for Claudio around 1950. There’s also a bit more about Orion’s arc in Three Graces, out in December 2023.