All the Ways We Said Goodbye

by Beatriz Williams

  She’d crept back to the road, but that had been a mistake. The Germans controlled the roads here. She spent a miserable hour in a ditch, shivering in the mud as a German convoy thundered past, sending troops to reinforce the line. She had simmered with frustration and shame, certain she should be doing something—but what? What use was she against a phalanx of Germans? She didn’t even have a knife, much less a gun, just a miraculous talisman that might or might not confer some sort of benefit on the wearer. Her ancestors, she thought darkly, might have been more specific. It was a pity they hadn’t taken something of more utility from Saint Jeanne. A sword, perhaps, or an arquebus.

  The talisman dug into the skin between her breasts. Aurélie crossed herself and muttered a quick prayer of apology. The fault wasn’t in the talisman; it was in her. Her weakness, her shame. Her father had flung himself into battle at the age of fifteen. Here she was, four years older than he had been then, cravenly crouching in a ditch, painfully aware of her own uselessness.

  Never, ever before had Aurélie felt herself so completely powerless. Here, in the dark, caught between two armies, all of her father’s noble blood, all of her mother’s precious francs couldn’t protect her. She was only a woman, alone.

  Aurélie fled back to the woods, skulking past burned-out farms, creeping carefully around the outskirts of villages where the German imperial flag hung like a taunt above the mairies. Her stomach rumbled. Petits fours at the Ritz had been a very long time ago. She wished she’d had the sense to bring food, a proper coat, anything. She’d always thought herself a countrywoman at heart, but she had never experienced the country like this. How had she thought the countryside quiet? Every step made the brush crackle. A wolf howled and an animal let out a high-pitched squeal. The woods felt like something out of the stories her nurse had told her: Red Riding Hood and the wolf, Hansel and Gretel and the witch lying in wait.

  A man approached her, a man in a British uniform. He spoke in what sounded like an educated voice but Aurélie shook her head and turned her back on him, walking very quickly away, resisting the urge to break into a run, to run and run with the twigs yanking at her silk stockings and the tree branches reaching clawing fingers toward her hair.

  Would morning never come? The night seemed to go on forever, far longer than any night ought to be allowed; Aurélie began to fear it would never be day again. She grimaced at her own whimsy. Of course, day must come. Mustn’t it? Just because she had been a fool didn’t mean the earth would stop its spinning. She hoped. She felt like a medieval peasant, afraid of the dark, stumbling along in a fog of cold and fear, her entire being reduced to the animal instinct of avoiding pursuit.

  When the sky began to lighten she scarcely knew it at first; her eyes were so firmly fixed on the path ahead. But there, there, the sky was surely more gray than black ahead. And was that . . .

  Yes. Yes, it was. In the distance, the great tower of Courcelles, still a mile away or more, but there.

  Her dress was in tatters, torn by twigs, her stockings glued to her heels by the blisters that had broken and bled, but Aurélie scarcely noticed the pain, buoyed by a relief so intense that she felt she floated rather than walked that last mile.

  Home.

  To the right, in the valley, lay the village of Courcelles, a cluster of brick houses with slate roofs, dominated by the substantial bulk of the mairie, tapering off into farmhouses toward the edges. To the left, up a deliberately steep road, loomed the Château de Courcelles, quiet in the gray dawn.

  The village was beginning to wake; Aurélie could see the thin curls of smoke beginning to emerge from chimneys as ovens were lit. The smell of baking bread taunted her. But where were the men who ought, even this early, to be trudging toward the fields to harvest the hay? Where was the sigil of their house, flying from the tallest tower?

  A terrible fear seized her. Over the course of the long, terrible night, she had seen so many homes burned, others abandoned or requisitioned. And that was to the west, closer to Paris. Courcelles was impregnable, so her father had always claimed, but that had been in the days of lances and siege engines, not now, not this.

  Slowly, aware of every ache, every bruise, Aurélie began the long trudge up the hill she had so seldom traveled on foot. When she went to town, she drove the pony cart or rode one of her father’s horses and people bowed as she passed.

  A man emerged from the guardhouse, placing himself squarely on the path, a gun pointed at her chest. “Who goes there? Kmint qu’os vos aplez?”

  The guttural tones of the Picard dialect made her weak with relief. The man was in the shadows of the guardhouse, but Aurélie knew his voice from the time she was little and he had put her on his shoulders to play with the weapons mounted on the wall in the hall.

  “It is I.” Her throat was so raw that the words came out as little more than a rasp. “Don’t you know me, Victor?”

  “Miss Aurélie?” Victor dropped the gun he had been holding, one of her father’s fowling pieces, brilliant for making the lives of pheasants a misery, somewhat less useful for warding off invading armies. He grabbed her cold hands, chafing them for warmth. “Miss Aurélie! What happened to you? We thought you were in Paris!”

  “I was.” With difficulty, Aurélie withdrew her hands. “Don’t fuss, Victor. Cha va fin bien.”

  I’m quite all right. The old dialect came easily to her tongue, bringing tears to the big man’s eyes.

  “You don’t look all right,” he said, with the bluntness for which their region was famed. “You look like you had a fight with a hedgehog and lost.”

  Aurélie gave a laugh that wobbled. “Close enough. Is my father here?”

  “The seigneur is in the old keep.” Victor followed after her through the gate and into the courtyard, forcing her to hang back. “Is it true the Germans are in Paris? Is that why you’ve come? We saw them go past—what they did in Catelet—” Victor spat on the flagstones.

  Aurélie paused, looking over her shoulder at him. “They’ve not come to Courcelles?”

  “Your father put a sentry on the road. Kill anyone who tries to come this way, he said,” announced Victor proudly.

  “Did they? Try, that is?”

  “Well, no.” Victor looked momentarily crestfallen. “They were too busy in Catelet. Beasts, they were. They shot Madame Lemaire Lienard through the throat—the throat!—as she lay hiding. There were beatings and men tied to trees and left to rot, houses looted, women—um, er. Well, then. But that was Catelet, not here. There were some as left the village when they heard the doings in Catelet. Fools. I told them the seigneur would protect them. Courcelles’s not been conquered yet.”

  As far as Aurélie could make out, the last time anyone had tried had been roughly during the Thirty Years’ War, but that was beside the point. Perhaps her father’s reputation had preceded him. Perhaps the Germans simply hadn’t wanted to climb the hill. Whatever the reason, she was grateful.

  “Thanks be to God and Saint Jeanne. No, no, Victor,” she remonstrated, as it seemed he meant to follow her and continue to regale her with horrors. “You mustn’t leave your post. What if the Germans were to come and you were not here? There’s no need to announce me. I know the way.”

  Every stone in the courtyard was an old friend; this had been her home every summer, while her mother enjoyed the more sophisticated pleasures of Deauville. Aurélie knew Courcelles as well as she knew the Ritz. Better. The Ritz belonged to the world, but Courcelles was hers, from the dent in the wall where a cannonball had landed during the Wars of Religion to the effigy of a long-ago lady of Courcelles in the chapel. There had been a gap by that stone lady’s feet where Aurélie used to hide her childhood treasures, bits of feather and string, and, once, an ornament off the armor of a Merovingian knight, found by an archaeologist her father had benevolently allowed to poke about.

  Ahead of her, across the courtyard, lay the family’s living quarters, a manor house within the old walls, built in the baroque style and de
corated during a period of relative affluence during the reign of Louis XV. It might be over two hundred years old, but it would always be known as “the new wing.”

  Her father, Victor had said, was in the old keep.

  Aurélie turned left at the gatehouse, toward the round tower that dominated the countryside. It was, her father liked to boast, the largest of its kind in France, a great circular tower, hung with tapestries and the relics of old wars, a gallery circling the whole so that minstrels could play above and adoring retainers gawp and cheer. The great fireplace was a later addition, added in the fifteenth century, featuring larger-than-life figures of the Nine Worthies, all of whom were said to have been modeled after the daughters of the lord of Courcelles of the day, particularly the busty one at the end, which was also said to be the reason why the carving was never quite finished and the artisan left with a chisel in his backside.

  There was no fire in the great fireplace today. Instead, Aurélie found her father directing the removal of antique weaponry from the walls, barking orders as axes long rusted to their stands were pried free and hauled down, joining antique muskets and ceremonial swords in a martial pile on the floor.

  It was her father’s wolfhound who gave her away, struggling up on his arthritic paws to wag his tail as best he could.

  Her father frowned at his old companion. “Clovis! Clovis! What’s got into you, you old so-and-so?”

  “I have, I think,” said Aurélie, and her father spun around, his face going whiter than the marble figures at the fireplace.

  “Aurélie? Aurélie!”

  “Father, don’t, your heart, the doctor said . . .” Aurélie could have kicked herself for her own folly. She ought to have let Victor announce her; she ought—oh, she didn’t know what she ought.

  “Oh, bother the doctor,” said her father irritably, and crossed the room in two strides, kissing her firmly on both cheeks before holding her out at arm’s length, frowning at the scratches and tears, the burrs in her hair and smuts on her cheeks. “By all that’s holy—I thought you were a vision.”

  “No, I’m quite solid, I promise you.” Aurélie breathed in the familiar scents of tobacco and wet dog, molding tapestries and flaking paint. Her father was thinner than she remembered, his cheekbones sharper, his hair wilder, but he smelled like home. Nothing could be wrong when Courcelles was still Courcelles and her father ruled supreme. When she was little, when the priest spoke of God the Father, it was always her father she pictured, with his unbending posture, his autocratic voice, and his strong sense of noblesse oblige.

  Her father frowned at her, those brows so like her own drawing together over his nose. They were, she noticed with a pang, entirely white now. Her father was thirty years older than her mother; he had been nearly fifty when Aurélie was born. But that didn’t mean anything, she told herself hastily. He was still hearty, still vigorous. Nothing could daunt her father, not even a German invasion.

  But his heart . . . She ought to have remembered his heart.

  “What in the name of Saint Eloy brings you back here? Is Paris fallen?”

  “No, no, nothing of the kind! I thought—I thought I’d come home.” Put that way, it sounded rather unconvincing. Aurélie cleared her throat and tried again. “They’re fighting for Paris right now. I drove Jean-Marie to join his regiment and then—well, I drove this way rather than the other.”

  “You drove Jean-Marie to his regiment?” After a moment of silence, her father exploded in a great bark of laughter. The men around them exchanged looks of relief and permitted themselves nervous chuckles, although they stopped when her father glared at them. He clapped Aurélie on the shoulder. “Your mother always said the Courcelles have more guts than sense, and you’re Courcelles to the bones, my girl.”

  He didn’t need to know how terrified she had been in the woods, how weak. “How could I leave you to face the Germans alone? How could I leave our people to them?”

  “Bored at the Ritz, were you? There’s work to be done here and plenty. The Germans will be back, and I mean to be ready for them when they do.”

  Aurélie looked down at the pile. “With Sigismund de Courcelles’s tournament lance?”

  Her father hefted the lance, the long shaft wobbling dangerously. “As good as the day he used it to break Raimond the Fat’s shield.”

  It was a very nice lance, and Aurélie was sure that her ancestor had wielded it valiantly, but to charge a field gun with a lance seemed a bit optimistic.

  “Maybe it won’t come to that. Maybe they’ll be driven clear back to the Rhine and all we’ll see will be their backs as they run.”

  “Have you ever known the Hun to give up so easily? No, they’ll be back as soon as food gets scarce. We’ve precious little enough for our own. The harvest is rotting in the fields. The idiots dropped their tools and ran to join up when they heard war had come.”

  “You would have done the same,” Aurélie pointed out.

  “I’m a knight of France, not a field hand. It’s my job to fight for France. Their job is to thresh wheat.”

  That explained why there had been no men straggling toward the fields. “If the men are all gone, then someone will have to bring the harvest in,” said Aurélie thoughtfully.

  Her father looked horrified. “I trust you’re not suggesting I do it.”

  “No,” said Aurélie, who sometimes thought it a shame her father hadn’t been born during the days of the Sun King. “I’m suggesting that I do.”

  Every man in the room instinctively backed away, waiting for the explosion.

  “No,” said her father. “I won’t have you with your skirts kilted, burned brown—”

  “I’ll wear a hat. If the Germans don’t kill our people, starvation will—and of the two, I’m not sure that wouldn’t be worse. We can’t let that happen. I can ask in the village. If the men can’t harvest, we’ll hand the women their scythes. They’ll do it,” she added, cutting off her father’s protests, “when they see I’m doing it with them.”

  Her father was silent a long moment. He looked at Aurélie, his expression unreadable. “There are times,” he said, at last, “when you’re very like your mother.”

  “I’m not like my mother.” Aurélie thought of her mother, all silk stockings and plucked brows, holding court at the Ritz. She couldn’t imagine her mother threshing wheat. Any flailing she did was with her tongue. “I’m not!”

  “How is she?” her father asked abruptly. “Your mother.”

  “My mother is my mother.” Realizing just how ungracious she sounded, Aurélie flushed and plunged on. “She’s well. Or she was well when I left her yesterday. She’s holding court with what’s left of her salon.”

  “That’s one good thing,” said her father grimly, turning away to survey the coat of arms engraved above the fireplace. “As long as the relic is with her, I don’t have to worry about it falling into German hands.”

  Aurélie just stopped herself from putting her own hands to her breast, where the talisman hung heavy beneath her chemise, shirtwaist, and jacket. “You wouldn’t rather have it here, at Courcelles, in case of need?”

  “And have every fortune hunter in the Prussian army after it? No. It’s safer where it is. One thing I don’t doubt about your mother is her tenacity. What she has, she holds.”

  Except for her marriage. Except for her daughter.

  With false brightness, Aurélie said, “Well, then. That’s good then, isn’t it?” She’d meant to present the talisman to her father like a trophy. Now it was contraband, something to be hidden. “I’ll just say a quick prayer to Saint Jeanne, shall I, before I take the harvest in hand?”

  “I don’t think the saint’s much to do with scythes,” said her father drily. “You would have to ask Monsieur le Curé. If you can pry him from his devotions.”

  “I’ll do that,” said Aurélie, and left him discussing with the blacksmith the best way of putting a better edge on a fourteenth-century sword.

  The chape
l lay outside the castle walls, a small, rectangular edifice made of the same stone as the keep. There was a parish church in Courcelles at which the villagers made their devotions; as a child, Aurélie had joined in the processions on saints’ days. But this chapel was for the family and their retainers. Effigies lined the walls, narrowing the nave. The original Sigismund de Courcelles, the one who had gone on Crusade with Louis the Fat, lay on a slab of stone, his wolfhound at his feet, his sword still in his hand.

  But it wasn’t to Sigismund the First that Aurélie went, but his wife, Melisande. She had a dog as well, but hers was smaller and fluffier. Aurélie had never been sure whether it was a miscalculation on the sculptor’s part or design that had left a little alcove between the dog’s tail and the lady’s feet, entirely hidden unless one looked from just the right angle.

  Aurélie knelt down beside the effigy, contorting her body into a space that had been much more comfortable for a five-year-old. Looking behind her to make sure she was still alone, she wiggled the chain holding the talisman up over her head. For a moment, the diamonds and rubies glimmered in the light slanting through the small, rosette windows. Mercilessly, Aurélie muffled their glow, wrapping the talisman in her handkerchief and thrusting the small bundle into her old hidey-hole.

  Please let no one find it, she prayed to the saint. Please let no one find us. Let the Germans stay away—and away from Paris, as well, she added virtuously.

  She felt a momentary pang for the anxiety it must have caused her mother when she emerged from the dining room to find Aurélie and the talisman gone.

  But would she have worried, really? The talisman was insured, and it wasn’t as though her mother had any regard for the saint, anyway. As for Aurélie . . . well, her mother would scarcely notice she was gone, would she? She would be too busy. She’d probably be glad of the extra seat in the salon.

  It wasn’t true, she knew, but it made her feel better to think so.

  Aurélie rose, dusting the dirt of decades off her skirt—wherever Monsieur le Curé accomplished his devotions, it certainly wasn’t here—and went to go set her father’s affairs in order.