All the Ways We Said Goodbye

by Beatriz Williams

  “True. But Le Mouton Noir is this way. If we want to find La Fleur, I think that’s the best place to start, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” I said, feeling oddly disappointed and not a little foolish as I ran to catch up with him. “That’s why we’re here. To find La Fleur.”

  I forced a smile as we walked together, retracing my footsteps to the bookstore from the previous day, and fervently wishing I’d never heard of La Fleur.

  Chapter Eleven

  Aurélie

  The Château de Courcelles

  Picardy, France

  September 1914

  There were flowers at Aurélie’s place at the table when she came down for breakfast the next morning, a bouquet of daisies tied with a grosgrain bow.

  “You have an admirer, I see,” said her father. “One with simple tastes.”

  “It must have been one of the mayors,” said Aurélie, slipping into her seat beneath a painting of a decidedly overdressed shepherdess. “When they came out this morning for their instructions.”

  “It was the quiet German left them for you.” Suzanne slapped the coffeepot down so hard that Aurélie was amazed the porcelain pot didn’t shatter. It was surprisingly sturdy stuff, Limoges. “Came right in, all please and thank you and apologies, wanting to know which was your place. I wouldn’t have told him, but . . .”

  But when a German asked, one obeyed.

  “Of course, you couldn’t do otherwise.” The flowers that had been sweet a moment ago now seemed sinister. A floral tribute wasn’t much of a tribute when one hadn’t the right to refuse it.

  Would you commandeer my good will? she had asked Lieutenant von Sternburg the night before. It seemed he intended to do just that.

  “They’re only flowers,” she said, to no one in particular.

  “He has a softness for you.” Aurélie didn’t miss the way her father glanced over his shoulder as he said it, watching for listeners.

  Aurélie shrugged and helped herself to a miniscule portion of jam. On second thought, she recklessly slathered the bread. Better to take what they could before the Germans commandeered it. “He doesn’t like unpleasantness, that’s all. He’s trying to pretend this is a social call.”

  “Then maybe you ought to assist him in that fiction.” Her father regarded her over the rim of his coffee cup. “Men speak unguardedly to women they admire.”

  The jam stuck to the roof of Aurélie’s mouth. “You want me to consort with the enemy?”

  “Only one of them,” said her father, as though that made a difference. “Just—lend him an encouraging ear.”

  “Spy, you mean.”

  “There’s no need to be crude about it.”

  Aurélie frowned at her father. “Only canaille sink to such levels, you said. A gentleman goes into battle properly, honorably.”

  “You are a woman.” Her father waved a hand, appealing to the shepherdesses on the wall, hideous, simpering things. “Women wage war differently.”

  Aurélie was too outraged to mince words. “On their backs, you mean?”

  “Aurélie.” Her father had been friends with the late English king during his wild career as the Prince of Wales. He was disapproving, but hardly shocked. “I’m not suggesting you turn courtesan.”

  It was exactly what he was suggesting. “Men speak unguardedly to women they admire?”

  “Use the wits you were born with. When one is in extremis, one does what one must. We ate rats during the Siege of Paris.” Before Aurélie could point out that she’d heard about those rats before, her father changed tack. “Your mother wouldn’t balk at it.”

  And that meant she shouldn’t either? Aurélie pushed her plate away. “Just because Maman—” she began, and broke off, unable to say the words.

  “Lived her life with a man not her husband?” Her father’s voice was lightly ironical. “There’s no need to protect my pride, my dear. If all of Paris knew, I could hardly remain ignorant.”

  “Yes, but . . .” Aurélie wasn’t quite sure how she had found herself in the wrong. She was meant to be the picture of outraged virtue, not a shamed schoolgirl. “I don’t want to be like Maman.”

  “Your mother has her merits,” her father said neutrally, which seemed rather rich given that her parents had been estranged for the past fifteen years. They were like the mechanical figures on a clock. When one came out, the other went in. He couldn’t resist adding, “Discretion, however, was not one of them.”

  “What, then, am I meant to be?”

  “The picture of maidenly virtue.” Her father shrugged. “Take Von Sternburg for a stroll in the gardens. Show him the portraits in the green salon. You can take a chaperone if you fear for your good name.”

  The good name she had never had, thanks to her mother’s notoriety. Other girls were considered virtuous until proven otherwise. Aurélie had been labeled fast before she had even known what it meant. She had worked so hard to distinguish herself from her mother, to prove to the gratin that she, at least, was above reproach. And now . . .

  “There’s no point to it. They’ll be gone in a week. Herr von Sternburg said so.”

  Her father cast her a long, sidelong look. “You see? You’ve begun already.”

  “But I didn’t—” The intimacy of that encounter, the damp dress clinging to her, the warmth of Von Sternburg’s regard, all came crashing back, tangling her tongue, making the color rise in her cheeks.

  Her father looked owlishly at her over his coffee cup.

  Aurélie ate the rest of her breakfast in dignified silence. What her father suggested was impossible.

  Besides, it would be only a week, two at most. There was no need to work her dubious wiles on Von Sternburg to obtain information that could only be of limited use. The French would push forward again, she was sure of it. And then they would be free.

  But it wasn’t a week, or even two. September slid into October and the Germans were still there. Twenty-four kilometers to the west, the shelling continued, a faint rumble like thunder, a storm that went on and on without breaking.

  In the village of Courcelles and all the other villages under Major Hoffmeister’s command, the walls of the mairies were pasted with overlapping notices. At first, it was almost laughable, the commands that all hens were to lay two eggs a day, all of which were to be reserved for German officers. Every wild rabbit was to be counted and listed. All molehills were to be flattened.

  “Do they mean to make the chickens march in goose step?” snorted Victor as he hid jars of preserves beneath the straw of the old icehouse.

  But his laughter faded as the demands continued. The mattresses, the linen, the cooking pots, the meager treasures of the families in the village were methodically stripped away. A tax was imposed, eighty-six hundred francs in so-called war contributions.

  “If you mind so much for your people, you could pay it yourself,” said the major when Aurélie’s father complained that one could hardly squeeze blood from a stone.

  “Shall I wire my banker in Paris?” asked the count sarcastically.

  The major regarded him unsmilingly. “Your kind always have a bit tucked away. Don’t think I don’t know you’ve been hiding things from me. We’ll find them. We always do. Like those idiots who buried their clocks without stopping the chimes.”

  The count sketched an ironic bow. “Be my guest. Search the castle. My humble abode is, it appears, at your disposal. I shall send my accounting to Berlin.”

  It was empty bravado. They all knew that here, now, cut off from the rest of the world, there was no appealing to Berlin. Her father’s lineage, his position, meant nothing.

  That night, Lieutenant Kraus used the Venetian goblets for target practice, laughing as they shattered, spraying wine like blood.

  Major Hoffmeister said merely, “I assume you’ll add it to your account?” and Aurélie knew he was taunting her father on purpose, waiting for him to break, to do something rash.

  Lieutenant Kraus, she was convin
ced, was half-mad. A sot and a bully, breaking toys for the fun of it. Lieutenant Dreier was a sycophant, as firm of purpose as a feather mattress. He greedily guzzled the good wine when he thought no one was looking, pressing his Brownie camera onto the servants and demanding that they take pictures of him next to the gilt-limned walls of the ballroom to send home to impress his family in Darmstadt.

  But Major Hoffmeister was another matter entirely. He didn’t imbibe. He didn’t grab at treasures. Instead, he needled. One little slight after another, small inconveniences created for no cause other than to discomfit his reluctant hosts, to show them his power. He was breaking them, or trying to.

  “A week?” said Aurélie’s father, as October staggered into November, gaunt and cold. “Two at most?”

  He had taken to haunting the parapets with a spyglass, noting German troop movements. He was, she knew, relaying the information to a contact by means of pigeon, even though keeping pigeons had been banned on threat of death.

  Aurélie didn’t know whether to be alarmed at her father’s recklessness, or grateful that he hadn’t engaged in more direct action.

  “Who would have thought it could go on this long?” Aurélie hugged herself against the wind that bit through her thin jacket. She had always spent winters in Paris, never at Courcelles. Her wardrobe was a summer wardrobe, unsuited to dawn parapets. “It can’t go on much longer. It can’t.”

  “Can’t it?” said her father, and Aurélie thought that if he mentioned the Siege of Paris in ’71 again she might scream. “We might know more—if you took the pains to learn.”

  “I doubt that,” said Aurélie sharply. “What might Lieutenant von Sternburg know other than the numbers of hens who failed to lay their required quota of eggs?”

  Whenever she saw him, he was hurrying past with a ledger under his arm. He looked as though he had a perpetual headache. She rather hoped he had.

  The children in the village said he gave them bars of chocolate. This, Aurélie thought, would have been rather more heartwarming if he hadn’t also been one of the men in charge of robbing those children’s parents.

  “His uncle is a member of the high command. Haven’t you noticed the letters that arrive for him every week?”

  “I hadn’t realized you went through their mail.”

  “Of course I don’t,” said her father impatiently. “Henri does.”

  Henri was the old butler, eighty if he was a day, the constant butt of the Germans’ jibes. Aurélie felt an idiot for not having thought of it herself.

  “If Henri is reading his letters already, why do you need me?”

  “Because Henri can’t always get to them. He’s loyal but he’s not—what was that American’s name? Houdini. Your mother made me see his performance,” he added as an aside, his lip curling slightly, although whether at the magician or her mother, Aurélie had no idea. “It would be more effective to go to the horse’s mouth, as it were.”

  She really shouldn’t be thinking about Lieutenant von Sternburg’s mouth. “If the opportunity arises.”

  “True daughters of Courcelles,” said her father, “make their own opportunities.”

  She might have told him that all she had seen of Von Sternburg recently was the back of his head. She might have told him that she thought the German was avoiding her—or perhaps she was avoiding him. Or maybe they were avoiding each other.

  Instead, she pushed away from the parapet. “I need to go to the village.”

  Her father turned to look at her. “You can’t stop a dam with a loaf of bread.”

  “Who would waste good bread on a dam?” said Aurélie tartly, and stomped down the stairs, annoyed with the world and her father in particular. She didn’t know if he had only lately developed a habit of aphorism or if she had just never noticed it before. If it was the latter, she was beginning to have slightly more sympathy for her mother.

  Or maybe she was annoyed because she knew, on some level, that he was right, and that her own efforts were a poor excuse for action.

  No, that wasn’t entirely true. Aurélie stopped in the kitchens, taking the prepared basket from Suzanne as the cook glanced furtively behind her to make sure no loitering German soldiers were about. What she was doing did matter. Even if it was only a loaf of bread here, an egg there.

  All of the grain, their hard-won grain that she could reckon in calluses on her palms, had been confiscated. The mill ground only for the Germans; the bakery turned out loaves and cakes for the conquerors. The people of Courcelles were surviving, barely, on gruel and thin soup, flavored with what roots the Germans considered beneath them. Starving, the villagers had taken to gleaning any stray grains of wheat they could find and grinding them into coarse meal in their coffee grinders.

  On hearing of this, Major Hoffmeister had ordered all the coffee grinders in the village confiscated.

  Never mind that all the able-bodied men had long since gone. Never mind that he was starving old men and young children and expectant mothers.

  So Aurélie had taken matters into her own hands. The Germans kept copious records, but could they say, truly, how many eggs had gone into their souffle, how many chickens into their stew? Suzanne had become an expert at making shift, spiriting food from the pot into Aurélie’s basket. Every day, she would wait until Hoffmeister and his two favorite flunkies were out hunting her father’s forest, pretending to be the very grand seigneurs they claimed to despise. Then she would creep down the hill, distributing her makeshift charity to the people of the village.

  “Angel,” they called her, and “Demoiselle,” and she felt like the world’s greatest hypocrite, to accept their praise when she had done so little. If she were truly a heroine, she would take a knife to Hoffmeister as Charlotte Corday had done to Marat—although preferably not in his bath. Whatever Lieutenant von Sternburg might say about the medieval tradition of bathing guests, seeing Hoffmeister naked was a humiliation she had so far been spared.

  And if she did stab him? They would only shoot her. Shoot her and burn the entire village in reprisal. All would be lost and for what? Another Hoffmeister would be sent to administer the charred remains of what once had been Courcelles, and the wild grass would grow over the houses that had been and the people who had died for her foolishness.

  No, she had to be cleverer than that. But how?

  The stories of her youth had all been of bold action or virtuous resignation, Joan of Arc or Patient Griselda, neither of them noted for their subtlety. Aurélie wondered, fleetingly, what her mother would do. Hold a salon for the conquerors? Twist their words until they found themselves agreeing with her despite themselves?

  She wasn’t her mother.

  She had always been so proud of that, that she was a Courcelles to the bone. For the first time, Aurélie caught herself wondering, uneasily, whether she ought to have paid more attention to her mother’s tutelage, to have inherited something more from her than the color of her hair.

  The sun was shining, but the village felt gray, all the bustle subdued. The usual clog-clad crowd of women around the well in the village square was missing; the Germans had made it illegal to congregate in groups of more than three. There was no washing hanging on the lines; that, too, had become a crime. The smells of food cooking, the old men at the café whose voices grew louder as they drank glass after glass of blanche, all were gone. The villagers hid behind the curtains of their houses, out of sight of the German imperial flag that hung boldly from the front of the former police station, now a German command post.

  Those women who were out and about on errands moved quickly and furtively, looking back over their shoulders at the Germans who sat at the café or loitered by the entrance to the command post.

  Aurélie took the back way, past the churchyard, avoiding the square. The familiar old church felt alien, stripped bare of the walnut trees that had, for generations, shaded the graveyard. The work of centuries had been cut down in an afternoon, the wood shipped to Germany to make rifle barrels
.

  No smoke came from the chimney of the schoolhouse. The schoolmistress had been deported to Germany for the crime of starting classes at the traditional ten o’clock rather than the German-mandated nine. Well, that and singing “La Marseillaise” very loudly at Lieutenant Dreier when he came to demand that the school time be changed. Local opinion was divided upon whether that had been heroic or foolish—or merely an affront to the ears and national pride.

  Some houses had Germans billeted in them. Aurélie avoided those. Swiftly, not lingering, she went from garden to garden, past the empty runs where chickens used to peck, handing over a loaf here, a half chicken there, a few links of sausage, a sack of withered apples. Her meager offerings were hidden under the corners of shawls, whisked through kitchen doors, treated as though they were diamonds cut from a rajah’s crown and not the dregs of the kitchen, one step away from pig slop.

  It seemed impossible to remember a time when pigs ate as well as men, when the villagers heedlessly threw crusts to birds and peeled potatoes in great, careless strips.

  The village felt empty, abandoned; the Germans were sending able-bodied men and women, the ones who defied them, or the ones who appeared to defy them, to work camps in Germany. There had been rumors in the village, wild rumors, that the infirm men, the ones whose health had been ruined by the phosphate mines and their brains by genièvre, were to be shot; that the women were to be organized into brothels. Rumors, just rumors, Aurélie hoped. There was so much, two months ago, that she would have thought wild speculation had she not seen it herself. The joke about goose-stepping chickens had long since lost all humor.

  But what was she to do? Something, something, something. Aurélie could hear the words in time to her footsteps as she hurried back up the hill to the castle, her empty basket hidden beneath her thick shawl.