“You are very kind, and you don’t even know me. I promise to let you know if I get tired.” She looked at me closely, her dark eyes penetrating. “I would much prefer to get to know you, although I feel as if we’re already old friends, no?”
“I have that sort of face. I suppose it makes it easy for me to make friends.”
“Perhaps.” She indicated the chair next to the bed. “Please do sit.”
I glanced at the small gold clock on the side table by her chair. “It’s four o’clock. Shall I order tea?”
“That would be wonderful, thank you.”
I ordered tea and had sat down again when I noticed three framed photographs on the dressing table across the room. “If this is where you sit the most, wouldn’t you like your photographs closer?”
“That is a very good idea, Barbara, and so thoughtful. I imagine you’re an excellent mother. You have children, no?”
“Three,” I said proudly as I walked toward the dresser to retrieve the frames. “Two boys and one girl.” I looked down at the pictures. “Are these your children?”
“Oui. I also have three—but two girls and one boy.”
“They are very good-looking children,” I said. The oldest two, a girl and a boy, were both dark-haired and seemed to be in their middle to late twenties. The youngest girl, in her early twenties, also had dark hair, but it was lighter than her siblings’. Despite the difference in hair color, of the three she resembled their mother the most.
“Do they live here in France?” I asked as I arranged the frames on the small table.
Her face fell. “Sadly, no. They are in Canada. It is our home, and they have their lives there. I didn’t want them to fret while I was in Paris for treatment. My youngest daughter is still at university. They plan to visit at the end of term.”
“Something to look forward to, then,” I said, leaning over and adjusting the pillow behind her head. I noticed again how thin she was, how the veins in her hand were a startling blue against the whiteness of her skin. “Can I get you another blanket? Or perhaps a sweater?”
She laughed, bringing a welcome spot of color to her cheeks. “I’m perfectly fine, but thank you. The tea is here so if you would pour me a cup I would love to sit and listen to you tell me about your family.”
A waiter wheeled in the tea tray and I dismissed him so I could pour the tea. I fixed a plate of small sandwiches and pastries for Margot, although she didn’t touch them no matter how many times I pushed the plate toward her.
“Tell me more about your children,” I said. “Are the oldest two finished with school?”
“They are, but I’d rather not talk about them right now. It makes me miss them too much. Tell me instead about you. You said you are a widow?”
I nodded, and took a sip of my tea. “Yes. My late husband, Kit, died a year ago. He’d been ill for about a year so it wasn’t a shock, but still . . .”
“But it’s still as if your heart was ripped out of you without warning.”
“Yes. That’s it exactly.”
She plucked at the satin blanket covering her knees, her tea growing cool on the table beside her. “I see you still wear your wedding ring. Because you feel you are still married to him?”
I stared at the plain gold band on my hand, remembering Kit sliding it on my finger on our wedding day. I no longer wore the sapphire engagement ring, having long ago put it away to give to Penny on her twenty-first birthday. It was too dainty, too decorative for my hands, and I’d always felt as if it should have belonged to someone else.
I met her eyes again. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think I wear it because I don’t know who else I am supposed to be if I’m not Kit’s wife.”
Her intense gaze bored into me. “You are a strong woman, Barbara. I know this already about you. Sometimes we don’t know how strong we are until we are left with no other choice, yes?” She smiled. “What is it they say? Some women are lost in the fire, and some are built with it. It’s too easy to quit when our lives don’t turn out the way we expect. But you and I are strong enough to imagine a new life. Something different, perhaps, but even better than what we’d hoped.”
A most annoying lump had formed in my throat and I forced it down with a gulp of tea so I could speak and not embarrass myself with silly tears. “I’m not sure you’re right about me. I seem to have a particular gift for wallowing in my misery.” I frowned. “Why are you being so kind to me? You barely know me.”
She shrugged, her bony shoulders mere shadows under her bed jacket. “Perhaps because you appear to need someone to be kind to you.”
I laughed nervously. “And here I was, thinking it was the other way around.” Uncomfortable with her scrutiny, I pushed her plate closer to her. “You haven’t eaten a thing. Should you at least try? I imagine you need to keep up your strength.”
“I will try for you, although I have no appetite.” She picked up a small cucumber triangle and took a tiny bite. “You are very young to be a widow. How are your children coping with the loss of their father?”
“I’m thirty-eight, so not very young. Our youngest two, Penny and Rupert, are handling it as well as can be expected. Stiff upper lip and all that.” I tried to smile at my little joke, but failed miserably. “Our oldest, Robin, has had the hardest time. He and Kit—my husband—were very close. Robin was just sent down from Cambridge for drinking. He’s with my sister and her husband now, which is probably the best place for him since I’m not exactly the icon of strength at the moment.”
She put the little sandwich back on her plate without having taken another bite. “You do see, Barbara, that’s why you are strong. A weak woman would never have admitted that her son was hurting and needed help elsewhere. And, of course, you are here on a lovely vacation. So not exactly ‘wallowing in your misery,’ hmm?”
“Oh, I’m not on holiday. I’m actually here to . . . well.” I drew a deep breath. “I’m here to find out about my husband’s time in Paris during the war.”
She looked surprised. “Did your husband never talk of it?”
I shook my head. “No.” Only in nightmares. “He was in a German prison camp and when he was released at the end of the war and sent home, he was in very bad shape. He wanted to forget about the war and everything that reminded him of it.” I looked down at my teacup, the cream clumping in the now cold liquid. “So he never talked about it, and for the same reason, I never asked.”
“How very difficult for you both. But then you married and had three wonderful children. It was a good life, yes?” She seemed to be genuinely interested in my answer.
“Yes,” I said without having to think. “It really was. And it still can be,” I added hastily. “I just need to stop grieving so I can get on with things.”
“Your grief will end, I promise you. And then you will have room for joy again. I know this to be true. Just because your life will be different, that doesn’t mean it can’t still be beautiful.”
I wanted to ask her how she knew this, but the words were stuck in my traitorous throat.
A soft smile lit her face, showing me a hint of the beauty she had once been. “I find I am getting tired, and I’m sure you are exhausted from being my nursemaid. I think I shall read for a bit. Would you mind bringing my book to me before you leave? I left it by the chair in front of the window.”
I swallowed, happy for the reprieve. “Of course.” I walked across the room to fetch her book, glancing at the title as I picked it up. Les Misérables. There was something comforting in the thickness of the volume, as if its very length showed an optimism I suspected very few battling cancer might have.
“I have found a delightful bookshop if you find yourself in need of another book when you’re done with this one.” I handed the book to her and she placed it on her lap. “I’m afraid we spoke mostly about me,” I said. “But if you’d like company while I’m here at the Ritz, I’d enjoy coming back and you can tell me all about your beautiful children and Canada. I’v
e never been.”
She reached for my hand. “I would like that very much.”
I squeezed her hand before letting go, alarmed at how brittle her bones felt, how papery her skin. “Goodbye, then. Until next time.”
I started to leave but turned back, a question pecking at my head like a blackbird.
“If you don’t mind me asking, Margot, what happened to your husband?”
“Gone. Like so many people during the war.”
“I’m so very sorry.”
“Don’t be. I, too, managed to have a happy life. You see? We are both strong women because we know how to survive the worst that life can throw at us.”
I smiled. “I’ll let you read. I look forward to seeing you again.”
I let myself out, closing the door behind me. I stood there for a long moment, feeling as exhausted as if I’d just completed a gymkhana and not completely convinced that a strong woman would feel the compelling need to run to her room and bury her face in a pillow and cry.
Chapter Fourteen
Aurélie
The Château de Courcelles
Picardy, France
December 1914
One shouldn’t feel so much like crying at Christmas.
It was bitter cold in the chapel, the moonlight falling jaggedly through the high old windows. Aurélie fisted her frozen fingers for warmth and tried to concentrate on the familiar ritual as the priest, in his white vestments, rustled about at the altar. But he was cold, too, cold and nervous. As the censer slipped through his fingers, clattering to the floor, everyone in the small congregation froze, looking over their shoulders.
“Go on,” Aurélie’s father commanded, and everyone exhaled again, their breath showing in the frosty air.
The Germans had contrived to rob them even of Christmas. Hoffmeister had plastered his posters on the wall of the mairie and the doors of the cafés: there would be no midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Everyone was to be in their homes by six o’clock. For safety’s sake.
But it wasn’t safety, it was pure meanness. They had so little left, so precious little, couldn’t he at least have left them this? There would be no réveillon, the traditional midnight feast, no bûche de Noël. Not that the Germans were stinting themselves. The orders had gone out weeks ago, every available duck, goose, or chicken was to be sent to the château, to be boiled, roasted, and stuffed for the Germans’ own feast. Every remaining bottle of wine, every hidden stock of brandy, had been ferreted out and claimed. But it wasn’t enough for them, was it? It wasn’t enough that they had the villagers’ feast. They had to take their devotions from them as well.
Aurélie’s father had gathered together the castle servants and bidden Monsieur le Curé to say midnight mass anyway, here, in the old chapel.
“They ordered us to keep to our homes by six?” her father had said, with a glimpse of his old arrogance. “This is my home, all of it, every hectare. Let them turn me out of my own chapel.”
Yes, but it wasn’t only his pride at issue. There was Monsieur le Curé, who might be punished, or Suzanne or Victor for attending. Aurélie knew her father was relishing his small rebellion, but she found herself wishing he had chosen to express his discontent in some other way. He thought he was pulling the wool over Hoffmeister’s eyes, chalking up a point in their grudge match. He seemed not to realize there was no game. There was only the business of survival. That Hoffmeister knew of this and was choosing, for his own purpose, to ignore it, Aurélie had no doubt.
She also had no doubt that he would enact his revenge. When and how it suited him.
Her father was enjoying himself, playing the grand seigneur, and Aurélie felt guilty, so guilty for grudging him that—but also frustrated, frustrated that he couldn’t see what she saw. When had he become so childish? She oughtn’t think that about her father. It was unfilial. But there it was, and it wouldn’t go away.
She didn’t want to doubt her father’s judgment. He had always been her touchstone, a model of stability against the giddy nonsense of her mother’s fashionable urban existence. But this . . . There was no consolation in it. They ought to have waited, ought to have gone to the morning mass in the village that Hoffmeister had grudgingly deigned to permit because he could find no good reason to refuse it.
The mass was concluding, a strange, gabbled mass without music, without light. Her father, with the air of a conjurer, drew out a bottle of brandy.
“Let’s see them keep us from our réveillon!” he said, and Aurélie could see the flash of teeth as Victor grinned and took the bottle.
The bottle came around and Aurélie took a swig, hoping it would warm her. Together, they tottered across the blighted grass from the old chapel, ducking beneath the lighted arrow slits of the old keep, where Hoffmeister held his own Christmas court. They could hear the voices, German voices, singing songs in their own barbaric language.
Was Maximilian von Sternburg one of that boisterous company? Undoubtedly. It was at moments like this that she was forcibly reminded that he was the enemy, alien, no matter how friendly he professed to be, no matter how their strolls in the dead garden conjured the memories of gentler times.
Aurélie ducked her head and blundered into the warmth of the kitchen.
“This will warm you right up, my love.” Suzanne unearthed some cider and began warming it on the hearth, handing out steaming cups.
Perhaps there was something in it, in this illicit celebration. It seemed to be bucking up her father’s retainers, at least.
“There,” said Victor. He took the baby Jesus from his hidden place behind the crèche, placing the wooden baby in the cradle in the manger. “Now it’s truly Christmas.”
The crèche was a crude one, whittled locally, decorated with paper flowers, a brave attempt at festivity in the midst of despair.
There had been a crèche in Aurélie’s mother’s rooms at the Ritz. It had amused her mother to adopt that old tradition. The crèche had been baroque, featuring exquisitely carved and painted figures: delicately gilded halos on the holy family, streetsellers juggling apples, gossips chatting across houses, the wise men on their camels, bearing their precious burdens of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Throughout the Christmas season, guests would come to ooh and aah over it. It had become a tradition of sorts. Aurélie had hated it, had hated their home being made so public, constantly on display.
Now she found herself wondering if her mother had put up the crèche as usual. She had loved it as a child. She would make the camels canter and dangle the angels from their golden halos. And her mother had never once complained, not even when Aurélie chipped a wing on an angel.
What was her mother doing now? Was she wondering about Aurélie? Worrying about her? When Aurélie had run off, all those months ago, it had seemed like a grand act of defiance, but it had never occurred to her that the war would go on so long or in such stalemate, that she would find herself so entirely cut off from Paris, unable even to let her mother know she was alive and unharmed.
Clovis, her father’s wolfhound, butted his head against her hand, and Aurélie absently scratched him behind the ears, noticing how gray he had become, how stiffly he bent his knees to settle at her side.
The heat of the kitchen, the taste of the cider woolly on her lips, her father’s unaccustomed shabbiness, Clovis’s stiff knees—it all felt unreal, dreamlike. And not a good sort of dream.
She had always sulked over Christmas at the Ritz, scowling at the artificiality of it, the chocolate-box prettiness, but now she would have given anything to open her eyes and be back there, to turn back the clock to last year, when she had suffered through her mother’s réveillon in a dress that was too tight in the collar, making half-hearted conversation with the wits of Paris. If only they could put everything back as it was, make her father himself again, take the gray hair from Clovis’s coat, make the village a peaceful, happy place, a place of refuge in contrast to the bustling, smoke-stained city.
“Do you know what
Nicolas told me?” Suzanne said, as she topped up Aurélie’s steaming beaker of cider.
“Nicolas the baker’s son or Nicolas the schoolmistress’s nephew?” asked her father.
“The baker’s son.” Suzanne splashed cider into her father’s cup. “He said he’d had a letter from Father Christmas. Father Christmas wrote that he was mistaken for an airman and shot in the foot and that was why he wouldn’t be delivering any gifts this year—but not to worry, he’ll be all recovered by next Christmas. Wasn’t that clever, now?”
“That was Madame Lelong, the postmaster’s wife,” said Aurélie’s father. “She wanted to make sure the little ones wouldn’t be crying for their presents.”
“But it’s horrible,” Aurélie burst out. Her cup was empty; she couldn’t remember drinking it. Her tongue felt thick with the cloying taste of the cider. “Father Christmas—shot. What have we come to?”
“It was a kindness.” There was a warning in her father’s voice.
“Kind? To tell the children we’ve killed Father Christmas?”
“Not killed,” said Victor patiently. “Only wounded.”
It was monstrous. “Don’t you think Father Christmas ought to come after all?” She looked around at the others, their faces slightly blurry in the candlelight. She hated herself for not having thought of it before, for not having contrived something. It hadn’t occurred to her. Because she had been taking too many walks with Lieutenant von Sternburg? Max. He had asked her to call him Max and she had, because it advanced their cause, that was all. “The books from the library . . . I could give every child a book.”
“Do you really think the village children yearn for Aristophanes?” asked her father.
More than her father ever had. He had never been a great reader, another rift between him and her mother.
Guilt made Aurélie fierce. “At least it would be something.”
“With our arms in it? They would know where it was from in an instant.”
All the Ways We Said Goodbye Page 20
