Except that she had come from Paris and the talisman with her. Aurélie felt rumpled and scattered and thoroughly confused. “I don’t understand. Why would you tell him about the talisman?”
There’ll be fortune hunters, her mother had warned her once. Men who want what you have. Not her personal charms. It was clear her mother hadn’t meant that. But the jewels that were part of her patrimony. The jewels embedded in the talisman.
“It seemed to make sense at the time,” said Max helplessly. “The major was going to destroy the château. One less center of resistance, he said. He meant to find a pretext to torch the castle and your father in it. So I told him—I told him there was a treasure hidden in the walls. He didn’t know Paris well enough to know that the talisman is the centerpiece of your mother’s salon. That isn’t his world. But he liked the sound of priceless jewels—and mystical powers.”
“You told him it was here.” So much began to make sense. All those veiled comments. Hoffmeister’s determination to oust her from her quarters. She wondered if he had yanked the boiseries from the walls, torn up the boards from the floor.
Max grasped her cold hands. “I only meant to prevent him destroying the château. He had meant to place headquarters in Le Catelet, but once he heard there was a treasure at Courcelles . . . I wanted you to have a home to come back to.”
“You’re saying you did this for me?” She didn’t know whether to be touched or appalled. “You’re saying all of this—this occupation—is because of me?”
“No! Courcelles would have been occupied anyway. Just by other people. And the castle would have been destroyed and all its history lost.”
Her father in it, he had said. Yes, she could see her father refusing to leave his citadel, immolating himself on a principle. “So this was meant as a kindness, then?”
She must have sounded as incredulous as she felt. “Don’t you think I’d go back and change it if I could? There’s so much I would change if I could. I lie there at night wishing I’d gone back to Paris before all this started so that I might have told you—”
“Told me?”
It was as though her voice recalled him to their circumstances. She felt his sudden stillness, his indecision.
Quietly, without inflection, he said, “That I love you.”
Without the sound of the guns, the night was painfully quiet and still, the air sharp with frost. “Love.”
“Love,” repeated Max. His hands tightened on hers. “Do you think I don’t realize what effrontery it is to speak the word to you here? If I had come back to Paris, if I had spoken before, I might have said something without the sentiment being loathsome to you. But now . . . How can it be anything but an imposition?”
Aurélie registered the passionate tone of his voice, the press of his hands, but the words themselves seemed to ricochet around her like billiard balls, all scattershot.
“Love,” she said again.
“It seems an absurdity, I know, here, in these circumstances. I wouldn’t have said anything . . . I didn’t mean to say anything . . . but . . . you kissed me,” he said, and it sounded like a question. It was a question. And Aurélie didn’t have an answer for it.
Love.
What did she know of love?
Oh Lord. It had been one thing to walk with Lieutenant von Sternburg, to allow him her company and pretend it was duty, pretend she was doing it for what gleanings she might gain for the war effort. Pretend she didn’t enjoy his company, didn’t look forward to the sound of his voice, the feel of his arm through hers as they strolled.
But love . . .
“It’s late. I should be getting back.” Aurélie stood so abruptly she almost tripped over her basket.
“I see,” said Max, but she knew he didn’t see, not at all. How could he when she didn’t understand herself? But he mastered his emotions all the same, standing at once. “I’ll see you to the keep.”
“There’s no need.” The path up the hill had never seemed longer. How could she walk it with Max beside her, feeling whatever it was between them, knowing how he felt? It was impossible. “I know the way.”
“I don’t doubt that. It’s just that the sentry is less likely to shoot you if you’re with me.”
“Yes, but he’ll think . . .” The sentry would think they’d been doing exactly what they’d been doing. The memory of their kiss, of the power of it, made her voice unnecessarily harsh as she said, “He’ll think I’m your trollop. Just another French whore.”
Max stiffened, every bit the outraged Prussian nobleman. “You can’t imagine I would ever let anyone think—”
What a damnable mess it all was. Aurélie began walking, faster and faster, too fast, her words crisp and sharp as frost. “You can’t control their thoughts. And why should they think otherwise? It’s common enough. A bit of real coffee, a pair of silk stockings . . . chocolate for the children.”
Max hurried to catch up to her. “Do you think I expect payment . . . in any kind? It was for the children, of my own account. I would never—”
His goodness shamed her. She was ashamed of herself, of everything. “I know you wouldn’t. But other men haven’t your scruples. Or your kindness. Haven’t you noticed the world is made of wolves?”
They walked in silence for a moment. Max said, in a low voice, “I never meant to put you in an impossible position.”
How had he thought it anything but impossible? He was German; she was French. It was as simple as that. At least, it was supposed to be. Oh yes, he might try to steal a kiss, that was the sort of thing the conqueror did, but she wasn’t meant to kiss him. Or enjoy it. And he wasn’t meant to speak of love. He certainly wasn’t supposed to mean it.
“When did you decide you loved me?” The words escaped her before she could think better of them.
“I’m not sure I would call it a decision.” They walked in silence a moment more, before he said, “It was a Tuesday in May, a year and a half ago. I’d come to your mother’s salon because I was told it was one of the sights of Paris, like the Comédie Française or the Tour Eiffel. That didn’t come out quite right, did it? Rather, I should say, I was told that her salon was a cultural experience, that in her suite in the Ritz, one met all the cleverest writers and wisest men, all the most eloquent poets and visionary painters. I came for that, thinking I would visit once so that I might say I had, and then never come again.”
“Are you going to say you saw me and loved me?” said Aurélie doubtfully.
“No, nothing like that. Not that one wouldn’t,” he added hastily. “But I’ve never understood men who are struck by a pair of fine eyes not bothering to know what’s going on behind them. No. It was about an hour after I had arrived. Monsieur Proust was reading from his manuscript, and you were standing in the back of the room, commenting. I nearly snorted madeleine up my nose.”
Aurélie had never heard anyone refer so tenderly to the occasion of getting food up one’s nose. “I didn’t know,” she said.
“I tried not to choke too obviously,” said Max gravely. “But I came back again to your mother’s salon for you, to see what you would say next. Sometimes you weren’t there, but mostly you were.”
“Standing in the back of the room.” She had never noticed, at least, not consciously, how often Maximilian von Sternburg had found his way to the back of the room beside her. If she had considered it, she would have thought only that the best seats, the sofas and settees and spindly Louis XV chairs, were already taken as of right by her mother’s regulars. “You came for me?”
“If I had wanted poets, I might have found them at any café,” said Max. “But you were only to be found at the Ritz, so to the Ritz I came. If not for Elisabeth . . .”
The grief in his voice was so palpable that Aurélie, without thinking, put her hand on his arm. The touch went through her like a shock. Never mind that she’d walked arm in arm with him a hundred times before. It felt different now. Dangerous.
“I’m sorry,” she
said, and she wasn’t only talking about his sister.
She wrapped her hands in the folds of her shawl, as if she could blot out the memory of his skin. The sentry was watching them from his box. She had no doubt what he was thinking.
She blurted out, “I don’t think we should see so much of each other anymore.”
Max went very still. She could see him looking at her, trying to read her face. “If that’s what you want.”
It wasn’t, not at all, but that was precisely why she needed to stay away from him. At least as much as one could within a set of medieval walls.
Max said something to the sentry in German, a command, and then turned and bowed stiffly to her. “Goodnight, Mademoiselle de Courcelles.”
He turned, but not toward the keep. Away, back toward the bare hill and the sleeping village, where no church bells rang.
“Wait,” said Aurélie, knowing it was weakness to prolong their parting. “Where are you going?”
He seemed very remote, and very German, in his big greatcoat and uniform cap. “To deliver your packages.”
Aurélie bit her lip, remembering the basket, abandoned by the bench. Her duty, forgotten. “I thought Father Christmas had come already.”
Max looked at her steadily. “These children deserve all the joy they can get, in small packages or large. And how could I not—after you risked so much?”
She thought of those pitiful little packets of nuts, scattered when the basket had fallen in the heat of their kiss. “So much for so little, you mean.”
“It isn’t little, to care.” Max’s eyes were very bright in the moonlight. He doffed his cap to her, the torchlight glinting off his silver-gilt hair. “Joyeux Noël, Mademoiselle de Courcelles.”
Avoiding the eyes of the sentry, Aurélie began walking rapidly across the courtyard, back toward the new wing. No, it wasn’t so little, to care. Not at all. And that was what scared her.
There was a hollow place where Max von Sternburg had been. Aurélie hadn’t realized how much time she spent with him, how much she relied upon his company, until he wasn’t there anymore. January shivered into February, cold, bitter cold, her ears numb to the sound of distant shelling, her hands perpetually covered with chilblains. The coal had been diverted to Germany, the trees in the forest felled to make planks to line trenches. The walls of the castle had never seemed so gray, or the world so bare.
It might have been better had she had an occupation, if there were fields to till or crops to harvest, but this was the quiet time of year, when the ground was frozen hard. If there had been wool, she might have spun—if one of the women had taught her. There was mending to do, always, but Suzanne was a far better hand with a needle than she. Hoffmeister hadn’t thought to forbid her the books in the library, so she read, puzzling over difficult words, wishing she had applied herself more to her studies, trying to avoid the suspicion that she was striving, in some strange way, to impress Max von Sternburg, even though she went out of her way to avoid him and he her.
She tried to find her father, but he, too, proved remarkably elusive. That he was engaged on some grand project, she had no doubt. That he didn’t trust her enough to include her, she also knew, and it stung. He was protecting her, she told herself, but she didn’t really believe it, not entirely.
In the end, Aurélie took refuge in the chapel, going on her knees on the worn old stones engraved with the names of long-dead Courcelles. She tried to pray, but her thoughts remained stubbornly of the earth. In her strange, solitary childhood, she had come to the chapel frequently. She would evade her governess and sit on the floor beside the effigy of the first countess, absently stroking the carved fur of the lady’s lapdog as she poured out all her thoughts and concerns to her ancestress. Aurélie had never thought herself fanciful, but sometimes she imagined she could see the lady herself, standing there insubstantial in the shade, smiling down at her in the warm silence.
But that had been summer, always summer, when the air was sweet with the scent of roses and jewel-toned light fell through the old stained-glass windows, dappling everything with color. Try though she might, Aurélie could find no sense of presence here now, either human or divine. Where was the Lord, to have visited such horrors upon them? The children of the village grew wasted, frail. Where were her ancestors, as Germans reveled in their keep, shaming their shades? Where was her father, keeping her in ignorance when she burned to do something, anything?
She felt lost, deserted by everyone on whom she had relied.
Everyone except the one person she had the least reason to trust.
Love. It was absurd to think of love at a time like this. She shouldn’t be thinking it. It made her chest hurt and her head ache.
“It was a Tuesday in May,” he had said, sounding sure, so sure. No wild declarations of passion, just that calm certainty.
So sure in his love for her.
For her.
Jean-Marie loved her, Aurélie knew, but he loved her because it was expected. He loved her because their families had known each other for generations. He loved her because it was less bother than finding a wife for himself.
But Max had no obligations to her, no ties of family or history. If he loved her—Aurélie made sure to stress that if—it was purely because of some quality in her. Because there was something about her that called to him. Or something he thought called to him.
She had to keep telling herself that, because if she were to allow herself to believe that he saw her, truly saw her, as he had seen her in the corner of her mother’s salon, away from the throng, impatient with their philosophies, and still loved her anyway—that was heady and dangerous stuff, and she shouldn’t be allowing herself to consider even the possibility of it, not with a German, not when she was all but promised, never mind that she’d never felt any more passion for Jean-Marie than he felt for her.
Certainly nothing like the passion she’d felt on Christmas Eve, in the churchyard, with Max von Sternburg.
Aurélie rested her forehead against the cold stone of the countess’s pet dog, praying for clarity, for a sign, for anything.
The cold wind whistled through the cracks in the windows. And then Aurélie heard a noise that wasn’t the wind at all.
She froze against the stone, her body chilled and alert at the same time.
There was a flutter and a cooing noise. Slowly, Aurélie lifted her head—to see a white pigeon perched on the breastplate of Sigismund the First.
For a moment, all disbelief fled. Here was fairy tale, indeed. A sign from her ancestors. A dove bearing—a metal canister?
Sense returned with a vengeance. This wasn’t a metaphor or a message. Not that sort of message, in any event. This was a carrier pigeon, banned on pain of death, bearing intelligence, and if Hoffmeister found it here, they’d all pay for it.
“Hello,” said Aurélie to the pigeon. “If I may?”
The pigeon submitted to having its cylinder removed. Inside was a tiny scrap of foolscap, rolled into a scroll thinner than a knitting needle. Aurélie was just about unroll it when a shadow fell across the nave.
Hastily, Aurélie placed herself between the intruder and the pigeon, as though that would make any difference.
“Father! Thank goodness,” she said. “I thought—”
“The German dogs would never come in here,” said her father dismissively. He wasn’t, Aurélie noticed, as well groomed as usual. His valet had gone for a soldier back in August, and Victor, while enthusiastic, was hardly skilled. There were nicks on her father’s chin, clumsily covered with sticking plaster. But his manner was as imperious as ever. He held out a hand. “I believe that message is intended for me.”
Aurélie didn’t surrender it. “You should be more careful. What if someone else had found it?”
“Who else comes here? Monsieur le Curé?” Her father gave a snort. “He prefers to practice his devotions in the comfort of the green salon. That pig of a major? He doesn’t want the stench of papistry on his
skin.”
“He’d risk it if he knew what you were keeping in here.” The pigeon was pecking at the count’s breastplate as one who had pecked there before. A bell tower with no bell, close to her father, under the Germans’ very nose. “You are keeping the birds here, aren’t you? I ought to have guessed it before. I’m amazed no one else has.”
“Why would they?” There was a warning in her father’s voice. “Are you planning to inform him?”
Aurélie drew herself up very straight, one hand on the countess’s stone foot. “How could you suggest such a thing?”
Her father regarded her narrowly. “Pillow talk, perhaps?”
“I’m not on those terms with any of our captors,” said Aurélie, trying not to think of Christmas Eve and the kiss. That had been a long time ago. Max had been true to his word; he had stayed away as she had asked. “Besides, you were the one who wanted me to get close to Lieutenant von Sternburg!”
“Ought I to have specified how close?” Her father appeared every inch the grand seigneur, looking down his nose at her. “I saw you returning together on Christmas Eve.”
“He was trying to keep me from getting shot, that’s all.” After her father had all but pushed her into the line of the guns. Did he want her a martyr for France? It was a decidedly disconcerting thought, that her father might think her of more use dead than alive. Aurélie swallowed over a lump in her throat. “Whatever you’re suggesting, I assure you, it isn’t the case. Lieutenant von Sternburg is . . . was a friend.”
“No. He’s the enemy.” Her father snapped his fingers at the paper in her hand. “I’ll take that.”
Aurélie glanced down at the paper with its tiny writing. It was coded, of course, but she recognized the hand, the distinctive angle of the 4, the lack of a central slash on the 7. She looked up at her father in surprise. “This is my mother’s writing.”
Her father looked annoyed at being questioned. “And what if it is?”
All these weeks, wondering if her mother knew she was alive, feeling both guilty and irritated by her own guilt, trying to convince herself her mother didn’t care, while knowing that she did . . . And, all the while, her father had been communicating with her mother and never bothered to tell her.
All the Ways We Said Goodbye Page 25
