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 decorated 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.