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 chapel 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.