Had her ancestors stood and waited at the Battle of Rouvray, where Jeanne d’Arc had worked her miracles? No. And nor should Aurélie. If only she could think of something, anything, to do.
“So we have been invaded.” Her father’s voice brought her back to herself. “How well do you know that curious young man?”
Aurélie gave her head a brisk shake. “Hardly at all. Herr von Sternburg is Maman’s acolyte, not mine. He was kind enough to make me the loan of an umbrella one afternoon when I found myself without one.”
Wandering among the paintings at the Louvre. Chocolate and cakes at Angelina. Delicate white-and-gold daisies and the press of a gloved hand.
It had been a matter of chance, nothing more than courtesy. He wasn’t at all her sort of person; maybe that was why the afternoon had stuck in her head, the unlikelihood of it. The Louvre was her mother’s province, not hers. She had always preferred to race with Jean-Marie, to play pirates with his brothers. That, she reminded herself firmly, was why she and Jean-Marie were so very well suited. He would come back from the war and they would marry and they would go on just as they always had. Lieutenant von Sternburg had nothing to do with it, nothing at all.
Except now he did. Now he held their fates in his hand.
“His grandfather was a good man,” said her father thoughtfully.
Aurélie scowled at him. “Do you know what the Germans said, when they came to Le Catelet? ‘The barbarians have come.’ That is what they said. And then they made good their word. Victor told me. It doesn’t matter what his grandfather might have been. He’s one of them.”
“One doesn’t reject a sword because it is made out of the wrong sort of steel. Not when one has no other.” This was a side of her father she had never seen before. Calculating. “Herr von Sternburg is no barbarian. And he has a softness for you.”
“For Maman, you mean.” She wasn’t sure why it was so important to press that point, but it was. “I shouldn’t have thought you would give in so easily.”
“What am I meant to do, run them through with a lance?” Never mind that she had suspected him of planning to do just that. At the look of disappointment on her face, he gave a gruff laugh and said, “A child of my own heart. At nineteen, I felt as you. But one learns with time.”
“To surrender?”
Her father winced. Surrender was a sore point with him. For all his fame, for all his legend, the French had lost at Mont-Valérien. “To bide one’s time. Your German made a good point, whatever his motives.”
“About waiting?”
“About the price of pride. Once, war was waged by gentlemen. But now . . . If my opponent is no gentleman, need I treat him with honor? There are some with whom one would not sully one’s sword.”
He was speaking to himself as much as her. Aurélie wasn’t sure she liked the way his thoughts were tending. “What do you mean?”
“I mean we wait,” said her father. “And we see if your Lieutenant von Sternburg may yet be of some use to us. But in the meantime, we dress for dinner.”
The major demanded that dinner be laid out, not in the dining room in the new wing, with its mahogany table that seated forty, its gas lighting, its intricate plasterwork and beautifully painted murals, but in the cavernous hall of the old keep, where torches guttered in holders long rusted with disuse, wax dripped from the tallow candles in the ancient iron chandeliers, and the servants huffed in indignation as they hauled platters the breadth of the courtyard.
The mayors of the various towns who had been summoned from all about the region had been left standing, huddled in small clusters in the great room. Some of them had struggled into their Sunday best, ill-fitting suits and too-tight collars. Others had come as they were. All seemed nervous—and hungry.
“Has no one brought refreshments for those men?” Aurélie caught Victor by the sleeve as he passed with a carafe of wine.
“We were told not to. By His Royal Uppishness.” Victor jerked a thumb at the major, who sat in state at the lone table placed in the hall.
The major had placed himself in the center, above the salt, like a medieval lord. All that was missing were the rushes on the floor and the dogs nosing about for bones.
“Bring him the best wine, he demanded, as if he could tell the difference between wine and horse piss.”
“Victor—” Aurélie looked at her father’s old retainer with alarm.
“No, I didn’t,” he said with regret, although Aurélie suspected he might have spat in it once or twice.
“When you’ve delivered that, tell Suzanne to see that bread and beer are brought for the mayors. It’s absurd to bring them here when they would be at their suppers and leave them hungry.”
Victor grinned at her. “Yes, mademoiselle.”
As an afterthought, Aurélie asked, “Where’s Clovis?” Her father’s wolfhound was always at her father’s feet, but he was conspicuously absent tonight.
“In the kitchen,” said Victor. “With Suzanne. His Lordship the High and Mighty doesn’t approve of animals. He says they’re unsanitary.”
“Clovis?” Clovis had always thought himself more people than people. He was the very aristocrat of animals and considered himself well above such lesser beings as the kitchen cat. “Clovis is as much a member of the family as I!”
“I’ll show him unsanitary,” said Victor grimly, and spat twice in the carafe for good measure.
Aurélie rather wished she were in the kitchen with Clovis instead of in the decidedly drafty hall dressed in last summer’s best, a Worth gown of rhinestone-embroidered tulle over pale pink satin. The rhinestones itched and the tulle draping her arms was more a suggestion than an actual sleeve. The prior Demoiselle de Courcelles, she thought with some annoyance, had been fortified with rather more layers of velvet and wool before being expected to dine in this hall.
There were diamond clips in her hair and on her breast. Well, paste. But they looked like diamonds in the uncertain light. One didn’t discard a sword, her father had said, because it was made of base metal. One could only hope the major would be too impressed by the glitter to look to the provenance. For good measure, Suzanne, the cook, had insisted on clasping a crucifix about her neck as though they were meant to dine with a vampire rather than a Hun.
Suzanne had not been impressed by this distinction.
He was only a man. A grasping little man. Just passing through. How long could they possibly stay? A night? A week? Sooner or later, one imagined, the line of battle would move again, as it had all through the fall, and the troops would go this way or that, and the major and Lieutenant von Sternburg would rush forward or fall back, depending on the fortunes of war, but, at any event, they wouldn’t be Aurélie’s problem anymore.
She was stalling. She was stalling because she didn’t want to step into that room, so familiar, and so strange, and be forced to sit at that high table with Germans, as though she were their hostess rather than their captive.
It wasn’t that she was scared. Not of Major Hoffmeister. Aurélie pressed her cold hands together, looking at the men at the high table, Hoffmeister with his ratlike features, his subordinates, one with a flaming thatch of red hair that made him look like a turkey—and Maximilian von Sternburg, who once, in better times, had made her the loan of an umbrella and had listened to her as though her opinions had merit, as though she weren’t just so much debris in the wake of the brilliant comet that was her mother.