Her thick eyebrows shot up. “Do you really think so? I am quite a good writer, so it would make perfect sense.” She raised her hand and called for the waiter. “Garçon!” she called, butchering the word so that the waiter had no idea he was being summoned. “Garçon!” she yelled, louder this time and he turned, most likely to find out what the commotion was all about. “Get me a typewriter. Immediately before I lose my muse!”
Drew took my elbow and began to gently pull me away from the table. Precious waved. “You two kids have fun.” She actually winked and I blushed, quite sure that her definition of fun didn’t involve riding boots and a gelding. Or perhaps it did.
I began heading toward the lift, but Drew called me back. “Where are you going? I thought we had a date.”
“Oh, I just said that—” I stopped. “You don’t have to take me anywhere.”
“Maybe I’d like to.”
“Really?” I said, feeling like a giddy schoolgirl. “I’m sure you have other things to do.”
“Actually no. So if you’re free, let’s go.”
I felt a little surge of something in my chest as I followed him outside. We headed out the door and he began walking while I clutched Kit’s book and wondered what I was supposed to do with it while riding a bicycle. “Wait,” I said, stopping. “You’re headed in the wrong direction. The park is that way, on the western edge of the sixteenth arrondissement,” I said, pointing in the opposite direction.
“True. But Le Mouton Noir is this way. If we want to find La Fleur, I think that’s the best place to start, don’t you?”
“Of course,” I said, feeling oddly disappointed and not a little foolish as I ran to catch up with him. “That’s why we’re here. To find La Fleur.”
I forced a smile as we walked together, retracing my footsteps to the bookstore from the previous day, and fervently wishing I’d never heard of La Fleur.
Chapter Eleven
Aurélie
The Château de Courcelles
Picardy, France
September 1914
There were flowers at Aurélie’s place at the table when she came down for breakfast the next morning, a bouquet of daisies tied with a grosgrain bow.
“You have an admirer, I see,” said her father. “One with simple tastes.”
“It must have been one of the mayors,” said Aurélie, slipping into her seat beneath a painting of a decidedly overdressed shepherdess. “When they came out this morning for their instructions.”
“It was the quiet German left them for you.” Suzanne slapped the coffeepot down so hard that Aurélie was amazed the porcelain pot didn’t shatter. It was surprisingly sturdy stuff, Limoges. “Came right in, all please and thank you and apologies, wanting to know which was your place. I wouldn’t have told him, but . . .”
But when a German asked, one obeyed.
“Of course, you couldn’t do otherwise.” The flowers that had been sweet a moment ago now seemed sinister. A floral tribute wasn’t much of a tribute when one hadn’t the right to refuse it.
Would you commandeer my good will? she had asked Lieutenant von Sternburg the night before. It seemed he intended to do just that.
“They’re only flowers,” she said, to no one in particular.
“He has a softness for you.” Aurélie didn’t miss the way her father glanced over his shoulder as he said it, watching for listeners.
Aurélie shrugged and helped herself to a miniscule portion of jam. On second thought, she recklessly slathered the bread. Better to take what they could before the Germans commandeered it. “He doesn’t like unpleasantness, that’s all. He’s trying to pretend this is a social call.”
“Then maybe you ought to assist him in that fiction.” Her father regarded her over the rim of his coffee cup. “Men speak unguardedly to women they admire.”
The jam stuck to the roof of Aurélie’s mouth. “You want me to consort with the enemy?”
“Only one of them,” said her father, as though that made a difference. “Just—lend him an encouraging ear.”
“Spy, you mean.”
“There’s no need to be crude about it.”
Aurélie frowned at her father. “Only canaille sink to such levels, you said. A gentleman goes into battle properly, honorably.”
“You are a woman.” Her father waved a hand, appealing to the shepherdesses on the wall, hideous, simpering things. “Women wage war differently.”
Aurélie was too outraged to mince words. “On their backs, you mean?”
“Aurélie.” Her father had been friends with the late English king during his wild career as the Prince of Wales. He was disapproving, but hardly shocked. “I’m not suggesting you turn courtesan.”
It was exactly what he was suggesting. “Men speak unguardedly to women they admire?”
“Use the wits you were born with. When one is in extremis, one does what one must. We ate rats during the Siege of Paris.” Before Aurélie could point out that she’d heard about those rats before, her father changed tack. “Your mother wouldn’t balk at it.”
And that meant she shouldn’t either? Aurélie pushed her plate away. “Just because Maman—” she began, and broke off, unable to say the words.
“Lived her life with a man not her husband?” Her father’s voice was lightly ironical. “There’s no need to protect my pride, my dear. If all of Paris knew, I could hardly remain ignorant.”
“Yes, but . . .” Aurélie wasn’t quite sure how she had found herself in the wrong. She was meant to be the picture of outraged virtue, not a shamed schoolgirl. “I don’t want to be like Maman.”
“Your mother has her merits,” her father said neutrally, which seemed rather rich given that her parents had been estranged for the past fifteen years. They were like the mechanical figures on a clock. When one came out, the other went in. He couldn’t resist adding, “Discretion, however, was not one of them.”
“What, then, am I meant to be?”
“The picture of maidenly virtue.” Her father shrugged. “Take Von Sternburg for a stroll in the gardens. Show him the portraits in the green salon. You can take a chaperone if you fear for your good name.”
The good name she had never had, thanks to her mother’s notoriety. Other girls were considered virtuous until proven otherwise. Aurélie had been labeled fast before she had even known what it meant. She had worked so hard to distinguish herself from her mother, to prove to the gratin that she, at least, was above reproach. And now . . .
“There’s no point to it. They’ll be gone in a week. Herr von Sternburg said so.”
Her father cast her a long, sidelong look. “You see? You’ve begun already.”
“But I didn’t—” The intimacy of that encounter, the damp dress clinging to her, the warmth of Von Sternburg’s regard, all came crashing back, tangling her tongue, making the color rise in her cheeks.