Her father looked owlishly at her over his coffee cup.
Aurélie ate the rest of her breakfast in dignified silence. What her father suggested was impossible.
Besides, it would be only a week, two at most. There was no need to work her dubious wiles on Von Sternburg to obtain information that could only be of limited use. The French would push forward again, she was sure of it. And then they would be free.
But it wasn’t a week, or even two. September slid into October and the Germans were still there. Twenty-four kilometers to the west, the shelling continued, a faint rumble like thunder, a storm that went on and on without breaking.
In the village of Courcelles and all the other villages under Major Hoffmeister’s command, the walls of the mairies were pasted with overlapping notices. At first, it was almost laughable, the commands that all hens were to lay two eggs a day, all of which were to be reserved for German officers. Every wild rabbit was to be counted and listed. All molehills were to be flattened.
“Do they mean to make the chickens march in goose step?” snorted Victor as he hid jars of preserves beneath the straw of the old icehouse.
But his laughter faded as the demands continued. The mattresses, the linen, the cooking pots, the meager treasures of the families in the village were methodically stripped away. A tax was imposed, eighty-six hundred francs in so-called war contributions.
“If you mind so much for your people, you could pay it yourself,” said the major when Aurélie’s father complained that one could hardly squeeze blood from a stone.
“Shall I wire my banker in Paris?” asked the count sarcastically.
The major regarded him unsmilingly. “Your kind always have a bit tucked away. Don’t think I don’t know you’ve been hiding things from me. We’ll find them. We always do. Like those idiots who buried their clocks without stopping the chimes.”
The count sketched an ironic bow. “Be my guest. Search the castle. My humble abode is, it appears, at your disposal. I shall send my accounting to Berlin.”
It was empty bravado. They all knew that here, now, cut off from the rest of the world, there was no appealing to Berlin. Her father’s lineage, his position, meant nothing.
That night, Lieutenant Kraus used the Venetian goblets for target practice, laughing as they shattered, spraying wine like blood.
Major Hoffmeister said merely, “I assume you’ll add it to your account?” and Aurélie knew he was taunting her father on purpose, waiting for him to break, to do something rash.
Lieutenant Kraus, she was convinced, was half-mad. A sot and a bully, breaking toys for the fun of it. Lieutenant Dreier was a sycophant, as firm of purpose as a feather mattress. He greedily guzzled the good wine when he thought no one was looking, pressing his Brownie camera onto the servants and demanding that they take pictures of him next to the gilt-limned walls of the ballroom to send home to impress his family in Darmstadt.
But Major Hoffmeister was another matter entirely. He didn’t imbibe. He didn’t grab at treasures. Instead, he needled. One little slight after another, small inconveniences created for no cause other than to discomfit his reluctant hosts, to show them his power. He was breaking them, or trying to.
“A week?” said Aurélie’s father, as October staggered into November, gaunt and cold. “Two at most?”
He had taken to haunting the parapets with a spyglass, noting German troop movements. He was, she knew, relaying the information to a contact by means of pigeon, even though keeping pigeons had been banned on threat of death.
Aurélie didn’t know whether to be alarmed at her father’s recklessness, or grateful that he hadn’t engaged in more direct action.
“Who would have thought it could go on this long?” Aurélie hugged herself against the wind that bit through her thin jacket. She had always spent winters in Paris, never at Courcelles. Her wardrobe was a summer wardrobe, unsuited to dawn parapets. “It can’t go on much longer. It can’t.”
“Can’t it?” said her father, and Aurélie thought that if he mentioned the Siege of Paris in ’71 again she might scream. “We might know more—if you took the pains to learn.”
“I doubt that,” said Aurélie sharply. “What might Lieutenant von Sternburg know other than the numbers of hens who failed to lay their required quota of eggs?”
Whenever she saw him, he was hurrying past with a ledger under his arm. He looked as though he had a perpetual headache. She rather hoped he had.
The children in the village said he gave them bars of chocolate. This, Aurélie thought, would have been rather more heartwarming if he hadn’t also been one of the men in charge of robbing those children’s parents.
“His uncle is a member of the high command. Haven’t you noticed the letters that arrive for him every week?”
“I hadn’t realized you went through their mail.”
“Of course I don’t,” said her father impatiently. “Henri does.”
Henri was the old butler, eighty if he was a day, the constant butt of the Germans’ jibes. Aurélie felt an idiot for not having thought of it herself.
“If Henri is reading his letters already, why do you need me?”
“Because Henri can’t always get to them. He’s loyal but he’s not—what was that American’s name? Houdini. Your mother made me see his performance,” he added as an aside, his lip curling slightly, although whether at the magician or her mother, Aurélie had no idea. “It would be more effective to go to the horse’s mouth, as it were.”
She really shouldn’t be thinking about Lieutenant von Sternburg’s mouth. “If the opportunity arises.”
“True daughters of Courcelles,” said her father, “make their own opportunities.”
She might have told him that all she had seen of Von Sternburg recently was the back of his head. She might have told him that she thought the German was avoiding her—or perhaps she was avoiding him. Or maybe they were avoiding each other.
Instead, she pushed away from the parapet. “I need to go to the village.”
Her father turned to look at her. “You can’t stop a dam with a loaf of bread.”
“Who would waste good bread on a dam?” said Aurélie tartly, and stomped down the stairs, annoyed with the world and her father in particular. She didn’t know if he had only lately developed a habit of aphorism or if she had just never noticed it before. If it was the latter, she was beginning to have slightly more sympathy for her mother.
Or maybe she was annoyed because she knew, on some level, that he was right, and that her own efforts were a poor excuse for action.
No, that wasn’t entirely true. Aurélie stopped in the kitchens, taking the prepared basket from Suzanne as the cook glanced furtively behind her to make sure no loitering German soldiers were about. What she was doing did matter. Even if it was only a loaf of bread here, an egg there.
All of the grain, their hard-won grain that she could reckon in calluses on her palms, had been confiscated. The mill ground only for the Germans; the bakery turned out loaves and cakes for the conquerors. The people of Courcelles were surviving, barely, on gruel and thin soup, flavored with what roots the Germans considered beneath them. Starving, the villagers had taken to gleaning any stray grains of wheat they could find and grinding them into coarse meal in their coffee grinders.