On hearing of this, Major Hoffmeister had ordered all the coffee grinders in the village confiscated.
Never mind that all the able-bodied men had long since gone. Never mind that he was starving old men and young children and expectant mothers.
So Aurélie had taken matters into her own hands. The Germans kept copious records, but could they say, truly, how many eggs had gone into their souffle, how many chickens into their stew? Suzanne had become an expert at making shift, spiriting food from the pot into Aurélie’s basket. Every day, she would wait until Hoffmeister and his two favorite flunkies were out hunting her father’s forest, pretending to be the very grand seigneurs they claimed to despise. Then she would creep down the hill, distributing her makeshift charity to the people of the village.
“Angel,” they called her, and “Demoiselle,” and she felt like the world’s greatest hypocrite, to accept their praise when she had done so little. If she were truly a heroine, she would take a knife to Hoffmeister as Charlotte Corday had done to Marat—although preferably not in his bath. Whatever Lieutenant von Sternburg might say about the medieval tradition of bathing guests, seeing Hoffmeister naked was a humiliation she had so far been spared.
And if she did stab him? They would only shoot her. Shoot her and burn the entire village in reprisal. All would be lost and for what? Another Hoffmeister would be sent to administer the charred remains of what once had been Courcelles, and the wild grass would grow over the houses that had been and the people who had died for her foolishness.
No, she had to be cleverer than that. But how?
The stories of her youth had all been of bold action or virtuous resignation, Joan of Arc or Patient Griselda, neither of them noted for their subtlety. Aurélie wondered, fleetingly, what her mother would do. Hold a salon for the conquerors? Twist their words until they found themselves agreeing with her despite themselves?
She wasn’t her mother.
She had always been so proud of that, that she was a Courcelles to the bone. For the first time, Aurélie caught herself wondering, uneasily, whether she ought to have paid more attention to her mother’s tutelage, to have inherited something more from her than the color of her hair.
The sun was shining, but the village felt gray, all the bustle subdued. The usual clog-clad crowd of women around the well in the village square was missing; the Germans had made it illegal to congregate in groups of more than three. There was no washing hanging on the lines; that, too, had become a crime. The smells of food cooking, the old men at the café whose voices grew louder as they drank glass after glass of blanche, all were gone. The villagers hid behind the curtains of their houses, out of sight of the German imperial flag that hung boldly from the front of the former police station, now a German command post.
Those women who were out and about on errands moved quickly and furtively, looking back over their shoulders at the Germans who sat at the café or loitered by the entrance to the command post.
Aurélie took the back way, past the churchyard, avoiding the square. The familiar old church felt alien, stripped bare of the walnut trees that had, for generations, shaded the graveyard. The work of centuries had been cut down in an afternoon, the wood shipped to Germany to make rifle barrels.
No smoke came from the chimney of the schoolhouse. The schoolmistress had been deported to Germany for the crime of starting classes at the traditional ten o’clock rather than the German-mandated nine. Well, that and singing “La Marseillaise” very loudly at Lieutenant Dreier when he came to demand that the school time be changed. Local opinion was divided upon whether that had been heroic or foolish—or merely an affront to the ears and national pride.
Some houses had Germans billeted in them. Aurélie avoided those. Swiftly, not lingering, she went from garden to garden, past the empty runs where chickens used to peck, handing over a loaf here, a half chicken there, a few links of sausage, a sack of withered apples. Her meager offerings were hidden under the corners of shawls, whisked through kitchen doors, treated as though they were diamonds cut from a rajah’s crown and not the dregs of the kitchen, one step away from pig slop.
It seemed impossible to remember a time when pigs ate as well as men, when the villagers heedlessly threw crusts to birds and peeled potatoes in great, careless strips.
The village felt empty, abandoned; the Germans were sending able-bodied men and women, the ones who defied them, or the ones who appeared to defy them, to work camps in Germany. There had been rumors in the village, wild rumors, that the infirm men, the ones whose health had been ruined by the phosphate mines and their brains by genièvre, were to be shot; that the women were to be organized into brothels. Rumors, just rumors, Aurélie hoped. There was so much, two months ago, that she would have thought wild speculation had she not seen it herself. The joke about goose-stepping chickens had long since lost all humor.
But what was she to do? Something, something, something. Aurélie could hear the words in time to her footsteps as she hurried back up the hill to the castle, her empty basket hidden beneath her thick shawl.
She was so lost in her own thoughts that it took her a moment to realize that something was wrong, that the door to her room, which she had left closed, was ajar, and Victor was hopping from one foot to the other in the corridor like an agitated mime.
“Mademoiselle Aurélie, Mademoiselle Aurélie . . .”
“Ah, Mademoiselle de Courcelles.” Her room. Hoffmeister was in her room. The doors of the wardrobe gaped open, dresses piled haphazardly on the bed. The drawer of her dressing table stuck out like a distended tongue. She had precious few books and papers—she had always preferred action to reflection—but those she did have had been pulled from the escritoire and left gaping on the desktop.
From beside the wardrobe, Drier stood smirking at her, his arms full of her underthings.
“I . . . what . . . what are you—”
Dreier had the decency to look mildly abashed. Hoffmeister did not. He took a step forward, his movements deliberate. “You have been stealing from us.”
“I . . . what?” Her confusion was genuine.
Aurélie tried to think what she might have done, what he might think was hidden in her room, that he needed to search it so, tearing apart the bindings of her books, ransacking her dressing table drawer, which contained nothing more exciting than several dried-out powder puffs and a saint’s medal given to her by Victor on the occasion of her First Communion.
Her father . . . stealing information . . . the pigeons . . . had they thought she might have . . .
Aurélie felt as though she’d been carved from wood. “You are mistaken. I’ve taken nothing.”
Hoffmeister favored her with a humorless twist of the lips. “Do you think I don’t know? Everything is seen. Everything is counted. You have been stealing food and taking it to the village.”
“Stealing food?” Was that what he was doing, scrabbling through her chemises looking for madeleines? Aurélie removed her thick shawl, dropping it over the dressing table chair, and, coincidentally, over her empty basket. “I have given to the villagers of my own rations—as I believe you yourself suggested, major. If I choose to part with my bread, it is none of your concern.”
“Everything that occurs in this region is my concern, mademoiselle.” Hoffmeister was a spare man, barely her own height, but the self-importance that radiated from him made him seem larger. “I did not authorize those disbursements.”