“Oh, I’m not on holiday. I’m actually here to . . . well.” I drew a deep breath. “I’m here to find out about my husband’s time in Paris during the war.”
She looked surprised. “Did your husband never talk of it?”
I shook my head. “No.” Only in nightmares. “He was in a German prison camp and when he was released at the end of the war and sent home, he was in very bad shape. He wanted to forget about the war and everything that reminded him of it.” I looked down at my teacup, the cream clumping in the now cold liquid. “So he never talked about it, and for the same reason, I never asked.”
“How very difficult for you both. But then you married and had three wonderful children. It was a good life, yes?” She seemed to be genuinely interested in my answer.
“Yes,” I said without having to think. “It really was. And it still can be,” I added hastily. “I just need to stop grieving so I can get on with things.”
“Your grief will end, I promise you. And then you will have room for joy again. I know this to be true. Just because your life will be different, that doesn’t mean it can’t still be beautiful.”
I wanted to ask her how she knew this, but the words were stuck in my traitorous throat.
A soft smile lit her face, showing me a hint of the beauty she had once been. “I find I am getting tired, and I’m sure you are exhausted from being my nursemaid. I think I shall read for a bit. Would you mind bringing my book to me before you leave? I left it by the chair in front of the window.”
I swallowed, happy for the reprieve. “Of course.” I walked across the room to fetch her book, glancing at the title as I picked it up. Les Misérables. There was something comforting in the thickness of the volume, as if its very length showed an optimism I suspected very few battling cancer might have.
“I have found a delightful bookshop if you find yourself in need of another book when you’re done with this one.” I handed the book to her and she placed it on her lap. “I’m afraid we spoke mostly about me,” I said. “But if you’d like company while I’m here at the Ritz, I’d enjoy coming back and you can tell me all about your beautiful children and Canada. I’ve never been.”
She reached for my hand. “I would like that very much.”
I squeezed her hand before letting go, alarmed at how brittle her bones felt, how papery her skin. “Goodbye, then. Until next time.”
I started to leave but turned back, a question pecking at my head like a blackbird.
“If you don’t mind me asking, Margot, what happened to your husband?”
“Gone. Like so many people during the war.”
“I’m so very sorry.”
“Don’t be. I, too, managed to have a happy life. You see? We are both strong women because we know how to survive the worst that life can throw at us.”
I smiled. “I’ll let you read. I look forward to seeing you again.”
I let myself out, closing the door behind me. I stood there for a long moment, feeling as exhausted as if I’d just completed a gymkhana and not completely convinced that a strong woman would feel the compelling need to run to her room and bury her face in a pillow and cry.
Chapter Fourteen
Aurélie
The Château de Courcelles
Picardy, France
December 1914
One shouldn’t feel so much like crying at Christmas.
It was bitter cold in the chapel, the moonlight falling jaggedly through the high old windows. Aurélie fisted her frozen fingers for warmth and tried to concentrate on the familiar ritual as the priest, in his white vestments, rustled about at the altar. But he was cold, too, cold and nervous. As the censer slipped through his fingers, clattering to the floor, everyone in the small congregation froze, looking over their shoulders.
“Go on,” Aurélie’s father commanded, and everyone exhaled again, their breath showing in the frosty air.
The Germans had contrived to rob them even of Christmas. Hoffmeister had plastered his posters on the wall of the mairie and the doors of the cafés: there would be no midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Everyone was to be in their homes by six o’clock. For safety’s sake.
But it wasn’t safety, it was pure meanness. They had so little left, so precious little, couldn’t he at least have left them this? There would be no réveillon, the traditional midnight feast, no bûche de Noël. Not that the Germans were stinting themselves. The orders had gone out weeks ago, every available duck, goose, or chicken was to be sent to the château, to be boiled, roasted, and stuffed for the Germans’ own feast. Every remaining bottle of wine, every hidden stock of brandy, had been ferreted out and claimed. But it wasn’t enough for them, was it? It wasn’t enough that they had the villagers’ feast. They had to take their devotions from them as well.
Aurélie’s father had gathered together the castle servants and bidden Monsieur le Curé to say midnight mass anyway, here, in the old chapel.
“They ordered us to keep to our homes by six?” her father had said, with a glimpse of his old arrogance. “This is my home, all of it, every hectare. Let them turn me out of my own chapel.”
Yes, but it wasn’t only his pride at issue. There was Monsieur le Curé, who might be punished, or Suzanne or Victor for attending. Aurélie knew her father was relishing his small rebellion, but she found herself wishing he had chosen to express his discontent in some other way. He thought he was pulling the wool over Hoffmeister’s eyes, chalking up a point in their grudge match. He seemed not to realize there was no game. There was only the business of survival. That Hoffmeister knew of this and was choosing, for his own purpose, to ignore it, Aurélie had no doubt.
She also had no doubt that he would enact his revenge. When and how it suited him.
Her father was enjoying himself, playing the grand seigneur, and Aurélie felt guilty, so guilty for grudging him that—but also frustrated, frustrated that he couldn’t see what she saw. When had he become so childish? She oughtn’t think that about her father. It was unfilial. But there it was, and it wouldn’t go away.
She didn’t want to doubt her father’s judgment. He had always been her touchstone, a model of stability against the giddy nonsense of her mother’s fashionable urban existence. But this . . . There was no consolation in it. They ought to have waited, ought to have gone to the morning mass in the village that Hoffmeister had grudgingly deigned to permit because he could find no good reason to refuse it.
The mass was concluding, a strange, gabbled mass without music, without light. Her father, with the air of a conjurer, drew out a bottle of brandy.
“Let’s see them keep us from our réveillon!” he said, and Aurélie could see the flash of teeth as Victor grinned and took the bottle.
The bottle came around and Aurélie took a swig, hoping it would warm her. Together, they tottered across the blighted grass from the old chapel, ducking beneath the lighted arrow slits of the old keep, where Hoffmeister held his own Christmas court. They could hear the voices, German voices, singing songs in their own barbaric language.