Was Maximilian von Sternburg one of that boisterous company? Undoubtedly. It was at moments like this that she was forcibly reminded that he was the enemy, alien, no matter how friendly he professed to be, no matter how their strolls in the dead garden conjured the memories of gentler times.
Aurélie ducked her head and blundered into the warmth of the kitchen.
“This will warm you right up, my love.” Suzanne unearthed some cider and began warming it on the hearth, handing out steaming cups.
Perhaps there was something in it, in this illicit celebration. It seemed to be bucking up her father’s retainers, at least.
“There,” said Victor. He took the baby Jesus from his hidden place behind the crèche, placing the wooden baby in the cradle in the manger. “Now it’s truly Christmas.”
The crèche was a crude one, whittled locally, decorated with paper flowers, a brave attempt at festivity in the midst of despair.
There had been a crèche in Aurélie’s mother’s rooms at the Ritz. It had amused her mother to adopt that old tradition. The crèche had been baroque, featuring exquisitely carved and painted figures: delicately gilded halos on the holy family, streetsellers juggling apples, gossips chatting across houses, the wise men on their camels, bearing their precious burdens of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Throughout the Christmas season, guests would come to ooh and aah over it. It had become a tradition of sorts. Aurélie had hated it, had hated their home being made so public, constantly on display.
Now she found herself wondering if her mother had put up the crèche as usual. She had loved it as a child. She would make the camels canter and dangle the angels from their golden halos. And her mother had never once complained, not even when Aurélie chipped a wing on an angel.
What was her mother doing now? Was she wondering about Aurélie? Worrying about her? When Aurélie had run off, all those months ago, it had seemed like a grand act of defiance, but it had never occurred to her that the war would go on so long or in such stalemate, that she would find herself so entirely cut off from Paris, unable even to let her mother know she was alive and unharmed.
Clovis, her father’s wolfhound, butted his head against her hand, and Aurélie absently scratched him behind the ears, noticing how gray he had become, how stiffly he bent his knees to settle at her side.
The heat of the kitchen, the taste of the cider woolly on her lips, her father’s unaccustomed shabbiness, Clovis’s stiff knees—it all felt unreal, dreamlike. And not a good sort of dream.
She had always sulked over Christmas at the Ritz, scowling at the artificiality of it, the chocolate-box prettiness, but now she would have given anything to open her eyes and be back there, to turn back the clock to last year, when she had suffered through her mother’s réveillon in a dress that was too tight in the collar, making half-hearted conversation with the wits of Paris. If only they could put everything back as it was, make her father himself again, take the gray hair from Clovis’s coat, make the village a peaceful, happy place, a place of refuge in contrast to the bustling, smoke-stained city.
“Do you know what Nicolas told me?” Suzanne said, as she topped up Aurélie’s steaming beaker of cider.
“Nicolas the baker’s son or Nicolas the schoolmistress’s nephew?” asked her father.
“The baker’s son.” Suzanne splashed cider into her father’s cup. “He said he’d had a letter from Father Christmas. Father Christmas wrote that he was mistaken for an airman and shot in the foot and that was why he wouldn’t be delivering any gifts this year—but not to worry, he’ll be all recovered by next Christmas. Wasn’t that clever, now?”
“That was Madame Lelong, the postmaster’s wife,” said Aurélie’s father. “She wanted to make sure the little ones wouldn’t be crying for their presents.”
“But it’s horrible,” Aurélie burst out. Her cup was empty; she couldn’t remember drinking it. Her tongue felt thick with the cloying taste of the cider. “Father Christmas—shot. What have we come to?”
“It was a kindness.” There was a warning in her father’s voice.
“Kind? To tell the children we’ve killed Father Christmas?”
“Not killed,” said Victor patiently. “Only wounded.”
It was monstrous. “Don’t you think Father Christmas ought to come after all?” She looked around at the others, their faces slightly blurry in the candlelight. She hated herself for not having thought of it before, for not having contrived something. It hadn’t occurred to her. Because she had been taking too many walks with Lieutenant von Sternburg? Max. He had asked her to call him Max and she had, because it advanced their cause, that was all. “The books from the library . . . I could give every child a book.”
“Do you really think the village children yearn for Aristophanes?” asked her father.
More than her father ever had. He had never been a great reader, another rift between him and her mother.
Guilt made Aurélie fierce. “At least it would be something.”
“With our arms in it? They would know where it was from in an instant.”
Yes, but they would also know someone had cared.
Aurélie tried desperately to think what else they might bring. If she’d had her old room, she might have ransacked the useless trivialities, the little luxuries she had taken so for granted. But now she slept in a garret above the kitchen, sparsely furnished. A coin for each—if they’d had the coins to give. If they wouldn’t have to worry about the coins being confiscated, the children punished for receiving them. So many things had been made illegal, it was hard to remember them all.
“Here,” said Suzanne, coming unexpectedly to her aid. “We’ve some nuts put by. If we tie them up in a bit of cloth with some string, it will be enough. Just so they can see Father Christmas made the effort after all.”
“Give them here,” said Victor. “I’ll parcel them out.”
Aurélie’s father looked at her sideways. “And who’s to deliver these parcels?”
It felt like a challenge. “I shall.”
“After curfew?”
“Didn’t you just say there’s no curfew for a de Courcelles?” Ordinarily, she’d never have spoken so to her father. He was the head of his house, and due respect.
But he didn’t take her to task for it. “I didn’t say it quite like that. All right, then. If you’re determined.”
She hadn’t been determined, but he seemed to have determined it for her. Aurélie squinted at her father. The fire in the kitchen smoked; she couldn’t tell, but she thought he was, obscurely, pleased. Because she was thumbing her nose at the Germans?
But this wasn’t about the Germans, she reminded herself. It was about the children. And Father Christmas.
Why, then, did she feel as though she had been managed?
“You will be careful?” said Suzanne, handing her the basket. She was beginning to look worried. “If they’ve sentries out . . .”
“They’ll all be at the feast.” Aurélie wasn’t quite as sure as she sounded. She doubted Hoffmeister would ignore so obvious a precaution. He’d probably enjoy denying some man his Christmas revels, making him sit outside in the cold. “They wouldn’t shoot a woman.”