“Was there ever any proof that he took it?” I disliked this Pierre Villon but thought I should be fair.
André shook his head, his lower lip curled in distaste. “People like him always covered their tracks, like cats with their excrement.” He tapped his forefinger against his graying temple. “But I know. I know his type. I know what he was capable of.”
“Do you know what happened to him? After the war.”
Andre shrugged. “Who knows? He disappeared at some point—I do not recall when. Like so many during the war, he just poof.” He illustrated the word by opening his fists in a starburst of fingers.
A very large woman carrying a small dog under each arm approached, calling for Monsieur Deneaux. “Please excuse me. If you need anything else, please don’t hesitate to let me know.” He bowed his goodbye, then left.
“Well, hello.”
We turned at the familiar Southern accent that stretched the two syllables of the last word into three.
Precious Dubose, immaculately turned out in ice-blue linen, smiled at us. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation with that lovely Monsieur Deneaux. Actually, it was the word jewels that caught my attention. I do so love jewelry. Is there anything I might be able to help you with?”
I recalled her telling me that she had lived at the Ritz, at times with Coco Chanel. “You were here during the war, right?”
She pressed her pink lips together and looked up at the ceiling as if thinking. “Off and on. Why do you ask?”
“We’re looking for the de Courcelles talisman,” explained Drew. “It was displayed in a case in the Comtesse de Courcelles’s suite, then disappeared in 1942. My father, who was OSS during the war, was dropped into France to retrieve it, but something happened to it. We think La Fleur might have stolen it.”
Her delicate eyebrows rose. “La Fleur? I’ve always been fascinated by her. Such a woman—and such a legend. My knowledge of French history is very good, you know. If you think I can be of any help, I’d love to hear the whole story.”
Drew and I looked at each other and then back at Precious. “Three brains are always better than two,” Drew said.
“Wonderful,” Precious said, drawing out the word. “Let’s go have a drink, and you can tell me all about it. I always think better with a drink in my hand.” Precious winked at Drew. “Come on. The Bar Hemingway is the only place in town that knows how to make the perfect mint julep.”
We followed in her perfume-scented wake toward the bar, the incessant clatter of Prunella Schuyler’s typewriter like little reminders that the closer we got to finding La Fleur, the closer I got to facing the ghosts I’d told Drew I didn’t believe in.
Chapter Twenty
Aurélie
The Château de Courcelles
Picardy, France
April 1915
There were no ghosts in the back corridors of the castle, only dust.
Aurélie stifled a sneeze as she crept along an abandoned passageway built into the thickness of the wall in the new wing. It wasn’t a secret passage, not as such. It had been put in when the new wing was built in the eighteenth century, the very latest in modern conveniences, so that servants might appear, as if by magic, without passing through the grand chambers and anterooms, unseen and unheard. When she was young, the passages had bustled with servants, whisking around one another. But there were no grand house parties at Courcelles anymore. The staff had dwindled even before the advent of war.
The lack of a mistress, her mother would have said. But whatever the reason, it meant the old servants’ passageways languished unused. Except, of course, by a rebellious girl who sometimes liked to slip from her rooms without her governess seeing her.
It didn’t matter that the passage was in darkness. Aurélie knew the location of her own rooms in her muscles, in her bones. She reached out and felt the handle of the hidden door just where it was meant to be, the brass worn smooth with age beneath her palm.
For a moment, Aurélie was sixteen again . . . twelve . . . nine. And this was her room, her own special place that always felt so much more her own than her lavishly decorated bedchamber at the Ritz, never mind how much money her mother had spent.
But it wasn’t. Not anymore. A man’s shaving set dominated her dressing table. There were spectacles beside the bed and piles upon piles of papers overwhelming the desk of the escritoire she had almost never used. Hoffmeister hadn’t torn the boiseries from the wall or the hangings from the windows, but the casual debris of his belongings was almost worse, somehow, because it was still the same, all of it, but he’d marked it as his, as surely as a dog in the woods with a contested tree.
How dare he? How dare he drape his hideous uniform over her chaise longue? How dare he leave the dent of his ugly head on her pillow? Aurélie wanted to scrub it all with carbolic and lye, to fling his belongings out the window as he’d flung hers.
Her nails were making dents in her palms. Aurélie forced herself to relax, finger by finger. She couldn’t scrub out the taint; she couldn’t let him know she had ever been here. Hoffmeister was downstairs, presiding over another endless supper, toasting the Kaiser over a feast that would have fed the village for a week. And she . . . she was here to see what she could see. To find something, finally, that might make her father look at her again, really look at her, as though she weren’t Minnie Gold’s daughter, but the true heir to Courcelles. As though she were the son he had always wanted her to be.
The son she had tried to be, for him, scorning the modiste for the hunting field, racing cars and horses, practicing and practicing until she could outshoot Jean-Marie, until she could skewer any man with a fencing foil, drive the faint of heart off the road.
But it wasn’t enough. It was never enough.
Of course, this wasn’t about that, not really. This was about France, and the people of the village, Aurélie hastily reminded herself. It was about finding something, some snippet of information that might prove the key to ousting the conqueror. The date of the next big offensive . . . damning information about an officer . . . movements of munitions that might be intercepted . . .
Aurélie went to the overburdened escritoire, placed beneath the skeptical countenance of an ancestress who had been a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette and had escaped the guillotine due to the good offices of an Englishman with an impossibly floral nom de guerre.
She started on the piles with a will, but her determination soon turned to dismay. It wasn’t the language. She could read the German easily enough, thanks to the tutors her mother had hired in the forlorn hope that one day Aurélie would be seized with the urge to study Kant in the original. Nor were the papers disorganized; quite the contrary. They were meticulously, painfully detailed. All the hideous, petty regulations Hoffmeister had imposed upon the surrounding villages, all were recorded here, in ledger upon ledger. There were weekly accounts of everything from the number of eggs collected to the number of men executed.
It was chilling and boring all at the same time, which rather summed up Hoffmeister. How could one man be both so deadly and so dull?
There was correspondence, too. Letters about English soldiers found sheltering in the woods and shot; pigeons sighted and shot down.