“Clovis!” Aurélie frantically shrugged out of her shawl, wadding the material against Clovis’s side to stanch the blood.
“It’s no use,” said her father, his voice tight. “There’s no saving him.”
“Remember that.” The major was standing above them, and it was all Aurélie could do not to snarl at him, not to wrench that wretched pistol from his hand and bludgeon him with it. “Remember. Next time I shoot your daughter, perhaps. Your dog, your daughter . . . and then you. Do not give me cause.”
He turned without waiting for a response and marched away, his sycophants falling into place behind him. Max cast one long, concerned look over his shoulder at Aurélie. Through the fog of her tears, she vaguely saw him raise his brows at her and cock his head.
Leave, he was saying. Leave.
A hand grasped her arm, a hand considerably more twisted than she remembered, with brown splotches on it. “Come away.” Her father drew her to her feet and stood for a moment, beside her, looking down at his old companion. Gruffly, he said, “He was old. He had a good life.”
“You can’t mean that.”
Her father looked down at her and Aurélie saw that he wasn’t calm at all; he was stiff with rage. He began walking rapidly toward the new wing. “Would I prefer to thrash that canaille until he is nothing more than pulp? Certainly. But now is not the time.”
“He means to kill us all.” Aurélie grabbed his arm, pulling him into the relative shelter of the kitchen garden. In a low voice, she said, “You can’t do anything more with the pigeons. If he finds another—”
“How, pray, am I meant to send messages to Paris? Donkey and cart?”
“Send them by me.” She hadn’t thought it until she said it, but there it was, fully formed. “There is to be a civilian evacuation next month. Send the messages with me.”
Her father looked at her assessingly. “Where did you hear this? From your lieutenant?”
“Yes,” said Aurélie shortly.
Her father plucked a spear of last year’s lavender, still winter gray. He rubbed it between his fingers. “He wants you to go.”
“He wants me safe.”
Her father tossed the mangled lavender aside. “Maybe he wants you out of the way.”
Did he? For a moment, Aurélie wondered. But then she remembered Max kneeling before her, his head bowed. Soon. If he wanted her out of the way, it was for her own safety—and his, she reminded herself. If she went, he went.
But she wasn’t going to tell her father that.
There was so much she couldn’t tell, not to Max, not to her father.
Aurélie shrugged, looking away. “Does it matter, if it serves our purpose?”
“That depends on the our,” said her father. He was standing very straight, as though back in the military. “You ask me to work with a German.”
“I ask a German to work with you. If you provide the necessary papers, he will find me a place on the convoy.”
Her father smiled without humor. “You would compromise my honor and his. You are thorough, I give you that.”
Aurélie grimaced at her father. “Or perhaps no one’s honor need be compromised. He removes a thorn in the flesh of the German command. And I—I get your messages through. And there’s something else,” Aurélie added all in a rush. “There’s something I didn’t tell you. I have the talisman. Here. At Courcelles.”
That, at least, had the benefit of getting her father’s attention. “Here?”
“Here.” She didn’t tell him where. The very stones of the castle had ears these days. “I thought I could do some good with it, that my very being here with the talisman would somehow make the Germans retreat.”
She felt foolish even saying it, but her father didn’t mock her. “I, too, once,” he said, staring out over the bedded remains of last year’s herbs. “I brought it with me into battle and watched my comrades fall around me.”
“You were not the demoiselle,” said Aurélie, and winced, because if it failed to work because he was not the demoiselle, what did it mean, then, that it had not worked for her? Was she less than the true born daughter of her father? No, her eyebrows were his, most definitely. There was no implication that her mother had played her father false until well after Aurélie had been born. No one disputed her birth, only her upbringing. “I had thought, in my hand, it would work.”
Her father’s hand settled on her shoulder. He gave a heavy pat, his one gesture of affection, the same he had given her when she was a girl and skinned her knees climbing the old tower stairs and didn’t cry as Suzanne bandaged them up again. “These things work in ways that pass our understanding. Who knows? Maybe it is working, even now. Maybe . . .”
“Maybe?”
“Maybe you are right. Maybe we send you back to Paris with the word that you have retrieved the talisman from the hands of the enemy. We spread the message through France that the demoiselle holds the talisman and the enemy must fall.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Daisy
Le Mouton Noir
Paris, France
November 1942
“They must fall,” said Daisy. “They will fall. This can’t be for nothing.”
Beneath her hand, Kit stirred, slurred, mumbled. “Fall? What’s fallen?”
“The Germans. Will fall. They must. The news from Algiers . . .”
“Algiers? Why are we talking about Algiers?”
Daisy lifted her head. “Because it’s the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for! The tide’s turning, I can feel it. And Algiers is our doing, just four hundred of us Resistance overturning the Vichy pigs—”
“My dear. Can’t you ever just bask? For a moment? Even . . . even half . . . half a minute . . .”
Kit’s voice fell away into the pillow. His eyes were still closed, his muscles slack. This was one of the few points of incompatibility between the two of them: Kit fell into a stupor immediately after lovemaking, whereas sex tended to charge Daisy with new life. As Kit rolled away semiconscious, Daisy wanted to cuddle and talk (chatter, Kit called it) and sometimes even to make love all over again, although Kit was generally willing to oblige that impulse, after a certain amount of encouragement. She said it was because they had so little time like this together. Almost always, when they were able to snatch an hour or two together at all, they met in the morning or the early afternoon, while the children were at school, clock ticking away, and Daisy didn’t want to miss a single minute in slumber. Kit said nonsense, she was just that sort of woman. What sort? she asked dangerously, and Kit, without stopping to consider, or perhaps too knackered to think, walked straight into that trap. The sort who finds sex invigorating, he replied, and Daisy had made him pay for that careless observation, never fear.
But that was months ago. Now they’d grown used to each other’s habits, to all the shades of expression and gesture and humor. Kit was so familiar that Daisy, gazing at his face, catching his glance across the bookshop or her grandmother’s suite or some discreet café in the tangled alleys of the Left Bank, knew exactly what he was thinking, anticipated exactly what he would say. Lying here in Kit’s narrow bed, clothes strewn around them, skin glowing furiously, she felt as if they had somehow grafted together, two seedlings grown into one, her postcoital vigor merging into his languor as two parts of the same perfect whole. She was Kit, and Kit was Daisy. As they had just established yet again. She folded her hands beneath her chin and stared at Kit’s lips.