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.
There was, Aurélie noticed with relief, no reference to either her father or the chapel. Hoffmeister seemed to think the pigeons were coming from a deserted boathouse by the lake and was having Kraus keep it under surveillance. Which explained, she supposed, the many fishing expeditions from which Lieutenant Kraus returned thoroughly sloshed, but with no fish.
And then, at the very bottom of the pile, she saw something else entirely. The distinctive paper of a telegraph form. The writing was very dark; there were places where the nib had pierced through the paper.
Erster Generalquartiermeister W.H.F. von Witzleben. Wire soonest. Delicate matters to discuss. Yr loving nephew, M v S.
M v S. Maximilian von Sternburg?
She was frowning at the paper, trying to figure out why it was here, what it meant, when the sound of footsteps and voices made her start. Aurélie shoved the telegram back where she’d found it. Her body was faster than her mind; she was halfway to the passage by the time the footsteps stopped outside the door. A key was inserted into the lock.
Aurélie escaped into the passage, pulling the door softly shut behind her, grateful for those long-ago servants whose movements were meant to be inaudible, the door padded and the floor covered in drugget.
“—another telegram,” Hoffmeister was saying. “He sent it this morning, from the village.”
“Or thinks he has, eh?” Someone giggled unpleasantly. Aurélie recognized the voice as Dreier’s. Putting her eye to the crack in the door, she couldn’t quite see him, just a leg dangling off the edge of her chaise longue. But the voice was unmistakable. “How many does this make?”
“Four,” said Hoffmeister succinctly. “All to his uncle in Berlin. Wire soonest. Delicate matters to discuss.”
“Is that brandy?” said Dreier hopefully, and Aurélie heard the sound of her father’s Napoleon brandy being poured into one of her great-grandmother’s crystal glasses. There was silence for a moment, punctuated by slurping. “Won’t he realize when he doesn’t hear back?”
“Berlin has other matters to attend to,” said Hoffmeister drily. “They sent him to spy on me, you know.”
“Cheek,” said Dreier indistinctly. “More brandy?”
Crystal clinked against crystal. “These Junkers look after one another. Never mind that their world is done. Like all this. The arrogance of them. That Von Sternburg would sell out his country for a girl.”
“Or her, ahem, jewels, eh?” Dreier made a noise that was somewhere between a burp and a laugh.
In the passage, Aurélie stood as still as she could, scarcely daring to breathe, her hands like ice. The telegram she had seen beneath the ledgers. The promised intervention from Berlin . . . Intercepted. Gone. She had never quite believed in it, but it had been comforting to hope it was there, that the old laws of behavior still governed, that there would be recourse. Now, she felt marooned, as surely as Crusoe on his island. There was no law but Hoffmeister’s law, and his law was no law at all.
“Get your mind out of the gutter, lieutenant,” said Hoffmeister without heat. “I don’t care if he’s swiving her six ways from Sunday. But I want that relic.”
“With those jewels,” said Dreier, eager to agree, “you could buy a palace that would make this one look like a hovel!”
“With those jewels,” Hoffmeister corrected him, “I could buy the men who would make me a lieutenant colonel. And then there’s the relic itself . . .”
“I didn’t know you believed in all that,” hiccupped Dreier.
“I don’t,” snapped Hoffmeister. Cutting off Dreier’s hasty apologies, he said, “But they do, those peasants. They think it’s magic. Miracles and hocus-pocus. They say—what is it?—that France cannot fall while the demoiselle holds the talisman.” He made the archaic title a slur. “So we’ll show them who holds that relic. And then we’ll burn it.”
“Not the jewels!”
“No, you cretin. Not the jewels. The relic. That disgusting, decaying scrap of fabric they claim is saturated in the saint’s own holy blood. We’ll show them it will go up in flames as quickly as your grandmother’s kerchief.”