There was a confusion of people in the courtyard, but at the center of it, Aurélie could make out a cluster of German uniforms: Hoffmeister, flanked by Dreier on one side and Kraus’s flaming red head on the other. Across from them stood her father. They were all staring at something on the ground.
Aurélie pushed and wiggled her way through, elbowing Suzanne and stepping on Victor’s foot.
“Pardon me, excuse me. . . . What’s this?” She arrived breathless at her father’s side.
“What do you think it is, mademoiselle?” clipped Hoffmeister, and Aurélie finally looked down and saw what they had all been staring at.
A pigeon.
A dead pigeon, lying in a welter of blood-stained feathers.
“It’s a bird,” she said dumbly.
Behind Hoffmeister, she could see Max, looking so very official and German again in his uniform and cap.
“Not just any bird. A pigeon. Well?” Hoffmeister demanded, so suddenly and so loudly that everyone jumped. “Whose is this? Who was keeping this pigeon?”
No one spoke.
Hoffmeister’s face was white with fury—but also a strange, furtive satisfaction. “I will find out. I don’t care who you are, or what you think you are, I will find out, and the miscreant will be shot.”
The count’s hand tightened on his wolfhound’s collar as Clovis snarled at Hoffmeister.
“Have you considered that it might have been passing through?” He sounded thoroughly bored, but Aurélie could see how white his knuckles were against Clovis’s graying fur.
Hoffmeister raised his pistol, training it on Aurélie’s father. “You do know,” the major said, in a dangerously conversational tone, “that to keep a pigeon is death.”
“There was a time,” said the count blandly, rubbing the area between Clovis’s ears, “when to keep a pigeon was dinner.”
“You will not joke about this. You are lord here? Good. Then you take responsibility for your people. Any pigeons I find are your pigeons.”
Max put a hand on Hoffmeister’s arm. “Sir, with respect . . .”
“Enough! You want your—what do you call it?—your noblesse oblige? You take the consequences. If I find another pigeon, Monsieur le Comte, it does not matter where or how I find it. You will die for it. Do you not think I mean it?”
The only response was the shuffling of feet in the courtyard, the lowering of eyes.
Hoffmeister’s lips pressed tightly together. His gun was pointing at Aurélie’s father still, shaking slightly with the force of his rage.
“This,” he said tightly, “this will be your fate if I find another one of these cursed birds.”
He lowered the gun and pulled the trigger.
The sound of the report hammered against Aurélie’s ears, broken by an agonized yelp that turned into a low howl.
“Clovis!” He was lying on the flagstones; there was blood on his fur. Aurélie flung herself down beside him, her hands moving desperately over his coat, trying to find the wound. “Clovis, Clovis.”
At her voice, the old wolfhound struggled to rise, but his legs folded beneath him. His tongue lolled out of his mouth.
“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.”