I stepped back, my lips swollen and sore. “Goodbye, Drew.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Aurélie
The H?tel Ritz
Paris, France
August 1915
“Bonjour, Maman,” said Aurélie.
Her mother was on her feet, her face gray. “Aurélie?”
“Hello,” said Aurélie, since it was very hard to know what to say when one had been gone for nearly a year, when one had absconded with a priceless jewel and run away to a war zone without so much as a word.
She nodded vaguely in the direction of the other people in her mother’s salon, shadow figures with neat beards and well-tailored suits. They might have been puppets or paper cutouts, so unreal did they seem, so strangely clean and tidy, well-groomed and well-fed. She had been traveling for five weeks, and everything felt a little blurry. Except the smells. She could smell her own rank sweat, her mother’s perfume, the overripe flowers in a vase.
Aurélie swallowed hard against a wave of nausea. “I’ve come back.”
“Aurélie. It’s you. It’s really you. I had thought . . . when I heard—” Her mother clutched the back of a chair, as though she, too, were feeling not entirely steady.
Everyone was staring. Aurélie was very conscious of her own disarray. The Red Cross had offered them baths at the Swiss border, but that had been a week ago, and the stench had long since sunk into her clothes. Aurélie began sidling in the direction of her old bedroom. “If I might . . .”
“Of course.” Her mother came sharply to herself, moving rapidly to Aurélie’s side. Taking Aurélie by the arm, her mother called over her shoulder, “Marie! Tell everyone to go. I’m not at home. How did you get here? What happened to you? When did you leave Courcelles?”
“In June.” That seemed the easiest question to answer. June felt a very long time ago. The world had been reduced to a series of stops and searches, choking down bites of tasteless food, trying not to be ill. “I took a train. The Germans—they allowed some people to be evacuated.”
“June?” Her mother stopped and stared at her. “Did they take you via Timbuktu?”
“No, to Belgium. And then to Switzerland.” Aurélie drew a hand across her eyes, which felt gritty. All of her felt gritty. “It was not—it was not a pleasant journey.”
They had been rounded up at the train station in Le Catelet and given numbers, strapped to their chests, then marched by armed gendarmes onto the train. No one had been permitted to say farewell, no well-wishers were allowed to approach. They were shuffled away like prisoners, like criminals. A baby had cried, and the baby’s mother had quickly muffled the cry with her shawl, terrified the Germans would lose patience and hurt the child. They were all stiff and silent with fear.
The train took three days to cross into Belgium, where soldiers stripped and searched the evacuees, and anxious rumors spread that they were to be taken, not into France at all, but to work camps in Germany. Aurélie braided the talisman into her hair and slept in her clothes. Fear became numbness. They were detained one week, then two, before being sent on again. The swaying of the train, the cramped conditions and smells in the third-class compartment made Aurélie queasy; trying not to be ill took all her concentration and will.
It took over a week to reach the Swiss border, where they were met by Red Cross workers with mugs of milk, real milk, and hot coffee and tea, and bread rolls, proper bread rolls. It made Aurélie want to cry to see the wonder on the children’s faces, at the food and the kindness. What had they come to that a bit of bread and a smile were a wonder?
The Red Cross workers had bundled them onto yet another train, but this was different now; there were no guards, no warders, no searches. Hours later, they were in évian, on French soil, where hotels were put at their disposal free of charge, and people came to help them with their papers. It had seemed safer to remain Jeanne Deschamps, to make her way to the Ritz quietly, the talisman hidden close to her breast.
And all the while, Aurélie replayed those final moments, that moment when Max had scrambled back in through the window.
He was safe, he had to be. And her father, too. He had said he would save her father. He would. He had.
“But you’re here now,” said her mother. There were two thin lines between her brows as she examined Aurélie’s face. “You’re home.”
Home. The Ritz didn’t feel like home. The Ritz had never felt like home. But what other home did she have?