“Oh, I’m sorry. I beg your pardon. I thought with . . .” He made a vague movement with his hands either indicating my shoes, my suit, my hat, or all of the above. “I mean, I thought you were older. My greatest apologies.” With a deeply chagrined expression that somehow made him even more appealing, he pulled open the door. “You were headed to the bookshop? I am, too.”
I glanced behind him to the crowded interior of the shop, the floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with multihued volumes with more stacks of books on the floors crowding the aisles. I could not imagine being in that small space with this large man—not the least reason being that I found him attractive and he thought of me as elderly.
Clutching my hat to my chest and no doubt crushing it beyond repair, I shook my head. “Actually, I’ve changed my mind. Thank you again.”
I turned on my heel, prepared to cross the street from where I’d just come.
“Look left,” the man shouted as I once again approached the intersection looking the wrong way. Completely mortified, I pretended I hadn’t heard him and instead of crossing the street, took a left down the sidewalk, intent on walking until I’d forgotten the scent of pipe tobacco, and the hazel—yes, they were definitely hazel—eyes of a particularly outspoken, well-fed, and well-groomed American. Except all I’d accomplished after an hour of walking was a pair of very sore feet and a memory that remained startlingly clear.
Chapter Five
Aurélie
The Chateau de Courcelles
Picardy, France
September 1914
The towers of the Chateau de Courcelles stood out clearly against the gray-tinged light of dawn.
Aurélie could have sobbed with relief at the sight of them. She managed to turn the sob to a sort of half gulp, half hiccup, but she couldn’t control the shivers that made her teeth knock together and her skin prickle beneath her too-thin clothes. She balled her hands together to stop their shaking, trying to find some, any, of that buoyant spirit with which she had set off the previous evening, back when it had seemed a brilliant gesture to thumb her nose at Paris and the Ritz and spin the wheel east, to Courcelles.
She had seen the battlefield and assumed that would be the worst of it.
She had been wrong. So wrong.
Aurélie yanked the corners of her thin jacket closer and tried to ignore the memory of a hand protruding from a ditch, an English soldier bloated with death and wastewater, his feet bare where someone had looted his boots.
The crows had been at him, even in the dark she could tell that much. The stench had been appalling. She had forced herself to stay and murmur a quick prayer for his soul—a very quick prayer. It seemed the least she could do. She’d had vague thoughts of covering him somehow, but then the sound of someone’s motor had forced her to flee into the woods, and he had been left to the crows again.
It felt as though she had been walking for years, cursing the delicate shoes that had been fashioned for the thick rugs of the Ritz, not the viscous mud of Picardy. She had been forced to abandon her beloved Hispano-Suiza somewhere just north of Haudouin, after an anxious farmer, mistaking her for a German, put a bullet in the fuel tank and narrowly missed putting another one into her shoulder. When she’d shouted back that she was French, he’d not apologized, not really, only shouted at her that she was a fool to be about and made some rather alarming insinuations about her status and her level of virtue. Aurélie had deemed it wiser to depart than to debate the point.
The car was beyond saving. A sacrifice for France, she’d told herself, trying to make light of it, but she’d never imagined how dark the night might be, nor how small she could feel without that metal carapace between her and the world. She took to the fields, but it was slow going in the dark, and she’d found herself floundering about, her skirt knee deep in mud, terrified that she’d lost her way and was going in circles. She’d always prided herself on her sense of direction, but it was one thing to find one’s way by road, another to navigate in darkness by the stars and the sound of shelling behind her.
She’d crept back to the road, but that had been a mistake. The Germans controlled the roads here. She spent a miserable hour in a ditch, shivering in the mud as a German convoy thundered past, sending troops to reinforce the line. She had simmered with frustration and shame, certain she should be doing something—but what? What use was she against a phalanx of Germans? She didn’t even have a knife, much less a gun, just a miraculous talisman that might or might not confer some sort of benefit on the wearer. Her ancestors, she thought darkly, might have been more specific. It was a pity they hadn’t taken something of more utility from Saint Jeanne. A sword, perhaps, or an arquebus.