The talisman dug into the skin between her breasts. Aurélie crossed herself and muttered a quick prayer of apology. The fault wasn’t in the talisman; it was in her. Her weakness, her shame. Her father had flung himself into battle at the age of fifteen. Here she was, four years older than he had been then, cravenly crouching in a ditch, painfully aware of her own uselessness.
Never, ever before had Aurélie felt herself so completely powerless. Here, in the dark, caught between two armies, all of her father’s noble blood, all of her mother’s precious francs couldn’t protect her. She was only a woman, alone.
Aurélie fled back to the woods, skulking past burned-out farms, creeping carefully around the outskirts of villages where the German imperial flag hung like a taunt above the mairies. Her stomach rumbled. Petits fours at the Ritz had been a very long time ago. She wished she’d had the sense to bring food, a proper coat, anything. She’d always thought herself a countrywoman at heart, but she had never experienced the country like this. How had she thought the countryside quiet? Every step made the brush crackle. A wolf howled and an animal let out a high-pitched squeal. The woods felt like something out of the stories her nurse had told her: Red Riding Hood and the wolf, Hansel and Gretel and the witch lying in wait.
A man approached her, a man in a British uniform. He spoke in what sounded like an educated voice but Aurélie shook her head and turned her back on him, walking very quickly away, resisting the urge to break into a run, to run and run with the twigs yanking at her silk stockings and the tree branches reaching clawing fingers toward her hair.
Would morning never come? The night seemed to go on forever, far longer than any night ought to be allowed; Aurélie began to fear it would never be day again. She grimaced at her own whimsy. Of course, day must come. Mustn’t it? Just because she had been a fool didn’t mean the earth would stop its spinning. She hoped. She felt like a medieval peasant, afraid of the dark, stumbling along in a fog of cold and fear, her entire being reduced to the animal instinct of avoiding pursuit.
When the sky began to lighten she scarcely knew it at first; her eyes were so firmly fixed on the path ahead. But there, there, the sky was surely more gray than black ahead. And was that . . .
Yes. Yes, it was. In the distance, the great tower of Courcelles, still a mile away or more, but there.
Her dress was in tatters, torn by twigs, her stockings glued to her heels by the blisters that had broken and bled, but Aurélie scarcely noticed the pain, buoyed by a relief so intense that she felt she floated rather than walked that last mile.
Home.
To the right, in the valley, lay the village of Courcelles, a cluster of brick houses with slate roofs, dominated by the substantial bulk of the mairie, tapering off into farmhouses toward the edges. To the left, up a deliberately steep road, loomed the Chateau de Courcelles, quiet in the gray dawn.
The village was beginning to wake; Aurélie could see the thin curls of smoke beginning to emerge from chimneys as ovens were lit. The smell of baking bread taunted her. But where were the men who ought, even this early, to be trudging toward the fields to harvest the hay? Where was the sigil of their house, flying from the tallest tower?
A terrible fear seized her. Over the course of the long, terrible night, she had seen so many homes burned, others abandoned or requisitioned. And that was to the west, closer to Paris. Courcelles was impregnable, so her father had always claimed, but that had been in the days of lances and siege engines, not now, not this.
Slowly, aware of every ache, every bruise, Aurélie began the long trudge up the hill she had so seldom traveled on foot. When she went to town, she drove the pony cart or rode one of her father’s horses and people bowed as she passed.
A man emerged from the guardhouse, placing himself squarely on the path, a gun pointed at her chest. “Who goes there? Kmint qu’os vos aplez?”
The guttural tones of the Picard dialect made her weak with relief. The man was in the shadows of the guardhouse, but Aurélie knew his voice from the time she was little and he had put her on his shoulders to play with the weapons mounted on the wall in the hall.
“It is I.” Her throat was so raw that the words came out as little more than a rasp. “Don’t you know me, Victor?”
“Miss Aurélie?” Victor dropped the gun he had been holding, one of her father’s fowling pieces, brilliant for making the lives of pheasants a misery, somewhat less useful for warding off invading armies. He grabbed her cold hands, chafing them for warmth. “Miss Aurélie! What happened to you? We thought you were in Paris!”