“I was.” With difficulty, Aurélie withdrew her hands. “Don’t fuss, Victor. Cha va fin bien.”
I’m quite all right. The old dialect came easily to her tongue, bringing tears to the big man’s eyes.
“You don’t look all right,” he said, with the bluntness for which their region was famed. “You look like you had a fight with a hedgehog and lost.”
Aurélie gave a laugh that wobbled. “Close enough. Is my father here?”
“The seigneur is in the old keep.” Victor followed after her through the gate and into the courtyard, forcing her to hang back. “Is it true the Germans are in Paris? Is that why you’ve come? We saw them go past—what they did in Catelet—” Victor spat on the flagstones.
Aurélie paused, looking over her shoulder at him. “They’ve not come to Courcelles?”
“Your father put a sentry on the road. Kill anyone who tries to come this way, he said,” announced Victor proudly.
“Did they? Try, that is?”
“Well, no.” Victor looked momentarily crestfallen. “They were too busy in Catelet. Beasts, they were. They shot Madame Lemaire Lienard through the throat—the throat!—as she lay hiding. There were beatings and men tied to trees and left to rot, houses looted, women—um, er. Well, then. But that was Catelet, not here. There were some as left the village when they heard the doings in Catelet. Fools. I told them the seigneur would protect them. Courcelles’s not been conquered yet.”
As far as Aurélie could make out, the last time anyone had tried had been roughly during the Thirty Years’ War, but that was beside the point. Perhaps her father’s reputation had preceded him. Perhaps the Germans simply hadn’t wanted to climb the hill. Whatever the reason, she was grateful.
“Thanks be to God and Saint Jeanne. No, no, Victor,” she remonstrated, as it seemed he meant to follow her and continue to regale her with horrors. “You mustn’t leave your post. What if the Germans were to come and you were not here? There’s no need to announce me. I know the way.”
Every stone in the courtyard was an old friend; this had been her home every summer, while her mother enjoyed the more sophisticated pleasures of Deauville. Aurélie knew Courcelles as well as she knew the Ritz. Better. The Ritz belonged to the world, but Courcelles was hers, from the dent in the wall where a cannonball had landed during the Wars of Religion to the effigy of a long-ago lady of Courcelles in the chapel. There had been a gap by that stone lady’s feet where Aurélie used to hide her childhood treasures, bits of feather and string, and, once, an ornament off the armor of a Merovingian knight, found by an archaeologist her father had benevolently allowed to poke about.
Ahead of her, across the courtyard, lay the family’s living quarters, a manor house within the old walls, built in the baroque style and decorated during a period of relative affluence during the reign of Louis XV. It might be over two hundred years old, but it would always be known as “the new wing.”
Her father, Victor had said, was in the old keep.
Aurélie turned left at the gatehouse, toward the round tower that dominated the countryside. It was, her father liked to boast, the largest of its kind in France, a great circular tower, hung with tapestries and the relics of old wars, a gallery circling the whole so that minstrels could play above and adoring retainers gawp and cheer. The great fireplace was a later addition, added in the fifteenth century, featuring larger-than-life figures of the Nine Worthies, all of whom were said to have been modeled after the daughters of the lord of Courcelles of the day, particularly the busty one at the end, which was also said to be the reason why the carving was never quite finished and the artisan left with a chisel in his backside.
There was no fire in the great fireplace today. Instead, Aurélie found her father directing the removal of antique weaponry from the walls, barking orders as axes long rusted to their stands were pried free and hauled down, joining antique muskets and ceremonial swords in a martial pile on the floor.
It was her father’s wolfhound who gave her away, struggling up on his arthritic paws to wag his tail as best he could.
Her father frowned at his old companion. “Clovis! Clovis! What’s got into you, you old so-and-so?”
“I have, I think,” said Aurélie, and her father spun around, his face going whiter than the marble figures at the fireplace.
“Aurélie? Aurélie!”
“Father, don’t, your heart, the doctor said . . .” Aurélie could have kicked herself for her own folly. She ought to have let Victor announce her; she ought—oh, she didn’t know what she ought.