“Oh, bother the doctor,” said her father irritably, and crossed the room in two strides, kissing her firmly on both cheeks before holding her out at arm’s length, frowning at the scratches and tears, the burrs in her hair and smuts on her cheeks. “By all that’s holy—I thought you were a vision.”
“No, I’m quite solid, I promise you.” Aurélie breathed in the familiar scents of tobacco and wet dog, molding tapestries and flaking paint. Her father was thinner than she remembered, his cheekbones sharper, his hair wilder, but he smelled like home. Nothing could be wrong when Courcelles was still Courcelles and her father ruled supreme. When she was little, when the priest spoke of God the Father, it was always her father she pictured, with his unbending posture, his autocratic voice, and his strong sense of noblesse oblige.
Her father frowned at her, those brows so like her own drawing together over his nose. They were, she noticed with a pang, entirely white now. Her father was thirty years older than her mother; he had been nearly fifty when Aurélie was born. But that didn’t mean anything, she told herself hastily. He was still hearty, still vigorous. Nothing could daunt her father, not even a German invasion.
But his heart . . . She ought to have remembered his heart.
“What in the name of Saint Eloy brings you back here? Is Paris fallen?”
“No, no, nothing of the kind! I thought—I thought I’d come home.” Put that way, it sounded rather unconvincing. Aurélie cleared her throat and tried again. “They’re fighting for Paris right now. I drove Jean-Marie to join his regiment and then—well, I drove this way rather than the other.”
“You drove Jean-Marie to his regiment?” After a moment of silence, her father exploded in a great bark of laughter. The men around them exchanged looks of relief and permitted themselves nervous chuckles, although they stopped when her father glared at them. He clapped Aurélie on the shoulder. “Your mother always said the Courcelles have more guts than sense, and you’re Courcelles to the bones, my girl.”
He didn’t need to know how terrified she had been in the woods, how weak. “How could I leave you to face the Germans alone? How could I leave our people to them?”
“Bored at the Ritz, were you? There’s work to be done here and plenty. The Germans will be back, and I mean to be ready for them when they do.”
Aurélie looked down at the pile. “With Sigismund de Courcelles’s tournament lance?”
Her father hefted the lance, the long shaft wobbling dangerously. “As good as the day he used it to break Raimond the Fat’s shield.”
It was a very nice lance, and Aurélie was sure that her ancestor had wielded it valiantly, but to charge a field gun with a lance seemed a bit optimistic.
“Maybe it won’t come to that. Maybe they’ll be driven clear back to the Rhine and all we’ll see will be their backs as they run.”
“Have you ever known the Hun to give up so easily? No, they’ll be back as soon as food gets scarce. We’ve precious little enough for our own. The harvest is rotting in the fields. The idiots dropped their tools and ran to join up when they heard war had come.”
“You would have done the same,” Aurélie pointed out.
“I’m a knight of France, not a field hand. It’s my job to fight for France. Their job is to thresh wheat.”
That explained why there had been no men straggling toward the fields. “If the men are all gone, then someone will have to bring the harvest in,” said Aurélie thoughtfully.
Her father looked horrified. “I trust you’re not suggesting I do it.”
“No,” said Aurélie, who sometimes thought it a shame her father hadn’t been born during the days of the Sun King. “I’m suggesting that I do.”
Every man in the room instinctively backed away, waiting for the explosion.
“No,” said her father. “I won’t have you with your skirts kilted, burned brown—”
“I’ll wear a hat. If the Germans don’t kill our people, starvation will—and of the two, I’m not sure that wouldn’t be worse. We can’t let that happen. I can ask in the village. If the men can’t harvest, we’ll hand the women their scythes. They’ll do it,” she added, cutting off her father’s protests, “when they see I’m doing it with them.”
Her father was silent a long moment. He looked at Aurélie, his expression unreadable. “There are times,” he said, at last, “when you’re very like your mother.”