“I’m not like my mother.” Aurélie thought of her mother, all silk stockings and plucked brows, holding court at the Ritz. She couldn’t imagine her mother threshing wheat. Any flailing she did was with her tongue. “I’m not!”
“How is she?” her father asked abruptly. “Your mother.”
“My mother is my mother.” Realizing just how ungracious she sounded, Aurélie flushed and plunged on. “She’s well. Or she was well when I left her yesterday. She’s holding court with what’s left of her salon.”
“That’s one good thing,” said her father grimly, turning away to survey the coat of arms engraved above the fireplace. “As long as the relic is with her, I don’t have to worry about it falling into German hands.”
Aurélie just stopped herself from putting her own hands to her breast, where the talisman hung heavy beneath her chemise, shirtwaist, and jacket. “You wouldn’t rather have it here, at Courcelles, in case of need?”
“And have every fortune hunter in the Prussian army after it? No. It’s safer where it is. One thing I don’t doubt about your mother is her tenacity. What she has, she holds.”
Except for her marriage. Except for her daughter.
With false brightness, Aurélie said, “Well, then. That’s good then, isn’t it?” She’d meant to present the talisman to her father like a trophy. Now it was contraband, something to be hidden. “I’ll just say a quick prayer to Saint Jeanne, shall I, before I take the harvest in hand?”
“I don’t think the saint’s much to do with scythes,” said her father drily. “You would have to ask Monsieur le Curé. If you can pry him from his devotions.”
“I’ll do that,” said Aurélie, and left him discussing with the blacksmith the best way of putting a better edge on a fourteenth-century sword.
The chapel lay outside the castle walls, a small, rectangular edifice made of the same stone as the keep. There was a parish church in Courcelles at which the villagers made their devotions; as a child, Aurélie had joined in the processions on saints’ days. But this chapel was for the family and their retainers. Effigies lined the walls, narrowing the nave. The original Sigismund de Courcelles, the one who had gone on Crusade with Louis the Fat, lay on a slab of stone, his wolfhound at his feet, his sword still in his hand.
But it wasn’t to Sigismund the First that Aurélie went, but his wife, Melisande. She had a dog as well, but hers was smaller and fluffier. Aurélie had never been sure whether it was a miscalculation on the sculptor’s part or design that had left a little alcove between the dog’s tail and the lady’s feet, entirely hidden unless one looked from just the right angle.
Aurélie knelt down beside the effigy, contorting her body into a space that had been much more comfortable for a five-year-old. Looking behind her to make sure she was still alone, she wiggled the chain holding the talisman up over her head. For a moment, the diamonds and rubies glimmered in the light slanting through the small, rosette windows. Mercilessly, Aurélie muffled their glow, wrapping the talisman in her handkerchief and thrusting the small bundle into her old hidey-hole.
Please let no one find it, she prayed to the saint. Please let no one find us. Let the Germans stay away—and away from Paris, as well, she added virtuously.
She felt a momentary pang for the anxiety it must have caused her mother when she emerged from the dining room to find Aurélie and the talisman gone.
But would she have worried, really? The talisman was insured, and it wasn’t as though her mother had any regard for the saint, anyway. As for Aurélie . . . well, her mother would scarcely notice she was gone, would she? She would be too busy. She’d probably be glad of the extra seat in the salon.
It wasn’t true, she knew, but it made her feel better to think so.
Aurélie rose, dusting the dirt of decades off her skirt—wherever Monsieur le Curé accomplished his devotions, it certainly wasn’t here—and went to go set her father’s affairs in order.
The sound of shelling became a steady accompaniment to the whistle and thump of the scythe. Aurélie rose exhausted and fell into bed exhausted. Her team of harvesters consisted of the baker’s oldest daughter, who was very conscious of her own dignity; two ten-year-old boys; and a sixty-year-old sot. Kilting up her skirts, Aurélie did her best to lead by example.
Unfortunately, she had about as much experience with a scythe as with a plow, so her example was one, she rapidly realized, that no one ought to follow. But with a great deal of error and waste that made her wince, they made some progress, and the pile of bales in the carts began to grow. They weren’t very shapely bales, but they were bales all the same.