“Bring him the best wine, he demanded, as if he could tell the difference between wine and horse piss.”
“Victor—” Aurélie looked at her father’s old retainer with alarm.
“No, I didn’t,” he said with regret, although Aurélie suspected he might have spat in it once or twice.
“When you’ve delivered that, tell Suzanne to see that bread and beer are brought for the mayors. It’s absurd to bring them here when they would be at their suppers and leave them hungry.”
Victor grinned at her. “Yes, mademoiselle.”
As an afterthought, Aurélie asked, “Where’s Clovis?” Her father’s wolfhound was always at her father’s feet, but he was conspicuously absent tonight.
“In the kitchen,” said Victor. “With Suzanne. His Lordship the High and Mighty doesn’t approve of animals. He says they’re unsanitary.”
“Clovis?” Clovis had always thought himself more people than people. He was the very aristocrat of animals and considered himself well above such lesser beings as the kitchen cat. “Clovis is as much a member of the family as I!”
“I’ll show him unsanitary,” said Victor grimly, and spat twice in the carafe for good measure.
Aurélie rather wished she were in the kitchen with Clovis instead of in the decidedly drafty hall dressed in last summer’s best, a Worth gown of rhinestone-embroidered tulle over pale pink satin. The rhinestones itched and the tulle draping her arms was more a suggestion than an actual sleeve. The prior Demoiselle de Courcelles, she thought with some annoyance, had been fortified with rather more layers of velvet and wool before being expected to dine in this hall.
There were diamond clips in her hair and on her breast. Well, paste. But they looked like diamonds in the uncertain light. One didn’t discard a sword, her father had said, because it was made of base metal. One could only hope the major would be too impressed by the glitter to look to the provenance. For good measure, Suzanne, the cook, had insisted on clasping a crucifix about her neck as though they were meant to dine with a vampire rather than a Hun.
Suzanne had not been impressed by this distinction.
He was only a man. A grasping little man. Just passing through. How long could they possibly stay? A night? A week? Sooner or later, one imagined, the line of battle would move again, as it had all through the fall, and the troops would go this way or that, and the major and Lieutenant von Sternburg would rush forward or fall back, depending on the fortunes of war, but, at any event, they wouldn’t be Aurélie’s problem anymore.
She was stalling. She was stalling because she didn’t want to step into that room, so familiar, and so strange, and be forced to sit at that high table with Germans, as though she were their hostess rather than their captive.
It wasn’t that she was scared. Not of Major Hoffmeister. Aurélie pressed her cold hands together, looking at the men at the high table, Hoffmeister with his ratlike features, his subordinates, one with a flaming thatch of red hair that made him look like a turkey—and Maximilian von Sternburg, who once, in better times, had made her the loan of an umbrella and had listened to her as though her opinions had merit, as though she weren’t just so much debris in the wake of the brilliant comet that was her mother.
Her father was already at table, impeccably turned out in evening dress, his Order Grand Croix proudly pinned to his breast. He had been seated, in an unsubtle form of insult, at the far left of the long table, not at the major’s right hand, as his position would have commanded. There were only seven places set at the table, all facing out, so the assembled local dignitaries might see their conquerors eat as they stood hungry. All were filled but for one.
Aurélie lifted her skirts and entered the room. The mayors fell quiet as she approached. Aurélie could feel the torchlight striking off the diamonds in her hair and at her breast.
“The Demoiselle de Courcelles,” announced Victor, pronouncing the words with relish, as though she were their talisman, a relic made real.
The lieutenant rose. The major didn’t.
“Major. Lieutenant.” Aurélie inclined her head with what she hoped was elegant condescension but felt more like a tic of the neck.
The major didn’t bother to respond. He was staring at the servants, who had begun circling among the local dignitaries, offering platters of bread and mugs of the local beer.
“Who told them to feed those men?”
“I did.” Aurélie’s voice carried through the hall. These weren’t her people, not most of them; they came from other villages, held by other families, some old, some new, but, now, in this moment, local rivalries were forgotten, extinguished. She stood for them and for France. “Those men had a long and weary walk and will have another before they see their beds.”