I opened the front cover, reading the words stamped inside. Le Mouton Noir, Rue Volney, Paris. I began flipping through the pages until the book opened up to a folded piece of paper, another letter, this one sent to Kit a year after his return. I didn’t need to read it to know what it said. I’d read the French words often enough that they were emblazoned on my brain.
My Darling Kit,
Oh, how I have missed you. I have barely existed these past years after we last said goodbye, waiting for news of you, to know if you survived. It has been so long since I’ve seen your face, but I remember it as well as my own. I see it every night when I fall asleep, and it’s as if you are next to me again, in Paris, where we found love amid so much destruction. When you told me that swans mate for life.
Remember the promise that we made to each other? That if we are both alive we would meet at the Ritz. So, darling, meet me at the Ritz this Christmas. I will wait for you until New Year’s and if you don’t come, I will know that you have a new life and that I am no longer a part of it. I will not write again. My only hope is that you remember me and the short time we had together and know that I will always love you. Always. La Fleur
My anger exploded inside of me, fueled by guilt and betrayal and grief. By the irrefutable fact that I’d never been my husband’s first choice. Shoving the letter back into the book, I slammed down the trunk’s lid before hurrying out of the attic, The Scarlet Pimpernel clutched tightly to my chest.
I marched down to Kit’s study and pulled out a pen and paper. Before I could stop myself, I wrote a letter to Mr. Andrew Bowdoin, informing him that I would book a room at the Ritz and would like to meet with him after my arrival on the twentieth. I signed it Mrs. Barbara Langford and sealed it into an envelope.
As I placed the letter on the hall table to go out with the outgoing post, I had a fleeting worry as to what Mrs. Finch might think, but then quickly brushed the thought aside. I was weary of wrestling with ghosts. It was time to lay this one to rest.
Chapter Two
Aurélie
The H?tel Ritz
Paris, France
September 1914
“Darling, do try to rest. You’re making me dizzy with your pacing. Wearing a track in my carpet won’t drive the Germans away, you know.”
“Neither will drinking champagne,” muttered Aurélie, but her mother didn’t hear her.
Her mother never heard her.
Even now, with the Germans a mere thirty kilometers from Paris, with trains running to the provinces to evacuate the fearful, with the government in exile in Bordeaux, her mother refused to allow anything to interfere with her precious salon. The treasures of the Louvre might be hastily packed in crates and shipped to Toulouse, that dreary Monsieur Proust might have taken his complaints and his madeleines and decamped to the seaside pleasures of Cabourg （and good riddance, thought Aurélie）， but in the Suite Royale at the Ritz, the famed Boldini portrait of the Comtesse de Courcelles still hung above the mantel, the cunning little statuette by Rodin brooded on its stand near the fireplace, and the remains of her mother’s entourage continued to admire the countess’s elegant toilette, laugh at her witticisms, and eat her iced cakes.
Trust her mother not to allow a little thing like an invasion to discommode her.
When bombs had fallen from a German monoplane the week before, all her mother had said was, “I do hope they don’t blow out the windows. I rather like my view.”
The bon dit had already made the rounds of Paris, and Madame la Comtesse de Courcelles was being held up in the international press as an example of French fortitude, which Aurélie thought was rather rich given that her mother was American, an heiress who had married a French count and had never gone home. Whatever the early days of her parents’ marriage had been, Aurélie had no idea; all she knew was that by the time she was four her father had taken up permanent residence at the family seat in Picardy, staying at the Jockey Club if business necessitated that he spend the night in town, while her mother, abandoning the Courcelles h?tel particulier in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, had established herself in the second most opulent suite at the Ritz, surrounding herself with artists, poets, and would-be wits, American expatriates, British aesthetes, and German philosophers. In short, the riffraff of Europe. Her mother, Aurélie thought in annoyance, was an American’s idea of a Frenchwoman, impeccably turned out, always ready with a quip, urban to the bone, and about as French as California wine.
Through her father, Aurélie was a de Courcelles. She had made her debut at the bals blancs; she was invited to the teas and dances of the Faubourg, as was expected. But she knew that she was suspect, an interloper, alien among her own relations, that web of cousins that comprised most of the old nobility of France. The true old nobility, not those Bonapartist upstarts or the Orleanist arrivistes. But even though her blood on her father’s side went back to Charlemagne, the whispers followed Aurélie through the drafty drawing rooms of the old guard: What could the girl be after an upbringing like that? All of Minnie Gold’s millions couldn’t make up for the taint—although those millions had done rather a nice job of restoring the roof of the chateau.