“If you mind so much for your people, you could pay it yourself,” said the major when Aurélie’s father complained that one could hardly squeeze blood from a stone.
“Shall I wire my banker in Paris?” asked the count sarcastically.
The major regarded him unsmilingly. “Your kind always have a bit tucked away. Don’t think I don’t know you’ve been hiding things from me. We’ll find them. We always do. Like those idiots who buried their clocks without stopping the chimes.”
The count sketched an ironic bow. “Be my guest. Search the castle. My humble abode is, it appears, at your disposal. I shall send my accounting to Berlin.”
It was empty bravado. They all knew that here, now, cut off from the rest of the world, there was no appealing to Berlin. Her father’s lineage, his position, meant nothing.
That night, Lieutenant Kraus used the Venetian goblets for target practice, laughing as they shattered, spraying wine like blood.
Major Hoffmeister said merely, “I assume you’ll add it to your account?” and Aurélie knew he was taunting her father on purpose, waiting for him to break, to do something rash.
Lieutenant Kraus, she was convinced, was half-mad. A sot and a bully, breaking toys for the fun of it. Lieutenant Dreier was a sycophant, as firm of purpose as a feather mattress. He greedily guzzled the good wine when he thought no one was looking, pressing his Brownie camera onto the servants and demanding that they take pictures of him next to the gilt-limned walls of the ballroom to send home to impress his family in Darmstadt.
But Major Hoffmeister was another matter entirely. He didn’t imbibe. He didn’t grab at treasures. Instead, he needled. One little slight after another, small inconveniences created for no cause other than to discomfit his reluctant hosts, to show them his power. He was breaking them, or trying to.
“A week?” said Aurélie’s father, as October staggered into November, gaunt and cold. “Two at most?”
He had taken to haunting the parapets with a spyglass, noting German troop movements. He was, she knew, relaying the information to a contact by means of pigeon, even though keeping pigeons had been banned on threat of death.
Aurélie didn’t know whether to be alarmed at her father’s recklessness, or grateful that he hadn’t engaged in more direct action.
“Who would have thought it could go on this long?” Aurélie hugged herself against the wind that bit through her thin jacket. She had always spent winters in Paris, never at Courcelles. Her wardrobe was a summer wardrobe, unsuited to dawn parapets. “It can’t go on much longer. It can’t.”
“Can’t it?” said her father, and Aurélie thought that if he mentioned the Siege of Paris in ’71 again she might scream. “We might know more—if you took the pains to learn.”
“I doubt that,” said Aurélie sharply. “What might Lieutenant von Sternburg know other than the numbers of hens who failed to lay their required quota of eggs?”
Whenever she saw him, he was hurrying past with a ledger under his arm. He looked as though he had a perpetual headache. She rather hoped he had.
The children in the village said he gave them bars of chocolate. This, Aurélie thought, would have been rather more heartwarming if he hadn’t also been one of the men in charge of robbing those children’s parents.
“His uncle is a member of the high command. Haven’t you noticed the letters that arrive for him every week?”
“I hadn’t realized you went through their mail.”
“Of course I don’t,” said her father impatiently. “Henri does.”
Henri was the old butler, eighty if he was a day, the constant butt of the Germans’ jibes. Aurélie felt an idiot for not having thought of it herself.
“If Henri is reading his letters already, why do you need me?”
“Because Henri can’t always get to them. He’s loyal but he’s not—what was that American’s name? Houdini. Your mother made me see his performance,” he added as an aside, his lip curling slightly, although whether at the magician or her mother, Aurélie had no idea. “It would be more effective to go to the horse’s mouth, as it were.”
She really shouldn’t be thinking about Lieutenant von Sternburg’s mouth. “If the opportunity arises.”
“True daughters of Courcelles,” said her father, “make their own opportunities.”
She might have told him that all she had seen of Von Sternburg recently was the back of his head. She might have told him that she thought the German was avoiding her—or perhaps she was avoiding him. Or maybe they were avoiding each other.