Instead, she pushed away from the parapet. “I need to go to the village.”
Her father turned to look at her. “You can’t stop a dam with a loaf of bread.”
“Who would waste good bread on a dam?” said Aurélie tartly, and stomped down the stairs, annoyed with the world and her father in particular. She didn’t know if he had only lately developed a habit of aphorism or if she had just never noticed it before. If it was the latter, she was beginning to have slightly more sympathy for her mother.
Or maybe she was annoyed because she knew, on some level, that he was right, and that her own efforts were a poor excuse for action.
No, that wasn’t entirely true. Aurélie stopped in the kitchens, taking the prepared basket from Suzanne as the cook glanced furtively behind her to make sure no loitering German soldiers were about. What she was doing did matter. Even if it was only a loaf of bread here, an egg there.
All of the grain, their hard-won grain that she could reckon in calluses on her palms, had been confiscated. The mill ground only for the Germans; the bakery turned out loaves and cakes for the conquerors. The people of Courcelles were surviving, barely, on gruel and thin soup, flavored with what roots the Germans considered beneath them. Starving, the villagers had taken to gleaning any stray grains of wheat they could find and grinding them into coarse meal in their coffee grinders.
On hearing of this, Major Hoffmeister had ordered all the coffee grinders in the village confiscated.
Never mind that all the able-bodied men had long since gone. Never mind that he was starving old men and young children and expectant mothers.
So Aurélie had taken matters into her own hands. The Germans kept copious records, but could they say, truly, how many eggs had gone into their souffle, how many chickens into their stew? Suzanne had become an expert at making shift, spiriting food from the pot into Aurélie’s basket. Every day, she would wait until Hoffmeister and his two favorite flunkies were out hunting her father’s forest, pretending to be the very grand seigneurs they claimed to despise. Then she would creep down the hill, distributing her makeshift charity to the people of the village.
“Angel,” they called her, and “Demoiselle,” and she felt like the world’s greatest hypocrite, to accept their praise when she had done so little. If she were truly a heroine, she would take a knife to Hoffmeister as Charlotte Corday had done to Marat—although preferably not in his bath. Whatever Lieutenant von Sternburg might say about the medieval tradition of bathing guests, seeing Hoffmeister naked was a humiliation she had so far been spared.
And if she did stab him? They would only shoot her. Shoot her and burn the entire village in reprisal. All would be lost and for what? Another Hoffmeister would be sent to administer the charred remains of what once had been Courcelles, and the wild grass would grow over the houses that had been and the people who had died for her foolishness.
No, she had to be cleverer than that. But how?
The stories of her youth had all been of bold action or virtuous resignation, Joan of Arc or Patient Griselda, neither of them noted for their subtlety. Aurélie wondered, fleetingly, what her mother would do. Hold a salon for the conquerors? Twist their words until they found themselves agreeing with her despite themselves?
She wasn’t her mother.
She had always been so proud of that, that she was a Courcelles to the bone. For the first time, Aurélie caught herself wondering, uneasily, whether she ought to have paid more attention to her mother’s tutelage, to have inherited something more from her than the color of her hair.
The sun was shining, but the village felt gray, all the bustle subdued. The usual clog-clad crowd of women around the well in the village square was missing; the Germans had made it illegal to congregate in groups of more than three. There was no washing hanging on the lines; that, too, had become a crime. The smells of food cooking, the old men at the café whose voices grew louder as they drank glass after glass of blanche, all were gone. The villagers hid behind the curtains of their houses, out of sight of the German imperial flag that hung boldly from the front of the former police station, now a German command post.
Those women who were out and about on errands moved quickly and furtively, looking back over their shoulders at the Germans who sat at the café or loitered by the entrance to the command post.
Aurélie took the back way, past the churchyard, avoiding the square. The familiar old church felt alien, stripped bare of the walnut trees that had, for generations, shaded the graveyard. The work of centuries had been cut down in an afternoon, the wood shipped to Germany to make rifle barrels.