She also had no doubt that he would enact his revenge. When and how it suited him.
Her father was enjoying himself, playing the grand seigneur, and Aurélie felt guilty, so guilty for grudging him that—but also frustrated, frustrated that he couldn’t see what she saw. When had he become so childish? She oughtn’t think that about her father. It was unfilial. But there it was, and it wouldn’t go away.
She didn’t want to doubt her father’s judgment. He had always been her touchstone, a model of stability against the giddy nonsense of her mother’s fashionable urban existence. But this . . . There was no consolation in it. They ought to have waited, ought to have gone to the morning mass in the village that Hoffmeister had grudgingly deigned to permit because he could find no good reason to refuse it.
The mass was concluding, a strange, gabbled mass without music, without light. Her father, with the air of a conjurer, drew out a bottle of brandy.
“Let’s see them keep us from our réveillon!” he said, and Aurélie could see the flash of teeth as Victor grinned and took the bottle.
The bottle came around and Aurélie took a swig, hoping it would warm her. Together, they tottered across the blighted grass from the old chapel, ducking beneath the lighted arrow slits of the old keep, where Hoffmeister held his own Christmas court. They could hear the voices, German voices, singing songs in their own barbaric language.
Was Maximilian von Sternburg one of that boisterous company? Undoubtedly. It was at moments like this that she was forcibly reminded that he was the enemy, alien, no matter how friendly he professed to be, no matter how their strolls in the dead garden conjured the memories of gentler times.
Aurélie ducked her head and blundered into the warmth of the kitchen.
“This will warm you right up, my love.” Suzanne unearthed some cider and began warming it on the hearth, handing out steaming cups.
Perhaps there was something in it, in this illicit celebration. It seemed to be bucking up her father’s retainers, at least.
“There,” said Victor. He took the baby Jesus from his hidden place behind the crèche, placing the wooden baby in the cradle in the manger. “Now it’s truly Christmas.”
The crèche was a crude one, whittled locally, decorated with paper flowers, a brave attempt at festivity in the midst of despair.
There had been a crèche in Aurélie’s mother’s rooms at the Ritz. It had amused her mother to adopt that old tradition. The crèche had been baroque, featuring exquisitely carved and painted figures: delicately gilded halos on the holy family, streetsellers juggling apples, gossips chatting across houses, the wise men on their camels, bearing their precious burdens of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Throughout the Christmas season, guests would come to ooh and aah over it. It had become a tradition of sorts. Aurélie had hated it, had hated their home being made so public, constantly on display.
Now she found herself wondering if her mother had put up the crèche as usual. She had loved it as a child. She would make the camels canter and dangle the angels from their golden halos. And her mother had never once complained, not even when Aurélie chipped a wing on an angel.
What was her mother doing now? Was she wondering about Aurélie? Worrying about her? When Aurélie had run off, all those months ago, it had seemed like a grand act of defiance, but it had never occurred to her that the war would go on so long or in such stalemate, that she would find herself so entirely cut off from Paris, unable even to let her mother know she was alive and unharmed.
Clovis, her father’s wolfhound, butted his head against her hand, and Aurélie absently scratched him behind the ears, noticing how gray he had become, how stiffly he bent his knees to settle at her side.
The heat of the kitchen, the taste of the cider woolly on her lips, her father’s unaccustomed shabbiness, Clovis’s stiff knees—it all felt unreal, dreamlike. And not a good sort of dream.
She had always sulked over Christmas at the Ritz, scowling at the artificiality of it, the chocolate-box prettiness, but now she would have given anything to open her eyes and be back there, to turn back the clock to last year, when she had suffered through her mother’s réveillon in a dress that was too tight in the collar, making half-hearted conversation with the wits of Paris. If only they could put everything back as it was, make her father himself again, take the gray hair from Clovis’s coat, make the village a peaceful, happy place, a place of refuge in contrast to the bustling, smoke-stained city.