“Standing in the back of the room.” She had never noticed, at least, not consciously, how often Maximilian von Sternburg had found his way to the back of the room beside her. If she had considered it, she would have thought only that the best seats, the sofas and settees and spindly Louis XV chairs, were already taken as of right by her mother’s regulars. “You came for me?”
“If I had wanted poets, I might have found them at any café,” said Max. “But you were only to be found at the Ritz, so to the Ritz I came. If not for Elisabeth . . .”
The grief in his voice was so palpable that Aurélie, without thinking, put her hand on his arm. The touch went through her like a shock. Never mind that she’d walked arm in arm with him a hundred times before. It felt different now. Dangerous.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and she wasn’t only talking about his sister.
She wrapped her hands in the folds of her shawl, as if she could blot out the memory of his skin. The sentry was watching them from his box. She had no doubt what he was thinking.
She blurted out, “I don’t think we should see so much of each other anymore.”
Max went very still. She could see him looking at her, trying to read her face. “If that’s what you want.”
It wasn’t, not at all, but that was precisely why she needed to stay away from him. At least as much as one could within a set of medieval walls.
Max said something to the sentry in German, a command, and then turned and bowed stiffly to her. “Goodnight, Mademoiselle de Courcelles.”
He turned, but not toward the keep. Away, back toward the bare hill and the sleeping village, where no church bells rang.
“Wait,” said Aurélie, knowing it was weakness to prolong their parting. “Where are you going?”
He seemed very remote, and very German, in his big greatcoat and uniform cap. “To deliver your packages.”
Aurélie bit her lip, remembering the basket, abandoned by the bench. Her duty, forgotten. “I thought Father Christmas had come already.”
Max looked at her steadily. “These children deserve all the joy they can get, in small packages or large. And how could I not—after you risked so much?”
She thought of those pitiful little packets of nuts, scattered when the basket had fallen in the heat of their kiss. “So much for so little, you mean.”
“It isn’t little, to care.” Max’s eyes were very bright in the moonlight. He doffed his cap to her, the torchlight glinting off his silver-gilt hair. “Joyeux No?l, Mademoiselle de Courcelles.”
Avoiding the eyes of the sentry, Aurélie began walking rapidly across the courtyard, back toward the new wing. No, it wasn’t so little, to care. Not at all. And that was what scared her.
There was a hollow place where Max von Sternburg had been. Aurélie hadn’t realized how much time she spent with him, how much she relied upon his company, until he wasn’t there anymore. January shivered into February, cold, bitter cold, her ears numb to the sound of distant shelling, her hands perpetually covered with chilblains. The coal had been diverted to Germany, the trees in the forest felled to make planks to line trenches. The walls of the castle had never seemed so gray, or the world so bare.
It might have been better had she had an occupation, if there were fields to till or crops to harvest, but this was the quiet time of year, when the ground was frozen hard. If there had been wool, she might have spun—if one of the women had taught her. There was mending to do, always, but Suzanne was a far better hand with a needle than she. Hoffmeister hadn’t thought to forbid her the books in the library, so she read, puzzling over difficult words, wishing she had applied herself more to her studies, trying to avoid the suspicion that she was striving, in some strange way, to impress Max von Sternburg, even though she went out of her way to avoid him and he her.
She tried to find her father, but he, too, proved remarkably elusive. That he was engaged on some grand project, she had no doubt. That he didn’t trust her enough to include her, she also knew, and it stung. He was protecting her, she told herself, but she didn’t really believe it, not entirely.
In the end, Aurélie took refuge in the chapel, going on her knees on the worn old stones engraved with the names of long-dead Courcelles. She tried to pray, but her thoughts remained stubbornly of the earth. In her strange, solitary childhood, she had come to the chapel frequently. She would evade her governess and sit on the floor beside the effigy of the first countess, absently stroking the carved fur of the lady’s lapdog as she poured out all her thoughts and concerns to her ancestress. Aurélie had never thought herself fanciful, but sometimes she imagined she could see the lady herself, standing there insubstantial in the shade, smiling down at her in the warm silence.