Aurélie drew herself up very straight, one hand on the countess’s stone foot. “How could you suggest such a thing?”
Her father regarded her narrowly. “Pillow talk, perhaps?”
“I’m not on those terms with any of our captors,” said Aurélie, trying not to think of Christmas Eve and the kiss. That had been a long time ago. Max had been true to his word; he had stayed away as she had asked. “Besides, you were the one who wanted me to get close to Lieutenant von Sternburg!”
“Ought I to have specified how close?” Her father appeared every inch the grand seigneur, looking down his nose at her. “I saw you returning together on Christmas Eve.”
“He was trying to keep me from getting shot, that’s all.” After her father had all but pushed her into the line of the guns. Did he want her a martyr for France? It was a decidedly disconcerting thought, that her father might think her of more use dead than alive. Aurélie swallowed over a lump in her throat. “Whatever you’re suggesting, I assure you, it isn’t the case. Lieutenant von Sternburg is . . . was a friend.”
“No. He’s the enemy.” Her father snapped his fingers at the paper in her hand. “I’ll take that.”
Aurélie glanced down at the paper with its tiny writing. It was coded, of course, but she recognized the hand, the distinctive angle of the 4, the lack of a central slash on the 7. She looked up at her father in surprise. “This is my mother’s writing.”
Her father looked annoyed at being questioned. “And what if it is?”
All these weeks, wondering if her mother knew she was alive, feeling both guilty and irritated by her own guilt, trying to convince herself her mother didn’t care, while knowing that she did . . . And, all the while, her father had been communicating with her mother and never bothered to tell her.
Aurélie clutched the bit of paper. Maybe it was her imagination, but she could smell her mother’s perfume, the scent made just for her by the house of Caron. “I hadn’t thought that you and my mother were on writing terms.”
“They say war makes strange bedfellows.” Her father made an expansive gesture with one tweed-clad arm. “Just because I can’t live with your mother doesn’t mean I don’t have the greatest admiration for her abilities. Why do you think I let her have charge of you?”
“Because I wasn’t a son.”
She’d never said it, never even allowed herself to think it, but there it was. Her mother, her despised mother, had wanted her. Her father hadn’t.
Her father clasped his hands behind his back, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “A girl needs her mother.”
“A mother who isn’t received because her husband won’t live with her? They shunned me in the Faubourg. They treated me like a mongrel. If you had been there—” Years of hurt came pouring out. Her father never thought of her, not then, not now. She was crushing the precious message in her hand. Aurélie forced herself to relax her fingers, before she smudged the writing beyond repair. “If you admired my mother so much, why couldn’t you bring yourself to live with her?”
“Your mother was the one who left me,” her father snapped.
That wasn’t quite how Aurélie remembered it. She remembered the fights about everything, about her mother’s friends, her dress, her lack of refinement. And her mother fighting back with complaints about her father’s mistresses, his gambling, his horses. She would, her father had told her, in the ultimate insult, have understood if she were French. And, somehow, they had been left alone in the great house in the Faubourg. Her father’s brushes and shaving soap had disappeared from his dressing room, along with the valet who had let Aurélie build houses out of her father’s used playing cards and sniff all the mysterious lotions in his dressing case. He had gone on an extended trip, and the next thing Aurélie knew the house had been shut up around them and she and her mother had, like refugees, taken up residence in the Ritz, where her mother’s Americanness wasn’t quite so foreign.
“That was all a long time ago,” said her father, as if it could be dismissed so easily as that. “Your mother and I understand each other. May I have the message?”
“Will you tell me what’s in it?” Aurélie asked.
“Nothing you need to know.”
Just as she hadn’t needed to know all those years ago. Go back to the nursery, they had told her. This is no matter for little girls. But it was. It was her life, her country, her concern.