I have arranged to be assigned to my firm’s Paris office for a brief period of time starting April 20th. I understand that this is short notice and you most likely have a very busy life and would be unable to make the trip across the Channel. Yet I feel compelled to at least ask—very brazen and American of me, I know. But I believe that being in Paris while searching for La Fleur is what I must do, and it is my strongest wish that you might be able to join me in this quest. My father never met you, but he was certain that the woman Kit Langford married had to be a force to be reckoned with. I’m not a betting man, but I’d like to wager that he was right.
I will be staying at the Ritz and you may address any correspondence there as they have instructions to forward to my office if a letter arrives prior to my own arrival. I look forward to hearing from you or, even better, meeting you in Paris.
Yours truly,
Andrew Bowdoin, Esq.
My hands shook when I read the letter again, and then a third time. Then, carefully, I refolded the letter and returned it to its torn envelope. Ignoring the rest of the post scattered on the steps, I climbed the remaining stairs and headed down the long hallway to the door at the end, each step more purposeful than the last, my anger at the enigmatic woman I had been forced to share my husband with for almost twenty years growing with each step. The grandest traitor of them all.
I yanked open the door to the attic steps, ignoring the puff of dust that blew in my face and made me sneeze, the stale, icy air of the unused space making my teeth chatter. I made my way to the trunk in the corner, a place I hadn’t returned to since I’d thought I’d buried the memory of La Fleur. A ticking bomb, indeed.
With another sneeze, I knelt down in front of the trunk, lifted the latch, and opened the lid. I pulled out a linen-bound book, allowing it to rest in my hands while I sat back on the floor, ignoring the coating of dust. Smoothing my hand over the title, I read it in the murky light. The Scarlet Pimpernel. It was the one thing Kit had managed to keep in the camp, hidden again and again to prevent it from being confiscated. Kit had once confessed that it had been his token of survival, his lucky card. When he’d recovered enough, he’d asked me to throw it away as it was a part of his past. And then he’d asked me to marry him.
I opened the front cover, reading the words stamped inside. Le Mouton Noir, Rue Volney, Paris. I began flipping through the pages until the book opened up to a folded piece of paper, another letter, this one sent to Kit a year after his return. I didn’t need to read it to know what it said. I’d read the French words often enough that they were emblazoned on my brain.
My Darling Kit,
Oh, how I have missed you. I have barely existed these past years after we last said goodbye, waiting for news of you, to know if you survived. It has been so long since I’ve seen your face, but I remember it as well as my own. I see it every night when I fall asleep, and it’s as if you are next to me again, in Paris, where we found love amid so much destruction. When you told me that swans mate for life.
Remember the promise that we made to each other? That if we are both alive we would meet at the Ritz. So, darling, meet me at the Ritz this Christmas. I will wait for you until New Year’s and if you don’t come, I will know that you have a new life and that I am no longer a part of it. I will not write again. My only hope is that you remember me and the short time we had together and know that I will always love you. Always. La Fleur
My anger exploded inside of me, fueled by guilt and betrayal and grief. By the irrefutable fact that I’d never been my husband’s first choice. Shoving the letter back into the book, I slammed down the trunk’s lid before hurrying out of the attic, The Scarlet Pimpernel clutched tightly to my chest.
I marched down to Kit’s study and pulled out a pen and paper. Before I could stop myself, I wrote a letter to Mr. Andrew Bowdoin, informing him that I would book a room at the Ritz and would like to meet with him after my arrival on the twentieth. I signed it Mrs. Barbara Langford and sealed it into an envelope.
As I placed the letter on the hall table to go out with the outgoing post, I had a fleeting worry as to what Mrs. Finch might think, but then quickly brushed the thought aside. I was weary of wrestling with ghosts. It was time to lay this one to rest.
Chapter Two
Aurélie
The Hôtel Ritz
Paris, France
September 1914
“Darling, do try to rest. You’re making me dizzy with your pacing. Wearing a track in my carpet won’t drive the Germans away, you know.”
“Neither will drinking champagne,” muttered Aurélie, but her mother didn’t hear her.
Her mother never heard her.
Even now, with the Germans a mere thirty kilometers from Paris, with trains running to the provinces to evacuate the fearful, with the government in exile in Bordeaux, her mother refused to allow anything to interfere with her precious salon. The treasures of the Louvre might be hastily packed in crates and shipped to Toulouse, that dreary Monsieur Proust might have taken his complaints and his madeleines and decamped to the seaside pleasures of Cabourg (and good riddance, thought Aurélie), but in the Suite Royale at the Ritz, the famed Boldini portrait of the Comtesse de Courcelles still hung above the mantel, the cunning little statuette by Rodin brooded on its stand near the fireplace, and the remains of her mother’s entourage continued to admire the countess’s elegant toilette, laugh at her witticisms, and eat her iced cakes.
Trust her mother not to allow a little thing like an invasion to discommode her.
When bombs had fallen from a German monoplane the week before, all her mother had said was, “I do hope they don’t blow out the windows. I rather like my view.”
The bon dit had already made the rounds of Paris, and Madame la Comtesse de Courcelles was being held up in the international press as an example of French fortitude, which Aurélie thought was rather rich given that her mother was American, an heiress who had married a French count and had never gone home. Whatever the early days of her parents’ marriage had been, Aurélie had no idea; all she knew was that by the time she was four her father had taken up permanent residence at the family seat in Picardy, staying at the Jockey Club if business necessitated that he spend the night in town, while her mother, abandoning the Courcelles hôtel particulier in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, had established herself in the second most opulent suite at the Ritz, surrounding herself with artists, poets, and would-be wits, American expatriates, British aesthetes, and German philosophers. In short, the riffraff of Europe. Her mother, Aurélie thought in annoyance, was an American’s idea of a Frenchwoman, impeccably turned out, always ready with a quip, urban to the bone, and about as French as California wine.
Through her father, Aurélie was a de Courcelles. She had made her debut at the bals blancs; she was invited to the teas and dances of the Faubourg, as was expected. But she knew that she was suspect, an interloper, alien among her own relations, that web of cousins that comprised most of the old nobility of France. The true old nobility, not those Bonapartist upstarts or the Orleanist arrivistes. But even though her blood on her father’s side went back to Charlemagne, the whispers followed Aurélie through the drafty drawing rooms of the old guard: What could the girl be after an upbringing like that? All of Minnie Gold’s millions couldn’t make up for the taint—although those millions had done rather a nice job of restoring the roof of the château.
But, still, the daughter. Not quite like us. That was what they whispered behind her back. She might be tall like her father, have his straight, dark brows—de Courcelles brows, as distinctive as a royal birthmark, chiseled in stone on the effigies in the family chapel, immortalized in oils in portraits, displayed in the flesh on her father’s beloved face—but her hair was her mother’s, soft masses of fluffy ash-blond hair, like something out of an advertisement for soap. Common, they said. So like her mother, even though she wasn’t at all, not really, not if one really looked. But no one did.
Aurélie wis
hed she had been born a man, to prove them wrong. Then, she might have distinguished herself in battle, proved her valor in fighting for her country. She might have been awarded the Légion d’honneur as her father had been, when he was only fifteen and had lied about his age to take sword against the Prussians back in the war of 1870. Admittedly, the French forces had been repulsed and her father had been forced with the rest of the troops to retreat to Paris, where they had endured terrible privations under siege, but no one denied his bravery. It was the first thing anyone mentioned when speaking of her father: “Do you remember the battle of Mont-Valérien?” And they would wag their heads in admiration over his audacity, as though it had been five years ago and not close on fifty.
Here was France in peril again, and what was she, Aurélie, doing? Sitting in a sulk in her mother’s salon while an elderly professor of ancient history droned on about Caesar’s wars and how they wouldn’t be in the bind they were in if only more military men had bothered to attend his lectures.
“Yes, but did Caesar have trains?” said her mother, taking the sting out of the comment by handing the professor another cake. Aurélie’s grandfather had made his fortune in something to do with trains, just after the American Civil War. Her mother rather liked reminding people of that. “Rilla, darling, will you ring for more coffee?”
As Aurélie went to tug the bell, she heard the professor saying stiffly, “He had baggage trains, which was much the same thing.”
“Somewhat slower, I imagine,” said Maman.
“No slower than our army at the moment.” Seizing the advantage, one of her mother’s other guests leaned forward to grab the countess’s attention. “Have you heard they haven’t enough trains to take the troops to the front? They’re requisitioning the taxis.”
“With all the taxis gone, how will we get to the opera?” murmured Maman.
“But the opera is closed,” said the professor blankly.
Maman briefly pressed her eyes shut. “Yes,” she said gently. “I know.”
It was, Aurélie knew, a dreadful trial to her that the clever men, the young men, had all gone off, most to war. Like Maximilian von Sternburg, fighting, one presumed, for the wrong side.
“Shall I see if the papers have come?” Aurélie said, too loudly, breaking into whatever her mother was saying. She wasn’t sure what had made her think of Herr von Sternburg. Germans, she supposed. “La Patrie should be here by now.”
Her mother glanced at the ornate ormolu clock on the mantel, a gilded Bacchus reclining on top of the clockface while two cherubs dropped grapes into his mouth. “It’s four o’clock. We should have La Liberté as well.”
Since war had been declared, they measured their days by the arrival of the papers, Le Matin with their morning chocolate, Le Paris-Midi at noon, La Patrie at three, La Liberté at four, and L’Intransigeant at six. It was the one sign Maman gave that she was at all concerned with the fate of her adopted country: the way her jeweled hands grabbed for the daily papers. Not that they were of terribly much use. The government had passed a law back in August banning any military information from the papers and anything that might serve to dampen national morale, which meant that one tended to read very little that actually mattered. But even that little was enough to make them check the clock and badger the porters for the papers.
“They’re saying it will be another 1870,” said the professor. “We’ll be roasting rats for supper.”
“I’m sure the chefs here can turn even rat into a delicacy,” said Maman, never mind that most of the kitchen staff had been called up, along with the rest of the male populace of Paris.
“I remember the last time,” said the professor gloomily. “The Germans at the gates.”
“Plus ça change.” Maman shrugged her narrow shoulders, and her entourage laughed, as though she’d said something dreadfully witty. Aurélie hated all of them: the men about town with their lilac cravats, the artists with their paint-stained waistcoats, the poets who thought themselves above the vulgarities of war. There were no captains of industry here, no men of action; her mother had had enough of those, she said, in her youth in New York. Instead, she entertained the philosophers and the fainéants, the men too old or effete to don uniform.
“That’s not funny,” protested Aurélie, her hand on the ornate doorknob. Whatever the papers said, however much they tried to boost morale, there was no getting around it. They were losing. The word had gone around, all available troops had been called up, all the reserves, all the able-bodied men, all to be rushed west to make one last stand to protect Paris.
Had the Germans already overrun Courcelles? Had her father raised his sword and swung into battle as he had before, one man against an army? There was no word, no way to receive word. All communications had been cut, all was in disarray. Aurélie had tried to use her father’s position and her mother’s reputation to extract information from the Ministry of War, but had been sent pointlessly from one department to the next, shunted along with a bow and a few polite words, before being told, after hours and hours of being shuffled here and there, that spies were everywhere and no information could be given.
I’m hardly a spy, Aurélie had protested. I’m the Demoiselle de Courcelles.
It was a name that ought to have some resonance. Her ancestors had fought with Joan of Arc.
But the official, a very minor official, had only shook his head and repeated that he couldn’t tell her anything.
Can’t or won’t? Aurélie had asked desperately. Do you know anything of my father? Anything?
But he hadn’t answered, had only flipped the tails of his coat and seated himself again at his desk, as though Aurélie weren’t there at all.
She wasn’t sure what was worse, that there might be news of her father, of her people, and she was not told, or that they didn’t know, that the very Ministry of War was as much in the dark as the rest of them. It did not inspire confidence.
“If the Germans take Paris . . . ,” she said, and broke off, not being able to imagine it.
“Then we’ll treat for peace,” said her mother matter-of-factly.
“What peace can there be with the Hun?” Her father’s stories of 1870 mingled with the pathos of the papers, Belgian babies murdered, women violated, villages laid to waste and plunder.
“They’re not all savages, sweetheart.” Maman’s lips twisted in a wry smile. “One can’t believe everything one reads in La Patrie.”
Aurélie hated being made to feel young and naive.
“They’re not all poets, either,” she retorted.
Paris drew a particular type of German nobleman, or at least her mother’s salon did. They all seemed to quote Goethe, read the poetry of Rimbaud, and have strong feelings about the works of Proust. It was very hard to imagine the Germans of her mother’s entourage spitting babies on the spikes of their helmets.
But they were Germans. Goodness only knew what they might do. What they might be doing even now.
“No, I imagine not,” said her mother. “But a man’s a man for all that. When the war is over, one might even be inclined to like them again.”
Like them? There were thousands dead, thousands more likely to die, whole areas of France overrun by soldiers. How could one forgive something like that? How could one take tea with a conqueror?
“If you were French—” Aurélie bit off the words, knowing she was only opening herself up to mockery. “Never mind.”
“Will you pardon me?” With a gracious smile for her guests, Maman rose from the settee and came to stand by Aurélie. The smell of her mother’s distinctive perfume, the particular way her silk skirts swished around her ankles as she moved struck Aurélie with a combination of old affections and resentments. Once, those had spelled comfort to her; recently, they had been the opposite. Aurélie stood stiffly as her mother set a jeweled hand on her arm. “Darling, I’ve lived in Paris since I was nineteen. More than half my life. Don’t you think I care just a little?”
&n
bsp; Yes, that her coffee not be served cold.
She was being unfair, Aurélie knew. Her mother wasn’t like the Marquise Casati, who had gone into hysterics in the lobby last week—not because of the men dead or the babies butchered, but because the reduction of staff had meant her breakfast had been delayed. Her mother did care. In her own way.
“It’s not the same for you,” said Aurélie, hating her voice for cracking. “You’re not a Courcelles.”
Her mother glanced fleetingly across the room at a glass curio case lined with velvet in which rested a single item: the Courcelles talisman, a scrap of cloth dipped in the blood of Joan of Arc. One could hardly see the precious relic; her mother, as a young bride, had had it cased in an elaborate pendant of gold, studded with precious stones, so that all one saw was the glow of rubies and diamonds, not the frail remnant of the holy martyr.
Aurélie’s father had been appalled, but he hadn’t interfered: it was a tradition that the talisman was to be carried by the women of the family, ever since a long-ago Comtesse de Courcelles had knelt at the feet of the Maid of Orléans and tried to stanch her blood with fabric ripped from her own dress. The saint had blessed the comtesse, and, ever since, the talisman had protected the house of Courcelles, conferring victory in battle or safety to the bearer, depending on whom one asked.
The relic had been passed down in Aurélie’s family ever since, carefully guarded—until her grandfather had lost it in a game of cards, and her father had suffered the humiliation of having it bought back by an American heiress, a bribe for a betrothal.
“I know I’m not a Courcelles. I gave up trying to be a long time ago. It wasn’t worth the effort.” Maman looked up at Aurélie, twin furrows in her celebrated forehead, uncharacteristically at a loss for words. “My dear, I understand your pride. I do. Your father was always rotten with it. No, no, we won’t quarrel about your father. All I mean to say is, you mustn’t let your ancestors rule your life. There’s more to you than your lineage.”
All the Ways We Said Goodbye Page 2