Just as Adi had feared, George returned home to La Maison Chinoise to find her gone.
No note, nothing said to Thomas. Augustin was concerned for a moment that the young woman was a figment of his friend’s imagination. Maybe an elaborate prank.
However, when it was discovered that Halick was missing as well, and Detective Lendt—taken all together, this formed a sinister picture that was hard to ignore.
George was devastated.
He tried taking it out on Thomas, though Thomas was beating himself up enough for the both of them. When it became clear that he wasn’t to blame for Adi’s vanishing act, they were left with nothing but speculation. It took half the afternoon to catch Augustin up on the rest of the story: kidnappers, brothers, watches, and riddles. But in the end, they had to admit that they didn’t know much more than Belfort, and that they used to throw cats off towers in Ypres.
Thomas found another detective to replace the missing Lendt, but the man’s efforts, though diligent, were ultimately fruitless. The days turned to weeks with no clues.
Then it was August 1914.
And as Uncle Henri had predicted: like dominos falling, everyone declared war. No one wanted to be caught on the defensive. Everyone mobilized. And so it began.
By the end of September, Augustin was called up to join his cavalry regiment, which made George feel even more worthless. Despite Thomas’s best efforts, George started drinking again. Thomas grew accustomed to collecting his friend from the police at odd hours. Or equally alarming, dragging him away from enlistment centers, where he attempted on several occasions to join up.
It was a wet miserable autumn in Alorainn, as it was all across Europe in 1914, but few complained. However inconvenienced they might have been, the thought of hundreds of thousands of their fathers and sons, brothers and husbands, marching along muddy roads or living in rain-filled trenches, put their trifling discomfort in perspective.
• • •
The duchess, rather than becoming debilitated by the uncertainty of her only child’s fate, instead grew more engaged, first with the running of the household and then with the business of state. Through it all, she maintained that Halick would be returning any day.
To no one’s surprise but her own, after years of disinterest as the duke’s wife, the duchess realized she had a ferocious appetite for power. Every day she took on more of the duties she had been grooming Halick to assume—after what she envisaged would be George’s inevitable disintegration.
As is so often the case in times of great uncertainty, people are more than willing to give up authority to someone who can assure their safety. With the ever-closer war as an excuse, the duchess turned an open household into something resembling an armed camp.
Some members of the family said they didn’t care what the woman did as long as she kept the war on the other side of the wall. Aunt Elodie, on the other hand, wondered if she was the only one to notice that the formerly colorful, largely ceremonial, palace guard had been replaced by a group of dark and dangerous-looking thugs.
• • •
For a time at least, far enough away from the invading armies and front lines, life in much of Europe carried on, as if a war was something that one could be excited about but still ignore, like typhoons in the China Sea.
Bakers still rose before dawn to make bread and children continued to neglect their lessons. In Paris, as in Berlin, women in violaceous gowns and men in hats (quite as tall as last year) attended the opera. People carried on affairs in Saint Petersburg and embezzled from their business partners in London, just as they had before.
Most everyone strived, for as long as they could, to deny the fact, becoming clearer as the months flew past, that this war, the first one they’d seen in a generation, spreading from Europe and Russia to the Middle East, to Africa and India, China and Japan, was not going to be over by Christmas.
Alorainn had no standing army. This didn’t keep a good portion of the household from joining up with the French. Cousin Klaus, having people in Bamberg and generally being contrary, wanted to fight for Germany, but was dissuaded. George’s uncles Robert, Sébastien, and Henri went off to serve in the French army as officers. This only exacerbated George’s feelings of frustration. He stayed drunk for the better part of a year—living up to all of the duchess’s hopes for him, driving Thomas near to distraction.
This went on until one morning when George found himself waking up in another cow pasture. Lying there, staring up at the clouds, he came to the conclusion that he’d been going about this all wrong. Taking the weekend to shake off the worst of his hangover, he quietly put his affairs in order. Monday morning, bright and early, he got Samuel to give him a ride on his motorcycle to the train station in Saint Clouet—without a goodbye to anyone. Not even Thomas.
In the city of Lyon, a couple of hours south, a barber cut George’s beautiful ash brown curls down to stubble, and he traded in his fine suit for a well-used one and a sensible pair of shoes. That afternoon, he managed, finally, to find someone unobservant enough to sign him up. It was a year to the day since Adi had disappeared.