We’ve had our first taste of real winter weather here—and I don’t mean just the water freezing in our pails. We’re used to that by now. We had our first snow this week and it took us all by surprise. The inhabitants say they’ve never known it to start so early and they hadn’t thought they’d see us again until spring. But nothing stops these women from their appointed rounds. Nell Baldwin staggered off to Esmery-Hallon and came back just before supper looking like a walking icicle. Our assistant director had to take our one working truck and go off after the Van Alden girl, who had, it appeared, spent all day in a miserable hut to make a dying woman as comfortable as possible (pneumonia, in case you were wondering—we have a great deal of pneumonia here).
As for yours truly, this morning, Dr. Pruyn and I arose at five thirty and started for Hombleux with the horse and cart (I use the term horse broadly) lent us by the sous-préfet. We got a little more than halfway and found the snow in such drifts that we had to abandon the cart entirely and walk the beast the rest of the way to Hombleux. I think it expected us to carry it, but we were already carrying half a medicine chest on our backs and had to decline.
If the snow keeps up, we are going to be in a very bad way indeed. Our villages cover such a large territory. . . .
—Dr. Ava Stringfellow, ’96, to her husband, Dr. Lawrence Stringfellow
December 1917
Grécourt, France
“Emmie.” Sick with relief at finding her, Kate grabbed Emmie before she could go haring off for a shovel. “We can’t just bury this—whoever it is. She’ll need the last rites. We’ll tell the commandant. He’ll send a priest. When the snow lets up,” she added with a grimace at the road, which wasn’t much of a road at the moment.
Emmie looked down at Kate with stricken eyes, making it impossible to be upset with her. “But we can’t just leave her! Her cat will eat her.”
Kate wasn’t quite sure cats ate people like that, but she knew that once Emmie got an idea in her head, there was no budging it. “Which one is the mayor?” she asked resignedly.
The mayor, unfortunately, was no more excited than Kate by the idea of hiking up the snow-covered hill to fetch a body. Also, Kate was interfering with her children’s bedtime and letting the cold air in.
Five minutes later, Kate returned to Emmie with the best compromise she could broker. “She says the Germans used the old bathhouse as a morgue. If we get Mme Lepinasse down, we can put her there.”
And that was how Kate found herself, in the dark, the ruins of a medieval castle looming over her, carrying a body down a hill, with Mme Lepinasse’s cat hissing and spitting irritably from the depths of Emmie’s haversack. She was also liberally coated with snow from having fallen while carrying said corpse.
“I f-feel like Victor Frankenstein,” commented Emmie, her teeth chattering uncontrollably.
“Remind me not to consider a career in body snatching,” panted Kate as Emmie edged backward ahead of her, holding the corpse’s feet while Kate grasped the body awkwardly beneath the arms, the head bumping disconcertingly against her chest.
“Do you think we’ve become hard?” Emmie asked anxiously.
They were carrying a woman’s body down a snow-covered slope in pitch darkness so her cat wouldn’t eat her. The idea of Emmie becoming hard would have made Kate laugh if she’d had the energy to laugh. “No. Can we keep moving, please? I can’t feel my feet.”
Finally, finally, Mme Lepinasse was safely stowed in the makeshift morgue and her cat with the mayor, whose toddler had been delighted and immediately tried to pull its tail.
Emmie looked anxiously over her shoulder as she climbed into the jitney. “D-do you think we should try to go straight to Amiens to get them to s-send a p-priest?”
“Wrap yourself up in that lap rug,” ordered Kate as she vigorously turned the crank, her breath steaming in the cold air. “And no. No one will come tonight. We’d best get back to Grécourt and send word in the morning. If the roads are clear enough.”
They weren’t clear now. The lamps of the jitney glinted off an entirely unrecognizable landscape, softened by snow, the barbed wire and broken buildings all turned into something pure and lovely.
“It looks like gingerbread,” said Emmie dreamily. In the light of the car lamps, her lips were a distinct blue. Kate could practically see the veins through her skin. “A gingerbread world, all frosted with sugar.”
“When’s the last time you ate?” Kate asked.
“Breakfast?” Emmie stirred a little, pulling herself upright. “I guess that would explain why I’ve been feeling so light-headed.”
“Yes,” said Kate resignedly. “Yes, it would.”
This was the problem of trying to be angry with Emmie. One just couldn’t, not for extended periods of time. Emmie was so busy giving and giving and giving that she never thought to care for herself, so that, inevitably, someone—that someone being Kate—had to step in and do it for her, and you just couldn’t stay angry at someone who didn’t even remember to eat.
Emmie fingered her haversack. “I’ve some DeWitt’s in my satchel. I brought them for Mme Lepinasse.”
And that was just like Emmie too. She’d set the biscuits on the woman’s grave as funeral offerings rather than eat them herself. As gently as she could, Kate said, “I’m sure she wouldn’t begrudge them to you.”
“No, she wouldn’t—she liked feeding people. She’d been a cook, you know. Up at the castle. And then, during the war—she helped feed the village.” Emmie clutched her haversack with both hands. “She wasn’t even that old. About the same age as my mother. In her fifties, maybe. I keep thinking, if only I had come sooner . . .”
Kate felt a brief stab of guilt. She’d made out the rota for truck use as fairly as she could. And Courcelles was so far, on the outer edges of their rounds. It used up so much essence and essence was in such short supply. “You weren’t to know.”
“But I should have known. If I had been doing my job . . .” Emmie squirmed on the bench seat. “She had no one, Kate. Just us.”
More sharply than she intended, Kate said, “There are two thousand people here who need us. Many of them have no one. You can’t let yourself get too attached.”
“Too attached?” Emmie stared at her in horror. “They’re people, Kate.”
“So are we.” Kate’s shoulders tensed as the jitney wobbled in the deep tracks left by some larger, heavier vehicle. She had never been so aware of her own frailty, her own limitations. Just flesh and blood and force of will. “We’re only people, Emmie. We can’t be in fifty places at once.”
“If we changed the schedule—” Emmie began.
“How?” They’d come to a crossroads. Kate swung the truck east, toward Grécourt. “There are only fifteen of us—thirteen now, with Maud and Liza in Paris. I wish we could do more. I wish we had trucks that worked, Emmie, and people to drive them, but there’s only so much we can do with what we have.”
“What if I learned how to drive? If we had another driver—”
The thought of Emmie at the wheel was so horrifying that Kate turned her head for a moment to look at Emmie. A mistake. Ahead of them on the road, a dark shape loomed up, large as a woolly mammoth. Breathing in sharply, thinking all the words her mother had told her never to say, Kate braked hard, feeling a sickening lurch as the truck swayed and spun.
For a moment, she thought she could feel Nick Penniston’s hands on her shoulders, hear his confident voice saying, “If you lose control of the machine, drive into the spin.”
Blindly, Kate turned the wheel in the direction of the skid, feeling the truck finally, mercifully, stop, just short of a snow-covered hedge.
She sat there, breathing hard, a cold sweat prickling beneath the linen and wool of her uniform.
“Well,” said Emmie weakly, picking herself gingerly up from the floor of the truck. She rolled one shoulder, wincing. “If that’s how you feel about my driving . . .”
Kate pointed a shaking finger. “That’s how I feel about their driving.” Blocking the road was an overturned army camion. A slow anger churned in her stomach. “The idiots. They could have at least pushed it to the side of the road. If we’d hit that—”
“But we didn’t.” Emmie bumped her shoulder against Kate’s in a quick gesture of affection, and Kate felt her chest tighten, because it was so like Emmie, always these fleeting touches, as if she were afraid she’d be pushed away. “Thank goodness you’re such a smashing driver.”
“I’m trying not to smash, thank you very much.” Kate drew in a deep, cleansing breath, feeling the cold scouring the back of her throat. She’d have had no idea what to do but for Nick—had Nick taught her that? She didn’t remember it. Her memory was of endless sunshine along Bellevue Avenue. But he must have. Otherwise how would she have known? “Nick Penniston showed me what to do.”
“Well, thank goodness for Nick, then,” said Emmie with feeling, and Kate tried not to glance around her shoulder for the shade of a man in goggles and scarf. The dark and cold were making her fanciful. “How can we get around them?”
“We can’t.” Forcing herself to focus, Kate took a deep breath, flexed her shoulders, and readjusted her grip on the wheel. “I’m going to back up until we can turn. We’ll have to find another way. Get that map out, will you?”
Very, very carefully they backed up, retracing their own tire tracks. But the snow had knocked down rotten signposts, and those that were still standing were so blurred they were hardly legible. They backed up and turned and turned again, burning match after match from Emmie’s haversack trying to read the tiny print on the map.
“Cookie?” offered Emmie as they came to yet another illegible signpost.
Kate shook her head. “We’d best ration them. We might need them later.” If the cold didn’t kill them first. “I haven’t the faintest idea where we are.”
Emmie peered at the sky, which still had that overcast aura, as though it were contemplating snowing again. “Could we navigate by the stars?”
“Like Vasco da Gama?” Kate didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Emmie contemplated. “I think he used an astrolabe.”
“Yes, well, we don’t have one of those either,” said Kate. They had two choices, both unpalatable. They could go on, and risk going the wrong way, getting farther and farther from Grécourt, possibly even blundering into hostilities. Or they could stop for the night. “I’d say we should stop for the night and reconnoiter in the morning, but if we do, we might freeze.”
“I’m in favor of not freezing,” said Emmie. With the echo of her old optimism, she added, “Surely we’ll find someone sooner or later.”
So they went on, on roads eerie in their emptiness. Usually, the night was the safest time for troops to travel; the roads were generally thick with army camions, with French or English troops on the move, supply trucks, ambulance drivers going back and forth from the front, the air lit by the flashing lights of airplanes overhead. But tonight, with the storm, the roads were abandoned, unrecognizable. Even the planes weren’t flying.
Kate began to go from annoyed to afraid, genuinely afraid, afraid that their petrol would run out, afraid that they wouldn’t find shelter before the cold claimed them. She drove on, grimly, wondering how long it would be before they would have to stop and rinse their feet in snow water to ward off frostbite. Her toes were dangerously numb.
Emmie was buried so deep in her muffler that Kate could hardly see her. In a very small voice, she said, “Thank you for coming to get me.”
“I was hardly going to leave you roaming a war zone.” It sounded so grudging put that way. Kate tried again. “You know I wouldn’t leave you there.”
“You’ve been so upset—” Emmie’s voice changed; she jerked upright. “Kate! Kate! Over there! To the left—I mean, the right—do you see the light? Is that—”
“It’s a house.” Kate felt light-headed with relief. “A house! And an army camion in front of it—no, two camions. Maybe they can tell us where we are.”
Emmie was already straightening up, adjusting her coat, fussing with her mittens. “I was afraid we were going to run out of essence,” she admitted. “And freeze.”
“I’m sure it wouldn’t come to that,” said Kate, even though she had been thinking the exact same thing. She spotted a man detaching himself from the side of one of the camions, a cigarette tip glowing red in the darkness. “Look, there’s a soldier guarding the camions. We can ask him where we are.”
The soldier pitched his cigarette to the ground, grinding out the stub. “Qui va là?”
“Les dames Américaines,” said Emmie eagerly, half falling out of the truck. “Sorry, we’re a bit frozen. We’ve lost our way. We’re trying to get back to Grécourt, but we haven’t the faintest idea where we are.”
The soldier looked at the jitney and then back at them. “All by yourselves?”
There was something about the way he said it that Kate didn’t quite like. “If you could just show us on the map,” she said coolly, “we’ll be on our way.”
He could do better than that, the soldier said, suddenly very helpful. He could escort them as far as Ham, if they were willing to wait an hour. He and his comrades in arms were just having a bit of supper. Would les dames Américaines—he essayed an exaggerated bow—care to share their repast?
“Oh, yes, please!” exclaimed Emmie, before Kate could decline on their behalf. “How kind of you. Isn’t it terribly kind?”
“Ye-es,” said Kate, wondering if the cold had just addled her brain. Here they were, looking for shelter, and they’d found it. But there was something making her uneasy. “I’m not sure, though—”
Emmie jostled her with her elbow. “Food! And heat! My fingers are icicles. Either that or my icicles are fingers. I can’t tell which.”
“Welcome,” said the soldier, throwing open the door and speaking in rapid French to the people inside. Kate caught the words women and alone.
“Oh, lovely!” said Emmie, and plunged inside, Kate following more slowly.
After the outdoors, the room was smotheringly hot, the air shimmering with steam coming off an iron range, a pot bubbling on the top. Some seven or eight French poilus were sitting around a table in their shirtsleeves and braces, being served bowls of soup and thick slices of black bread by a woman who seemed to have forgotten to do up all the ties of her blouse. Another woman sat on the lap of a soldier, removing herself, none too speedily, as they came inside.
Behind them, the door slammed shut. Kate turned, frowning, and the guard made little swooshing gestures, urging them forward. He was grinning in a way she didn’t at all like, showing teeth stained by cigarettes.
“Goodness, it’s lovely and warm in here!” exclaimed Emmie, happily oblivious, as the woman at the stove surreptitiously did up a button. “I can’t tell you how grateful we are to have found you.”
Seven men stared at her. One of them, with black hair slicked back and his sleeves rolled to the elbows, pushed back his chair and stood. “But who are you?” He looked to the guard. “Pierre?”
Pierre shrugged. “They just drove up. In a truck.”
One of the men gave a guttural chuckle. “One doesn’t look at the bridle of a gift horse.”
“No, just the legs,” retorted another, and they stared at Kate and Emmie in a way that made Kate put her hands on her collar, even though it was already buttoned as high as it would go. Emmie, whose French wasn’t nearly as colloquial, smiled uncertainly at them, aware that there was a joke, but not sure what it was.
Kate didn’t at all like the way the men were smiling. “We,” she said crisply, “are with the American Red Cross.”
These men might not have heard of the Smith Unit, but everyone knew the Red Cross. And Americans.
“Red Cross, eh?” The men all exchanged glances. The leader, the one with the black hair, smiled back at them, showing too many teeth. “We love the Red Cross.”
“We do what we can,” said Emmie, pleased. “We’re so happy to be here to help.”
“Oh, I have some ideas for how you can help,” called out one of the men.
“Really? We’re always looking for ways to improve our services,” said Emmie gamely, and looked confused when that raised a great laugh.
Kate edged closer to her. “Emmie, I don’t think—”
But Emmie was resolved to be pleasant. “We can’t tell you how much we appreciate your hospitality.” Kate could see her determinedly ignoring their discarded jackets and the fact that they made no effort to put them back on. “What regiment are you with?”
There was a sudden, charged silence. The woman at the stove concentrated hard on her soup pot.
“Oh, you wouldn’t have heard,” said the black-haired man smoothly.
“I told them,” said the guard standing behind Kate, “that we can take them as far as Ham. After we have our supper.”
“Ah, yes. After supper.” The black-haired man banged the table. “Two more bowls of soup! Come, sit, eat.”
“No, thank you,” said Kate, grabbing Emmie’s sleeve to keep her from going to the table. There was something about the way the man had said “after supper” that raised her hackles. She thought, without being sure why, of Julia, and the man who just wanted to share his notes. Until he didn’t. “We just need someone to show us where we are on the map. And then we’ll be on our way.”
“But Kate . . . there’s soup.” Emmie had eyes only for the tureen. “Besides, it would be so rude to say no now that they’ve invited us. And I’ve only just started to feel my toes. It’s already so late, surely another hour won’t make any difference.”
The serving woman slammed two bowls down on the table, slopping soup over the sides.
Kate didn’t like the way the men were looking at them; she didn’t like the way the guard was standing between them and the door. “I don’t think we should stay, Emmie.”
“Why are you standing there?” The black-haired man came around the table. Sizing them up, he slung an arm companionably around Emmie’s shoulders. “Come, sit, take off your coat.”
“Er, um, thank you,” Emmie said breathlessly as the man’s hands went to the buttons of her coat. “That’s very kind of you.”
“Oh, we are all very kind,” said the man, showing too many teeth, as he propelled Emmie toward the table.
Emmie grimaced at Kate over her shoulder, more bemused than alarmed. Kate felt frozen, terrified and helpless.
Pausing, one hand on Emmie’s shoulder, the black-haired man said quietly to the serving woman, “The room upstairs, it is free, yes?”
Kate’s paralysis broke. She grabbed Emmie’s hand, pulling hard. “Emmie, we’re going now.”
The man grabbed Emmie’s shoulder, equally hard. “Oh, no,” he said, and he wasn’t smiling anymore. “I think she stays.”
Kate didn’t waste any more time. She hit him, right in the nose, with the full force of her five foot one inches and one hundred and two pounds.
She did it the way her stepfather had taught her: striking up with the flat of her palm. Her hand hit his nose with a sickening crunch, sending him reeling backward into the table, men yelping, chairs toppling, soup and bread crashing down. Blood spurted through the man’s fingers as he sprawled on the table.
He stared at it with disbelief, and then he lifted his head and Kate saw murder in his eyes.
“Quick!” Grabbing Emmie by the hand, Kate ran for the kitchen door, not looking back, ignoring the angry cries behind them, her fingers fumbling on the door handle, knowing every second counted, every second gave them a chance.
Kate was never quite sure how after, but somehow she got Emmie through that door and into the jitney, turning and turning the crank with all her might, praying it wouldn’t break down, praying the men wouldn’t catch them before they could start, knowing that she’d be no use against all of them. Any one of them could break her arm with one hand tied behind his back. She wished she had a gun like Maud, a knife like Julia, anything.
“Go, go, go,” Kate muttered to the jitney, and nearly sobbed with relief when the engine caught. Every instinct screamed speed, but she forced herself to go carefully; if the truck broke down, they’d have no escape and the retaliation would be dreadful.
Light arced across the snow as the kitchen door swung open. The motor hiccupped and Kate nearly cried, but then it caught again, the truck jerking backward, out of the clearing, as the man in the doorway shouted curses, his shirt stained with blood and soup.
Kate swung the truck. The road was dreadful, rutted and icy, but she clung grimly to the wheel and kept going, away, away, just away. She had no idea where they were; the only important thing was to put as much distance as possible between them and those men.
“But—what—” Emmie was twisting back, staring over her shoulder. “You hit him.”
“Not nearly hard enough.” The full realization of what had almost happened swept over her. A room upstairs—be kind—alone—
Emmie’s voice seemed to come from very far away. “Do you think—do you think we ought to pay for the damage?”
The truck bounced over a pothole. Kate was shaking so hard she could barely hold the wheel. “The what?”
Emmie was twisting and twisting her fingers. She was missing her gloves, Kate noticed, probably dropped in their flight. “The damage. To that inn.”
“Pay for the damage?” Kate knew she sounded hysterical. She couldn’t help it.
“Well, yes,” said Emmie, sounding mildly bewildered, and Kate nearly ran the truck into a ditch. “We did make rather a mess.”
Through determined effort, Kate wrenched the car back onto the road, managing not to kill either of them. “You do realize what they meant to do, don’t you?”
“Give us soup and take us to Ham?” said Emmie wistfully.
“Do you really believe that?” Kate wasn’t sure whether Emmie was being willfully obtuse or whether she was really that naive. Or maybe it was just that Kate had gone mad. But she didn’t think so. She remembered the way that man had looked. She remembered Julia. “They were never going to take us to Ham. Didn’t you hear that man asking about a room? They were going to take us upstairs. He was unbuttoning your coat.”
“It was warm in there,” said Emmie, but she didn’t sound entirely certain. “I think he was just trying to be . . . helpful.”
“Helpful?” Kate’s voice went up. “They meant to rape us, Emmie!”
It felt very strange to say it.
There was a moment of silence as the trunk bumped along. And then Emmie said, “You mean like the Sabine women.”
As if rape were something that happened only in ancient Rome. Kate found it entirely infuriating. “Like all those women with Boche babies. How do you think that happened? It certainly wasn’t out of pure and lasting affection.”
“But those were Germans,” said Emmie, as if that made all the difference. “These were Frenchmen. They’re our allies.”
“They’re men,” said Kate, thinking of Julia and that doctor. He was meant to be her colleague, and look how he’d behaved. “I’m pretty sure these were deserters. Didn’t you see how they looked when you asked after their regiment? They were men with nothing left to lose. And we’re women, alone, in a war zone, in the middle of the night.”
“But—” She could see Emmie struggling with it, fighting it, and wanted to shake her. “Everyone’s been so helpful.”
“Yes! To the Smith Unit! But tonight we weren’t the Smith Unit; we were just two women alone—you can’t just assume that every man you meet is going to help you.”
But Emmie did assume that. In Emmie’s world, everyone was there to help. And why wouldn’t they? She was Emmie Van Alden. Doors magically opened for her and courtiers threw down their cloaks in the mud. It was like being Queen of England without the responsibilities.
The engine gave a strange hiccup, but Kate barely noticed. She was too busy being upset. “We should never have been there in the first place! But no, you had to up and go to Courcelles by yourself in the middle of a snowstorm!”
Emmie curled herself into a pretzel on the bench. “It wasn’t snowing when I left.”
It wasn’t snowing. That was all she had to say?
They were in a war zone in the middle of the night. She had no idea where they were or how much essence they had left, and somewhere was a group of French deserters—Kate was reasonably sure they were deserters—who wanted them dead. And all Emmie could say was that she hadn’t known it would snow.
“Do you ever think of anyone but yourself?” Kate demanded. “I told you we’d have a new truck soon—”
She broke off as the engine made a strange sputtering sound and then went alarmingly quiet. Kate managed to turn the wheel, steering the truck to the side of the road, before the jitney stalled out entirely.
Emmie’s voice was full of trepidation. “What happened?”
“We’re out of essence.” There ought to have been another can in the truck, but there wasn’t, because she hadn’t bothered to check before she went running off after Emmie, convinced Emmie was lying dead in a ditch somewhere between Grécourt and Courcelles. “We could try to walk, but I have no idea where we are. We’re going to have to camp here until morning.”
Here being the side of a road, which could, in the snow, be just about anywhere. They were surrounded by barbed wire, stunted trees, and the ruined remains of houses, which could have been anywhere between the Somme and Switzerland. With the headlamps of the jitney dead, it was pitch-black, the true darkness of the more horrifying sort of fairy tale. And it was cold, bitter, wretched cold.
In the darkness, Kate heard Emmie fumbling with her haversack. A hand emerged right in front of Kate’s face and a small voice said, “Biscuit?”
Kate thought about saying no, on principle, but she was hungry. Without a word, she took the biscuit from Emmie.
They crunched in silence for a moment, and then Emmie said, “I am sorry.” When Kate didn’t answer, she went on, stumbling over her words, “I meant to leave Courcelles by two at the latest, but then Mme Lepinasse was so ill, and I couldn’t leave her—”
“So, really, it’s not your fault at all,” said Kate, knowing she was being unfair, but unable to help herself, because she was cold and scared and really not at all looking forward to freezing to death. “Nothing is ever your fault. It’s always Saint Emmaline off to save the world, and never mind who gets hurt along the way, because you always mean well.”
“But—I don’t know what else I could have done,” said Emmie helplessly.
“You could have not been there! We should never have taken Courcelles in the first place—but that was another one of your impulses. You had to have Courcelles, and then poor Margaret had a nervous breakdown.”
Admittedly, Margaret would probably have had a nervous breakdown anyway, but Kate was in no mood to be reasonable. Being reasonable didn’t seem to have gotten her anywhere. She had tried to be reasonable, but Emmie had gone running off on her own, and here they were.
“And never mind that we have a schedule—a schedule designed to keep everything running properly and everyone safe—you have to go running off to the edge of beyond!”
She could feel Emmie stiffening on the bench next to her. “There was nothing for me to do at Grécourt. . . .”
“There’s always something to do! There were parcels to sort and children to teach and letters to write—you could have found something. You could have helped Florence with the animals or Nell with sorting books. You just didn’t want to because it’s so much more fun playing Lady Bountiful among the peasantry!”
Kate hadn’t meant to say it. She hadn’t even known she was thinking it. But there it was. The words hung in the cold air, ugly, between them.
“I’m not—I don’t—” In a very small voice, Emmie said, “I was just trying to help.”
“I know.” Kate could feel the cold seeping into her bones, the cold and the weariness. She should have felt vindicated, but instead she just felt drained. Because Emmie was trying to help. “You can’t just do whatever you want whenever you want to. You’ve been so sheltered—you have no idea what’s out there.”
“Like those men tonight?” There was a moment of silence, and then Emmie asked, “Do you really think they meant to force themselves on us?”
“Yes.” And if they were deserters, possibly also kill them, but Emmie sounded upset enough that Kate decided not to mention that. “Emmie—I know you didn’t know.”
“But that’s no excuse, is it?” Emmie sounded frantic. “You’re right. I got us both into this. I made you come here. If you hadn’t hit that man—”
“Thank my stepfather for that. He taught me. I never thought I’d use it, though.” Next to her on the bench, Kate could feel Emmie shivering, and not just from cold. Feeling thoroughly chastened, Kate scooted a little closer, until they were side to side. “We’ll get out of this, Emmie. We will.”
They sat in the dark, huddled together for warmth, listening to the tree branches crackle in the wind.
“Do you know what time it is?” asked Emmie.
They used one of Emmie’s precious matches to check the watch pinned to Kate’s jacket.
“Nine thirty,” said Kate, wanting to cry. She’d thought it was well past midnight. It would only get colder throughout the night. Their hands and feet were already dangerously numb. At least nine hours to get through before it would be light enough to venture on.
“We could do calisthenics to keep warm,” suggested Emmie.
“Or we could sit as still as possible so we don’t attract wolves.”
“Are there wolves?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Kate. “But I feel as if there ought to be—what was that?”
“It sounded like hooves.” Emmie clutched Kate’s hand. Or maybe Kate clutched Emmie’s hand.
And a voice, in English, called out, “Halloo? Anyone there?”
“Americans?” asked Kate in a high-pitched voice she hardly recognized as her own.
“Even better, Canadians!” the voice responded, and the clopping noise resolved itself into two sets of horses’ hooves. Kate shielded her eyes as an Eveready flashlight blazed in her face. “Sorry about that—Miss Moran?”
“And Miss Van Alden.” Now her eyes had recovered, Kate could see them properly, two Canadians with the distinctive badge on their hats showing a beaver and two crossed axes. “You’re the foresters!”
“Guilty as charged. What are you doing all the way out here?”
“We got lost in the snow and then—” Emmie broke off, looking at Kate uncertainly.
“We had a spot of trouble with our truck,” said Kate briefly. It seemed best not to go into the rest of it. “We were visiting one of our villages, got turned around in the snow, and stalled out here.”
Fortunately, they seemed to think that an entirely sensible story. There was a murmured conversation between the two Canadians.
“You’d best come back with us. We’ve our housekeeper there as chaperone,” added the shorter of the two men hastily, turning a little pink about the ears. “She can give you assurance as to our honorable intentions.”
“We never doubted them,” said Kate gravely. They had no idea. “Thank you. We appreciate your hospitality.”
“Oh, it’s nothing, nothing at all. Happy to share the old château. Can you ride pillion? It’s too far to walk. We’ll send someone to fetch your car in the morning.”
“Poor old jitney,” murmured Emmie, patting the truck’s side. “Do you really think you can fix her?”
“She looks like she’s had a time of it,” said the shorter Canadian cheerfully. Kate thought she might have sat next to him at Thanksgiving, but she wasn’t entirely sure; she’d been too loopy with fever to pay much attention. “But we’ll do our best. At least we can offer you a warm fire and some hot soup.”
It would be soup, thought Kate madly. But these weren’t French deserters. These were their Canadian friends. They were back through the other side of the looking glass, the one where everyone was a friend. They were the women of the Smith College Relief Unit, due every courtesy—not just women, alone. Easy prey.
“Soup would be lovely,” she managed.
Emmie made a choking noise, covering her face with her hands.
The Canadians clearly thought that was a perfectly reasonable reaction to being lost in the cold.
“You look done in,” the taller one said sympathetically. “If I can get Bucephalus here close enough, d’you think you could use the running board as a mounting block?”