The British question is what absorbs all our minds these days. With the exception of three American women in the Philadelphia Unit and three in the Red Cross hospital at Nesle, we know of no other British or American women in the part of the war zone controlled by the British—they’re really quite strict on the topic.
You ought to see the British officers marching by with their troops. It’s quite remarkable. Long, clean-cut, absolutely trim in appearance, well-tailored, they stalk along at the head of their companies through miles of mud in the most casual way as though they were out on a Sunday-afternoon walk; it would never seem to occur to you that they had any idea of fighting. I believe they are said to go to battle in the same casual way.
There are several “affairs” in the Unit at present, but it’s an awful place to have an affair with so little privacy and such an audience. (Don’t ask how I know!) There’s a British officer who has been making eyes at Emmie Van Alden and for the sake of delicacy we all have to pretend we know nothing about it—while all secretly hoping it might weigh the scales in our favor. Not that one is supposed to admit such things, but . . . all’s fair in l’amour et la guerre?
—Miss Eleanor (“Nell”) Baldwin, ’14, to her family
February 1918
Grécourt, France
“Colonel—Mrs. Barrett—”
Emmie glanced at Captain DeWitt and found it wasn’t quite in her power to form his name. Her lips just didn’t seem to want to move in that direction.
Emmie began backing toward the door. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize we had visitors.”
“Very welcome visitors,” said Mrs. Barrett meaningfully. She looked at the colonel, who nodded. “Colonel Hayes has just been telling us that we’re to be allowed to stay.”
Emmie clasped her hands together, which at least gave her something to do with them. Otherwise, she suddenly seemed to have more arms than an octopus, and at least half a dozen legs. “Oh, that’s marvelous! Thank you!”
She was trying very hard not to look at Captain DeWitt, which meant, of course, that she was alarmingly aware of his every infinitesimal movement. What did one say to someone who had kissed you two months ago—well, it was a war, these things did happen—and then sent long, thoughtful letters entirely failing to mention said kiss or said war? Emmie wasn’t sure what the protocol was for that. Neither the more traditional governesses approved by her father nor the relentlessly progressive ones chosen by her mother had covered those niceties in their tutelage. She could greet ambassadors in three languages but she couldn’t meet Captain DeWitt’s eyes.
“I don’t know if you should be thanking me or cursing me,” said Colonel Hayes briefly. “I ought to have you out—but the French won’t have it. I’ve been bombarded with visits from every petty official from here to Paris insisting that you be allowed to stay.”
“Monsieur le Commandant Monin brought a book of newspaper clippings,” said Captain DeWitt, straight-faced, but Emmie could tell he was amused all the same. “He said if we evicted you, we would be worse than the Hun.”
“Typical Frenchman,” muttered Colonel Hayes.
“He’s been lovely,” said Emmie with feeling, possibly a little too much feeling. “Everyone’s been lovely. We’re so very grateful.”
“We are, of course, appreciative of your confidence in us,” said Mrs. Barrett diplomatically. “We should like, if possible, to remain another six to eight months to see our work truly brought to fruition.”
“Fritz might have a thing or two to say about that,” said Colonel Hayes. “If you do stay—”
“We intend to do so,” said Mrs. Barrett pleasantly. “As you can see, we have a great deal of work in hand. Have we told you about our spring planting?”
Colonel Hayes cleared his throat. Under the mustache, he was really fairly young, Emmie realized. And trying very hard to retain control of the situation. “As I was saying, if you do stay, there will be conditions.”
“Naturally,” said Mrs. Barrett, which meant, Emmie knew, that she meant to persuade him out of all of them. “Would you like more coffee, Colonel? Miss Van Alden, if you would be so kind as to ask Madame Gouge?”
“Oh, yes, of course.” Emmie fumbled for the coffeepot, a rather pretty one, which Mrs. Barrett had brought with her from Paris.
“Let me carry that for you,” said Captain DeWitt, and neatly scooped up the coffeepot before she could drop it. He held open the door for her with his other hand. “After you, Miss Van Alden.”
“There was really no need,” said Emmie as the door shut behind them. “I’ve spent the morning hauling bookshelves for Anne. I can manage a coffeepot.”
“I know you can.” Captain DeWitt paused on the path between the new house and the kitchen tent, which they were still using, despite Mrs. Barrett’s determination to move the one working stove to the new house. “Don’t you recognize a stratagem when you see one?”
“A stratagem? To abscond with the coffee?”
“It is very good coffee. But no.” Captain DeWitt looked at her over the coffeepot, the sunlight winking off the badge on his cap. “I mean to abscond with you—at least as far as the kitchen.”
Emmie didn’t seem to be breathing properly. “That isn’t much of an—is abscomption a word?”
“I don’t believe so,” said Captain DeWitt gravely.
They stared at each other over the coffeepot, like strangers but not. It had been two months since they had seen each other in person, two months since that bench by the moat. It was one thing to sit with someone at a party, flown on music and good food, and quite another to see them by day, in one’s official capacity. And wonder if he still saw whatever it was he had seen then, if he thought whatever it was of her he had thought then. Or if it had just been Christmas and loneliness and the front and a sympathetic ear. Well, lips, really.
The silence stretched between them, if it could truly be called silence with artillery pounding in the distance and one of Emmie’s roosters screeching.
It was so strange to be shy of each other when they’d been living inside each other’s heads since Christmas. But there was a world of difference between being invited into the private world of someone’s mind—all the odd thoughts and memories—and then presented, once again, with the living, breathing person in whom those thoughts resided, someone at once familiar and alien. And very, very much made of flesh. Emmie was strangely aware of the physicality of him, the way his uniform belted in at the waist, the breadth of his shoulders beneath the drab khaki, the ungloved hands holding the coffeepot.
“Or I can go away again,” Captain DeWitt said, watching her very closely, “and write you a letter.”
Emmie flushed. “That’s an idea, isn’t it? We could set up a postbox somewhere between here and the house and leave each other letters in it. You know, things like, ‘hello,’ and ‘fine day, isn’t it?’”
“It is a fine day,” agreed Captain DeWitt.
Emmie wished her uniform were cleaner. And that she’d washed her hair more recently. “Thank you for letting us stay.”
“It wasn’t my decision.” The captain shifted the coffeepot from one hand to the other. “The colonel really was driven half-mad by Frenchmen petitioning him on your behalf.”
Emmie couldn’t help but feel flattered. “On the Unit’s behalf, you mean.”
Captain DeWitt shook his head. “Not just the Unit. You. Your work in Courcelles is a shining model of what determination, hard work, and a warm heart can accomplish—I translate from the French, of course,” he added drily.
There was something in his tone that made a little of the light fade from the sky. “You sound as though you don’t agree.”
“I wish I didn’t. If you were a dilettante or a hobbyist, it would be much easier to urge you to get out. The trouble is that what you’re doing is making a difference.” He looked at her, his eyes shadowed by the brim of his cap. “You know the children have a game they play. They call it Les Dames Américaines. The heroine of the game is called Mademoiselle Aimée. That is what they call you, isn’t it? Aimée?”
She who is beloved. Emmie gave an awkward sort of shrug. “It’s only because they can’t pronounce Emmie. Please don’t tell me the game is something awful.”
“It’s not if you’re six. Someone lies down and pretends to be sick and the others dance around and sing a song and the Mademoiselle Aimée character helps the first child up. It’s a bit more than that, but that’s the gist of it. I asked the little beasts what it was about. They said you were saving them.”
Emmie blinked rapidly, trying not to show how close she was to tears. “All I did was get them milk and a village pump.”
“And blankets and beds and shoes and clothes. They appreciate it, you know. We just march through, but you stopped for them. Half those children would have died this winter without you. Don’t tell me I’m exaggerating. I’m not. You’ve done the hardest part—you’ve kept them going through winter. But winter is over. And the sooner you get out, the better.”
“But there’s still so much left to do—it’s not just winter.” Emmie looked at him appealingly, trying to make him understand. “There’s still the rest of the planting. We’ve done a first round of distributions for basic needs, but that’s only the beginning. We need to canvass everyone again and find out what else they need, and that takes time. It all takes time.”
“Time is what you don’t have.” Captain DeWitt lowered his voice, looking over his shoulder. “There’s going to be fighting—you must have heard talk. Haven’t you?”
“There’s always talk.” He was standing so close that she could see the insignia on his buttons. “We’ve thought we were going to be shelled out at least a dozen times since we arrived. And we’re still here.”
“It’s not like that this time. There have been rumblings across the line. There are trucks coming in from the east, trucks and men. We’ve caught the Germans studying our lines. They’re planning something, and whatever it is, it’s going to happen soon. We have plans in place to try to stave them off, but . . . I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.”
“No, you shouldn’t.” Emmie looked quizzically at him. “Your colonel did say the Unit could stay.”
Captain DeWitt made a noise of frustration. “It’s not the Unit I’m concerned about. It’s you. I was half hoping you’d all be out—that I could know you were safely in Paris, on your way back to the States, anywhere but here.”
“Because I can’t be trusted to take care of myself?”
“Because the Germans can’t be trusted not to shoot everyone on sight,” Captain DeWitt said roughly. “Do you think they’ll care that you’re only here to help? Or that you’re American rather than French? You’re at war now too. I can’t tell you to go—I haven’t the right to tell you to go—but there are nights when I wake up in a cold sweat, dreaming the Germans have come and you’re here in their path. There’s no protection for you here, nothing.”
“Only you,” said Emmie, looking up at Captain DeWitt, at his weathered, worried face. “You stand between us and them.”
“I wish we were equal to that trust—oh, don’t think we won’t do our damnedest. We will. But numbers tell in the end. It doesn’t matter how pure your heart is, no matter what the poets say.”
“Are you trying to scare me?” Emmie asked seriously. It was hard to reconcile this talk of death with the sun shining down, with the smell of springtime in the air, with Zélie chasing Minerva across the lawn, trying to get back someone’s winter underclothes.
“Would it work if I did?” Captain DeWitt asked hopefully.
“I’m not going,” Emmie said. She hadn’t even realized she’d made her decision until she said it. “I made a promise to the people here—and to the Unit. I can’t just run away to save my own skin.”
“I know,” Captain DeWitt said soberly. “You have your duties and I have mine, and it’s entirely beside the point that I want you to live. I want us both to live. Preferably together. If you could bring yourself to have me if this war ever ends.”
“Emmie! Have you seen Minerva?” It was Florence, coming down the path, shielding her eyes from the sun.
“She went that way,” said Emmie, pointing, and turned back to Captain DeWitt, who was looking quite uncomfortable and more than a little embarrassed. “Was that—are you—did you just propose to me?”
“No!” He winced. “Possibly. Could we say I’m proposing to propose? I can’t propose to you like this. I’m holding a coffeepot.”
“It’s a very nice coffeepot,” said Emmie.
Captain DeWitt grimaced at the item in question. “Never mind the coffeepot. That’s the least of it. If something happens—when something happens—I don’t want you tied to a man with no legs. Or no face. It would be one thing to be killed outright, but . . . you were there at the hospital at Neuilly. You know what the odds are.”
“You know that wouldn’t matter to me.” Everything felt very unreal. Any moment now, she’d find she wasn’t here at all, on the path with Captain DeWitt, but on her cot in the barrack, with Florence shaking her awake. Emmie squinted up at Captain DeWitt, trying to read his expression. Tentatively, she said, “But . . . you can’t really want to propose. Or propose to propose.”
Captain DeWitt looked down at her, his expression very serious. “Are you going to tell me we hardly know each other? I’ve known people for years I haven’t known nearly so well as I’ve known you in six months.”
“It’s closer to seven, actually. Not that I’ve been counting,” Emmie added hastily.
“I don’t want to deceive you—I’m really rather dull when I’m not in a uniform.” His lips quirked in a crooked smile. “I used to collect stamps when I was a boy, not because they were valuable, but because I liked thinking about where they’d come from and where they might go. But the truth is, I probably won’t go much of anywhere. I’d thought of it once, of roaming the world and going to the edges of the map, where the sea serpents stand sentinel. But I like my home too much, and my family.”
He’d written to her about them all. About his sister at Somerville College, his little brother at Harrow, about the model village they were building for their biscuit factory workers, or had been, before the war.
“It’s a good thing to like one’s family,” said Emmie seriously. She loved her brothers, but she wasn’t sure that anyone in her family liked each other terribly much. “I used to do the same—not with stamps, but with maps. I used to steal the atlases from my father’s library and imagine myself away, anywhere but where I was.”
“Would a small village in Durham be far away enough for you? If it helps,” he said diffidently, “we have turrets and gargoyles. My grandfather built a faux medieval monstrosity, complete with leaded windows and a priest’s hole. We even have a secret passage—though I’m not sure it precisely counts as secret when everyone knows exactly where it goes.”
There was nothing Emmie would like better. Wandering through a not-so-secret passageway with—and there was the problem.
“Do you realize, I still don’t know your first name?”
“What’s in a name?” Captain DeWitt caught himself. “Never mind, Romeo isn’t an example we want to be following.”
“That was Juliet.” Emmie looked up at him, remembering a long-ago conversation in a Salvation Army canteen, what felt like roughly a decade ago. “You did promise not to descend to Shakespeare.”
“I did, didn’t I?” He looked at her in a way that made the world around them fade into nothing. No chickens, no trucks, no colonel waiting for coffee. There was nothing in the world but the two of them, here, on this scrap of duckwalk in the midst of the spring mud. “It’s Fitzwilliam. My friends call me Will.”
“That’s not nearly so bad as Algernon,” said Emmie softly, unable to look away.
“I’m glad it passes muster. You wouldn’t mind seeing it on your stationery, then? At some point,” Captain DeWitt added, “my father will shuffle off this mortal coil and you’d be lumbered with a lady in front of your name—but hopefully not for quite some time. He’s a good old stick and I rather like him. I think you would too.”
Emmie hated to say it. She hated to even think it. But someone had to. “Haven’t you stopped to think . . . we’re in the midst of a war zone. There aren’t any other women within miles. You might change your mind when you get home. You might decide you’d rather not be saddled with—with an overgrown do-gooder with buck teeth. And an American,” she added as an afterthought.
“You’d be surprised how many Americans there are in London. Lady Randolph Churchill for one. You’ll fit right in. More to the point . . . what idiot told you you’re overgrown?” he demanded, sounding every inch the outraged English lordling. “You’re just the right height.”
“For getting things off high shelves?” Emmie couldn’t help herself; she always spouted nonsense when she was nervous.
“No,” he said firmly, looking at her in a way that proved just how well-matched they were in height. In her thick-heeled rubber boots, they were practically nose to nose. And lip to lip. He brushed a strand of stray hair out of her face, his hand cupping her cheek. “For this.”
“Don’t mind me!” They jolted apart as Nell brushed past them. “Dave’s ditched the Red Cross truck at the gate again. Marie is threatening bodily harm.”
Captain DeWitt pressed the heel of his hand against his eye. “Good Lord, it’s like Euston Station. Is there any privacy?”
“Not much.” Emmie fought a disconcerting tendency to giggle. They’d gone from romance to farce, but, bizarrely, that made her feel better. It made it more real, somehow. More something that might actually happen to her, instead of a woman out of a book. “Come on, we’d best go get the coffee.”
She took his arm, and it felt entirely natural to do so, to walk down the duckwalk together with the sun shining on their heads.
Captain DeWitt—Will, she reminded herself—looked sideways at her. “They’ll all be talking about us now, won’t they?”
“They already were,” Emmie admitted, smiling despite herself. “We live in very close quarters here—it gives us something to talk about other than the war. Nell has been sneaking behind the barracks with one of the engineers and Florence has been walking out with a Canadian forester who doesn’t seem to mind that she hasn’t washed her hair since Christmas. She says it helps to keep warm. Oh, and Gwen Mills thinks we don’t know that she’s been exchanging letters with one of the doctors at the Red Cross hospital.”
“Emmie—” Will stopped her before she could lift the flap of the kitchen tent. “You do know, don’t you, that this isn’t just a wartime infatuation? This isn’t your friend and the forester or stealing kisses behind the barracks.”
Behind the barracks, Emmie thought, would be a much safer place than the duckwalk. She was rather sorry they hadn’t thought of it. Because if this was a wartime infatuation—well, maybe it made her a hussy, or a fallen woman, but she’d rather have all the memories she could have to take home with her once it was over.
Will tried to take her hands and remembered he was holding the coffeepot. “Before the war, when life was an endless garden party and the worst that might happen was tea gone tepid, I made the usual rounds of Saturday to Monday and did my duty at the requisite number of debutante dances. I’ve met any number of women I’m happy to esteem as friends, but never anyone I wanted to share a breakfast table with for the rest of my life.” Before Emmie could say anything, he added firmly, “That’s not the trenches speaking or the loneliness or delusion brought on by tainted food. That’s you. Because you’re like no one else in the world, and if the world had to come to this for me to find you—maybe the kaiser isn’t all that bad after all.”
“I really don’t think you should be saying that,” said Emmie in a voice that didn’t sound like her own. “Doesn’t that count as treason?”
“All right. We won’t invite the kaiser to the wedding,” said Will, his breath warm against her lips.
“That idiot of a Red Cross truck driver!” Emmie jumped roughly a foot in the air as Mme Gouge stomped up to them. “Pardon me—that man just makes me so angry. Did you want something?”
“Yes, some privacy,” muttered Will in English.
Emmie took the coffeepot from her would-be lover’s hand. She had very fond feelings about that coffeepot at present. She had very fond feelings about everything. But particularly the very annoyed Englishman standing next to her.
Demurely, Emmie handed the coffeepot to Mme Gouge. “Mrs. Barrett wanted a fresh pot of coffee for Colonel Hayes. And possibly a few biscuits?”