• 17 •

CONSTANCE DID NOT, upon discovering Sarah and the others in the woods, take up the challenge and begin immediately to train them for war work, as much as she might secretly have wished to. She ordered them to bed, as any self-respecting matron would do. But she was not immune to their pleas, particularly Sarah’s, for whom this was no escapade, but preparation for a future both imminent and treacherous. She entreated Constance to return the following night, and to teach them whatever she knew, if only for one night.

“An hour in the woods won’t harm anyone,” Sarah said. “We only want to improve. Come and show us what you can do, and give us a chance to show what we can do.”

“Yes,” answered Fern, the youngest of them, and so like Fleurette, but without Fleurette’s utter disinterest in military or martial arts. “Give us a chance. Don’t let us go off to France without — well, anything that might be of use.”

Who could resist a tiny creature like that, begging to be taught? Wanting more than the camp curriculum had to offer? Whether she might ever make it to France or not was another question, but her desire to serve was sincere. Constance agreed, warily, to meet them once more in the woods.

What bothered her the most was not the curfew violation, of course, but the prospect of their getting hold of real weapons. The very least that anyone expected of a camp matron was to return the girls to their families alive, entirely unbesmirched by gunshot wounds. The prospect of untrained hands on a rifle, a misfire in the dark woods — it was unthinkable.

And it was always the most unthinkable dread that visited in the middle of the night and demanded to be thought about. Such was the case for Constance that night, who was visited repeatedly by images of rifles slipping to the ground, of pistols carelessly handled, of a bullet tearing through one of her own charges, before they even laid eyes on the fighting in France. She made it her first order of business the following morning to find out why, exactly, Sarah believed it would be so easy to put her hands on a gun.

This did not prove at all difficult, and required almost none of Constance’s ability (however rusty it had become over the winter) as an inquisitor and investigator. Sarah believed Constance to be sympathetic to her cause — and she was, even if she disapproved of the methods proposed — and told her with very little prompting exactly where the rifles could be found.

“I can’t believe you don’t know about them already,” Sarah said, “now that you’re the camp matron. They’re kept in the supply shed behind the mess hall. I spotted the case myself, the last time I was on kitchen duty.”

Constance wasted no time. During supper that night, when everyone was gathered together in the mess hall, she slipped outside to the supply shed and rummaged around to see the guns for herself. The shed was by this time nearly filled to capacity with unused and discarded equipment: oilcloth tarps and tent stakes, a broken chair, a row of lanterns missing wicks, and shovels and axes in varying sizes. Ellie Duval’s portable Victrola was stored there, at Constance’s insistence, perched atop an empty wooden barrel. There were crates of potatoes, too, and tinned milk, which she was obliged to move in order to step inside.

Finally, feeling her way in the near-dark, her fingers struck a wooden case. It was under a heavy and unwieldy canvas tent, but she was able to shove enough of that aside to take a closer look. What she had before her was certainly a gun case, and it was Army-issued. It looked only large enough to hold two or three weapons, but as the case was locked, Constance couldn’t see what was inside.

If anyone had a key, it would be Hack or Clarence. She could ask them about it directly, but to do so would only raise their suspicions. One gun case in a supply shed was easy enough to keep an eye on, she told herself. Let them train in the woods. What harm could come from it?

“I DIDN’T THINK we’d see you again,” Margaret said, when Constance burst in on them later that night. It had taken her longer than expected to settle the camp down after curfew, owing to the coincidence of three different girls celebrating their birthdays, and festivities popping up between the tents like small fires. Constance went around extinguishing them as gently as she could — birthdays, after all, were worthy of commemoration and merited a little rule-breaking, especially when the girls were so far from home. She paced around the camp twice after everyone had gone to bed, just to make sure they stayed put. It was almost ten o’clock before she stole into the woods.

“You shouldn’t be seeing me again out here, and I shouldn’t see you,” Constance said, brushing pine needles from the hem of her skirt. “I was on the verge of handing out demerits to girls who were only celebrating their birthdays, and here are all of you, carrying on in secret.”

“It isn’t a secret now that you know about it,” Sarah said.

“What I mean to say,” said Constance, “is that it’s my obligation as matron to put a stop to this. If there’s to be any trouble at the camp, it mustn’t happen under my watch.” She thought it best to begin sternly, to put a little fear into them.

Sarah had been bunking with Constance long enough to have some idea when she wasn’t being entirely sincere. “But you enjoy it, don’t you? You’ve been waiting all day to come out in the woods with us.”

This was, of course, correct. The truth was that it gave Constance a fine feeling of adventure to sneak out at night. She’d been thinking all day about teaching her band of outlaws (already they were her outlaws) a little jiu-jitsu, just the simple moves that every deputy who worked inside a jail had to know. If she could only show them how to step up decisively and strike a blow, she’d give them a weapon almost as powerful as a gun. No one could protect them from bullets, but Constance could, at least, teach them to fend off attacks of the kind any woman might face in wartime.

Nonetheless, the rules were the rules.

“Couldn’t we train in the daytime?” Constance proposed. “We have a half-hour before supper, and if you don’t mind being last into the mess hall, you’d have a little more time than that.”

“Do you really want us to practice our rifle work in the middle of the training field?” Sarah said. “Or hand-to-hand fighting?”

“There won’t be any rifles,” Constance put in quickly.

“But what about the rest of it? Learning French and German phrases? I don’t think Miss Miner would approve of German being taught at an American military camp. You’d be booted out of the country for espionage.”

“But how are you to fight the enemy if you don’t speak a word of his language?” Constance argued, furious now, but nonetheless falling very neatly into Sarah’s line of reasoning. “Never mind about the training field. Someone would write home and complain that we’re not following the approved curriculum. These girls love to write to their mothers and air their grievances.”

With that, she surrendered to the inevitability of this secret night school. How could she refuse? Nothing about camp interested her but this. In fact, nothing at all had interested her for months, but at that moment, out in a field on a clear and chilly night with five women eager for a bit of trouble, she felt like her old self again — or, even better, like her new self. She wasn’t going backwards in time, retreating to better days long past. She was moving ahead, and that felt exhilarating.

The five of them were watching her, and waiting. They were as eager for adventure as any boy in a khaki uniform. Why not give it to them?

“I’ll start by showing you how to throw a man down to the ground,” she said. “Hilda, we’ll begin with you.”

Hilda was a dark-haired girl with a pleasingly prominent nose and front teeth that sat out over her lower lip when she smiled. She stepped forward and spread out her arms. “Is someone going to catch me when I fall?”

“I’m the one who’s going to fall,” Constance said.

“But I could never put you on the ground! You’re so much bigger — no offense, ma’am.”

“There’s nothing wrong with sizing up your opponent,” Constance said. “Knowing his size tells you what to do. If he’s so much larger than you, you’ll take his strength and use it against him.”

She grabbed Hilda’s wrist, roughly, and pulled. Hilda resisted and tried to back away, but she couldn’t, and allowed herself to be dragged along, her heels in the dirt.

“You see? I’m no match for you,” Hilda said.

“But look at what happens if I pull on you forcefully, and you use all that force to come toward me,” Constance said. “Now I’m going to yank on your arm, and you’re going to fling yourself at me. I’ll even be helping you do it, although I don’t yet realize that I’m pulling a lethal weapon toward me.”

They all giggled at that and grouped themselves in a half-circle behind Hilda to watch the action. Constance took her wrist again and pulled. This time, Hilda flung herself right at Constance’s chest, knocking her back a step.

“There, you see?” Constance said.

“But I didn’t push you over,” Hilda said. “I couldn’t.”

“I haven’t shown you how yet. This time, when you come in close, put your right leg between mine, like so. When you fling yourself at me, I’ll be unsteady on my feet, and you’ll kick my leg out from under me. Be prepared to fall with me. I might still be holding on to you.”

There was quite a bit more nervous laughter and uncertainty from the spectators, but Hilda was engrossed in the problem. She practiced it once or twice, taking a run at Constance and putting one leg between hers and just behind, so that Constance would stumble over it when she went backwards. Hilda wore a fine look of concentration as she worked it out in her mind. It pleased Constance enormously to see her study the problem.

When she was ready, she said, “But I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Only a minute ago you didn’t think you could do it at all,” Constance said. “The trick is that we’re going to go down slowly. I know what to expect, and you’re going to do it gently. It’s only practice, remember.”

Hilda did remember, but just barely. When Constance took her arm and gave a good hard pull, Hilda flew at her, planted a leg behind her, and only at the last minute remembered to kick softly when Constance stumbled backwards. The two of them went down into the damp grass, panting, to the carefully muffled applause of their spectators.

Hilda stood up first, and offered a hand to Constance. “I never would’ve thought of a maneuver like that.”

“Of course not,” Constance said. “It has to be taught.”

“And if it hasn’t been taught to you,” Fern said, “something else happens when you get grabbed.”

Everyone turned at once to look at her. Fern was the smallest of them. Constance was reminded again of Fleurette — they were the same size and had to be about the same age. A man would have no trouble in overpowering her. Constance shuddered to think of it.

In the silence that followed, Fern looked around defiantly. “Surely I’m not the only one.”

“You’re not,” Constance hastened to say. “And you’re entirely correct. If you don’t know what to do, something else could happen — but it won’t tonight. You’re next, Fern.”