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.