“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 chateau. 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?”
Chapter Eighteen
Merry Christmas to all at home! Your very own Smith Unit is exhausted with merrymaking. I never thought I’d be sick of parties, but you try having ten of them and see how you feel. Think about having two Sunday-school parties a day for five days and that’s about the shape of it. We started out with our own private party for the Unit, then one for the Unit’s friends—aviators and Quakers and engineers and foresters and doctors and even a few odd Brits. The only one who didn’t make it was the partridge in the pear tree. Some of those men came four hours to spend thirty minutes eating plum pudding with us! But they said it was worth it. （Probably more for the plum pudding than our dubious charms—most of us haven’t had a proper wash in weeks. Florence Lewes claims the dirt keeps the warmth in.）
Then it was back to work with parties for all our villages. Just imagine the mercury well below zero and all the roads clogged with snow and us in our little trucks, with Ethel Ledbetter dressed up as Père No?l in a red bathrobe. Then back to Grécourt to pack more presents and do it all again—and again—the next day. We’re all terribly grateful that Christmas comes only once a year, even in the Somme, where terrible things happen all the time.
It was so cold in those military barracks we’re using as village halls that one little girl froze her toes and had to stick her feet through a hole in the wall to be washed with snow! We had to organize a running-around game to keep everyone from frostbite, which got rather more exciting than planned when two stray dogs decided to join in the fun and bit Ethel, who promptly fainted and had to be revived with—you guessed it—more snow. Don’t you see the fun you’re missing?
But it was really touching to see how happy they all were, the old people as much as the children. . . .