There was a chair in the anteroom, a spindly gilded thing, so different from the stout wooden ones they’d been distributing to their villagers. Kate had been standing all day in one way or another, standing in line to get passes, standing in line to be admitted to the building, standing in line to be admitted to this office. She should sit, she knew, and muster her strength, but she was fizzing with nervous energy.
It had been nearly a week since she’d been in Paris, and she hadn’t accomplished a single thing she’d set out to do.
It had been an unnerving and largely silent train ride with Julia, who was officially in Paris to get her pass renewed. When Kate had delicately tried to broach the question of whether the presence of Dr. Stapleton at Grécourt might have something to do with her sudden desire to go to Paris, Julia had simply looked at her—one of her Medusa looks, designed to turn the unlucky into stone—and looked away again.
It was a moot point anyway, Kate had told herself as they sat in stony silence for the rest of the journey, Julia’s gigantic duffel bag wedged on the seat between them. As soon as Dr. Clare got her pass, they’d have no need for Dr. Stapleton and therefore no need to discuss it.
She and Julia had gone straight from the train to the hotel on the Quai Voltaire, which had become a sort of dormitory for the Smith Unit in Paris. They’d found the new girls there. They looked disconcertingly clean. Clean and pressed and entirely unprepared. Had she looked like that once? Kate supposed she had, but it was hard to remember. Their nails were smooth and white, not jagged with the stains of earth under them that never quite came out. They wore clothes that hadn’t been pounded by Marie, and their faces had a city smoothness to them, not windburn from months spent riding in an open truck with the wind and rain and snow howling through.
They were, as Kate and the others had, volunteering with various charities while waiting for their passes to come through, making prosthetics and special shoes, both awed and alarmed by the proximity of Grécourt to the war zone, full of questions about what had been done and what they were meant to do.
“Is it true that you walked through a blizzard carrying four gallons of wine?” asked Miss Williams.
“It wasn’t wine,” said Kate wearily. “It was milk. Milk from our cows. Milk needs to be delivered, even in the snow.”
“Thank goodness it’s spring now,” said Miss White, huddling into the shawl she had wrapped around her uniform jacket. “I can’t bear the cold.”
“The weather has been much better.” No need to tell them it was like Greenland at night, even in springtime. “And we’ve got plenty of blankets.”
“Were we ever that frivolous?” she asked Julia. They were sharing a room, a proper room. The dormitory, where Kate had stayed that first month, was being used for storage, bristling with things the various local Smith clubs had sent to the Unit, waiting to be sorted.
“They’ll learn,” said Julia, and put her pillow over her head to discourage further communication.
It felt odd to be sleeping in a proper bed, rather than a cot made of springs and sharp edges. Kate missed the slump and creak of it. She woke half a dozen times in the night at familiar but forgotten noises, the thrum of traffic, the sound of male voices. It was even worse leaving the hotel to run her errands. There were just so many people. The air felt different, warmer, stuffier, sootier. It felt wrong to be walking on pavement again instead of slogging through mud. The soot-stained buildings pressed too close around her; the air stank of assembled humanity instead of cows.
Kate had never thought she would miss the cows.
“Kate!” A large woman in a brown suit flung herself at Kate, nearly knocking her down.
“Liza!” Kate couldn’t believe how glad she was to see the other women, even though it was odd to see her with her hair washed and done up properly, in a suit that was very much the wrong color for her complexion. “I hardly recognized you in civvies!”
Liza plucked at her suit. “I hardly recognize me,” she admitted. “I never thought I’d miss the old uniform—but it does feel odd being out of it.”
“What are you doing in town?” Maud joined them, dressed to the nines in the best the Paris shops could offer, looking Kate up and down in a way that Kate remembered well, as though she were sniffing out potential weaknesses.
“Reports and errands.” Kate couldn’t bring herself to say that Mrs. Barrett had mandated that she take a rest. “I’ve promised fruit trees and chickens for Florence and I want to see what I can do about getting Dr. Clare’s pass expedited.”