Kate wasn’t very good at trusting. Her motto had always been, if you want something done, do it yourself.
But it seemed that wasn’t what it took for the Unit to run.
It was only a week, Kate told herself, as she went in to join the others for breakfast. There was only so much that could go wrong in a week.
As Kate came in, Emmie focused hard on pouring cream into her coffee. Usually, when they disagreed about anything—or even when they hadn’t—Emmie fell over herself to apologize. But not this time.
Nell raised a cup to Kate. “Hail our interim director! Do you have any directions for us?”
Kate sank into her seat—the seat at the head of the table that had been Mrs. Rutherford’s, and Dr. Stringfellow’s, and then Mrs. Barrett’s, and was now, briefly, Kate’s—and forced a smile. “Only carry on, as our British friends would say.”
“Are you sure you’re feeling quite well?” asked Nell.
“Gwen isn’t,” broke in Alice. “She’s got a rash across her face and she’s shivering like anything. She says the sun hurts her eyes.”
That caught Emmie’s attention. She looked up in alarm. “That sounds like measles. I saw a lot of it in New York—once it gets started in the tenements, it spreads something terrible. Whole families sick at once.”
Kate had caught it as a child, in a building Emmie would undoubtedly have considered a tenement. Kate remembered her mother sponging her head with a damp cloth, wringing it out, and starting again. She remembered how her eyes had stung and the soft sound of her mother’s voice, singing to her.
“Do we know how many of our people have had it?” Kate asked.
“Gwen’s been working in the infirmary,” said Alice, fidgeting in her chair. “She must have seen hundreds of people last week. She might have given it to any of them.”
“Not the children, though,” said Kate. Gwen was an excellent nurse—with adults. Children she saw as small, inferior adults who behaved in unpardonably irrational ways, and had no patience with them. “Emmie’s been seeing to the children.”
Kate looked at Emmie, feeling absurdly like she was trying to curry her favor, to make up for everything she wasn’t ready to admit to doing wrong.
“Hands up,” said Julia. “Who here has had it?”
Everyone raised their hands except Nell, who bit her lip and fiddled with her coffee cup. “I haven’t. My brother got it, but my mother sent me away in time.”
Kate put down her napkin. “The first thing to do is get Gwen into quarantine. I can run Gwen over to the Red Cross hospital in Nesle. If everyone agrees,” she added belatedly.
Julia pushed back her chair. “I’ll come with you to see Gwen settled, and then Emmie and I can start making the rounds of the villages to check everyone with whom Gwen came into contact over the last two weeks. If our interim director permits this alteration of the schedule?”
“Your interim director applauds this alteration of the schedule,” said Kate. “Nell, if you wouldn’t mind . . .”
“I’ll take over Emmie’s classes for the next two days,” said Nell promptly. “Don’t worry.”
“There’s always something to worry about,” said Florence, placidly eating bread and jam. “If it’s not measles, it’s the big drive.”
“On the plus side,” Alice said brightly, “it’s hard to worry about the big drive when we have a measles epidemic to worry about. My mother always used to say that if your head hurt, you should stamp hard on your foot.”
Julia stared at her. “That’s dreadful advice.”
“It does stop you thinking about your head,” said Alice.
“Yes, until you break a toe.” Julia looked hard at Alice. “Don’t break a toe.”
Gwen would contract measles the day Mrs. Barrett left, thought Kate, bitterly and unfairly, as she drove to the Red Cross hospital in Nesle, Julia in the back with Gwen, who was covered in raised red spots and running a worryingly high temperature.
Alice was wrong, Kate decided. It was quite possible to worry about both a measles epidemic and the big drive. If this hit their villages—if this hit the troops . . . The planes thrummed overhead, the noise making Kate’s back and shoulders tense, smoke like candy floss spinning through the air as men high in the clouds did their best to murder each other in the name of king and country.
It was a relief to arrive at the hospital, to hand Gwen off to a nurse in a white apron, who said cheerfully that she’d seen worse cases. The hospital had been a tuberculosis pavilion before the war. There was something about the airy rooms, the large windows, and the garden around it that made one feel inherently peaceful.