Emmie swallowed hard and gave Kate a big hug, as if they were at Smith again, when life was simpler. In a muffled voice, she said, “We heard the gun and thought Grécourt was under siege.”
Kate swiped at her eyes and gave a crooked smile. “You could call it that. We have two hundred hungry Tommies billeted on us. Julia is dealing with scratches and fevers, Nell is making up beds, and Anne is running the canteen. I’ve sent our basse-cour people on to Roye, with Marie to boss them.” Some of Kate’s brave facade crumpled. “Zélie may never forgive me for parting her from Minerva. She had to be carried protesting into the wagon. I felt like Lady Macbeth.”
“It had to be done—they couldn’t possibly have taken the goat with them. You can’t imagine what the roads are like. You did it for her own good.” With all the khaki uniforms bustling about around them, their insignia indistinguishable in the darkness, Emmie couldn’t help but ask, “Will—Captain DeWitt—he’s not here, is he?”
“No, he’s not,” said Kate with genuine regret. “He did come by this morning—he wanted to make sure we knew the Germans were coming. He came riding out of the mist like something out of one of your books. Young Lochinvar and the Scarlet Pimpernel all rolled into one. Poor man. It was utterly wasted on me—he pretended he was here for all of us, but it was you he wanted.”
It was so hard when Kate was being kind. “Did he leave any message for me? Did he say where he would be?”
“He had to go back to the line. He told me to tell you something about compasses,” Kate added as an afterthought. “The points of the compass always come together in the end.”
“It’s John Donne,” said Emmie, her throat scratchy. “‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.’ The two points of the compass always come together in the end, so true lovers can never really be parted, even when they run around in circles.”
Except in the poem, the author was speaking about death. Emmie didn’t want to think about death. It was all very well to talk about not loving as sublunary lovers love and expansion of souls and all that, but she’d really rather not have to commune with a soul. She wanted the whole person back.
He’d been alive this morning, which meant he’d survived the dawn assault, but if he’d gone back to the line . . .
“There’s been no word since?”
Kate shook her head. “No one really seems to know anything. Only that there was heavy fighting. You were closer to it than we were.”
Emmie thought about the ambulances, those endless ambulances, bearing their gruesome burden.
“I’m sorry,” said Kate.
She couldn’t let herself cry now. Not when there was so much to be done. Will was away somewhere, but these men were still alive and needed her. Emmie blinked hard. “What can I do?”
“You’ve done so much today already. . . .” Kate saw the expression on Emmie’s face and quickly changed whatever she had been about to say to “Anne could use the help—she’s in the kitchen.”
“We’ve been making gallons of tea,” said Anne distractedly, pushing a strand of ginger hair back behind her ear as Emmie poked through the canvas flap. Every pot they owned appeared to be in use, the big old stove smoking like anything. “They’ve been without rations for twenty-four hours, these poor boys. We’ve been cooking and cooking for them since three o’clock. We’ve opened every can of beans in the place and boiled every scrap of macaroni we could find. But mostly it’s tea they want, poor men. One nearly cried when I asked him if he wanted milk. He says he hasn’t seen milk for months.”
Emmie sliced bread and brewed tea and sliced more bread and brewed more tea, going back and forth to the dining room with tray after tray after tray as one group was fed and another came in.
Work helped. It was easier not to think of Will out there in the mist with the Germans coming upon them when her hands were busy making up beds or carrying trays. They were so grateful, those men. Emmie, Anne, and Nell went back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, cooking, collecting dishes, washing dishes, and filling them up again, while Florence saw to the animals, and Kate and Alice turned the dining room and the Orangerie into makeshift dormitories, stripping the mattresses and blankets off their beds to make pallets for the soldiers.
“Was that really the last of them?” asked Anne, sitting down heavily on a stool, her feet sticking out in front of her. It was two in the morning and everyone had been fed and put to bed except the seven remaining members of the Smith Unit, who were collapsed in the kitchen, among a stack of dirty pots and dishes.