“They went back to the front. Snug too.” The smile was gone; the dimple too. Nurse Fellowes seized on another photo at random. “Look! We have had such success with the most remarkable bone regeneration from mere fragments. This poor chap lost all his teeth and some of his jaw, but you can see, in the progress of these pictures, the process of regrowth. . . . It’s keeping them entirely still that’s the hardest. Dr. Blake has devised the most ingenious variety of splints.”
“Did I hear my name?” A slender man with a long, thin nose and a scrubbing brush of a mustache entered the room. “Ah, the lady doctors.”
“Hello, Joseph,” said Dr. Stringfellow. “It’s an honor to be greeted by the great man himself.”
“Still delivering babies in Philadelphia, Ava?”
“Among other things. I see you’ve been keeping busy.”
“I try, I try. We’re terribly proud of the work we do here. Has Nurse Fellowes been showing you our shop? We started out with 170 beds in ’14. We’re up to nearly a thousand. Some of our patients come through and leave; others are here for a year or more, for the more intricate work. Have you seen the fracture ward yet? We call it the machine shop.”
“We’ve been hearing about your reconstruction work,” said Julia. She held out a hand. “I’m Dr. Pruyn.”
Dr. Blake nodded pleasantly, humoring her. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Doctor. It seems a shame for a man to serve his country and come home a freak. So . . . here we are. Some of these men might have had no life at home at all, but for these surgeries. They don’t always take, of course,” he admitted. “But we do our best. As a last resort, we have the masks.”
“Masks?” asked Emmie. Masks sounded like a safer topic than surgeries.
“Remarkable things. Made of tin. There’s an American artist in the Latin Quarter who paints them. Matches ’em to what the man would have looked like before—well.”
“These photos—they’re remarkable,” said Miss Englund.
Emmie nodded vigorously. Remarkable was one word for it. It seemed almost impossible to comprehend that a man could have suffered injuries such as the ones in the photographs and lived.
Dr. Blake put an avuncular hand on Julia’s arm. Julia stiffened, her spine very straight. “We can do better than photos! I’ll take you about to see some of our patients in a bit, but in the meantime, let’s show you our collection of plaster casts.” Dr. Blake nodded to Nurse Fellowes, who obediently limped toward a cupboard. “We make molds before and after. It’s useful to have a three-dimensional model.”
Nurse Fellowes set two plaster casts down on the table. The second showed a normal sort of man, with a pronounced nose and a firm chin. The first—the nose was completely gone, leaving only a distorted hole. The mouth was drawn up on one side, a diagonal slash. One ear was half-gone. It had been painted, giving it a verisimilitude the gray-toned photos could never match.
“Oh Lord,” murmured Miss Cooper. She took a half step back, her eyes glassy. Emmie could see the sheen of sweat on her forehead, the unhealthy pallor of her skin.
Her eyes rolled back in their sockets.
“Kate,” said Emmie urgently. “Kate.”
Chapter Five
We went today to the big American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly and it was the most wonderful and awful place I have ever seen. . . .
They are doing miraculous work restoring faces that have been partly blown away. We saw plaster casts of faces before and after and Margaret Cooper （remember, the one who knows Gilbert’s cousin?） proceeded to faint on the spot.
—Miss Alice Patton, ’10, to her sister, Mrs. Gilbert Thomas （who did not attend Smith or even one of those other institutions that are not Smith）
August 1917
Paris, France
They caught Miss Cooper just before she went over.
It was amazing just how heavy one slender woman could be in a dead faint. It didn’t help that she was tall, thought Kate, who wasn’t. She could only be grateful that Dr. Blake’s back was to them as he attempted to explain something to do with bone grafts to Maud, who, for all her other sins, wasn’t the least bit squeamish.
Julia looked back over her shoulder, frowning, and, for once, Kate couldn’t blame her. She didn’t want Dr. Blake to see one of their number fainting either.
Lady doctors indeed.
“We’ve got to get her out of here,” she hissed to Emmie, who nodded faintly, her hair already coming out of its pins.