“Well, they do, don’t they? Own it, I mean,” said Emmie. Kate had forgotten Emmie’s inability to recognize a rhetorical question. She always considered them solemnly, as though they were the prompt for writing a theme. “The pink bits of it, at least. Now, Margaret, don’t fret, we’ll just get you a bit of water and you’ll feel right as rain in a minute. . . .”
Miss Cooper was still a bit gray about the gills when they made it back to the hotel on the Quai Voltaire.
“You shouldn’t feel bad, you know,” said Miss Englund quietly to Miss Cooper as they walked from the tram to the hotel, “about today. Every time I looked at those pictures, I saw my brother’s face.”
“Is he . . . here?” asked Emmie, trotting alongside with one arm protectively through Miss Cooper’s, mothering with all her might.
“With the 11th Engineers.” Miss Englund paused to let Maud and Liza brush past her. “Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe it will be all over by the time our boys are moved to the front.”
“Maybe,” echoed Kate, glad she was behind them, glad Miss Englund couldn’t see her face.
That map they’d seen, the map they weren’t supposed to see. The American flags had been planted right behind the front lines. She was shamefully grateful that her own brothers were still too young to join up.
Her mother’s real family.
“I, for one,” said Maud loudly, turning back as she pushed open the door of the hotel, “think we ought to be doing something for our soldiers, not going off to milk cows for French peasants, don’t you? And I mean to tell Mrs. Rutherford that. Oh! Mrs. Rutherford! I didn’t see you there. . . .”
If Mrs. Rutherford heard what Maud said, she didn’t let on. She did, however, sit them down and proceed to issue a series of rapid instructions. Their trucks would, at best, take another two weeks. In the meantime, there was work to be done and purchases to be made.
Emmie was put in charge of acquiring six cows, a bull, three pigs, one hundred chickens, eighteen pairs of rabbits, and, if time and budget permitted, possibly some goats.
“Barnum and Bailey travels with less!” exclaimed Maud, horrified. “People will think the circus has come to town.”
“Ah, Miss Randolph—you can be in charge of buying yarns, cloth, and woolens. I would advise starting at La Samaritaine. You’ll find it’s rather like Gimbels.”
“I don’t shop at Gimbels,” said Maud blankly.
“La Samaritaine,” said Mrs. Rutherford, “is giving us a five percent discount.”
And that was that.
Kate was rather less amused by Maud’s discomfort when she herself was tasked with buying two hundred dollars’ worth of agricultural tools. She refrained from pointing out that she wouldn’t know a garden implement if it bit her; she suspected that Mrs. Rutherford would only inform her that there was no time like the present to learn.
At least it wasn’t chickens.
While they were all in the midst of their orgy of shopping, Mrs. Rutherford was to tour the devastated areas; the doctors would visit hospitals. The rest of them, once they acquired their permits, would be loaned out to various organizations for the duration of their time in Paris, offered a choice of packing and unpacking supplies for the American Fund for French Wounded, rolling bandages for the Surgical Dressings Committee of the Red Cross, or manufacturing special splints for the wounded at the Société pour les Blessés in the Bois de Boulogne.
Kate had chosen the latter. She tried not to think what her mother would say about going all the way to Paris to engage in factory work, unpaid.
For that, she might have stayed in Brooklyn. And been paid for it.
The only saving grace was that their cots had arrived and were lined up in two rows in the attic like the beds for the seven little men in Snow White.
Kate crawled wearily into her cot, ridiculously grateful for something approximating a bed. It had been a long time since she had done anything more strenuous than write on a chalkboard. After carrying Margaret, her body felt as though someone had been at it with a hammer. And it was delicious to be on a mattress again, even only a sort of mattress, and not on a floor or deck. . . .
“Kate?” She heard the cot next to her creak as Emmie rolled in her direction. “Kate, are you awake?”
“Mmm?” She considered pretending to be asleep but couldn’t quite make herself do it. “Yes?”
“I can’t stop thinking about Nurse Fellowes.”