She surprised him into a laugh. It was raw and hoarse, but quite definitely a laugh all the same. “So it has. All right, yes. I do think it naive. You haven’t been to the front—you haven’t seen—”
“What the Germans can do?” Here, Emmie felt on firmer footing. “I’m not a hothouse flower, you know. I’ve spent the last five years doing settlement house work. I’ve seen more than you think.”
“Like the men at the American Ambulance Hospital?”
“No, nothing quite like that. At least, not on that sort of scale.” How could she explain to him? She’d seen women with hands mangled from being drawn into machinery. She’d seen a pregnant woman so badly beaten by her husband that she’d lost the child, and yet still gone home to him after. She’d seen a child whose arm was a mass of scar tissue from having fallen—or been pushed—into a coal fire. She’d seen cruelty, but this was different somehow. It was the impersonal nature of it that made it so horrifying.
“That wasn’t even the half of it. What you’re letting yourself in for . . .”
Unthinkingly, Emmie put her hand on his arm, trying to reassure him. “It’s kind of you to be concerned. We won’t be working with the ambulances at the front. We’ll be in a village well behind the lines. The conditions may be different from a city slum, but the needs are the same: shelter, clothing, food—affection. Those children need to know someone cares for them. The worse it is, the more that matters.”
“And you have affection to spare?”
Her hand was still on his arm. Emmie snatched it away. “The last I looked, kindness wasn’t rationed.”
“Are you quite sure?” The officer inclined his head, saying formally, “I wish you well, Miss—”
“Van Alden.” She had been rather enjoying the anonymity. People tended to react to the name Van Alden, because they were in awe of her lineage, offended by her mother, or, sometimes, both.
The British officer merely bowed over her hand. “Miss Van Alden.”
He didn’t seem to know who she was at all, and Emmie found that strangely wonderful. “Do you realize I don’t even know your name?”
“Perhaps I prefer to dwell in mystery, like the Scarlet Pimpernel.”
Emmie couldn’t quite hide her delight. She adored that book, had read it at least a dozen times, possibly more, no matter how many times Kate had protested it was all entirely improbable and anyone would have known who he was inside five minutes. “Do I find myself addressing Sir Percy Blakeney, baronet?”
He smiled down at her, a little creakily. “You’ve discovered me, I see.”
“Do those Frenchies seek you everywhere?”
He grimaced. “It’s not much of a guess whether this is heaven or hell.”
“‘The mind is its own place,’” quoted Emmie, feeling a bit giddy, “‘and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.’”
“When Milton wrote that,” said the British officer wryly, “he’d clearly never been to the Somme. Besides, it’s not fair switching authors. Next I’ll trot out John Donne and then we’ll be wallowing in Shakespeare before you know it.”
“Would that be so terrible?” asked Emmie, enjoying herself tremendously and feeling vaguely guilty about it.
“It depends on whether you mean to quote Much Ado or Titus Andronicus.”
“Possibly Troilus and Cressida,” said Emmie determinedly, “but never Titus.”
“‘What plagues and what portents!’” he recited softly. “‘What mutiny! . . . Frights, changes, horrors . . . enterprise is sick.’ There’s your Troilus and Cressida for you—and all too apt. Didn’t I tell you we were in danger of Shakespeare once we started?”
“We could try Keats instead,” suggested Emmie, wanting to shake that frozen look from his face.
“Beauty is truth? Maybe that means, then, that all this ugliness is nothing but a lie, an illusion—but it’s a very solid one.” He took her hand, his skin surprisingly warm through his gloves. “I would far rather stay and debate poets, but I have a rendezvous with a train.”
It hit Emmie like a vat of cold water. “Wait, are you going back to—”
“To the front? Yes.” Of course he was. That was why he was here. That was why they were all here.
In the delight of finding someone who spoke her language, even a slightly foreign dialect of it, she had allowed herself to forget, and the full horror of it rushed back upon her, choking her.