“I don’t think that’s really the problem,” began Emmie, but Maud didn’t seem to hear her.
“It would mean so much if you would lend your name to our appeal,” Maud said, and Emmie could feel herself freezing. Oblivious, Maud went on. “Of course, we could very well do it on our own—and we will!—but your name would add it extra weight.”
Not her, just her name.
It was always what they really wanted: not Emmie, who liked to read Tennyson and secretly enjoyed playing with children’s cookery sets to make miniature pies, but Miss Van Alden of the Fifth Avenue Van Aldens, connected by blood or marriage to every Knickerbocker family of consequence, to all those Dutch and Huguenot and Mayflower descendants who had come to New York to trade in furs or silks and made themselves lords of the new land, in fact if not in name. They looked at her and saw not a tall, awkward girl with buck teeth and a long chin and flyaway hair but that long and silent procession of Van Aldens and Stuyvesants and Livingstons and Schuylers.
It was one of the reasons she had taken to Kate so quickly, all those years ago. Kate hadn’t the first idea who any of those people were or why they mattered.
“Well, will you?” Maud asked impatiently. “We have it all written and ready to send off. Of course, it would also help if you would tell your mother—I’m sure people would listen to her—and then we could start doing the work that truly matters.”
“No.” The word was barely audible. Maud stared at her and Emmie tried again. “Our plans are already so well forward . . . it would be a waste at this point. . . .”
Maud waved her hand dismissively. “You mean because they put plumbing into a bunch of army barracks? I’m sure someone else can get some use out of it.”
On the stage, the last song was drawing to a close. The men looked so sad, the last reprieve ending, the trains waiting.
To decency, the officer had said, and those who persist in practicing it.
She would persist. She would.
“It’s not because of the plumbing,” Emmie said earnestly, trying to make Maud understand, wanting Maud to understand. “It’s because there are women and children there waiting for us. They’ve been told we’ll come. They’re relying on us. It’s summer now still—but what happens when winter comes? Could you live with yourself if a child died of exposure while we fed soup to the troops?”
“That’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it?” protested Maud. “Like ‘The Little Match Girl.’ We don’t know these children.”
“We don’t know these troops either.” Emmie hurried on before Maud could explain exactly how she knew them and just who knew whom from Montclair. “If we hadn’t committed to this, some other group might have come forward and done the work. But we did. Having done so . . . don’t you think we owe it to them?”
“No,” said Maud bluntly. “Now, about removing Mrs. Rutherford—”
So much for standing up for what she believed in. “Will you excuse me?” asked Emmie. “I believe some of those men might want some cigarettes before they go.”
And she fled.
It was the next morning before Emmie had the opportunity to unburden herself to Kate. She’d wanted to tell Kate immediately, but Kate had been asleep already when she came back—and, besides, Emmie wasn’t entirely sure Maud hadn’t already suborned Miss Patton, who seemed pleasant enough but a bit nervous and changeable and not exactly steady of purpose. So she’d waited until after breakfast, when the others were getting ready to go, and made Kate stay with her downstairs in the breakfast room, pouring it all out in an anxious whisper with one eye on the door, just in case Maud or Liza might wander in in search of another piece of war bread.
“Do you think we ought to tell her—Mrs. Rutherford, I mean,” Emmie asked breathlessly, “that Maud and Liza are . . .”
“Planning a coup?” Kate provided for her.
“Well . . . yes.” It sounded rather melodramatic put that way. But that was what it was, wasn’t it? A coup. “I think we ought, don’t you?”
Kate was quiet for a long moment. “Would it be such a bad thing to stay in Paris?”
Emmie looked at her in dismay. “But that’s not what we’re here to do.”
She couldn’t explain it even to herself, but it mattered that they were going to Grécourt. It felt silly and self-important to describe it as a call, like Joan of Arc and her voices, but that was what it was. When she closed her eyes, she could see the boys and girls of Grécourt calling to her, needing her.