I can’t tell you what a difference it makes to feel we can finally do some good. Sitting around in Paris, there were moments when I felt I wasn’t worth the food I was eating. I really do hope I can do some good, Beth. I feel so useless so much of the time. . . .
—Miss Margaret Cooper, ’14, to Miss Elizabeth Long, ’14
September 1917
Grécourt, France
There was a moat.
There was an actual moat, separating the castle from the chapel and outbuildings. Kate hadn’t noticed the moat the night before. She hadn’t noticed much of anything. It had been past midnight when they arrived, after an endless round of arguments with Julia, who insisted that they couldn’t go wrong if they navigated by the North Star. Kate pointed out that the half-obliterated signposts might be a more reliable guide, since they were hardly the Three Wise Men. That, of course, led Emmie into entirely unhelpful musing about the nature of myrrh.
The soldiers in the camion had been no help. Either that, or they were too busy trying not to snicker to say anything.
When they finally arrived, all Kate had registered was looming gates that framed a darkness that seemed to swallow everything beyond. But behind the menacing bulk of the chateau were three small and very modern army barracks, with two rooms each, nothing more than plasterboard squares, but clean and new and built on a human scale.
Kate couldn’t remember much beyond that, just kicking their cots into place and falling asleep wrapped in her coat, too tired to bother with bedding.
She had woken this morning to two coat-wrapped lumps: Emmie and Margaret, still fast asleep. It had been taken for granted that Emmie and Kate would room together, and Margaret had followed. Kate suppressed an unworthy thought that she would rather have had Fran. But Margaret had attached herself to Emmie like a stray cat.
Or like other charity cases of Emmie’s acquaintance.
Kate had snuck out very quietly, so as not to wake them, to take stock of their new world. It was . . . beautiful. She hadn’t expected beauty. She had been braced for ugliness, for trenches and barbed wire and ruin. There was ruin here, but even the ruin looked picturesque, as though the manor house had crumbled into disrepair in centuries past, had sat here, like the Beast’s garden, for a century or more, and not been deliberately bombed out by the Germans just this past spring.
It made her wary. The loveliness of the woods, the russet vines twining around a stone tower, the stolid redbrick facade of the village church, strangely unmarred by war. It felt like a trick, a way to lure them into a false sense of security.
Some wit had posted a sign over the green slime of the moat, saying “Bonne à Boire”： good to drink. Unless it wasn’t a joke at all.
There was reality for her, Kate thought wryly. The Germans had poisoned the wells, Mrs. Rutherford had said. Perhaps the green water of the moat really was bonne à boire in comparison.
“Ah, another early riser.” Mrs. Rutherford walked briskly toward her, coming from a dilapidated little house hard by the gates, just next to the bridge that led over the moat. “What do you think of our demesne?”
The archaic word just suited the scene. “I feel like I’ve wandered into Sleeping Beauty’s castle,” said Kate. She looked at the jagged walls of the chateau. “After the moths got at it.”
“Moths with teeth,” said Mrs. Rutherford, staring at one of the medallions that graced the facade, the portrait of a long-gone Robecourt, now half-crumbled. “It was beautiful once.”
There was a strange note to her voice. “Did you know this place? Before?”
“Briefly.” Mrs. Rutherford didn’t seem inclined to say more. After a moment, she said, “La Baronne de Robecourt relocated to a spa in Switzerland at the start of the war and left her people to fare as they would.”
Kate wished she could say she was surprised, but she wasn’t. The rich had always been good at protecting their own skins.
Mrs. Rutherford had used the feminine form of the title. “Is there no male article?” Kate asked.
Mrs. Rutherford began walking rapidly across the dew-slick grass, Kate trotting along behind. “The Baroness’s husband died some years ago. The current holder of the title is only a boy. I suppose not such a boy anymore. He ought to be nearly twenty by now.” They passed what had once been a greenhouse, reduced to twisted scraps of metal. “Madame la Baronne seems to have the strange notion that the war is a cross between a tennis match and a tea party. She wrote to the gardener’s wife asking her to see that the garden was kept in order in her absence.”