Kate followed Emmie out, feeling thoroughly dazed and entirely useless. “I had no idea you knew how to do any of that.”
“One learns,” said Emmie. “I’m not a proper nurse, but you do pick up a bit over time. It’s impossible not to. I couldn’t imagine seeing a child in pain like that and standing there with my hands folded. It would be . . . immoral.”
As Kate had been prepared to do. Well, not entirely. She had planned to send for the doctors. That was something, wasn’t it?
“I don’t know how you kept your head like that.” Kate’s hands were shaking. She stuffed them into her pockets to hide it. “I was ready to be ill.”
“I can’t say I’ve seen worse,” said Emmie, tucking the remains of their supplies carefully back in the truck, “but I’ve seen as bad.”
“Was this what your settlement house work was like?” Kate had always assumed that Emmie’s work was the merest hobby, flitting in and out of people’s lives with books and baskets, like the do-gooders who came to Greenpoint to tsk over the poverty and filth of the immigrants and give them pamphlets on hygiene.
“It wasn’t quite so open-air and there were more languages. You’d never imagine it, but I’ve picked up a smattering of the oddest dialects—German and Hungarian and Czech. Not much, but a few words, enough to help set people at ease and try to understand.”
“You do a very good job understanding,” said Kate soberly. There she had been, teaching French in an airy, well-appointed room to coiffed and gowned young ladies and thinking herself ill-used. She’d thought herself so superior to Emmie, just because she had to pay her own rent.
She wasn’t fit for this. She hadn’t the least idea what to do. She barely knew how to drive.
Yes, and she hadn’t known how to construct a car either, and she’d done that. But that was different. That was mechanical. These were people, people who needed help and understanding, and Kate’s very being quailed at the concept.
“They were being kind to us,” said Emmie matter-of-factly. “It’s often like that at first. They doubt what you can really do, but they’re ready to give you a chance. We just need to prove to them we mean to stay. We need to find some way to bring everyone to us, to make them like us.”
“Everyone does like you,” said Kate ruefully. Emmie was inherently likable. Probably because she cared so much. It wasn’t that she wore her heart on her sleeve; she carried it like a banner, waving in the air ahead of her.
“Mmm,” said Emmie, ducking her head. “Oh dear, I’m losing my pins again. They’re probably scattered from Grécourt to Canizy.”
“Like bread crumbs, only less edible,” said Kate. “Oh, stop, let me do that.”
Emmie turned so Kate could repair her hair for her, as she had a thousand times before. “It will take us forever to get to know everyone at this rate. A whole day and we didn’t even make it through two villages!”
“But they all know about the crazy ladies with the trucks,” said Kate, jabbing in a pin hard enough that even Emmie would be hard-pressed to shed it.
“Yes, but is that how we want them to know us? I’d rather we be the crazy ladies with milk—or candy. We need to find a way to get everyone to us. . . .” Emmie turned, looking very un-Emmie-like with her hair neatly pinned away from her face. “We could hold a children’s party on the grounds of the chateau—that might do it.”
Kate thought of the old woman lying on a pallet in the mud; the Boche baby with its child mother. Of the baroness, living in comfort in Switzerland while her people huddled in the castle cellars. “I’m not sure a party is precisely what they need.”
“People do like parties,” said Emmie seriously. “Particularly when they haven’t had anything to celebrate for a good long while. It’s—it’s the same way Mrs. Rutherford wants us to sell to them rather than give to them. It will make them feel like people again.”
“It’s charity,” said Kate.
“Then we have to find a way to not make it feel like charity,” said Emmie firmly, and got back in the truck.
Chapter Ten
On the twelfth, we called all day and didn’t get home until past five. We were just sitting down to supper when a soldier rode up with a letter. It was from the commanding officer saying that six cows had arrived at the station at Nesle and must be removed immediately. After some confusion about where Nesle might be, two of our members set off with the soldier to secure our livestock while the rest of us practiced cantiques with the villagers in their stable for a religious celebration to be held here next week. With the arrival of the cows, the musical evening turned into a moonlit demonstration of best French milking techniques. Your Unit was enthusiastic. The cows were not—and I can’t say I blame them. We must have seemed staggeringly inept.