“Not usually,” said Kate shortly. If Emmie was nervy it was because she’d been caught out. “It’s been a trying day, I gather. Will you excuse me for a moment?”
Maybe there was an explanation. Maybe she’d misunderstood. Maybe the accounting was wrong.
Either way, Kate needed to know. She needed to hear it from Emmie’s own lips.
But by the time she found Emmie, diligently scrubbing plates, the engineers had come roaring in, and Kate found herself pressed into service with a ladle, dishing out pumpkin soup into tooth mugs. And then it was a regular melee as everyone rushed about collecting the tooth mugs to be rewashed for the chocolate pudding, setting out platters of cauliflower cheese and roast beef, parrying the banter of the engineers, who were in roaringly high spirits.
All the while, Kate couldn’t help looking around the table at her sisters in arms, seeing them as if for the first time, all of them with their own quirks, their capable hands and determined faces, Alice’s lacy jabot contrasting with her grimy uniform, Maud ostentatiously waving her engagement ring and speaking loudly of Henry, Liza trussed up in bandages from the waist up but pink cheeked and happy as could be with two engineers to help her manage her cutlery and grab her the best pieces of beef.
They all looked so sure of themselves, despite their ragged uniforms that could never be made entirely clean, no matter how Marie scrubbed them. It was an assurance that couldn’t be taught, an assurance that came of always having had a cook and housemaid, of knowing that Daddy was a lawyer or a professor or a banker. It sat on them like polish.
Kate, wearing the same uniform, no more ragged than the rest, felt, nonetheless, very small and shabby, as if they could see in her bones she was different, that she wasn’t pulling her weight. Her head ached with the din of all those voices, all those strident, confident, honking voices.
One of the engineers was asking her about her people, and Kate smiled and responded vaguely. It didn’t matter—he mostly wanted to talk about himself, anyway, but Kate felt naked, naked and a fraud. Only Julia sat silent, with Dr. Stringfellow on one side and Emmie’s British captain on the other.
Charity case, Julia had called Kate all those years ago, and Kate had burned at it, at the indignity of it, when she had never accepted a penny from Emmie, when she had been so very, very careful not to ever take anything from Emmie. But now—now she was what Julia had called her and worse.
Kate looked around the table, wondering what this made her. Not a proper member of the Unit, a member of their fellowship, but a sort of paid companion, only there due to the munificence of—what had that loathsome reporter called her? The noble descendant of one of our first families.
Emmie’s charity case.
Would this lunch never end?
Finally, finally, the tooth mugs were cleared a second time, sounds of repletion made, napkins dropped. Finally, finally, they could disperse and Kate wouldn’t have to keep smiling in a way that made her face hurt.
But then the engineers produced, with a great air of triumph, a Victrola.
“A dance!” cried Nell, hiking up her skirt and hopping out of her chair. “Huzzah!”
There was no hope for it after that. The tables were pushed aside, the dishes stacked haphazardly to await cleaning later; Marie was miraculously induced to produce coffee, and the luncheon turned into a dance, engineers and Smithies galloping around the makeshift dance floor in their rubber boots.
Julia, Kate noticed, had disappeared, and she was deeply tempted to do the same, but there were more men than women and she found herself yanked into first one dance and then another, dancing with a sameness of pink-cheeked, clean-shaven men who all seemed to have a first cousin once removed who was engaged to this or that Smith girl, and, say, wasn’t it a bully thing they were doing here.
Emmie’s Brit had been attached by Alice, who was attempting to lead him in a Viennese waltz, swirling and dipping with anxious gaiety.
Emmie, meanwhile, had busied herself quietly collecting plates, as if trying to make herself as small as she could. For a moment, their eyes met, and Kate saw pure misery, misery and guilt, before Emmie ducked her head and began stacking plates with renewed vigor. Kate tried to make her way across the room to her—this was absurd, they needed to talk about this, they couldn’t just go on being miserable at one another—but she was plucked off by an engineer in want of a dancing partner and neatly suborned into another dance.
Waltzing past her, Kate heard Maud’s voice, too loud as always. “Look at Emmie Van Alden sulking! She shouldn’t think she can monopolize DeWitt’s Biscuits just because she saw him first. Did no one ever teach her to share?”