It made Kate furious just thinking of it.
The rain, the endless rain, dripped down. Even the mud was covered with mud. Nothing was ever dry. The best they could hope for was an acceptable level of dampness. The green twigs they poked into their stoves popped and smoldered. The Canadians explained to them that they were meant to dry the wood on the top half of the stove and then burn it, but there was never enough time, and so their meager fires smoked and never gave off near enough heat to dry their stockings, much less anything else. Tempers ran short, particularly Kate’s.
It didn’t help that Emmie watched her, constantly, darting anxious glances at her, as if trying to make sure she was enjoying herself. It soured everything. It made every triumph, every moment of joy or even mere content feel like an admission.
And she wouldn’t, couldn’t admit that Emmie had been right. Because she wasn’t. Not about what mattered.
When the Canadian foresters invited the Unit to their camp for Thanksgiving, Kate would have much preferred to beg off, but she was, still, despite it all, assistant director of the Unit, and her presence would be expected. If it hadn’t been for the Canadians dropping off loads of wood for the Unit, they would have frozen long since. Or chopped off a few stray limbs trying to chop their own wood. They couldn’t afford to offend them.
So, grudgingly, Kate put on her cleanest and driest shirtwaist and got back into her despised rubber boots. It was an eerie trip through barren fields marked with barbed wire and desolate forest with the mist rising from the ground. Like something out of a fairy tale, Kate thought, and almost said as much to Emmie before remembering she wasn’t speaking to Emmie. She saw Emmie glance at her and looked away, turning to determinedly chat with Miss Ledbetter, who only wanted to tell her all about the history of the forest and the chateau at which the Canadians were quartered.
Because it was a castle, a proper castle with a moat around it, not in ruins like Grécourt, but an uncannily preserved remnant of an earlier time. Beauty and the Beast, Kate thought—she and Emmie had read Mme Leprince de Beaumont’s fairy tales together at Smith. But there were no beasts here, only good, honest Canadians, who served them an incongruous supper of lobster and apple pie in a gray-paneled salon trimmed with holly and mistletoe.
Kate made an effort to chat cheerfully—they’d gone to such an effort, these Canadians. They’d even made menu cards for each place, decorated with a jaunty American flag. But she felt tired and lonely—all the more lonely in the midst of a crowd—and her hand hurt. She’d scraped it a week ago, trying to fix the Ford truck when it had broken down on them outside Canizy, and, despite cleaning and wrapping, it still felt as raw as it had that first day. Worse even.
“Don’t forget your dance card,” the man next to Kate reminded her when she rose from the table. He flipped the menu over to reveal a dance card. “We’re starting with a Virginia reel!”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to roll me through the reel after all that pie,” said Kate, and escaped as they began pushing the tables to the sides and sprinkling the old parquet floor with boracic acid for dancing.
She couldn’t leave until the others did—the truck was waiting to bring them back—but the candles were burning her eyes, the noise too loud. She wondered if she might not be a little feverish. Possibly. Or maybe it was just the exhaustion of being angry all the time, of going and going and going, because if she stopped, she would have to accept that Emmie was never going to understand why she was upset. And if she couldn’t, what did it mean for their friendship? Or had they ever really been friends?
Kate wove her way across the room, passing Maud, who was holding forth to a group of five foresters. “Our doctors may be all right delivering babies, but as general practitioners, you’re better off with a medieval barber-surgeon! Liza and I got into their records, and, can you believe, for a case of cancer of the stomach they prescribed soda mints? I ask you!”
“If that’s doctoring, I have a degree too,” one of the men said with a grin.
Kate paused. She had been there that day. She knew the woman Maud was talking about. Turning, she said, “They gave her soda mints because she was too far gone to do anything else.”
There was awkward silence and shuffling of feet. Kate felt like an utter heel, but she couldn’t have just left it. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. Dr. Stringfellow and Julia were doing their best.
“Well, I wouldn’t want them to doctor me,” said Maud loudly, and turned back to her audience. The conversation resumed, with Kate on the outside of it.