A month.
Oh, there had been reasons. First there had been Miss Lewes, who needed to be shown all the animals and who had been terribly nice about it and tried not to tell Emmie she had done everything all wrong, but had cheerfully gone about fixing everything. The roosters, the useless roosters, had been distributed at a cut-rate price to the people of the villages and had been replaced with actual chickens, who didn’t look all that different as far as Emmie could tell, but that was just the problem, wasn’t it? She hadn’t been able to tell, so she had wasted the Unit’s funds and cheated her villagers of the fresh eggs they might have been eating all this time.
Miss Lewes’s hens laid beautifully. The villagers had not only eggs but also three goats, who provided both milk and entertainment. Kate’s Zélie had become unofficial goat girl and could usually be seen trotting about running errands, followed closely by Minerva, the smallest of the goats, who seemed to be under the misapprehension that she was actually a dog.
Then there had been Liza. It wasn’t clear whether it was something wrong with the way the break in her collarbone had been set—as Maud loudly claimed—or if the fault was with Liza for refusing to follow Dr. Stringfellow’s orders and stay still—as Julia countered—but Liza’s collarbone just wouldn’t heal. In the end, there was nothing for it but to send Liza off to Paris for surgery. Maud, of course, had gone with her.
So Emmie had volunteered to take over the store. She was half-mad with anxiety at that point. It wasn’t that Kate wasn’t speaking to her. She was speaking to her. She just wasn’t saying anything that mattered, and all of Emmie’s attempts to broach the topic, to talk it out, only seemed to make matters worse. Everyone else seemed so busy and useful: Anne Dawlish had her carpentry classes, Nell Baldwin was starting a lending library, and Ethel Ledbetter had the older students in hand—which left very little for Emmie to do. Emmie organized games on the lawn once a week, but the children of the basse-cour and the neighboring villages didn’t need that anymore, not as they had. They were playing on their own now, playing like children again, and it filled Emmie’s heart with joy, but also made her feel decidedly out of it.
But the store had been an unmitigated disaster. Maud, it seemed, had had a talent for convincing people that what the store had was what they wanted. The wrong sort of sabots? But these sabots were so much better. And she would sell whatever it was and go away with an empty truck and the people would walk away feeling as though they’d got a bargain.
Emmie, on the other hand, would apologize profusely, take copious notes about the right thing （often entirely contradictory）， and then give them the offending item as a gift to make up for it. By the end of the first week, the store was deep in arrears and running days behind schedule. They were supposed to have been to Courcelles by then, but Emmie had made it to only eight villages in five days, not the eighteen they were scheduled to serve.
“We need you on the Christmas party committee,” Alice had told her, but what it really meant was that they wanted her away from the store.
So Ethel Ledbetter had taken over the store, and Emmie had been sent down to the cellars to sort out Christmas presents for the women and children: a new suit of clothes, candy, and a toy for each child, and a practical present and candy for every adult.
It would all be fine, Emmie told herself as she stood in the freezing cellar, digging through boxes, checking her lists and matching up gifts with names, if only they had their trucks again. Then she could do what she was really here to do: social service work with the outlying villages. But the White truck was still in Paris, waiting for a hard rim to be put on, a simple job that was meant to take a week and seemed to be taking a month. The Ford truck had given up the ghost and was in Noyon for parts. Only the jitney still worked, and that sporadically, when coaxed.
The sous-préfet at Nesle, feeling sorry for them, had loaned them a horse and cart, but Tambour, the horse, had been around since roughly the days of Miss Ledbetter’s beloved Merovingians and deeply resented being asked to cart around muscular Americans. It took two of them to move him, one to drive and one to poke him with a stick. He moved at a rate of two miles an hour, when he deigned to move at all.
Kate, undaunted, had worked out a schedule, allocating use of the jitney and Tambour between the store, the doctors, and the social service department, with trips doubled up whenever possible, even though the doctors complained about riding with the store, with the rakes and hoes poking them in the posterior, and Miss Ledbetter complained that all those passengers were taking up room needed for goods.