“Don’t worry, I’ll have you warm and comfortable in no time.” Murmuring useless nothings, Emmie tucked the blanket around the other woman and poked at the stove, which had gone out entirely. There was an old-fashioned flint sitting next to the stove. Emmie hadn’t the faintest idea how to use it.
With a surge of relief, Emmie remembered the matches in her haversack. Emmie made a fire as Mrs. Rutherford had taught them, sticks layered, little spills of paper to catch the flames, struck a match, and set it alight.
The kettle was bone-dry. So was the ewer. There was no water in the house. After checking on her patient, who called her Aurélie and grabbed at her hand, Emmie extracted herself and found the castle well. The Germans hadn’t bothered to poison it; it was too far away from the village. She held a cup of water to Mme Lepinasse’s lips, got her to drink a few sips, wiped away the spill.
By the time she had made the tea, in the broken Limoges teapot Mme Lepinasse had salvaged from the wreckage, Mme Lepinasse had lapsed into unconsciousness, her chest rising and falling with difficulty, her breath still showing in the air. Emmie stoked the stove, throwing in whatever she could find.
The snow fell harder and harder, drifting through the makeshift doorway. Emmie tried to pin the canvas down with a stone, but the wind howled through the edges. On her thin mattress, Mme Lepinasse stirred and whimpered, calling for Vincent, for Aurélie.
“I’m here, I’m here,” Emmie told her, kneeling by the cot, and Mme Lepinasse seemed comforted, at least a little. Emmie stayed by her, frozen in place. She tried to pray, bits and pieces floating through her head. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . . It was dreadfully shadowy here. He maketh me to lie beside green pastures. There had been green pastures here once. It was horrible to think what had been done, all the waste of it, so much lost, and why? She couldn’t even remember why anymore, only that here was a woman who had once had a home, a family, and lived now in a ruin with only a cat and a stranger to hold her hand, to sit by her in the valley of death.
Emmie didn’t know what time it was or how long she had been there. There was no way to measure time in that little room, with the old wooden shutters barred, the canvas pinned down, the only light the feeble glare of the stove.
“Mme Lepinasse?” Emmie whispered, but the only sound was the stove, and the hand in hers had gone limp. “Madame, wake up, it’s me, la dame Américaine.”
She wasn’t going to wake up, not ever, and Emmie knew it, had known it as soon as she had walked through that door and seen her lying there in that icebox of a room, forgotten, abandoned.
Emmie lowered her face to the dead woman’s hand and cried hopeless tears as the cat licked the salt from her cheeks.
Why hadn’t she thought to ask Dave before? Why hadn’t she taken Tambour? Why hadn’t she done something?
“I’m so sorry,” she apologized, but the other woman didn’t answer, couldn’t answer. She had survived the Germans, had survived torture, and succumbed to winter, to a cough. “If I had been here . . .”
If she had been here, she could have—what would she have done? Tried to shore up Mme Lepinasse’s poor little hut to keep the heat in better. Boiled up one of those blasted roosters to make her soup. Done something. Never mind that they lost more people to pneumonia than anything else. They shouldn’t. That was what they were there for.
It was winter, it was cold; it had been Emmie’s responsibility to look in on Mme Lepinasse, to look after her. It had all seemed so reasonable at the time; they hadn’t the trucks, everyone was taking turns. But in the meantime, Mme Lepinasse had been here, alone, sick.
Outside, the sky had darkened from silver to charcoal. Dusk. Emmie’s limbs felt stiff; she struggled through the snowdrifts down the hill, slipping and sliding, her skirt dragging at her legs, bumping into fallen stones obscured by the snow, too cold and numb to feel the pain, although she knew she’d have a nice set of bruises later.
The mayor received her with surprise, a baby on one hip and a toddler holding on to her skirt, in the half-destroyed stable she called home. Yes, they would see to the funeral arrangements when they could, but the snow—and it was dark already—and the way up to the castle treacherous. . . .
“Can’t anything be done for her?”
If it were summer . . . The mayor shrugged. In the cold, she would keep.
And Mme Lepinasse hadn’t been of the village. She had risked her life during the occupation to help smuggle food to the village, but she wasn’t one of their own, not really.