Finally, finally, Mme Lepinasse was safely stowed in the makeshift morgue and her cat with the mayor, whose toddler had been delighted and immediately tried to pull its tail.
Emmie looked anxiously over her shoulder as she climbed into the jitney. “D-do you think we should try to go straight to Amiens to get them to s-send a p-priest?”
“Wrap yourself up in that lap rug,” ordered Kate as she vigorously turned the crank, her breath steaming in the cold air. “And no. No one will come tonight. We’d best get back to Grécourt and send word in the morning. If the roads are clear enough.”
They weren’t clear now. The lamps of the jitney glinted off an entirely unrecognizable landscape, softened by snow, the barbed wire and broken buildings all turned into something pure and lovely.
“It looks like gingerbread,” said Emmie dreamily. In the light of the car lamps, her lips were a distinct blue. Kate could practically see the veins through her skin. “A gingerbread world, all frosted with sugar.”
“When’s the last time you ate?” Kate asked.
“Breakfast?” Emmie stirred a little, pulling herself upright. “I guess that would explain why I’ve been feeling so light-headed.”
“Yes,” said Kate resignedly. “Yes, it would.”
This was the problem of trying to be angry with Emmie. One just couldn’t, not for extended periods of time. Emmie was so busy giving and giving and giving that she never thought to care for herself, so that, inevitably, someone—that someone being Kate—had to step in and do it for her, and you just couldn’t stay angry at someone who didn’t even remember to eat.
Emmie fingered her haversack. “I’ve some DeWitt’s in my satchel. I brought them for Mme Lepinasse.”
And that was just like Emmie too. She’d set the biscuits on the woman’s grave as funeral offerings rather than eat them herself. As gently as she could, Kate said, “I’m sure she wouldn’t begrudge them to you.”
“No, she wouldn’t—she liked feeding people. She’d been a cook, you know. Up at the castle. And then, during the war—she helped feed the village.” Emmie clutched her haversack with both hands. “She wasn’t even that old. About the same age as my mother. In her fifties, maybe. I keep thinking, if only I had come sooner . . .”
Kate felt a brief stab of guilt. She’d made out the rota for truck use as fairly as she could. And Courcelles was so far, on the outer edges of their rounds. It used up so much essence and essence was in such short supply. “You weren’t to know.”
“But I should have known. If I had been doing my job . . .” Emmie squirmed on the bench seat. “She had no one, Kate. Just us.”
More sharply than she intended, Kate said, “There are two thousand people here who need us. Many of them have no one. You can’t let yourself get too attached.”
“Too attached?” Emmie stared at her in horror. “They’re people, Kate.”
“So are we.” Kate’s shoulders tensed as the jitney wobbled in the deep tracks left by some larger, heavier vehicle. She had never been so aware of her own frailty, her own limitations. Just flesh and blood and force of will. “We’re only people, Emmie. We can’t be in fifty places at once.”
“If we changed the schedule—” Emmie began.
“How?” They’d come to a crossroads. Kate swung the truck east, toward Grécourt. “There are only fifteen of us—thirteen now, with Maud and Liza in Paris. I wish we could do more. I wish we had trucks that worked, Emmie, and people to drive them, but there’s only so much we can do with what we have.”
“What if I learned how to drive? If we had another driver—”
The thought of Emmie at the wheel was so horrifying that Kate turned her head for a moment to look at Emmie. A mistake. Ahead of them on the road, a dark shape loomed up, large as a woolly mammoth. Breathing in sharply, thinking all the words her mother had told her never to say, Kate braked hard, feeling a sickening lurch as the truck swayed and spun.
For a moment, she thought she could feel Nick Penniston’s hands on her shoulders, hear his confident voice saying, “If you lose control of the machine, drive into the spin.”
Blindly, Kate turned the wheel in the direction of the skid, feeling the truck finally, mercifully, stop, just short of a snow-covered hedge.
She sat there, breathing hard, a cold sweat prickling beneath the linen and wool of her uniform.