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“Not much.” Emmie fought a disconcerting tendency to giggle. They’d gone from romance to farce, but, bizarrely, that made her feel better. It made it more real, somehow. More something that might actually happen to her, instead of a woman out of a book. “Come on, we’d best go get the coffee.”

She took his arm, and it felt entirely natural to do so, to walk down the duckwalk together with the sun shining on their heads.

Captain DeWitt—Will, she reminded herself—looked sideways at her. “They’ll all be talking about us now, won’t they?”

“They already were,” Emmie admitted, smiling despite herself. “We live in very close quarters here—it gives us something to talk about other than the war. Nell has been sneaking behind the barracks with one of the engineers and Florence has been walking out with a Canadian forester who doesn’t seem to mind that she hasn’t washed her hair since Christmas. She says it helps to keep warm. Oh, and Gwen Mills thinks we don’t know that she’s been exchanging letters with one of the doctors at the Red Cross hospital.”

“Emmie—” Will stopped her before she could lift the flap of the kitchen tent. “You do know, don’t you, that this isn’t just a wartime infatuation? This isn’t your friend and the forester or stealing kisses behind the barracks.”

Behind the barracks, Emmie thought, would be a much safer place than the duckwalk. She was rather sorry they hadn’t thought of it. Because if this was a wartime infatuation—well, maybe it made her a hussy, or a fallen woman, but she’d rather have all the memories she could have to take home with her once it was over.

Will tried to take her hands and remembered he was holding the coffeepot. “Before the war, when life was an endless garden party and the worst that might happen was tea gone tepid, I made the usual rounds of Saturday to Monday and did my duty at the requisite number of debutante dances. I’ve met any number of women I’m happy to esteem as friends, but never anyone I wanted to share a breakfast table with for the rest of my life.” Before Emmie could say anything, he added firmly, “That’s not the trenches speaking or the loneliness or delusion brought on by tainted food. That’s you. Because you’re like no one else in the world, and if the world had to come to this for me to find you—maybe the kaiser isn’t all that bad after all.”

“I really don’t think you should be saying that,” said Emmie in a voice that didn’t sound like her own. “Doesn’t that count as treason?”

“All right. We won’t invite the kaiser to the wedding,” said Will, his breath warm against her lips.

“That idiot of a Red Cross truck driver!” Emmie jumped roughly a foot in the air as Mme Gouge stomped up to them. “Pardon me—that man just makes me so angry. Did you want something?”

“Yes, some privacy,” muttered Will in English.

Emmie took the coffeepot from her would-be lover’s hand. She had very fond feelings about that coffeepot at present. She had very fond feelings about everything. But particularly the very annoyed Englishman standing next to her.

Demurely, Emmie handed the coffeepot to Mme Gouge. “Mrs. Barrett wanted a fresh pot of coffee for Colonel Hayes. And possibly a few biscuits?”

Chapter Twenty-Three

I want another month, perhaps two, to make sure the Unit is so firmly fixed in public opinion that no one could possibly contemplate sending them home again—or breaking them up into smaller groups and farming them out for canteen work, as the Red Cross is now threatening to do.

We are, as you may have heard, now officially under the control of the Red Cross.

Ruth Barrett is an expert politician and, I believe, equal to the task of making the Red Cross think they’re in charge while going on doing exactly what she wants to do. I just wish I knew for sure that what she wants to do is what I would like her to do. . . . It is particularly annoying having to run an organization through other people. They persist in having opinions of their own and those are not always what one would want those opinions to be. I have hopes of Kate Moran, but she’s young yet, and wants steadying.

Give the girls my love and tell them I’ll be home as soon as I may. I miss you all terribly.

—Mrs. Ambrose Rutherford (née Betsy Hayes), ’96, former director, to her husband, Ambrose Rutherford, Esq.

March 1918

Paris, France

“You look like you need a biscuit,” said Mrs. Rutherford.

Kate sat down gingerly on a silk-covered chair. Mrs. Rutherford was staying in a very grand house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the sort with ceilings higher than the heavens, windows that went on forever, and wall panels edged in gilt. Mrs. Rutherford’s battered suit with its sagging skirt and pouching pockets was decidedly incongruous next to all the ormolu and marquetry. “I think you’re confusing me with Liza.”

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Rutherford, rummaging in a large box and pulling out a battered packet of DeWitt’s rich tea biscuits. “I couldn’t possibly confuse you with anyone.”

There was something reassuringly mundane about that crumpled pack of cookies. The same couldn’t be said of the Greek gods holding court on the painted ceiling. “This is quite the place.”

“It’s on loan from an acquaintance. Cheaper than staying at a hotel,” Mrs. Rutherford added, handing Kate a biscuit. “This way, I can contribute my hotel fees to the Unit.”

She’d been here in Paris, all this time, donating money, chivvying reporters. But she’d left them on their own on one day’s notice.

“Why did you let them make you go?” It wasn’t what Kate had come to ask, but now that the question was out, she couldn’t stop. “If you’re still here, doing all this—why didn’t you stay?”

Mrs. Rutherford hesitated over two identical biscuits. She finally picked one. “You know that I was asked to resign.”

“Yes, but did you really have to listen?” There they had been, blundering their way along, freezing in barracks, desperately needing someone to give them guidance, while Mrs. Rutherford had been here, in this palace that looked like something out of the court of Louis XIV. “Or did you just not want to be there anymore?”