Page 115

“Did your students tie up your hands? Steal your ink? I wrote to you and wrote to you and wrote to you. Don’t tell me you wrote back,” said Emmie passionately as Kate opened her mouth. “Two lines every six months hardly counts. I told myself it was because you were working and busy and didn’t have the time . . . but maybe it was that you just didn’t want to be bothered with me anymore.”

Kate’s mouth opened and then closed again. She shook her head, entirely at a loss for words.

“I made you come out here. I know you didn’t want to. And I know you feel obligated to take care of me.” The words felt like knives; every single one tore at Emmie’s throat. “But you don’t have to anymore. I’d rather fail of my own accord than have you holding me up when you don’t want to.”

Kate’s knuckles were white against the edge of her cot. “You say that now—”

“I mean it!” Stung, Emmie retorted, “I know I’ve made mistakes, but you have too, Kate! What about Douilly? You should have seen something was wrong with Ethel’s reports!”

Kate’s throat worked, as if she was finding it hard to swallow. “When was I meant to do that?” Her voice crackled with frustration. “When I was reading fifteen other reports? When I was driving the truck to take the doctors to every village between here and creation? I can’t do everything!”

“No, you can’t.” Emmie sat back on her bed, feeling exhausted and sad. She wasn’t angry anymore. She wasn’t sure what she was. She felt about a hundred years old. “We’re meant to be a unit, Kate. We’re meant to work together. Not you running around trying to do everything and making yourself and everyone else miserable. That’s what Mrs. Barrett has been trying to tell you. That’s why she sent you away.”

“So I wouldn’t make you all miserable?” Kate looked absolutely ghastly, like someone in the last stages of consumption. “You try making all the decisions. . . .”

“But you shouldn’t have to make all the decisions. That’s just the point.” Emmie clasped her hands together in her lap, trying to make Kate understand, trying to salvage something. “If you’d trusted any of the rest of us just a little—”

With a swift movement, Kate extinguished the small lamp sitting on her steamer trunk. She rolled herself in her bedroll, turning her neatly braided head away from Emmie.

“It’s a good thing you have Mrs. Barrett, then, isn’t it?”

Chapter Twenty-Five

I’ve been meaning to thank you for my Christmas boots. I got some strange looks for them in Paris, but I’ve got the warmest, driest feet in the Unit and wouldn’t take them off for anything.

We may not have terribly much more time here. There’s not much I can tell you without running afoul of the censor, but I’m well and working hard, and you’re not to worry. We’ve had some measles in the Unit—I’m so glad I got it out of the way all those years ago, although I imagine it wasn’t much fun for you. I don’t remember much of it, but I do remember your reading me the same book over and over and over.

Things are a bit tense here, but the Unit has brave friends holding the line. There are even some of our very own boys from Brooklyn in the engineers. We had a mass at the village church our first month here, and the engineers sent over six of the men who were Catholic. I’m pretty sure I recognized at least one boy from St. Mary’s—although I’m very glad Matt and Timmy and Pat and Johnnie are safe home and not here with us.

New York seems a long way off just now. . . . I feel like a soldier writing his farewell letter home before going into action—which is very silly of me. I’ll write again soon and you’ll undoubtedly hear from the papers whatever happens long before this gets to you.

I’m sorry if this is muddled—the guns have been going nonstop for two days, so it’s hard to think, let alone write. I know I don’t write enough. But I do love you all.

—Miss Katherine Moran, ’11, Assistant Director, to her mother, Mrs. Francis Shaughnessy

March 1918

Grécourt, France

Mrs. Barrett left on a Monday.

“You didn’t have to see me off,” Mrs. Barrett said, drawing on her gloves and checking once again to see that she had her feuille bleue and carnet rouge, the papers that gave her access in and out of the war zone. “I’m only gone for a week—it’s hardly call for a committee.”

Kate shielded her eyes against the sun rising over the ruined walls of the château. “No, but I just wondered if you had any last instructions. . . .”

“My dear.” Mrs. Barrett put her gloved hand over Kate’s. “You girls have the work well in hand. Just go on doing what you’re doing. And take some time for play. Alice and Nell tell me the Englishmen quartered at Hombleux have a cinema going in an old barn. You ought to go with them once or twice.”

Kate blinked against the sun. Since her fight with Emmie, she’d felt strangely raw, as though her shell had been pried off her like a lobster, and every passing breeze touched a nerve. “Is that an order?”

“Consider it a suggestion,” said Mrs. Barrett. “A strong suggestion.”

Which, thought Kate, was just what Emmie had been telling her. That leading didn’t mean ordering people about. It meant trusting them to make their own decisions. But what if that didn’t work? What if the decisions they made were the wrong ones?

It was fine for Emmie to complain about Kate treating her like a child. Kate had never wanted to be here in the first place; it was Emmie who had dragged her here, Emmie who had insisted she needed her. If she was treating Emmie like a child, it was because Emmie asked to be treated like a child.

But it hit Kate in the gut, all the same.

She’d thought they’d been happy at Smith. It had seemed to work then. Emmie provided all the affection and Kate provided the practical skills, and between them, they balanced out rather nicely. She’d been happy to help Emmie with her Latin, and if they joked about things like Emmie being hopeless at remembering directions—well, it was a fond joke. She’d never thought Emmie minded. It was Emmie who was always reminding everyone that she would never have got through Smith without Kate, which Kate had always taken as just another sign of noblesse oblige, Emmie trying to make her feel important, make up for the difference in their situations.