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He smiled down at her, a little creakily. “You’ve discovered me, I see.”

“Do those Frenchies seek you everywhere?”

He grimaced. “It’s not much of a guess whether this is heaven or hell.”

“‘The mind is its own place,’” quoted Emmie, feeling a bit giddy, “‘and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.’”

“When Milton wrote that,” said the British officer wryly, “he’d clearly never been to the Somme. Besides, it’s not fair switching authors. Next I’ll trot out John Donne and then we’ll be wallowing in Shakespeare before you know it.”

“Would that be so terrible?” asked Emmie, enjoying herself tremendously and feeling vaguely guilty about it.

“It depends on whether you mean to quote Much Ado or Titus Andronicus.”

“Possibly Troilus and Cressida,” said Emmie determinedly, “but never Titus.”

“‘What plagues and what portents!’” he recited softly. “‘What mutiny! . . . Frights, changes, horrors . . . enterprise is sick.’ There’s your Troilus and Cressida for you—and all too apt. Didn’t I tell you we were in danger of Shakespeare once we started?”

“We could try Keats instead,” suggested Emmie, wanting to shake that frozen look from his face.

“Beauty is truth? Maybe that means, then, that all this ugliness is nothing but a lie, an illusion—but it’s a very solid one.” He took her hand, his skin surprisingly warm through his gloves. “I would far rather stay and debate poets, but I have a rendezvous with a train.”

It hit Emmie like a vat of cold water. “Wait, are you going back to—”

“To the front? Yes.” Of course he was. That was why he was here. That was why they were all here.

In the delight of finding someone who spoke her language, even a slightly foreign dialect of it, she had allowed herself to forget, and the full horror of it rushed back upon her, choking her.

“I—I wish you well.” What else did one say to a man heading to horrors unspeakable? “Good luck.”

“And to you,” he said solemnly. He raised his hat to her. “To decency and those who persist in practicing it.”

With that he was gone, walking away, straight-backed. He hadn’t, Emmie realized, ever told her his name.

“Who was that?” demanded Maud, arriving pink-cheeked with an empty basket.

Emmie looked after him, joining a group of men similarly garbed. “Sir Percy Blakeney. Baronet.”

“Oh, is he a friend of your family?” Maud didn’t wait for her to answer, setting down her empty basket on the table and adjusting her hat to a more becoming angle. “It’s amazing the people one knows who one meets here. Liza and I just bumped right into the cousin of a friend of one of my parents’ neighbors from Montclair—”

Emmie didn’t even try to untangle the relationship. She let Maud ramble on while she looked again for the British officer, but there were too many khaki uniforms to find one specific one. It seemed unlikely she would ever see him again. Their discussion felt, already, vaguely unreal.

But she was glad, glad to have met him even for that moment. It had made her feel like herself again, for the first time in a very long time.

“—which is why what I wanted to talk to you about is so important.”

“What you wanted—” Emmie blinked, trying to remember what Maud had been saying.

Maud sighed with exaggerated patience. “Yes, about our boys. I really think it’s absurd that we’re bothering with livestock and all that when we could be here, doing something for our boys.”

Emmie looked out at the rows and rows of troops, French and English and American. One could tell the Americans because they looked much better fed than their Continental counterparts, their uniforms fresher and cleaner. “But we are here, doing something for our boys.”

“Yes, now. But what about when Mrs. Rutherford gets back? If she has her way, she’ll drag us out to some godforsaken place to do goodness only knows what.”

“But we do know what,” said Emmie, feeling vaguely bewildered. “We’re to offer aid to those in the devastated zone.”

“You mean practically in the trenches,” said Maud. “That might have made sense four months ago, but you must agree, now that the new offensive is on, it’s perfectly insane to be even thinking of going anywhere near the front.”

“There’s a new offensive on?” That was one of the strangest things about being in Paris; they heard so much less about the war than they had in New York. The censors did their work well. But Maud appeared to have her ways, which, as far as Emmie could tell, consisted of dining out with a great many friends of friends and shamelessly interrogating all of them.