Page 38

Some wit had posted a sign over the green slime of the moat, saying “Bonne à Boire”: good to drink. Unless it wasn’t a joke at all.

There was reality for her, Kate thought wryly. The Germans had poisoned the wells, Mrs. Rutherford had said. Perhaps the green water of the moat really was bonne à boire in comparison.

“Ah, another early riser.” Mrs. Rutherford walked briskly toward her, coming from a dilapidated little house hard by the gates, just next to the bridge that led over the moat. “What do you think of our demesne?”

The archaic word just suited the scene. “I feel like I’ve wandered into Sleeping Beauty’s castle,” said Kate. She looked at the jagged walls of the château. “After the moths got at it.”

“Moths with teeth,” said Mrs. Rutherford, staring at one of the medallions that graced the facade, the portrait of a long-gone Robecourt, now half-crumbled. “It was beautiful once.”

There was a strange note to her voice. “Did you know this place? Before?”

“Briefly.” Mrs. Rutherford didn’t seem inclined to say more. After a moment, she said, “La Baronne de Robecourt relocated to a spa in Switzerland at the start of the war and left her people to fare as they would.”

Kate wished she could say she was surprised, but she wasn’t. The rich had always been good at protecting their own skins.

Mrs. Rutherford had used the feminine form of the title. “Is there no male article?” Kate asked.

Mrs. Rutherford began walking rapidly across the dew-slick grass, Kate trotting along behind. “The Baroness’s husband died some years ago. The current holder of the title is only a boy. I suppose not such a boy anymore. He ought to be nearly twenty by now.” They passed what had once been a greenhouse, reduced to twisted scraps of metal. “Madame la Baronne seems to have the strange notion that the war is a cross between a tennis match and a tea party. She wrote to the gardener’s wife asking her to see that the garden was kept in order in her absence.”

Kate looked at the great house, now missing several crucial details, like the entire third story. “Wouldn’t a roof be more to the point?”

“She hasn’t the faintest idea. She thinks she’ll return to everything as it was and all her loyal retainers tugging their forelocks.”

Kate looked down at her gray uniform skirt, more brown than gray with mud and dirt. “What does she have to say about our being here?”

Mrs. Rutherford’s lip curled. “She’s delighted to have a better class of women living in her cellars. She sent orders that the inhabitants—there are twenty-seven left in the village, just barely surviving—were to be turfed out in our favor. Let them eat cake. Or roots. When I came last month, they were terrified. They thought they were to be entirely homeless.”

Mrs. Rutherford was, Kate realized, blazingly angry, the sort of anger that expressed itself by not expressing itself. “That’s the very reverse of what we came here to do.”

Mrs. Rutherford gave a curt nod. “I told them not to be absurd, we’d do nothing of the kind. Of course, if we were being truly generous, we’d give them our barracks and sleep in the cellars.”

“I’m not sure that’s being generous.” The barrack had a roof, but that was about all that could be said of it.

“You haven’t seen the cellars yet.” Mrs. Rutherford gave her head a little shake. “Come. I’ll take you to see them—and to meet Madame la Maire. She’s mostly to be found at the washhouse this time of day.”

“Madame la Maire?” asked Kate, hurrying after her to a shack that lay to the right of the château, where a woman was making a vigorous job of scrubbing a woolen skirt.

“Most of the mayors in our villages are women—and doing a bang-up job of it too, with the resources they have. There’s only one man left in the pack,” said Mrs. Rutherford, “and no one likes him. They have their suspicions about how he avoided serving. But he knows too much about too many people, so they leave him be. Ah, Marie!”

The woman beating the clothes straightened.

Mrs. Rutherford hadn’t mentioned that their mayor was also their laundress. “Madame la Maire, this is Miss Moran, one of our chauffeurs.”

Marie nodded, started to speak, and then stopped, dropping to the ground and pressing her ear to the earth. “Do you hear it? They’re moving.”

“The lines,” said Mrs. Rutherford, as if this were all perfectly normal. “Marie’s husband, the baroness’s gardener, is at the front. She can hear which way the battle is moving from the trembling of the earth.”

Kate could hear a distant rumble, but the earth appeared to be entirely stationary for the moment.

“Ça va,” Marie said, and straightened, becoming immediately brisk and businesslike. “I take the dirty clothes on Monday. You will have them clean on Sunday. My boy will bring you hot water in the mornings for washing, one can per room, that is what we have arranged. I cooked for the Germans; I cook for you.”

“I hope we’re rather different from the Germans,” said Kate, nonplussed.

Marie looked at her with a jaundiced eye. “They were men. They ate more.”

The other girls were straggling out, blinking at the ruins. Kate was rather glad there wasn’t a mirror in the barrack, because if she looked anything like they did, she didn’t want to see it. Liza had a long crease down one cheek and Alice’s hair was all squashed to one side, like a cake that had overflowed the pan. Emmie’s hair was half-up, half-down, but that wasn’t anything out of the usual; that was just Emmie.

More introductions were made before their mayor excused herself to put on coffee and finish the wash, which was conducted to a strict schedule.