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“A Boche baby?” asked Alice, trying to hold her skirt out of the muck.

“A German father,” explained Mrs. Rutherford. “The mother is little more than a child—she was one of the spoils of war.”

“A Boche baby sounds like it ought to be born with horns and a tail,” mused Liza, tromping up the stairs behind.

“It’s half-French,” pointed out Kate with some asperity. She was a mutt herself and hadn’t enjoyed hearing her stepfather’s relations shaking their heads over her Bohemian blood, as if being her father’s daughter made her somehow prone to fits or howling at the moon.

“Only the horns, then,” said Fran, deadpan.

“Poor baby,” said Emmie. “And that poor mother too. We must make sure we go to her straightaway.”

“All of them need us straightaway. That’s the challenge of it,” said Mrs. Rutherford, waiting for everyone to join her by the ruined Orangerie that was to be their center of operations.

Once someone had swept it. And painted it. And put oilcloth on it.

The magnitude of it all pressed down upon Kate, and she found herself frustrated beyond measure by everyone and everything, by Mrs. Rutherford’s blind optimism and Emmie’s romanticism and those looks Maud kept giving Liza, those “I told you so” looks, all the more annoying because Kate tended to agree with her.

“Then we’ll just have to be organized about it,” said Kate sharply. “If we just run around scattershot, we’ll never get anywhere. We’ll need to go through the villages one by one and make lists of the people in them, who they are, and what they need from us in terms of supplies and medical care.”

“Oh, is that all?” said Maud, rolling her eyes at Liza.

“That’s a great deal,” said Mrs. Rutherford soberly. “You have no idea what a very great deal.”

Neither had Kate.

They set out after breakfast, two to a truck, taking with them piles of baby clothes and linens, what milk they had, and some small assorted medical supplies they’d been able to cobble together by going through their personal possessions for plasters and headache powders.

They visited with the villagers first, in the stable cellars, and no one made the obvious comments about mangers because the reality of it was too grim for joking. Twenty-three women, ranging in age from eighteen to eighty, one teenage boy, and three children, all living in the remains of a stable, water pooling in places on the floor.

Twenty-seven people grateful to have any roof at all, even a broken one.

Kate had a vague notion that things would get better the farther they got from Grécourt, that the more remote the hamlet, the more it might have been spared. They left Miss Dawlish behind to minister to the castle folk and set out to begin their inspections. The idea was that they would start with a social worker, a doctor, and a driver in each car, but they had three trucks and only two doctors, so Kate and Emmie made their way east on their own, across roads rutted by army trucks, bearing the scars of old military movements.

The first town they stopped at made Grécourt look like a thriving metropolis. There was only one house left standing; the rest had been deliberately destroyed.

Emmie consulted Mrs. Rutherford’s list. “There are fifty children living here.”

“Where?” asked Kate, looking around the ruins. The Germans had been thorough; she’d give them that. The houses were rubble, only bits of wall still standing.

“Wherever they can, I imagine. You’ll take notes for me, won’t you?” asked Emmie, wiggling down from the White.

“Of course.” Kate guiltily swung her own legs over the side. No point in telling Emmie that she’d hoped her job ended with the driving. What was she to say to a French villager? I’m so sorry? The words stuck on her tongue.

“It makes it easier to talk if they don’t see me writing things down,” Emmie explained, as though she had done this a hundred times before. “It’s easier if it’s someone else taking notes. If I were by myself, I’d try to do it by memory, but since your French is better than mine anyway . . . Bonjour! Madame? Nous sommes les Collégiennes Américaines. . . .”

The first place they visited was a stable, although to call it that lent it a dignity it didn’t have. It had been a distinctly one-horse shelter, roughly the size of Kate’s boardinghouse room in Boston. Her despised room felt like a palace in comparison. Kate picked her way across the muddy dirt floor, weaving between wooden boards that had been laid on the ground in lieu of beds. A pallet in the corner was occupied by an old woman, snoring gently, her teeth in a cracked teacup beside her. A girl of about ten, with a dirty cap covering snarled hair, was cooking over a makeshift fire, ringed with stones.

A woman wearing a stained dress, a baby on her hip, came to greet them. Oh yes, she’d heard of them. The crazy ladies with the trucks. She didn’t put it quite that way, but the inference was clear. Everyone seemed to have already heard about their driving around in circles three hundred yards from the castle.

“If you had only followed the signposts . . .” said their hostess helpfully, sticking her knuckle into the baby’s mouth to suck to stop it crying. Kate added a note to get some pacifiers in. Also to strangle Julia.

Emmie made a comic tale of their misadventures, and, in no time, the woman was telling them her story. The woman in the bed was her mother, who was ill; make no mistake, in full possession of her wits, just bedridden and cranky, it was the rheumatism, you know, which had been made worse by being evicted from their house, which had had four good bedrooms and silk paper on the wall of the dining room—“We’ll send our doctors to look at her,” Emmie promised. “Don’t worry. They’re good doctors”—her husband was away with the army; her oldest two sons, ages twelve and fourteen, had been taken away by les boches to a work camp in Germany, and no word had come since. Six other children, ranging in age from ten to two months (the baby wailed to confirm that he was, in fact, that young) shared the small room.

“We had a house once,” the woman insisted. “A very nice house.”

“And you will again,” said Emmie with such assurance that Kate nearly believed it. “With silk paper on the walls of the dining room. We’re waiting for our cows to be delivered, but once they come, we’ll be able to start bringing milk. When was the last time you had milk for the children?”

It all seemed a bit haphazard, but as Emmie chatted and Kate scribbled as hard as she could, a very sizable dossier of information emerged: where the family had lived, who was missing, what they needed, information about the other inhabitants of the village.