Page 48

Domine, non sum dignus. . . .

Lord, I am not worthy.

Alice had looked around nervously and copied whatever Julia was doing, usually several seconds behind; Liza had bounced on the balls of her feet and made the wrong responses in the wrong places, but with vigor. Emmie, of course, sang loudest of all, and almost entirely out of tune. The French were very patient about it and complimented them all lavishly, and Kate had left feeling somehow—not cleansed, but with some unspoken fear unrealized.

Even the weather had cooperated. It was the most perfect sort of autumn day, the midday sun gilding the grass and the browning leaves, lighting the faces of the old Robecourts on the walls of the château. The mayor had cleaned all their uniforms for them and the gray with its touches of French blue looked wonderfully official as they all darted this way and that among the villagers, fetching milk, holding babies, explaining about the dispensary and the store.

The Unit was, Kate realized with a faint sense of disbelief, doing just exactly what it had set out to do. For all their differences, all their false starts, it was working. Over the past ten days, they had made a start, a true start. The social workers had been diligently making their rounds, bringing with them milk from their own cows. The villagers had begun to straggle into the makeshift clinic the doctors held at Grécourt in the mornings. Their traveling store was to begin the next day, the Ford truck loaded with the results of Maud’s buying trip to Paris.

Maud had brought with her not just the chickens but three of the missing members of their Unit: Miss Baldwin, the librarian, who had arrived clutching an armload of French children’s books she had begged, borrowed, or quite possibly stolen; Miss Mills, full of ideas about nursing picked up during her brief time at the Villier hospital (Kate foresaw trouble there with Julia, who had pointed out that Miss Mills hadn’t actually trained as a nurse); and Miss Ledbetter, the journalist, who came armed with a legion of anecdotes about the history of Grécourt from the Merovingians to the present, almost undoubtedly apocryphal. They had all found themselves retiring very early from dinner the previous night under the onslaught of Miss Ledbetter’s learned discourse.

Fran poked Kate in the arm. “Quick, the Ledbetter is heading our way. Time to get more sweets for the children.”

“Do we have more sweets for the children?” Maud had bought what she could in Paris, but anything made with sugar cost the earth, and whatever packages had been sent them from home were all held up by the Red Cross Clearing House, distributed as it pleased them.

“Does it matter?” asked Fran.

“Fair point,” said Kate. She’d been spending more and more time with Fran when not on her rounds, grateful for the other woman’s easy company. Kate was, if she was being honest, avoiding Emmie, who kept trying to have discussions about their feelings. Kate didn’t want to discuss her feelings. Much of the time she was so tired, she wasn’t even sure she had feelings, and she was really quite happy with that. “Poor Alice. The Ledbetter’s got her.”

“I’m sure she’ll be fascinated to hear all about Clovis’s triumph at whatever it was,” said Fran. Next to the refreshment table, Maud was whispering something to Liza, one eye on Mrs. Rutherford. “Maud’s looking quite cat and canary.”

“Have you heard she traveled first class on a third-class ticket?” Maud had only told them six times.

“No, did she?” With mock seriousness Fran said, “The real problem was that no one had thought to buy her a first-class ticket in the first place. This was only her way of putting the world back the way it ought to be.”

“Like those people who insist that if they’d been born centuries ago, they’d have been nobles and not peasants.”

“In a pointy hat,” agreed Fran. “With a tame unicorn by her side. Don’t mention it to Miss Ledbetter, though, or you’ll hear more than you ever wanted about it, with excursions into The Song of Roland and the Almanach de Gotha.”

“Were those at the same time?”

“I have no idea. I was always more interested in physics than history. We aren’t planning on letting Miss Ledbetter loose on those poor children, are we?”

“Not the littler ones. That’s Emmie and Anne Dawlish and Nell Baldwin. Emmie will recite lyric poetry at them, but I think they should be able to weather it.” She was being catty about Emmie and she shouldn’t be. The truth was, she was still annoyed at Emmie, even though she knew she shouldn’t be. And she was still punishing Emmie in small ways, even though she knew she shouldn’t be. It made Kate feel petty and horrible but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “Miss Ledbetter’s supposed to be helping to teach the older children.”

“You taught older girls, didn’t you?”

“Yes, French. I don’t think that would be much use here.”

Fran raised a brow. “Still.”

“I was a terrible teacher,” Kate said firmly. It wasn’t that she disliked children; she just had no talent for making them either love or mind her, not like Emmie, who collected small children like the Pied Piper. “I hated every minute of it and so did my unfortunate pupils. I refuse to inflict myself on these poor children.”

Fran looked with concern at the group in front of them. “They’re so quiet. Children that age—they should be making such a din we could scarcely hear ourselves think.”

Miss Dawlish was working on getting a group of children to link hands and dance in a circle to “Sur le Pont d’Avignon.” She waved her arms about, bending exaggeratedly from the waist. “Les beaux garçons font comme ca!”

The beaux garçons hung their heads and looked uncertainly at the ground.

No one was running. No one was singing. No one was misbehaving. Emmie was running this way and that, with hoops and ropes, trying to coax children into activity, with distinctly limited success.

“I don’t know much about children, but I do have four brothers. They used to tear through our house, screaming like banshees, chasing each other.” It had driven Kate mad at the time, the constant din, the way they would fling themselves at each other and at her. Although they were rather sweet when they were snuggled up in her lap. For about five minutes.

“My brother and I were the same way. It gave my mother headaches.” Fran thought for a moment. “To be fair, everything gave my mother headaches. But Freddie and I really were that awful.”

“Do you think it’s because they’re undernourished?” asked Kate doubtfully, eyeing the subdued children. They were certainly thin, there was no denying that, their skin an unhealthy gray, but it was more than that.

“They haven’t played for three years.” Dr. Stringfellow came and stood beside them, her eyebrows, for once, at rest. “They don’t remember how. Some of them have no memory of life being other than this. It’s sickening.”