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Why hadn’t she thought to ask Dave before? Why hadn’t she taken Tambour? Why hadn’t she done something?

“I’m so sorry,” she apologized, but the other woman didn’t answer, couldn’t answer. She had survived the Germans, had survived torture, and succumbed to winter, to a cough. “If I had been here . . .”

If she had been here, she could have—what would she have done? Tried to shore up Mme Lepinasse’s poor little hut to keep the heat in better. Boiled up one of those blasted roosters to make her soup. Done something. Never mind that they lost more people to pneumonia than anything else. They shouldn’t. That was what they were there for.

It was winter, it was cold; it had been Emmie’s responsibility to look in on Mme Lepinasse, to look after her. It had all seemed so reasonable at the time; they hadn’t the trucks, everyone was taking turns. But in the meantime, Mme Lepinasse had been here, alone, sick.

Outside, the sky had darkened from silver to charcoal. Dusk. Emmie’s limbs felt stiff; she struggled through the snowdrifts down the hill, slipping and sliding, her skirt dragging at her legs, bumping into fallen stones obscured by the snow, too cold and numb to feel the pain, although she knew she’d have a nice set of bruises later.

The mayor received her with surprise, a baby on one hip and a toddler holding on to her skirt, in the half-destroyed stable she called home. Yes, they would see to the funeral arrangements when they could, but the snow—and it was dark already—and the way up to the castle treacherous. . . .

“Can’t anything be done for her?”

If it were summer . . . The mayor shrugged. In the cold, she would keep.

And Mme Lepinasse hadn’t been of the village. She had risked her life during the occupation to help smuggle food to the village, but she wasn’t one of their own, not really.

The mayor had children of her own; of course she wasn’t going up to the castle in the dead of night. And who else would go? Emmie knew the census of Courcelles by heart. The elderly, the infirm, children.

“Someone needs to feed her cat,” said Emmie helplessly, knowing that no one was going up there after a cat, not now. It was full dark and still snowing, light, indifferent flurries that didn’t care whether they fell on the living or the dead.

A broad swath of light suddenly swept the square. Emmie turned and squinted into the glare, which resolved itself into a Ford jitney, which groaned and rumbled its way through the snow, stopping in front of what had once been the town hall.

A small, well-wrapped figure swung down from the truck.

“There you are,” said Kate with relief. “We found your note when you didn’t come in for supper. What were you thinking, Emmie?”

“Kate.” Emmie clutched her friend’s gloved hand. “We need to bury Mme Lepinasse.”

“Madame—”

“Lepinasse. She’s all alone up in the castle and she—she was sick and alone and I thought with a little warmth and hot tea—but she’s dead, Kate. She’s dead and we can’t just leave her there. Do you have a shovel?”

Chapter Seventeen

We’ve had our first taste of real winter weather here—and I don’t mean just the water freezing in our pails. We’re used to that by now. We had our first snow this week and it took us all by surprise. The inhabitants say they’ve never known it to start so early and they hadn’t thought they’d see us again until spring. But nothing stops these women from their appointed rounds. Nell Baldwin staggered off to Esmery-Hallon and came back just before supper looking like a walking icicle. Our assistant director had to take our one working truck and go off after the Van Alden girl, who had, it appeared, spent all day in a miserable hut to make a dying woman as comfortable as possible (pneumonia, in case you were wondering—we have a great deal of pneumonia here).

As for yours truly, this morning, Dr. Pruyn and I arose at five thirty and started for Hombleux with the horse and cart (I use the term horse broadly) lent us by the sous-préfet. We got a little more than halfway and found the snow in such drifts that we had to abandon the cart entirely and walk the beast the rest of the way to Hombleux. I think it expected us to carry it, but we were already carrying half a medicine chest on our backs and had to decline.

If the snow keeps up, we are going to be in a very bad way indeed. Our villages cover such a large territory. . . .

—Dr. Ava Stringfellow, ’96, to her husband, Dr. Lawrence Stringfellow

December 1917

Grécourt, France

“Emmie.” Sick with relief at finding her, Kate grabbed Emmie before she could go haring off for a shovel. “We can’t just bury this—whoever it is. She’ll need the last rites. We’ll tell the commandant. He’ll send a priest. When the snow lets up,” she added with a grimace at the road, which wasn’t much of a road at the moment.

Emmie looked down at Kate with stricken eyes, making it impossible to be upset with her. “But we can’t just leave her! Her cat will eat her.”

Kate wasn’t quite sure cats ate people like that, but she knew that once Emmie got an idea in her head, there was no budging it. “Which one is the mayor?” she asked resignedly.

The mayor, unfortunately, was no more excited than Kate by the idea of hiking up the snow-covered hill to fetch a body. Also, Kate was interfering with her children’s bedtime and letting the cold air in.

Five minutes later, Kate returned to Emmie with the best compromise she could broker. “She says the Germans used the old bathhouse as a morgue. If we get Mme Lepinasse down, we can put her there.”

And that was how Kate found herself, in the dark, the ruins of a medieval castle looming over her, carrying a body down a hill, with Mme Lepinasse’s cat hissing and spitting irritably from the depths of Emmie’s haversack. She was also liberally coated with snow from having fallen while carrying said corpse.