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“Do they? They both have such—such a sense of purpose. I can’t imagine there’s anything that bothers Anne that she couldn’t just hammer away. She’s got those boys making shelves for their new social center, and all the girls sewing curtains. . . .”

“Yes, and you have three trucks that you somehow keep running. Alice?” Emmie wasn’t sure where the idea came from; it just sprang on her out of nowhere. “There’s been something I’ve been wanting to ask you. . . .”

Alice paused in her seed sorting, looking deeply wary. “Yes?”

“Would you be willing to teach me how to drive?” The second she said it, Emmie knew it was an awful idea, but she plowed on regardless. “You’re our best driver—and I’m afraid the others would make fun. I’m horrible at anything mechanical. And you know when someone says go right, I always go left. Never mind. Maybe I shouldn’t try. We don’t have enough trucks to be worth risking my wrecking one.”

“No, no,” said Alice, setting down her seed packets. “You can’t possibly do any worse than Red Cross Dave. And why should it matter about your right and your left? I’ll tell you what to do, and we’ll just follow the road—but not near the ditch.”

“Are you sure? I really don’t want to be a bother. . . . And we do have so many seeds to deliver. . . .”

Alice straightened, adjusting her collar. “Yes, I’m sure. We can start now.”

“Now?” asked Emmie apprehensively. “Now as in now?”

“We won’t waste any extra essence that way,” said Alice, suddenly brisk. “I’ll show you what everything is and what you do, and then when we find a straight stretch of road on our way to drop off the seeds, we’ll swap.”

Emmie wasn’t entirely sure that her definition of a straight stretch of road and Alice’s coincided, but if Emmie stalled the truck three times on the first attempt, at least she could tell herself it was all in aid of making Alice feel better. Alice was endlessly patient, explaining the same things over and over, without reproach. This was a very different Alice, an assured, confident Alice, not the Alice who simpered and tittered and always chose the absolute worst sort of hat.

“You’re really very good at this,” said Emmie as Alice directed her around a pothole.

“My father always said that I was the son he never had,” said Alice. She grimaced. “My mother said that if I wasn’t pretty, at least I could be useful. Not like my sister. . . . Look, Emmie! You’re driving!”

“Wait, I’m—what?” Emmie turned, forgetting that she was holding the wheel. The wheel turned with her. So did the truck.

“Not the ditch.” Alice lunged over her to grab the wheel, wrestling them back onto the road. “But there, you see? You did it! You weren’t even thinking about it and you drove the truck a good half mile.”

“I drove the truck?” She knew she’d been sitting there, holding the wheel, but she hadn’t quite equated that with the magical act of mechanics that the other girls were capable of accomplishing.

“Yes,” said Alice, beaming at her. “You drove the truck. Now do it again. It’s just repetition—like sewing. The more you do it, the less you have to think about it.”

“A friend offered to teach me once, in Newport,” Emmie confided to Alice, “but I was afraid I would take the car over a cliff.”

“Well, there aren’t any cliffs here,” said Alice. “Now I’ll show you how to back her up. . . .”

The fence, Alice assured her, had been rotten and on the verge of falling over anyway. And the Tommy she nearly hit was very nice about it and didn’t even bother to check her pass, even though he was standing there as part of a checkpoint. In fact, he seemed very eager to see them on their way.

“Oh no,” said Alice, when Emmie suggested that maybe that was a sign she shouldn’t be driving after all. “If that were the case, no one would let Red Cross Dave behind the wheel. Or Alfalfa Bill.”

Alfalfa Bill had spent two days living in the basse-cour, doing odd jobs for the Unit, after ditching his truck in the mud by the gate and declaring himself incapable of getting it out again.

“Yes, but do you think they’re really that bad at driving, or they just want Madame Gouge’s coffee?” Emmie asked seriously.

Alice shrugged. “Either way, by the end of the week, you’ll be a better driver than either of them, I promise.”

Emmie wasn’t sure about that, but Alice was relentless. Emmie drove on every straight stretch. She drove when they took out the store on Monday and Wednesday, distributing milk and seeds and selling the usual selection of aprons and sabots and kitchen implements. She drove when they took Nell to Canizy and Anne to Verlaines, where both were working on outfitting social centers for the villagers. She’d thought they might be nervous at driving with her, but they weren’t; they were too taken up with talking about the social centers and the various classes they intended to hold.

“I’m fitting up a corner as a dispensary,” said Nell, who had raided the Hague trunks for first-aid supplies. “Don’t you think that will be a huge help? Then the doctors don’t have to carry everything with them when they make their rounds. We can start working out of the villages instead of carrying everything on our backs like a snail. Or do I mean a turtle?”

That afternoon, Emmie managed to drive the truck through the gates and over the bridge, a feat that Dave and Bill had yet to master.

Alice gave her an approving nod. “You see? You should get Mrs. Barrett to add you to the chauffeur list.”

The chauffeur list. They depended on their chauffeurs like nothing else. The idea that she could climb into a truck and take them where they needed to go, without asking Kate or someone else to drive . . . according to Mrs. Barrett’s schedule, of course. “Won’t I need a driving license?”

“It wasn’t very hard to get one—when Kate and Julia come back, you could go to Paris and take the test. It would make such a difference having another driver.”

Emmie climbed down, lingering by the side of the truck. “Aren’t two of the new girls meant to drive? Williams and White?”