. beautiful. She hadn’t expected beauty. She had been braced for ugliness, for trenches and barbed wire and ruin. There was ruin here, but even the ruin looked picturesque, as though the manor house had crumbled into disrepair in centuries past, had sat here, like the Beast’s garden, for a century or more, and not been deliberately bombed out by the Germans just this past spring.
It made her wary. The loveliness of the woods, the russet vines twining around a stone tower, the stolid redbrick facade of the village church, strangely unmarred by war. It felt like a trick, a way to lure them into a false sense of security.
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