set up in all the villages for schools and clubhouses. In the meantime—there’s this lovely green field here. And on rainy days, they can come to the Orangerie.”
“With the dispensary,” said Dr. Stringfellow. “And the trucks.”
“You won’t have to hunt them down for medical care,” said Mrs. Rutherford brightly. “Think of the time saved! Besides, the dispensary will only be at Grécourt at certain times. And the trucks will be out all hours, so it scarcely matters, does it? If you’ll follow me through here—watch your step, Miss Cooper!—these are the old cellars. We can use them for storage.”
“We do need storage space,” said Kate, thinking of everything they had dragged along with them, all their plans for a store. Their barracks barely had room for them, much less all the various goods and chattels they intended to sell to the villagers.
Kate followed along after Emmie, her steps slowing as the smell struck her. Something had been rotting here. For a very long time.
Alice Patton held her handkerchief to her nose.
“Oh goodness,” said Emmie, her voice very small. Kate couldn’t bring herself to say anything at all; she was too busy trying not to gag. “What happened here?”
“Germans,” said Mrs. Rutherford succinctly. Her hands were on her hips and she looked distinctly displeased. “Monsieur le Commandant Monin promised me this would all be cleaned up by the time we arrived. The Germans lodged here just before they retreated and made the most terrible mess.”
Indoor latrines, from the look of it. Bunks made of chicken wire, padded with filthy straw, testified to just how many men had been crammed into the underground space. Someone had started a calendar, so many notches to the week. The walls were scrawled with slogans in German.
Miss Dawlish, who spoke the language, turned red and looked away.
“What does it say?” asked Liza.
“I don’t think we want to know,” said Fran Englund.
“I—I don’t know most of the words,” said Miss Dawlish. “I don’t think I want to.”
“They said two hundred men lodged down here,” said Mrs. Rutherford, unperturbed. “Of course, it wasn’t quite this bad before they dynamited the place and parts of the wall and the ceiling came down. It would have been watertight then, at least.”
It certainly wasn’t now. Damp dripped down the walls and seeped from the ceiling. It was cold, terribly, bone-chillingly cold.
“Didn’t you say the villagers have been living in the cellars?” asked Kate incredulously. She supposed it was better than no roof at all, but these were conditions that made the miserable apartment she and her mother had once shared look like a rest cure.
“In the stable cellars, not these. I’ll take you to them in a moment. In addition to being in our charge, they are an invaluable source of information about the other villages. Marie tells me there’s a little Boche baby that was born in Canizy just last week, Ava,” added Mrs. Rutherford as an aside to Dr. Stringfellow as they all struggled up out of the cellars, bumping into each other in their eagerness to get up into the clear air, away from the stench and despair. “You’ll want to visit the mother and the child.”
“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