Dedication

  To the real founding members of the Smith College Relief Unit, heroes all:

  Margaret Ashley, ’14

  Marion Bennett, ’06

  Elizabeth H. Bliss, ’08

  Marjorie Leigh Carr, ’09

  Anne M. Chapin, ’04

  Elizabeth M. Dana, ’04

  Ruth Gaines, ’01

  Harriet Boyd Hawes, ’92

  Catherine B. Hooper, ’11

  Ruth Joslin, ’12

  Maud Kelly

  Alice E. Leavens, ’03

  Millicent V. Lewis, ’07

  Lucy O. Mather, ’88

  Alice Weld Tallant, ’97

  Frances W. Valentine, ’02

  Marie L. Wolfs, ’08

  Margaret G. Wood, ’12

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Lauren Willig

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Dear Ma and Dad,

  I know this may come as some surprise, but I’ve decided to leave my position at Miss Cleary’s to join the Smith College expedition to France

  Dear Ma and Dad,

  I hope the boys are well. I have some exciting news to share. I’ve signed up with the Smith College Relief Unit. We’re a group of alumnae who mean to sail for France to bring aid to French villagers. I’ve resigned my position at

  Dear Ma and Dad,

  You may have read in the news about the Smith College Relief Unit.

  Dear Ma,

  Would it be all right if I joined you all for dinner next Sunday? I’ll be in town and would very much like to see everyone.

  Your loving daughter, Katie

  —Miss Katherine Moran, ’11, to her mother, Mrs. Francis Shaughnessy

  July 1917

  New York

  It was a very long way down to the wharf from the deck of the SS Rochambeau.

  Kate hadn’t expected the boat to be quite so large. When Mrs. Rutherford had informed them that a packet boat would be carrying the Smith Unit across the Atlantic to France, she had pictured a cross between the Staten Island Ferry and one of the barges that chugged along the East River, something squat and rectangular and human-sized. Not this behemoth of a ship, taller than a town house, giant smokestacks punctuating the sky, crowded with war workers of all description. American ambulance men exchanged war stories with French aviators; journalists jostled aid workers.

  Kate felt smaller than small in the midst of it, among all these laughing, shouting groups, families hugging, mothers kissing their sons one last time, champagne corks—of all things!—popping, baskets of fruits and bouquets of flowers piled into the arms of overworked porters, already staggering under piles of trunks and bandboxes and goodness only knows what else. It felt more like Smith graduation than an embarkation.

  Well, she hadn’t really expected them to come, had she? Her mother had made her disapproval clear.

  “Have you run mad?” was a phrase that didn’t leave itself open to much misinterpretation.

  There were lifeboats all around, swung out in the ready position in case of need. On the walls, strongly worded notices forbade such dangerous activities as smoking after blackout once they reached the war zone.

  Blackout. War zone. Maybe her mother was right; maybe she had run mad.

  Blame the day. That July day that had been hotter than hot, her room in the boardinghouse sweltering, the stupider-than-usual student who had come to her for tutoring in French, the sweat dripping down the back of her neck making her itchy and irritable. At that moment, any place in the world had seemed preferable to where she was, to that horrible, stultifying room that stank of cabbage, the brainless debutantes she had elected to teach in what had been meant to be a temporary position but had become six years of mindless drudgery.

  Kate hadn’t cared terribly much about the cause itself. But the idea that someone would pay her way—there were funds, Emmie assured her; it wouldn’t be charity, nothing like charity—to go abroad had seemed too good a chance to miss.

  We need you, Kate, Emmie had pleaded, and she’d allowed herself to be persuaded, less from charity than from desperation, desperation to be anywhere other than where she was.

  She knew it was madness in her mother’s eyes. Here she was, with a good position, a respectable position—a teacher at a private girls’ school! She would never have to scrub floors and empty chamber pots, as her mother had; never have to wear a white cap and lower her eyes and curtsy to her betters as they swept past her, making dark prints on a floor she had just cleaned.

  She had gone off to Smith, and look what had happened.

  Her mother hadn’t said that, not precisely, but it was there between them. There in all the things they never said; there in Kate’s clothes, her accent, the way her dad (not her father, always her dad, the man her mother had married when she was nine, kind, always kind, but not her father, never her father) called her “our college girl.” They were proud, yes, but also wary. She’d become a thing apart.

  Or maybe she always had been. Kate was the one relic of her mother’s first marriage. You could stick a ring in a drawer, but flesh and blood was harder to hide, especially flesh and blood that was old enough to remember and to mind that her past was being scrubbed away like chalk from a board. The early years, when her father had driven the cart for the brewery and come home smelling of beer and horse to tell long stories in his heavily accented English. And, after that, the lean years, when she and her mother had been all in all to each other, sharing a bed in the one-room apartment where the radiators never worked and the water came out brown, where her mother scrubbed the stairs in exchange for the roof over their heads, where they ate bread and dripping for supper and pretended it was all they wanted. It had been hard, but they had been together. They had been themselves.

  But then had come Frank Shaughnessy, member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, one of Brooklyn’s finest, a good man, a steady man, a policeman. Her mother had put cotton gloves over her reddened hands. There had been meat in the stew and sweet-smelling things in the kitchen and four little brothers, one after the other, each louder than the last. Kate had spent more and more time in the local library, reading her way around the shelves as the light shifted with her, the first one there after school, the last one out at dusk.

  Her parents might blame Smith for making her a stranger, but it had all happened long before Smith; she’d been a shadow on the edge of their life well before she’d won the scholarship that took her to Northampton.

  The one time Kate tried to go back, after Smith, after that summer with Emmie in Newport—well, suffice it to say it hadn’t been a success. It wasn’t that there hadn’t been room for her. They’d made room, even though it was tight in that two-family house with her four brothers all crammed into one room. But they hadn’t known what to do with her or she with them. The men her stepfather had brought home to meet her, boys from the force or the sons of friends, had called her “miss” and treated her like someone’s maiden aunt—or they’d been defensive, belligerent, as though daring her to look down on them.

  No. It hadn’t been a success.

  That was when Kate had found the job at Miss Cleary’s School for Young Ladies. Which hadn’t been a success either but had at least paid a wage. Because if there was one thing that month at home had taught her, it was that she couldn’t go home again, not really.

  But she hadn’t anywhere else to go either.

  “Oh, hello! Are you one of us?” A woman bumped into Kate and gave her a long look up and down. Given that she was wearing the same distinctive uniform, Kate rather thought the question answered itself. “You weren’t at the luncheon, were you? I would have known you then. I’m Maud Randolph, class of ’09.”

  Kate held out her hand. “Kate Moran, class of ’11.”

  “Moran—do you mean Warren?”

  “No, Moran.” It was really Moranck, but the gatekeepers at Ellis Island, confounded by her father’s excess of consonants, had, in a stroke, turned him from Jiri Moranck to Jerry Moran. He had made a most unconvincing Jerry Moran. Kate had been only five when he had died, but she could still remember his thick Bohemian accent, the way he pronounced his Bs as Ps.

  “I know some Warrens in Montclair,” offered Maud. “Why weren’t you at the luncheon? Everyone was meant to be at the luncheon.”

  Kate felt as though she’
d been caught sneaking in after curfew. “I was a late addition. Emmie Van Alden told me you were short a chauffeur and—well, here we are.”

  “Van Alden?” Maud, who had been looking over her shoulder, searching for more interesting prey, turned her full attention back on Kate at the sound of that magic name. “Oh, you drive? So does my friend Liza. I don’t, but I’m rather a dab hand at French, so I imagine we’ll get by. Liza! Come meet Miss Warren.”

  “Moran,” said Kate, without much hope.

  Straightening her hat, Maud asked, with false casualness, “Do you know them well, the Van Aldens?”

  “A bit.” Kate had stayed with them for that one summer, in Newport, in the house she had learned to call a cottage, even though it was anything but. It was the summer she had learned to drive; the summer she had learned, painfully, just how little she would ever belong to their world. “Emmie and I roomed together at Smith.”

  “Of course, my family knows her family—well, slightly. Not to speak to, really. But we move in the same circles. My father’s law firm handles some of their legal work.” Maud flapped an arm at another girl, who was attempting to press a large bouquet on an already overladen porter. “Have you met Liza Shaw? Liza! Come meet—”

  “Katherine Moran,” said Kate, resigned to repeating her name for the foreseeable future. It felt like freshman year all over again, milling about, trying to keep track of people’s names, liking some people on sight and disliking others. “Class of ’11.”

  “Liza Shaw, class of ’09.” Hurrying up to them, Liza said breathlessly, “Maud, there’s another bouquet for you. From Harry. I’ve had them put it in the cabin.”

  “That’s two bouquets from Harry,” said Maud with satisfaction, “and a basket of fruit. Although those pears are so terribly hard, I don’t know what he thinks we mean to do with them. Fling them at submarines?”

  Liza swiped at a lock of blond hair that clung damply to her cheek. She had a Dutch doll sort of prettiness, all red cheeks and slightly bulging blue eyes. “Well, yes, but if we leave them out to ripen . . .”

  “Where? Have you seen the cabin yet? I swear, the Black Hole of Calcutta has nothing on it.” To Kate, she said, “Are you rooming with Miss Van Alden?”

  “Yes, and with a Miss Cooper. I haven’t met her yet.”

  “Class of ’14. She seems nice enough. You really ought to have gone to the luncheon, you know. It was terribly inspiring.”

  “We’re going to have a killing time!” put in Liza. “I mean, it seems like a very good group.”

  “Except that doctor woman.” Maud gave an exaggerated shudder. “So mannish. Have you met them yet? There are two of them, a senior doctor and a junior one. The junior one’s all right, at least, her hat was very pretty, but the older one—I half expected her to try to worm me on the spot! I swear, I saw castor oil and carbolic in her eyes.”

  “We met them all at the luncheon,” put in Liza helpfully.

  “Yes, I got that.” Kate was beginning to feel as though she’d turned up at an examination having missed the first month of classes; she hated coming in at a disadvantage. She hadn’t even known there had been a luncheon; Emmie had come to beg her to join after the Unit had already been assembled, to fill a gap made by someone’s leaving. She was, as usual, an add-on. An afterthought. “What made you decide to join up?”

  Maud waved her hand in a way calculated to show the engagement ring placed carefully over her glove. “Oh, Harry’s unit is sure to be sent to France—Harry and I were just engaged this spring—and I heard they’re not giving wives passes anymore. So this way, I get over there on my own. And it’s only for six months. So how bad can it be? With any luck, we’ll have some time in Paris before we go wherever it is we’re going. I promised my mother I’d shop for my trousseau.”

  “Won’t they be rather short of everything?”

  “It’s Paris,” said Maud, as though that explained everything. “Oh, is that your old nanny come to see you off? That woman over there. She seems to be trying to get your attention.”

  “Where?” Following Maud’s careless gesture, Kate saw a familiar hat at the base of the gangplank, her mother’s very best hat, the one she wore to baptisms and wakes. Her mother was trying to push her way through the mass of humanity streaming down and away from the boat; a porter stopped her, pointing her away.

  “Poor thing; that was the last whistle. Didn’t you hear it? They’ll never let her on now. Still, it was sweet of her, wasn’t it?”

  Maud’s voice buzzed in Kate’s ear; Kate rose on her tiptoes and tried to wave, but her mother was remonstrating with the porter and didn’t see Kate, didn’t see that Kate had seen her. She’d come. She’d come despite it all. And they were turning her away.

  “They never do realize we’ve grown up, do they, these old nannies? Mine still comes from time to time and tries to wipe the cookie crumbs off my face.”

  The porter was quite firm. Kate’s mother shrugged and turned, looking back over her shoulder at the boat. Could she see her? Or was Kate too small a speck, way up high on deck? If she could just get down to the gangplank—

  Kate looked distractedly at Maud. “Would you excuse me? I must—”

  “They’re putting the gangplank up now. Oh dear, look at that frantic man. Like a picture of the guilty swain, don’t you think? But that collar! And did you ever see such a gaudy bouquet? I wonder who it could be for. Not that it matters now. He’s too late, poor man.”

  Too late. Kate strained to see through the crowd, to try to catch one last glimpse. It was a scrum down there, all the visitors who had been shooed off the boat milling about, getting in each other’s way. Her mother, never tall, was impossible to spot, was probably already halfway back to the El.

  Had she come to give Kate her blessing? Kate would never know now. She craned her neck, but it was hopeless. She could have wept with frustration. Why did it always have to be this way? Always just missing each other?

  “Oh, there’s Harry!” announced Maud, waving wildly. To Kate, she said graciously, “I’m sorry you missed your nanny.”

  That wasn’t my nanny. Kate opened her mouth to say it. She meant to, truly.

  But Maud poked Kate in the arm, hard. “Oh, there’s your friend! Miss Van Alden! Yoo-hoo! Miss Van Alden! So good to see you!”

  Kate bit her lip, knowing she should say something, should correct Maud, but Emmie was already upon them, dispensing goodwill and dropped hairpins with equal abandon. “Oh, how nice to see you again, Miss . . . Er! Isn’t it lovely to be here?” Kate could tell Emmie hadn’t the slightest idea who Maud was, but Kate knew Emmie would never hurt Maud’s feelings by saying so. “Kate!” Emmie folded Kate in a hug that smelled like their room at Smith, lavender sachets and cocoa powder and Pears soap. “You’re here! You’ll have to come see our cabin—I’ve given you the bed by the window, but the steward tells me it will be awfully hot with all the portholes closed so we might want to sleep on deck tonight.”

  Emmie’s hair, that indeterminate color between blond and brown that looks gray in the wrong light, was already frizzing out of its pins, frothing around her face. She shook the strands out of her eyes, like a horse shaking its mane.

  “You’re losing your pins,” said Kate, sticking one back in for her.

  “I know,” said Emmie ruefully. “I expect I’ll be entirely shed of them by the time we get to France and have to wear my hair in a long tail and all the Frenchmen will make mock of me.”

  “‘Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down,’” said Kate without thinking, slipping back years in a moment. They’d put on Henry V together their junior year, bit parts both, but the dialogue had become part of their personal lexicon. Any use of the word mock meant an immediate recitation of the tennis ball speech.

  “What are you on about?” demanded Maud.

  “It was our junior play,” offered Emmie in her conciliatory way. “Henry V. The tennis ball speech.”

  “A very long time ago,” said Kate, before Maud could ask her if she played tennis. It felt like a different lifetime. Back when she and Emmie had been inseparable. Back when Kate still thought she was one of them, could be one of them. Back before Newport.

  How do you like the latest charity case?