Two Wars and a Wedding, page 23
“I’m just tired,” she managed. Her face crumpled. “Oh, Charles.”
He took her quickly by the arm, hurrying her out of the path of other pedestrians. “Did you eat anything at all this morning? Or did you go immediately to bedevil the minister?”
“The latter. I didn’t even give him time to get his collar adjusted properly.” She pressed her eyes tightly shut, remembering, feeling it as if she were reliving it. “I just needed to talk to him—right away—to make him see—”
She swayed on her feet, and Charles put an arm around her, too worried for propriety. “My rooms aren’t far from here. Come.”
Betsy had never thought of where Charles lived. She knew he lived somewhere, of course, but it had never occurred to her to inquire. His rooms took up an entire floor of a neoclassical mansion. The nicest floor, of course; what the French called the bel-étage. That was hardly a surprise. Charles’s étage couldn’t be anything other than bel, thought Betsy, stifling a hysterical burst of laughter. The effort made her sway slightly.
Charles tightened his grip on her arm. “Is Aikaterini not looking after you?”
“She’s in Bad-somewhere,” said Betsy vaguely, as Charles brought her through a tiled foyer into a grand salon, the sun from long windows glinting off a truly staggering quantity of gold leaf.
Gold-framed portraits leered down from the walls; women in puffy petticoats swung in eternal glee over eighteenth-century shrubbery; devoted swains wheedled shepherdesses; and imposing Greek gods, not at all in the Greek style, disported themselves on the ceiling.
Betsy wandered in circles, reaching out a hand to touch a gilded clock, running her fingers across the marble top of a bombé chest, craning her neck to stare up at Aphrodite. “Good heavens. It’s like being in Paris. You’ve brought Paris to Athens.”
“It’s not at all like Paris,” said Charles decidedly. “Let me ring for coffee.”
“Where is Ethel when one needs her?” It seemed so strange to think that Ethel was undoubtedly still back at the American School, trying to figure out who stole Jane.
It seemed even stranger that the man who lived among these gilded relics had crouched over a campfire with her. This was all pure ancien régime. Betsy had no doubt that the powdered and bewigged characters who stared at her with pursed lips from the walls were actual ancestors and not the sort one bought secondhand to lend an impression of antiquity to recent wealth.
Betsy poked at a large bronze Hercules. “Did you leave anything in Paris?”
“Nothing that mattered.” Charles gave a sharp tug on a braided rope. He looked at Betsy. “Everything I care about is here in Athens.”
Betsy wasn’t entirely sure he was talking about the furnishings anymore. She seated herself carefully on a petit point settee far older than she was. “Doesn’t your wife mind?”
“Ah, Georgios.” The door opened, admitting a male servant. Charles spoke to him in rapid Greek that was much better than Betsy’s, ordering coffee and cakes. “We should have sustenance for you quite shortly.”
Sustenance. What was sustenance? Betsy shook her head distractedly. “How can I sit and eat cakes?”
“Much as you are,” Charles suggested, coming to join her on the settee, but Betsy was already on her feet, prowling distractedly around the room, pacing an uneven track across the Aubusson carpet.
“Yesterday—yesterday I was on a ship. Yesterday I was on a ship where six men died.” Betsy felt like an inkblot, the one disorderly note among all the harmony. She didn’t belong here in Charles’s jewel box, where everything was orderly and calm. “Six men.”
Charles leaned forward on the settee. “What happened?”
Betsy wove an erratic path around the furniture, faster and faster, as if she could outpace her own thoughts. “The medical officer on the Albania—he treated us all as though we were nothing, as though we didn’t matter. The Greek nurses were just peasants to him. And I—I was just a woman and an American and therefore of no account.”
“That I cannot believe. You are always of account.”
“You ought to have heard him. My dear girl.” Betsy viciously mimicked the officer’s veddy veddy British accent. “Do us the courtesy of assuming we know our own trade. But they didn’t. They didn’t. It was the arrogance of it.”
“Would you have been better off if there had been no ship at all?” Charles asked quietly.
“Yes! No. I don’t know. That’s what the minister said too, that it was a kindness of them. But if they hadn’t chartered a ship, maybe someone else would have. Or having chartered the ship, they might at least have listened to us.” Betsy stopped short next to a bust of a seventeenth-century worthy on a marble pedestal. “It was just so unnecessary. They didn’t have to die. It was such waste.”
“Il est défendu de tuer,” murmured Charles. “Tout meurtrier est puni, à moins qu’il n’ait tué en grande compagnie, et au son des trompettes.”
It is forbidden to murder unless one does it in a large company to the sound of bugles.
“Yes, but that’s the point,” said Betsy impatiently. “This wasn’t an act of war; this was an act of stupidity. These men survived the war. They fell prey to—oh, goodness, what does one even call it? Pure nitwittery! That’s what it was.”
“Folly has killed more men than cannon.”
Betsy narrowed her eyes at him. “Is that also Voltaire?”
“No. Merely an observation of my own.”
“Well, I won’t have it. Not if I’m there to stop it.” Never mind that Ava thought her the most foolish of all. At least Betsy knew better than to leave sick men lying exposed on the deck of a ship. “Next time. I’ll just have to speak louder, fight harder. I may not be much of a nurse, but I do know how to be a nuisance.”
Much good it had done her. Betsy blinked back another betraying wave of tears. She couldn’t, wouldn’t give in to them, to any of it.
“You go back?” Charles asked.
Betsy swallowed hard. “In two days.”
Charles gestured to the seat beside him, silently inviting her to sit down. “You don’t have to. No one would blame you if you didn’t.”
“I would blame me. I’ve started this, I need to see it through.” Betsy plunked down on the settee, feeling the exhaustion seeping through her. “It’s all right when I’m in it. It’s when I step away from it—here with you—back in civilization—”
She broke off as Georgios came in with the coffee tray.
Charles fixed her a cup the way she liked it, with a great deal of cream and sugar, before pouring his own, more Spartan beverage. “Shall I slurp my coffee from the saucer to make you feel less à l’ouest?”
“In English we would say ‘less at sea.’” Betsy didn’t want to think about being at sea, the rocking of the ship, the stench of the dying. “No, there’s no need to go to such lengths as that. I don’t think you could do anything inelegantly if you tried.”
Betsy sipped her coffee in silence, under the watchful gazes of Charles’s ancestors. The house boy had brought with him a little plate of macarons. Betsy nibbled a corner of one, just so Charles wouldn’t fret. When it didn’t taste entirely of ash, she took a second nibble, feeling the warmth return to her fingers and toes.
Betsy finished off her coffee, feeling infinitely restored, and set the elegant cup back down on the tray. “Thank you. I needed desperately to say all that to someone.”
“I’m glad I might be that someone.” There was a note in his voice that made Betsy turn sharply to look at him. He countered her with smooth urbanity. “Would you like more coffee?”
Betsy leaned closer, looking searchingly at him. She had hurt him and she hadn’t meant to. She never meant to, but she did anyway, that’s what Ava would say. “I didn’t mean it that way. That you were just any someone. You do know that, don’t you?”
A wry expression crossed Charles’s face. “Perhaps it is safer not to know.”
There was no safe. Those villagers thought they were safe—a hospital ship was meant to be safe—Betsy was sick of safe.
Betsy cupped Charles’s face in her hands, so he couldn’t avoid looking at her. His skin was very smooth. He smelled faintly of expensive shaving soap, overlaid by the insistent aroma of very strong coffee.
“But you do know,” she said seriously. “You know what you are to me.”
He lifted his hands to her wrists, as if to draw her hands away—but didn’t. “I know what I cannot be to you.”
“Why not?” Betsy demanded recklessly, the vision of all those men rising before her eyes. In three days—no, two now—she’d be back at the front. In two days. Facing death and suffering.
Charles closed his eyes, removing her hands with a great effort of will, leaving them clasped in his own. “You know why.” A faint smile touched his lips. “You’ve said it to me yourself. With great force.”
And so she had. But Betsy couldn’t remember now why she’d felt it was important. Ava would, she knew, but Ava wasn’t here. Ava wasn’t even answering her letters.
Betsy leaned forward and kissed his lips, right on that smile. “I was wrong.”
“No—no.” Charles’s hands tightened on hers, whether to hold her close or hold her back, she wasn’t sure. “You can’t—I can’t—”
“Why not?” All the frustration and fear Betsy had been feeling spilled out of her. “I could be dead tomorrow. You could be dead tomorrow. And we’ll have let everything we could have had go to waste for the sake of a woman in Paris!”
“Not just a woman. My wife. I can’t wish her away.” With a sigh, Charles let go of Betsy’s hands. He traced the path of a loose lock of hair against her cheek. “I wish I could. But I can’t. If I could . . .”
“I know.” Betsy turned her head and kissed his palm. “I don’t care.”
“Betsy.” She could see him trying to stay firm and the effort it was costing him. His chest rose unevenly beneath his expensive waistcoat. “You say that now . . .”
“And I’ll say it tomorrow”—Betsy punctuated her words by leaning forward and kissing him—“and the next day”—another kiss—“and the day after that.”
“I can’t think. Tu m’éblouit. . . . Tu m’enivres.”
“Am I melting your head of wax?” Betsy asked huskily, pressing a kiss to somewhere in the vicinity of his ear. He was right; it was intoxicating, intoxicating being this close to him, getting to touch him, kiss him; it drove everything else away, all the death and defeat and despair.
“Like Icarus next to the sun. Such a fall as that . . . I will not ruin you,” he said desperately, holding her and holding her away at the same time. “Betsy! I will not make you a—how do they say it? A fallen woman.”
“You don’t need to,” Betsy murmured, nuzzling his cheek as his arms slid around her, in direct contradiction of his words. “I’ve decided to ruin myself.”
“Head of wax . . .” he murmured, his lips discovering a particularly tender spot along the side of her neck, as Betsy found herself suddenly a great deal more horizontal than she had been a moment before.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she gasped, and lost herself in the feeling of falling.
Chapter Nineteen
For a week now, the battle has continued. Not the battle for Santiago, but the battle for the lives of our men, here, in the hospital tents of Siboney. Away in the hills, our boys still gallantly guard their garrison beneath a flag of truce. Who knows what messages pass between the commanders, what demands and refusals? All we know is that here, beneath our canvas shelters, the struggle continues.
For twenty-four hours I have been on duty with the assistance of one orderly, tending to forty patients suffering variously from fever, measles, and dysentery as well as those wounds meted out by our foes. There are a remarkable number of head wounds, for which treatment with ice is crucial, but ice is scarce and hard to come by. Miss Barton has sent her ship, the State of Texas, to Kingston for urgently needed ice, but we can only pray it will return in time for these men, whose lives depend upon constant cool applications.
Never in my life have I felt so helpless. . . .
—Miss Katherine Carson for the St. Louis Star Ledger, July 8, 1898
* * *
Siboney, Cuba
July 9, 1898
“You should be sleeping.” Nurse Hayes set down her lantern by Holt’s bed.
Holt had come to like this quiet time when everyone else was snuffling and snoring around him. There was something comforting about watching Nurse Hayes on her rounds, her sure, decisive movements as she took temperatures, held glasses of water to parched lips, applied poultices, soothed away nightmares. In the day, her progress was marked by sometimes raucous commentary as the men vied for her attention. But in this last dark before the dawn, the tent was quiet except for the ever-present slapping of the waves against the shore, the labored breathing of the men, and the swish of Nurse Hayes’s skirt as she moved steadily from bed to bed, a small light in a great darkness.
Holt was always the last, the final stop before the light passed out of the tent. “Morning and night don’t seem to make much difference when you never get out of bed.”
“You mean, aside from that big glowing thing in the sky shining in your eyes?” Nurse Hayes felt his brow with the back of one hand. “No fever. I can tell you that even without the thermometer. I think you’re on the mend, Private Holt. You and that cot can part ways soon.”
“I don’t know. I’ve gotten kind of attached to it.” The strangest part was that Holt wasn’t entirely joking. How many days had it been? He’d lost all track of time. It felt like he’d been in this tent, in this cot at the end of the row, for something approaching an eternity. He’d been lying here watching the play of lantern light against the canvas while Noah hammered away at his ark; he’d lain here somewhere between sleep and waking while Drake routed the Armada; he’d followed the progress of Nurse Hayes on her rounds while empires rose and fell. Centuries had come and gone; the world outside was a vague, hypothetical thing. Anything might lie out there. He might wake, like Rip Van Winkle, to find himself in a world changed beyond understanding.
He wasn’t quite sure who he was anymore: not the new man he’d tried to be, but not the old one either, a kaleidoscope of fragments, shifting and whirling.
Nurse Hayes made a face at him. “You mean this cot’s gotten kind of attached to you. We’ll have to peel that mattress off you if you don’t get moving. We need to get you up and walking soon, putting some weight on that leg. I don’t know how you managed to walk as far as you did on it before.”
Holt mustered a weak grin. “Sheer cussedness, I imagine.”
Nurse Hayes looked at him sternly. “I would have said idiocy. Who spends a week tramping around on a leg with a hole in it?”
“It wasn’t a big hole.”
“Ha,” said Nurse Hayes. She paused, hesitating. “I never did say—it was a good thing you did, saving Paul. A foolhardy thing—but a good one.”
“Anyone would have done the same,” Holt mumbled.
“No. They wouldn’t. So . . . thank you.”
She leaned forward just at the same moment that Holt turned his head to say something to her and her lips, which had been aiming for his cheek, brushed his lips instead. What happened next was just a reflex. Anyone would have done the same. Anyone encountering a soft pair of lips would have kissed them back. It was just human nature. Nothing conscious about it. For a whole few glorious seconds there was nothing in the world but the softness of her lips on his, flavored with the lingering taste of strong coffee.
And then the coffee was gone. The lips were gone. Nurse Hayes took a step back, her hand pressed against her mouth. In a muffled voice, she said, “You can’t kiss your nurse. It’s contrary to regulations. And if it isn’t, it should be!”
“You were the one who kissed me,” Holt protested, feeling his honor at stake, although if he had to stake his conscience on it, he wasn’t entirely sure he could swear he hadn’t. Kissed her that was. He would rather have liked to have gone on kissing her, and that was the most alarming bit of all, and not just for the coffee.
“I kissed your cheek.” Holt couldn’t be quite sure in the gloom, but he thought she was blushing.
Holt put his hand to his cheek. His very smooth cheek. He seized on the welcome distraction. “You shaved me!”
Nurse Hayes removed herself safely to the foot of the bed. “Days ago. You’ve only just noticed?”
“I haven’t been entirely myself.” And if he hadn’t been entirely himself before, he was even less so now. Every time he looked at Nurse Hayes, all he could think of was that kiss. That very brief, accidental kiss. “And now I know why.”
Nurse Hayes folded her arms across her chest. “Yes, because you were battling wound fever from the bullet hole you hadn’t bothered to get cleaned when the doctor told you to. Not because I removed that hideous growth from your face.”
“Was it really that hideous?” Holt had rather liked it. Particularly the way it hid his face. The way it made him feel like another person from that clean-shaved, brushed, and combed Harvard man.
Nurse Hayes snorted. “Are you looking for compliments? Let’s just say that your chin isn’t weak enough that you need to hide it.”
It wasn’t precisely the most fulsome of compliments but suddenly the air between them crackled and hissed like damp wood on a campfire. Holt couldn’t seem to look away. Neither could she.
Outside, something large crashed and someone cursed with great and inventive fluency.
“What’s going on back there?” he croaked.
“Oh, Miss Barton sent the State of Texas to Kingston for ice and to Tampa to pick up supplies. It must be back. Finally,” Nurse Hayes said with feeling, and Holt wasn’t sure whether the feeling was for the ice or something else entirely.
