Page 23 of Two Wars and a Wedding

Betsy made an effort to pull herself together. “Is that your official assessment as a trained nurse?”

“That’s my assessment as someone who’s held more heads over buckets than you’ve had hot dinners,” said Kit, unimpressed. “My oldest gets sick the second she gets in a carriage. She goes about the same color you are now.”

She’d told herself she didn’t need anyone. She’d told herself this was all a noble act of self-sacrifice. But it wasn’t. Betsy could feel the despair pulling her under. She couldn’t even do noble sacrifice right.

You’ve been given everything, Ava had said furiously. You’ve been given everything and you’re throwing it away.

“Look,” said Kit, putting a hand on Betsy’s arm. Her fingers were stained with ink from the dispatches she’d been writing up in between her nursing shifts. “There’s no guarantee we’ll be in on any fighting. We’re a relief force. There’s always a chance it will be all over by the time we get there and we’ll go in with our medical supplies and our barrels of jerked beef and tour orphanages and feed hungry children like Miss Barton meant to do in the first place.”

Betsy made a choking sound she hoped would pass for a laugh. “If there’s no war, then what will you write about?”

“Angels of mercy saving starving children,” said Kit calmly, but Betsy could tell she was watching her. “Readers love that sort of thing. Come on, let’s go hear what Miss Barton has to say. The word is that she’s going to make some sort of formal address now she’s back.”

Betsy held up her pile of blankets. “You go ahead. I need to get these stowed.”

What she really needed was to curl up in a ball, her arms over her head like a little girl hiding from the monsters under the bed.

“You’re sure?” Kit’s notebook was already in her hand. Betsy could see her shifting from foot to foot, torn between staying with Betsy and not missing the latest scoop.

“You go on.” Betsy did her best to look calm and competent and not the least bit green. Cuba. She’d never bothered to think what would happen if they went. All her imaginings had ended with Ava. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“All right,” said Kit, but she didn’t sound convinced. “I’ll see you up there. Don’t do anything stupid.”

She left before Betsy could tell her she already had.

Chapter Six

Darling Ava,

My modern Greek proceeds apace—a very slow pace, but any pace is still a pace. The servants seem to understand me, at any rate, and that’s the most important part of the exercise. If I’m ever to have part in a dig, I must be able to speak to the workmen in their own language and remember to keep my g’s a sort of y sound instead of the hard g of antiquity. Aikaterini tells me it’s harder for classicists to learn modern Greek than the average layman. She also tells me my dress sense is terrible and I was not made for excessive trim. Yes, I know you’ve been telling me that for years, so don’t gloat.

Despite our triumphant trek to Mycenae, Professor Richardson is still unconvinced as to the fitness of the female sex to endure the rigors of classical studies. Mercifully, the gentlemen of the other schools are more broadminded. I am to be given a tour of Delphi by an archaeologist of the French School.

Do you think the oracle will speak to me if I ask it nicely in my very best classical Greek?

All my love,

Betsy

—Miss Betsy Hayes ’96 to Ava Saltonstall ’96

Athens, Greece

November 1896

“Does Monsieur de Robecourt often arrange excursions for students of the American School?”

“Charles?” Aikaterini half turned on the pedestal on which she was standing, eliciting an agitated clucking from the woman crouching at her feet. “Yes, yes, I’ll stand still.”

It had become part of the routine of the house, Betsy joining Aikaterini in her boudoir for her morning dress fittings, happily breathing in the scents of rich fabrics and even richer perfumes. Betsy had grown up in a house of men. There had been only her father and Alex—and the less said of her brother, the better. But with Aikaterini, she felt what it might have been like to have a high-spirited sister to turn to. Someone who would listen and understand, not just about Herodotus, but about everything from the arrangement of hair to affairs of the heart.

Even so, it had taken her weeks to get up the nerve to ask Aikaterini about Monsieur de Robecourt.

Betsy ducked her head over a bowl of sweetmeats, saying casually, “I only ask because he’s got up an expedition to Delphi for the lot of us. I wasn’t sure if he made a habit of it.”

Or if he had only done it for her. Which was a foolish notion to contemplate. But Betsy couldn’t help contemplating it, any more than she could help the thrill she felt every time she came down to Aikaterini’s drawing room or entered a lecture hall and found Monsieur de Robecourt there, smiling at her, making the room glow as though all the gas jets had been turned up at once. Nice condescension from an experienced archaeologist to a would-be one, Betsy told herself, but there was a frisson she certainly didn’t feel with darling old Dr. Dörpfeld of the German School.

Betsy could just see their pictures in the paper in the fashion of that other notorious archaeological couple, Mr. and Mrs. Radcliffe Emerson, both covered in dirt and dust, posing next to a half-excavated column. “Monsieur and Madame de Robecourt at the site of their latest excavation. . . .”