Page 3 of Two Wars and a Wedding

“Did someone forget to feed you? Miss Hayes gets cranky when she’s hungry,” said Paul to his friend, which was all the more annoying because it tended to be true, she did get cranky when she was hungry, although she hadn’t felt properly hungry, not for months and months.

Hunger felt like a betrayal, an obscene indulgence. There were times when she hated her legs for moving, her skin for being warm, herself for being here when others were not.

“I’m fine,” she said.

Private Holt gave her a long look. “You’re on a train siding in the middle of the night.”

Paul blinked. “That’s a good point. You never said why you’re here. Why are you here?”

Betsy felt a rush of exasperated affection. The emotion felt rusty, but it was there, and she wasn’t sure if she liked it.

“I’m with the Red Cross,” she said. It wasn’t entirely a lie. She’d worked with the Red Cross, the Greek branch. Now she just had to hope the American branch would take her. A Betsy for an Ava. The American branch was run by Miss Clara Barton, the famous Civil War angel of the battlefield. Betsy had never met her, but she’d seen her picture in the papers, which almost amounted to the same thing. “I need to report to Red Cross headquarters. So, you see, I really must get to Tampa.”

“Ma’am.” It was that annoying man again. Holt. What kind of name was Holt? “If you want to get to Tampa, you need to get on the train. It will get there when it gets there.”

“When’s that? Sometime after the Last Trump?”

“Better than not getting there at all.”

“It’s a straight walk down the train tracks. I’ve walked farther than that—” Hiking up the hills in Mycenae, drinking in the thin air like wine, laughing down at the stragglers below. Betsy lifted her head, swiping irritably at a plume of coal smoke. “I’ve walked farther than that in worse circumstances.”

“In the dark?” The man sounded like he didn’t believe her. “There are alligators.”

He was making the mistake of assuming she cared about her own safety. “And bears too, I have no doubt? Perhaps an enraged mongoose? A griffin or a basilisk?”

“Only the odd hydra. Ma’am.” He held out his arm to her, and before she knew it, Betsy was back up in that compartment, carpetbag and all.

She could have screamed with frustration. But that would have given the man far too much satisfaction.

On an impulse, she leaned out the door. “Paul—”

The words she wanted to say to him burned on her tongue: Go home. Get out. Run for the hills. Run away from the hills.

But she couldn’t say any of them. Lamely, she raised a hand. “I’ll see you in Tampa?”

Paul beamed at her, assuming her worry was on her own part, not his. Or just not hearing it at all. Men were very good at not hearing what they didn’t want to hear. “It will be like old times.”

Only with more senseless death. “Quite.”

Inside the compartment, the child had finally spent his energy, falling asleep curled up against his mother. He fit neatly into the space beneath her arm, his head on her swelling stomach. His mother had wrapped herself around him in sleep, sheltering him with her body.

Betsy’s chest hurt. The smoke rasped at the back of her throat. Dragging a shawl from her carpetbag, she flung it over her head, the way she used to pull her covers up over her face as a child, as if the cloth could keep the ghosts at bay.

Curling into a corner of the seat, she fell asleep to the sound of goods being moved, soldiers snoring, engineers shouting, and a little boy sighing in his sleep.

Port Tampa, Florida

June 3, 1898

“We don’t take volunteers.” The nursing sister in charge, Sister Bettina, backed away from Betsy and the strange smells emanating from her garments.

Betsy couldn’t blame her. It had taken Betsy hours to track down the Red Cross headquarters, which had turned out to be not in Tampa at all but on a ship. A ship confusingly called the State of Texas. It wasn’t in Texas. It wasn’t even near Texas. It was anchored in Port Tampa, which was all of eight miles from Tampa but might as well have been the moon as far as Betsy was concerned, with all the roads clogged with soldiers. Betsy had floundered around in the June heat, still lugging that dratted carpetbag, still with sick on her skirt, until she finally found a carriage willing to accept an exorbitant amount of money to take her.

Betsy thrust a crumpled wad of paper at Sister Bettina. “Here—read this. You’ll see I have considerable experience.”

“Have you?” Sister Bettina might have tried to sound happier about it.

She had a hint of a foreign accent, something European. She was, Betsy realized, not much older than Betsy, and not much taller, but the uniform, the accent, and her uncompromising tidiness made Betsy feel like a schoolgirl brought before the headmistress.