Page 35 of Two Wars and a Wedding

Monsieur de Robecourt looked at her face as though memorizing it. “A triumph. A credit to the field. An inspiration for those who come behind you.”

Betsy folded her arms tightly across her chest. “If it’s my mind that’s so attractive, why kiss me?”

He touched his finger gently to her lips. “Just because a man knows he’ll be burned doesn’t mean he won’t reach out to the flames.”

“So now I’m a conflagration?” Her lips burned where he’d touched her.

“Qui a la tête de cire ne doit pas s’approcher du feu.” Betsy didn’t need him to translate for her. He who has a head of wax must not go near fire. “With you, I have the head of wax. I have no thought, no sense. I know the flame will burn and yet I cannot keep away.” Abandoning metaphor, Monsieur de Robecourt said simply, “I was married when I met you. I cannot help that. Any more than I could help falling in love with you.”

“You can’t say you’re in love with me.” Betsy could feel herself starting to panic. All the hours she’d spent daydreaming about his falling in love with her—but not like this. This was a warped and twisted version of the dream. “You can’t be married and in love with me.”

Monsieur de Robecourt raised a brow. “Whoever said marriage and love went hand in hand?”

“The Bible?” Betsy grasped at straws. She wasn’t sure who had said it; it was just something she had always known. One didn’t love outside marriage.

“This—this was all here before the Bible was ever thought of.” Monsieur de Robecourt waved his hand across the summit of the mountain. “From the very beginning of time love has wreaked havoc on the plans of man. Originally, Eros was the son of Chaos.”

“I thought Aristophanes said that Eros was the lover of Chaos.” Blast it. He was doing it again. In a moment, they’d be deep in a discussion of competing myths and she’d forget herself, let herself be drawn in again, drawn into his banter, drawn into his arms. Betsy dug in her heels. “It doesn’t matter. It’s all a myth. You can’t use a myth as an excuse.”

“Not an excuse so much as . . . an explanation.”

“Eros made you do it?” Betsy snorted. “Next you’re going to tell me he flitted by on his feathery little wings and shot an arrow into your hide and that completely justifies everything. Like those love potions in operettas where everyone acts like idiots but it’s all right because they weren’t in their right minds so none of it counts.”

“Love potions and arrows . . . those are a momentary madness. This is something deeper. Elemental, like that spring. One can try to dam it up, but there’s no containing it.” As he spoke, Betsy could feel the force of it, like a volcano, unstoppable. Any moment now, she was going to be swept away again. “Think of Paris and Helen.”

Betsy wrapped her hands in the folds of her skirt. “They’re not an example to follow. They cast the world into war and ruined thousands of lives, and for what?”

“For love.” Monsieur de Robecourt was deadly serious. “We’ve tried to make love into a chocolate box wrapped up in lace and ribbons and bonds of matrimony—but it isn’t. It’s a madness, a glorious sort of madness, that makes everything else seem without savor or meaning.”

Betsy glared up at him, small and fierce. “You can just find your glorious madness elsewhere. I don’t want any part of it. I won’t topple towers or launch ships. That’s just selfishness masquerading as sentiment.”

“Then what do you want?” It wasn’t a rhetorical question. He genuinely wanted to know. That, thought Betsy helplessly, was what was so horribly disarming about him.

As for what she wanted . . . she wanted this. Endless hours of arguing over whether Eros was the son or the lover of Chaos. Passionate embraces among the ruins. Grubbing in the dirt together and coming back at night to the privacy of their tent. His lips on that newfound spot on the side of her neck.

But that wasn’t an option, Betsy told herself brutally.

“I want to be allowed to pursue my work in peace.” Betsy’s throat felt raw. From the wind. Not from tears she couldn’t cry. “I want to be treated as a scholar—as an equal.”

It wasn’t a lie. It just wasn’t totally true.

She should have left it at that, but she couldn’t help herself. Turning, she said hoarsely, her voice half-lost in the wind, “I might have loved you—if you had been free. I could have been your friend—if you had been honest.”

“And now?” Monsieur de Robecourt was half hope, half fear.

She couldn’t unknow what had passed between them, the feeling of his lips on her skin; she would never be able to look at him, talk to him, without remembering.

“Now I don’t think we can be anything at all,” she said, and turned and walked away against the force of the wind before he could see her face buckle.

Chapter Nine

News reached the Red Cross on Friday morning that the first battle had been fought and the list of wounded was a long one, with no proper facilities established to take care of those who had fallen in battle. Our readers will be saddened to see many well-loved and familiar names on the lists of the dead and the wounded.

Miss Barton and her party immediately set sail for the small village of Siboney, where the wounded were being brought down from the hills where the action had taken place. The hospital ships being full, the wounded were taken to an old warehouse and left there on the floor, with only such blankets and gear as they had with them, and the scantiest of care.

The night was dark, and the water choppy, but nothing could keep Miss Barton and her crew from the service of these men who needed their ministrations so dearly. . . .

—Miss Katherine Carson for the St. Louis Star Ledger, June 25, 1898