Page 43 of Two Wars and a Wedding

Paul looked at him like he was crazy. “They killed them. The Spanish killed them.”

“We killed a fair few of them too.” Holt rubbed his forehead, trying to put his jumbled thoughts in order. His tongue felt too big for his mouth, making the words come out slow. “The way I see it, I can hate the Spaniards for what they did to the Cuban people. But I can’t hate them for shooting at us. We’re here to shoot at them. It’s war. They have every right to shoot back at us. As much as I’d prefer they miss.”

“They’re the enemy,” said Paul stubbornly.

“What is an enemy?” Time wobbled, and he was back at the law school, standing up in the middle of the room in Austin Hall, trying to work his way down through the tangle of common and civil law to first principles. “Is it someone who’s done you a wrong? Or just someone who happens to be on the other side of a conflict?”

Paul squinted at him owlishly, nine parts rum and one part skepticism. “Does it matter?”

“It matters why you do things, not just that you do them.” Or else they’d all just be running around killing because they could. “I’m not shooting the Spanish because I want to shoot them. I’m shooting them because I want to stop them doing what they’re doing. There’s a difference.”

“Don’t see it,” said Paul stubbornly.

He should just let it be, Holt knew. But it felt, in the strange intensity of the tropical night, his emotions raw with rum, very important to hold to that difference. The line between vengeance and purpose. Between God’s law and man’s.

Maybe because he’d come so close to toppling over into the wrong side of it.

After his mother died, when no one would believe him, when they patted him on the shoulder and told him that grief did strange things, it had been tempting, so tempting, to consider an “accident” of his own, payback for all the “accidents” his mother had endured over the years. If grief did strange things, a grieving widower might lean too far out a window. A grieving widower might drink a bit too much, slip, fall, and bash his head open on the sideboard.

But he couldn’t. Holt’s spirit recoiled. He couldn’t right murder with murder, even if his soul cried for justice. That wasn’t justice. That was revenge.

Instead, he’d done what he knew would hurt his father more. He’d dropped out of law school.

Holt’s head felt like a balloon, floating above his body. He clasped his hands on either side of his forehead to try to keep it steady. Paul was saying something but it danced in and out of his hearing.

Holt cleared his throat, searching for some middle ground. “Look. Ham Fish and the rest of them—they died for a cause.” Not like his mother, who had died to bolster a weak man’s pride. “They died knowing they were doing something good.”

“Does that mean we’re supposed to let their deaths go unavenged?” Paul demanded indignantly.

Holt was tired. So tired. He didn’t even realize he was listing backward until he felt the ground beneath his back. It was too much trouble to get up again, so he just stayed there, his cup balanced on his stomach. Above him, the tropical stars quivered in their spheres, shimmying like showgirls. Men might die, but these stars would still be here, shining impartially on whoever won or lost.

Holt lifted an unsteady finger. “Look. There’s Scorpius. And there’s the Southern Cross.”

Paul hesitated for a moment and then decided to take the olive branch. He lowered himself back so he could see too. “You must rely on the stars out on the range.”

Forget the range; he’d been a member of the Harvard Natural History Society.

But it would be cruel to strip Paul of his illusions. Holt missed illusions. He settled for a half-truth. “I wasn’t much of a cowboy. More a jack-of-all-trades. I only lasted three months on a cattle ranch.”

“Roaming the West, rounding up bandits,” said Paul dreamily, and Holt didn’t correct him.

“Join you?” Paul’s Yale friend Thede Miller flopped down next to them, stretching out his legs to display muddy boots.

Paul struggled up to a sitting position. “How’s Teddy?”

“Still playing polo in his head. Doc says it’s typhoid. I left him at the field hospital in Siboney.” Thede looked down at his legs as though surprised they still belonged to him. “It’s been a long walk back here.”

“Lie down and rest your legs,” said Paul generously. “Holt over here was just pointing out the constellations. Does that look like a scorpion to you?”

“Constellations.” Thede’s brow wrinkled and then his mouth dropped open. He jabbed a finger at Holt. “That’s it! That’s where we met! I knew I’d seen you before.”

A sick feeling settled in Holt’s stomach that had nothing to do with the rum. He lurched to a sitting position, feeling the world lurching with him.

“It was the mustache,” Thede went on obliviously, delighted to have finally remembered. “You didn’t have the mustache then. I was visiting with my brother-in-law. The Harvard College Observatory. You showed us the Great Refractor. Almost made me want to go to Harvard.”

Thede grinned as though that were too absurd to be contemplated.

Paul hooted at the very notion. “Holt at Harvard? You must have a—what do they call them? A doppelgänger. That’s it.”