Page 63 of Two Wars and a Wedding

Betsy fidgeted a bit, turning up the collar of her jacket, trying to pretend she didn’t feel terribly out of place. All the other nurses wore their uniforms: a gray dress and matching gray cloak, both with the Red Cross insignia, and a white bonnet with a thin gray veil.

Betsy wore purple: her favorite purple traveling costume with purple scrollwork. She stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb.

She hadn’t known they would be traveling in their uniforms.

For the first time, she wondered if maybe Ava had been right, if maybe she was making a mistake charging off to battle in a country that wasn’t her own in a war that wasn’t her own. But it was everyone’s, Betsy told herself hastily. Just the way ancient Greece was everyone’s. She was doing her bit for the birthplace of democracy!

It sounded better when she thought of it that way, and less as though she was a lone American on a train platform wearing the wrong clothes and not quite sure where she was meant to be going.

Someone tapped her on the shoulder, and Betsy whirled around, trying to stand straight and look martial and alert and whatever else it was nurses were meant to be.

But it wasn’t one of the doctors. It was Charles.

“Have you come to tell me not to go?” Betsy demanded belligerently.

The skin around Charles’s eyes crinkled. “Does one ask the Seine to cease its flow? The winds to forbear to blow? No. I am not such a fool as that. I came only to wish you bon courage. It is a good thing you go to do,” he added quietly. “A valiant one.”

“I’m glad someone thinks so,” Betsy said, and bit her lip, hard. She didn’t want to talk about Ava. Charles had tactfully refrained from mentioning Ava’s abrupt departure, but she knew he had noticed. “Not quite the same as riding bare-breasted on Crusade, but I’ll do my best to keep my end up.”

“I cannot imagine your ever doing otherwise.” There was something about the way he looked at her as he said it, the tenderness of it, that made Betsy duck her head and take a great interest in tucking in a loose strand of hair.

“You haven’t met my college professors,” she said indistinctly.

Charles laughed. “My tutors would have much to say of me, little of it good.” He paused, the bustle of the station carrying on around them, smoke drifting past them. “I brought something for you—you may think it foolish, but I should like for you to have it. If you will.”

He held out his hand, palm up. In it was a single golden coin. A hole had been bored through one end, and a ribbon strung through it.

“It is—I suppose you would say—a good-luck charm. Un talisman.”

“It’s the same in English. Talisman. But you know that. Your English is better than my French.” Charles lapsed into French only in the grips of emotion.

Betsy tentatively reached out and lifted the coin, the ribbon dangling down behind, brushing Charles’s outstretched hand. On one side, the words Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité were scrolled around a prosaic statement of the value and the date: 20 Francs, 1848. On the other, an angel—one of the avenging sort, not the small and fluttery kind—consulted a long scroll.

“This coin—it is said an earlier version of it saved one of my ancestors from discovery and the guillotine during the Terror. This coin itself has been handed down in my family since the révolution de Février. My father wore it into battle against the Prussians. And I have worn it since.”

It felt warm to her fingers, warm from Charles’s body. “You can’t mean to give it to me. What if I lose it?”

“If you lose it, then I have lost you, and what is a coin to that?” While Betsy was still working out the implications of that, he added, “You do not need to wear it—I know you do not agree with all my superstitions.”

“No! No, that isn’t it at all. It isn’t as though you’re asking me to disembowel a pigeon or dance around a campfire widdershins.” Betsy was babbling, but it was because she couldn’t quite fit her mind around the magnitude of the gesture encompassed by this one tiny coin. “Don’t you—shouldn’t you—save this for your family?”

“I have no son to carry it. No daughter either,” he amended, forestalling Betsy before she could say it. “I should be honored if you would take my luck with you.”

“I—I don’t know what to say. Thank you. Would you—would you put it on for me?”

With as much ceremony as though he were crowning her empress, Charles solemnly tied the ribbon behind her neck, while Betsy craned her head down to try to see the coin, now lying somewhere awkwardly in between her high shirt collar and the top button of her purple jacket.

“Goodness,” she said, swiping at the hair that kept escaping from her chignon, “I feel as though you’ve just invested me with the order of something or other. I—I will do my best to bring this safely back to you.”

“It is not the coin that matters.” Reaching out, Charles tucked her hair gently behind her ear. “Do what you need to do and return safely to me. To us,” he hastily corrected himself.

Betsy was seized by a horrible sense of injustice. They shouldn’t have to keep a polite distance; he shouldn’t have to pretend he was wishing her safely home to Aikaterini and the American School; she should be able to kiss him goodbye properly and swear to come home to him and only to him. But she wouldn’t, they couldn’t, and all because twenty years ago, when she was still in pinafores, he had married an unknown woman of his family’s choosing.

It wasn’t fair.

But it was what it was, so Betsy took a step back and clutched his coin in one hand and tried to rearrange her face along properly indifferent lines. “You’ll see, we’ll thrash the Turks and be back within a week.”

Charles raised a brow, making a valiant effort to sound equally detached. “Even Themistocles didn’t prevail in a week.”