Page 7 of Two Wars and a Wedding

“Betsy?”

Betsy came down with a thump to solid ground. Ethel, the only other female student at the American School, hailed Betsy from the end of the corridor. “Have you seen Jane? I left her on a table in the library and now I can’t find her anywhere.”

Jane wasn’t a person but a book—Jane Harrison and Margaret Verrall’s Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens—which was required reading for all members of the American School. Jane was constantly being taken for walks or going missing and turning up in odd places.

“Wingate must have filched her when you weren’t looking.” Betsy had bought her own copy of Jane, now heavily underlined. She wasn’t risking it to the uncouth hands of any of the Harvard men, who made up nearly half their cohort of nine students and took up more than their fair share of space and library materials. “Last I saw, he had her in the olive grove.”

“Bother.” Ethel shoved her spectacles up her nose, looking decidedly put out. “The goats have probably eaten it by now.”

“They’ll have got more out of it than the boys will,” said Betsy. “I got into such an argument with Wingate over her interpretation of the Aiora festival. He claims that vase was a depiction of a Dionysian bacchanal and nothing to do with Erigone.”

“We don’t really know one way or the other,” said Ethel, coming to Wingate’s defense. Betsy blamed coeducation. Ethel had spent her undergraduate years at Cornell. Betsy couldn’t fault Ethel’s scholarship but felt that her spirit had been irreparably dampened by the disadvantages of having her formative academic years spoiled by men in the classroom.

“It’s bunk,” said Betsy bluntly. “Why are men so fascinated by bacchanals, when they’d never participate in one themselves?”

“Most likely because they’d never participate in one,” said Ethel sensibly. “The ones who participate aren’t reading about them.”

“And the ones reading aren’t participating?” Betsy decided she didn’t need to picture that. “Speaking of nonsense . . . our esteemed director informed me that women aren’t welcome at the excavation in Corinth.”

“Did you think we would be?”

Betsy frowned at her colleague. “It’s the school’s excavation. We’re members of the school. We earned our entrance fair and square, just like the rest of them.” More than some of the rest of them. She and Ethel had to prove themselves and prove themselves and prove themselves again. “Can you believe Dr. Richardson asked me if I wanted to be a librarian?”

Ethel looked at her steadily. “I do want to be a librarian.”

Betsy felt the tips of her ears go pink. “Well . . . yes, if that’s what you want. But if you wanted to excavate, wouldn’t it madden you to be told you couldn’t?”

“But I don’t want to excavate,” said Ethel matter-of-factly. “I couldn’t think of anything I’d like less.”

Betsy could think of many things she would like less. Long donkey rides. Naming her bedbugs after Persians. That peculiar sandwich filling beloved of the men of the British school that tasted rather of old socks.

There was no accounting for taste. “So I suppose that means you don’t want to come on the trek to the Peloponnese with me?”

It would have been much easier to convince Sterrett to take both of them. Men had this strange idea that women needed to travel everywhere in pairs, for the sake of their virtue, as though two could get in less trouble than one.

“Of course I’ll come,” said Ethel calmly.

Betsy stared at her. “But you said you don’t want to excavate.”

“Just because I don’t want to dig it up doesn’t mean I don’t want to see it once somebody else has.” Ethel changed the subject. “Have you found new lodgings yet?”

“No, not yet.” Betsy thought it thoroughly unfair that the male students got to lodge in the school while the women were left to shift for themselves as they would. She had been living at the Hotel Grande Bretagne and would have been happy to stay there indefinitely, but she had noticed the way it raised brows among her fellow students. The last thing she wanted was to be thought a wealthy hobbyist. Wealthy, yes. She never pretended otherwise. But a hobbyist? No.

“There’s room with Reverend Kalopothakes,” offered Ethel.

“I’ll bear that in mind.” It might make it easier to befriend Ethel if she were rooming with her, but “boarding with a Presbyterian minister” was high on Betsy’s list of things she’d rather avoid. “Would you like me to come help you find Jane? I think the boys have been hiding her deliberately.”

“They wouldn’t do that,” said Ethel, even though Betsy was quite sure they not only would but had. “It’s all right. I probably left it in the olive grove myself and forgot.”

“I should probably go anyway.” Betsy tried to pretend she didn’t feel snubbed. “I’m engaged to pay my respects to an acquaintance of my father’s. A Mrs. MacHugh. She’s invited me to tea.”

The woman had left a card for her at the Grande Bretagne. Betsy hadn’t the slightest idea who she was. Her father had had a large and varied acquaintance, most of it conducted from his writing desk in Boston. Betsy could imagine this Mrs. MacHugh, undoubtedly the widow of an importer like her father, seventy if she was a day, all that was proper, bringing a bit of Boston to the heart of Athens.

“At least you might get a decent meal out of it,” said Ethel. “Something not drowned in olive oil.”

Betsy rather liked olive oil. “If there are little sandwiches, I’ll drop some in my pocket for you.”

“You wouldn’t—would you?”