Page 80 of Two Wars and a Wedding

Betsy tugged at Ava’s skirt. “But the fevers . . .”

“Betsy.” Ava squatted back down again. “I was in and out of my father’s surgery before I could toddle. I’ve had every disease you can name and then some—including typhoid. Why do you think I was never sick at Smith? It’s not just because I wrapped up warmly.”

“You won’t need to wrap up warmly here.” Betsy let Ava pull her up. “Well, except at night. It does get cold at night.”

“How many patients do you have?” Ava asked, all brisk and businesslike.

But that was Ava. Having once said something, she would never admit to it again. What was done was done. And there were patients to be cared for. Betsy led Ava down the steps toward the tents. “We had nearly five hundred in our care a week ago, but about half that now.”

“You’ve discharged them?”

“Some. Some didn’t make it.” Too many. Betsy forced herself to focus on the matter at hand. “We have a hospital building, two tent wards, and a surgery tent. We keep the sickest men in the hospital—they’re less exposed to the elements there—and the milder cases in the tents. Oh, this is one of our surgeons.” Betsy accosted Dr. Stringfellow as he charged down the well-worn path from the hospital to the surgery tent, smelling strongly of coffee. “He’s on loan to us from the army. We borrowed him and just never gave him back. Dr. Stringfellow, this is Nurse Saltonstall.”

“Very well, good,” said Dr. Stringfellow, trying to navigate around them.

Ava planted herself firmly in the doctor’s path. “Dr. Lawrence Stringfellow? I read your article in the Lancet. The one on the case of the anteverted wandering liver.”

“It sounds like a Sherlock Holmes story,” said Betsy brightly. “The Case of the Wandering Liver.”

Neither of them paid any attention to her. Dr. Stringfellow had stopped and was looking at Ava with the attention he usually only afforded particularly interesting injuries.

“It was a very strange case,” said Dr. Stringfellow modestly.

“Was it?” demanded Ava. “Was it, really? If one were to afford women’s health the attention we afford other branches of medicine . . .”

“You believe this is purely a female condition?”

Ava set her chin in a way Betsy knew well. “The woman had suffered a stillbirth at full term. Surely that must play some role.”

Dr. Stringfellow looked distinctly intrigued but also skeptical. “Yes, twenty-three years before.”

“As you yourself pointed out, she had been suffering from an inguinal hernia for roughly that same period of time. If one assumes . . .” Ava rattled off a spate of technicalities in something that vaguely resembled Latin.

Dr. Stringfellow, however, appeared to be utterly electrified by each and every multisyllabic incomprehensibility. He countered with gobbledygook of his own. It was like watching a sport for which one didn’t understand any of the rules.

At some point, Dr. Stringfellow had offered Ava his arm. At some point, she had taken it. They wandered together into the surgery tent, arguing fiercely and gazing into one another’s eyes.

A coup de foudre, that’s what the French called it.

That’s what Charles would have called it.

Betsy let out her breath, feeling distinctly wobbly. She needed to lie down. She had been on shift for over eighteen hours.

In Lamia, she had worked twenty-four hours at a time.

In Lamia, where she had seen Charles again . . .

Chapter Twenty

Dear Ava,

Did you think I’d given up hope? It’s not that I’ve given up writing at you—I will keep on writing at you, you know, until you write me back—it’s just that I’ve been so busy. I’ve lost track of what post I’m on. We set up a Red Cross hospital in a place called Lamia back in May. It’s a beautiful town, right on the Aegean, with crumbling Venetian walls on a hilltop and the cafés bustling with officers and attachés and international newspapermen. I even met an American attaché who had come all the way over from Vienna so as not to miss the excitement.

And excitement we got. The guns started going, the word came it was all hands to the front, and we nurses rushed off to Domokos.

It was a very different thing nursing men where they fell rather than in a hospital. The villagers looked at us as though we were mad and perhaps we were, but, Ava, some of those men wouldn’t have made it back to Lamia to be tended. But we were there and we tended them, right in the trenches. I helped patch up none other than the great Cipriani himself and got him on a stretcher to the coast. I won’t lie; I was scared witless. The noise was like nothing you could imagine. But it would all have been worth it if the Greeks hadn’t retreated and kept on retreating. We kept waiting for them to stop and take a stand, but the batteries kept right on going, all the way back to Lamia.

If the crown prince had only held his ground . . . But that’s a whole other topic.