Page 106 of Two Wars and a Wedding

So maybe, just maybe, she might have wanted to kiss Holt.

Betsy kissed him with the salt of her tears still on her lips. She kissed him with all of the fear and uncertainty and guilt and goodness only knew what else roiling through her, clinging to his shoulders to keep from falling, clinging to his shoulders because she was dizzy with exhaustion and emotion and the constant rocking of this ship, and just maybe because they were very nice shoulders, sturdy shoulders, and the arms that folded around her held her close and safe, so she could let her eyes shut and not worry about falling, because it was Holt and he was holding her and kissing her back, and if there was one person in the world she could trust to hold her up, to keep her from going splat, here he was.

It was strange, but there it was. Betsy had never ever in her whole life, not in Boston, not in Northampton, not in Athens, felt as sure and safe as she did here in Holt’s arms on the uneven deck of an ill-provisioned ship stuffed with wounded and fever patients.

She could have kept on kissing him like that indefinitely, but Holt’s conscience got the better of him, and Betsy opened her eyes to find him looking at her, looking as bemused as she felt, somewhere between guilt and awe.

Holt ran his hands gently down her arms until he reached her hands. He squeezed them and then let them go. “You’re tired—you’re distressed. I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.”

“I kissed you,” Betsy said bluntly. “Don’t you dare go all noble at me. I don’t think my feeble constitution can stand it.”

Holt grinned at her. Just like that. It was like seeing the northern lights or the Southern Cross or some other incredible natural phenomenon one had heard existed but didn’t quite believe in until one saw it oneself.

Holt’s grin was a wonder.

It made his whole face transform. It filled Betsy with an odd mix of lightness and trepidation all at the same time. As if she were on the threshold of something rather wonderful, but knew that she’d already bungled her chances of getting through the door.

Betsy looked at him through her damp lashes, feeling strangely uncertain, off-balance. “The things I said—can you forget I said them?”

Holt thought about it. “Are you going to forget what I said?”

Every single word of it was burned into her brain. “No.”

Holt cleared his throat. “When was the last time you slept?”

Betsy tried to remember sleep. It was something she had once done. In Switzerland, it had felt like she had done nothing but sleep. She had fallen asleep for a few minutes earlier that day kneeling by the side of Kit’s bed and woken with the imprint of the sheets on her forehead. “Siboney?”

Holt put an arm around her, guiding her as though she were an invalid. “There’s a deck chair. You’re sleeping now.”

Betsy yanked back against his arm. “I’m the only nurse on board!”

Holt shepherded her to the deck chair. “If you don’t sleep, you’ll be a dead nurse, and what use will that be to anyone? Captain Dowdy has his rota. There are four men on duty—and a doctor on call. We’ll wake you if you’re needed.”

“What about you?” Betsy asked suspiciously. “Weren’t you sleeping when I stepped on you? You’re still meant to be healing, you know.”

“I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

It was her job to worry about him. She was his nurse. And—well, his friend. Was friend the right word for it? Betsy knew she should object, should go back along her self-appointed rounds, but the deck chair rose to meet her. She could feel her body sinking into the wooden slats like plaster into a mold. There had never been a deck chair in the history of the world as comfortable as this deck chair.

“I’m only going to sit”—her words were disrupted by a giant yawn—“for a minute.”

“Only for a minute,” Holt agreed.

The last thing Betsy remembered was Holt settling his blanket over her as she slumped into slumber.

Betsy woke when her chair tipped over.

She came to herself sprawled on the deck like a child’s doll that had been dropped, legs spraddled and skirts any which way. She hastily clambered up onto her knees, and then onto her feet, realizing, belatedly, that it wasn’t just the deck chair that had moved but the deck itself, which was plunging up and down at an alarming rate, while crew members hurried around her, shouting at each other over the sound of the wind, no doubt doing vastly important things.

Spray dampened Betsy’s hair and dress; it was nearly impossible to hear over the sound of the wind and waves and shouting and chugging. Gathering up her damp skirts, grabbing on to whatever would support her as she careened from side to side, she stumbled for the hold, slipping and nearly falling on her way down, grabbing herself just in time, feeling the sort of wooliness she’d last had when they’d given her laudanum in Switzerland, but without the pleasant floaty feeling, just the foggy inability to concentrate.

What she saw in the hold woke her up immediately, more effectively than a bucket of cold water in the face.

The portholes had been closed against the spray, and the fog of blood and pus and feces was nearly unbearable; it rose to choke her.

Men were clinging to their bunks, crying out in pain as the ship tried to toss them out. Dr. Baird was rushing from bed to bed as fast as he could; Captain Dowdy and his volunteers were there too, lashing men to their bunks like Odysseus to the mast. Dr. Hicks was swaying down the narrow aisles, but that could have been either the whiskey or the motion; one could never tell with him. In the flickering electric light, Betsy could see bandages reddening where wounds had torn open.

“I’ll get the bandages,” she said, and raced for the supply cupboard, zigzagging drunkenly with the motion of the ship, grabbing up her meager supply of antiseptic gauze and styptic cotton, the last of the supplies she had filched from the hospital in Siboney.