Page 16 of Two Wars and a Wedding

Athens, Greece

October 1896

The morning chill felt like heaven on Betsy’s flushed cheeks.

She’d been late, of course. She’d had to run like anything for the steamer, but she was here now, and had been clouted amiably on the shoulder by one of the Harvard boys, frowned at by Ethel, and harrumphed at by Professor Sterrett, although she thought she’d gotten the better of that one when she’d pointed out that she was proving her stamina for the rigors ahead by showing how she could run. He’d been bemused rather than cross, which Betsy thought boded well for their future association.

“Pardon me—excuse me—” Betsy wove her way past an entire herd of goats, holding her bag high above her head so they wouldn’t scent the treats Aikaterini’s cook had pressed on her.

She did love living with Aikaterini, and not just because of the cakes.

“You don’t have to apologize to the goats,” Ethel pointed out, as Betsy joined her at the rail.

“It’s really more their boat than ours.” Not just the goats, but at least one bewildered cow, several chickens, and an entire regiment of soldiers. There were old ladies in rusty black with their heads veiled carrying straw baskets, and irritated donkeys laden with pallets, and the clothes, oh, the clothes! The men sported wide red sashes and baggy trousers and sometimes a sort of skirted garment. Athens was marvelous, with its antiquities jostling against the grand, modern marble mansions that had been erected in the past few decades, but this—this felt like Greece as she had imagined it.

Betsy elbowed Ethel, too excited to pretend to be blasé. “Look at that man over there, the one in the beard. Doesn’t he look straight off an Attic vase?”

“That one’s more a marble head,” said Ethel. “He looks like a bust I saw once in the Metropolitan Museum.”

Betsy tried to look everywhere at once, drinking it all in. “I wonder what all those soldiers are doing here. Ought we expect pirates?”

“Not pirates,” said a voice behind them. “But possibly Turks.”

Betsy turned too fast and tripped over her own skirts. Monsieur de Robecourt caught her before she could fall, his hands warm on her upper arms.

“We seem destined to collide,” he said, smiling at her from beneath the brim of his hat.

Betsy tilted her head up at him. “Only because you keep sneaking up behind me.”

“Shall I depart?” he offered, his hands sliding down her arms to her elbows.

“Certainly not.” Betsy suppressed an absolutely ridiculous impulse to rise up on her tiptoes and wrap her arms around his neck. “It’s safer to keep you where I can see you.”

Monsieur de Robecourt looked deeply into her eyes. “But am I safe from you?”

“You can always call the soldiers,” Betsy suggested breathlessly.

He held her out at arm’s length, examining her with mock seriousness. “You make a very unconvincing Turk.”

“It’s never been one of my aspirations,” said Betsy, basking in the admiration in his eyes. “Is that what they’re here for, these soldiers? To fight the Turks?”

Monsieur de Robecourt looked at her in surprise. Even worse, he let his hands drop. “But who else? The revolution wasn’t so very long ago.”

Betsy was vaguely aware that at some point the Ottoman Empire had occupied Greece and gone on occupying it until Lord Byron had made them stop. Or something of that sort. Betsy didn’t much care. She wished they could go back to the bit where he was holding on to her arms and teasing her.

“It’s rather like Leonidas and Themistocles, casting Xerxes back into Persia,” said Betsy, trying to twist the conversation back onto familiar ground. “Two thousand years on and the heart of democracy still stands stalwart against the tyrant.”

“Greece is a monarchy now,” said someone to Betsy’s left.

Ethel. Betsy blinked. She had forgotten all about Ethel. Ethel was standing there with her arms folded across her chest looking distinctly put out.

“Only a very mild sort of monarchy,” Betsy said hastily. “Oh, goodness, where are my manners? Miss Ethel Lewis, Monsieur de Robecourt. He’s one of those vandals from the French School that stole Delphi from us.”

Ethel gave her a long, measuring look before holding out her hand to Monsieur de Robecourt. “Monsieur.”

Monsieur de Robecourt bowed over her hand, but he glanced at Betsy as he spoke. “Are you, too, determined to prove that skirts don’t prevent one from pursuing archaeology?”

“No,” said Ethel crisply. “I have no interest in digging up the dead—only their words.”