Page 27 of Two Wars and a Wedding

“Fine.” Ethel turned to Betsy, resigned to reprising her role as the Coffee Angel. “Would you like coffee too?”

Betsy couldn’t bear the thought of sitting there while Ethel plied the Harvard boys with coffee. They were all so loud and brash and American, everything she hated herself for being. She wished she were French and sophisticated. “I want to take another look at the Stoa of the Athenians. I missed it on our way up.”

What she really wanted was to be alone. It felt a bit like the time, as a child, she’d put on her father’s spectacles and seen the world distorted. That was how she felt with Monsieur de Robecourt ever since Aikaterini had told her about his wife. When she was with him, talking with him, laughing with him, it felt utterly right until she remembered. And then everything went out of focus again.

Maybe, thought Betsy, wandering back down the slope, if she were European, she wouldn’t feel that way. Maybe it was just her American way of trying to put everything into simple categories. She kicked at a stone that might once have been kicked by the ancients. Somehow, the thought didn’t quite thrill her as it should.

Betsy tried to conjure Ava. Ava would remind her that it was about the archaeology, not the man, and she was just lucky to be here.

She might even have convinced herself of it if she hadn’t rounded the corner and seen the man himself, bending over a pile of rock in the shadow of the Stoa of the Athenians. Grubbing in the mud, Aikaterini had called it, but there was nothing grubby about it.

Monsieur de Robecourt looked up. His expression changed at the sight of her, lighting with delight—and Betsy knew, deep down in the pit of her stomach, that she’d been wrong about being wrong. Whatever it was, whatever she’d felt—it was real. It was here between them.

She should turn and walk away. She should make some excuse and go and find the others. But she didn’t.

“Hullo,” Betsy said in a voice that didn’t sound like her own. “Digging out of school?”

Monsieur de Robecourt brushed his hands off against his knees as he rose, his face a picture of amused contrition. “I know. But who can resist the lure of the treasures that still lie undiscovered? It would take more willpower than I possess to keep from searching—even out of season.”

Betsy lingered at the edge of the stoa. “After a point, that’s not archaeology. That’s treasure hunting.”

“Only,” said Monsieur de Robecourt with mock gravity, “if I fail to note it properly in my records. Properly catalogued, treasure hunting becomes scholarship.”

Betsy tried to focus on his words, but it was hard to concentrate when she was painfully aware of every whisper of the fabric of his trousers as he came to stand beside her. They were alone as they had never been before; Jenks and Wingate and Ethel were well away up the slope, far out of sight, out of hearing, out of everything.

“Are you sure there are more mysteries to be found?” Betsy asked, trying to sound normal and failing miserably. “Didn’t you have a bad season last year?”

“Winds and rain and mud. Yes. But we found a charioteer made of bronze, of a beauty to make you weep. He had been cast in segments and the segments had come apart, but each was whole and perfect there in the earth, waiting only to be put together again. We are still missing an arm, but that only makes him like any other veteran, battle-scarred.”

“You make him sound . . . real.”

“Legend has it that Zeuxis painted a bunch of grapes that looked so lifelike that birds blunted their beaks fighting to eat them. If you saw our charioteer . . .” Monsieur de Robecourt spread his hands in wordless illustration. “I wasn’t here when Homolle found the statue of Antinoüs. But they tell me he was standing on his plinth, waiting beneath the weight of dirt for someone to find him and dig him out.”

Despite her layers of wool, Betsy felt a chill along her spine. She had to resist the urge to look over her shoulder, to see if a classical statue was rising from the dirt behind her. “You speak as though the statues have spirits of their own.”

Monsieur de Robecourt’s eyes were amber, the sort of amber that held history embedded in it. “Don’t they? Here in Delphi, where the oracle speaks?”

She’d told herself she was a practical person, with practical interests. But something in his words struck a chord in her. Standing there, by the ruined ambitions of the Athenians, in the shadow of Apollo’s abandoned sanctuary, Betsy took a deep breath and recited from memory, “Tell the king that the flute has fallen to the ground. Phoebus does not have a home any more, neither an oracular laurel, nor a speaking fountain, because the talking water has dried out.”

Monsieur de Robecourt’s eyes were intent on hers. “So you do feel it. The magic.”

“Or the loss of it,” Betsy said unevenly.

Her skirt brushed against his trousers. She wasn’t sure if he had moved or she had. “To lose something, it must once have been.”

“Or have been imagined.” She should step back. Step away, pretend they were talking about Apollo.

Betsy rested her palms against his chest, feeling his heart beating beneath the layers of linen and wool.

“If one believes in something thoroughly, with all one’s heart,” said Monsieur de Robecourt quietly, “isn’t that enough to make it so?”

Betsy was quite sure it wasn’t.

She was also quite sure she didn’t have the words to deny it. Magic, he’d called it, and perhaps it was, because instead of using her hands to push Monsieur de Robecourt away, Betsy found her arms sliding up his chest and around his neck, her eyes closing as his lips moved to cover hers, while the ruins stood silent sentinel around them.

Chapter Seven

This morning, by special invitation from Commander Dunlap, Miss Clara Barton and the staff of the Red Cross were given a tour of the United States naval hospital ship the Solace. Miss Barton was kind enough to share her recollections of nursing during the Civil War with the doctors on the Solace, with whom she discussed methods of treating wounds, particularly her abhorrence of the practice of amputation, which the doctor assured her is no longer practiced so wantonly as it was in the past. Miss Barton was deeply gratified to hear it.