Page 26 of Two Wars and a Wedding

It gave Betsy a rather squirmy feeling, as though the ground which she had thought solid was suddenly moving beneath her. “Next you’re going to say ‘What is the good, Alcibiades?’ and I am going to be strongly moved to push you off your donkey.”

Monsieur de Robecourt grinned at her from beneath his hat. “Soit. I shall cease playing Socrates. I have never liked the taste of hemlock.”

“I should hope you’ve never tasted the taste of hemlock,” retorted Betsy.

A wry look crossed his face. “I should think absinthe is a close cousin. I drank enough of that for a time, seeking oblivion where I could find it. But enough. Do you see? The Sacred Way. We’ll see if we can convince you to value wonders over potsherds.”

The way he looked at her made her feel like a wonder. Her mind, Betsy reminded herself. He admired her mind. “Do you know, I owe you a debt.”

“For Delphi?” he asked.

“No. Our discussion at Tiryns—it made me realize what I’m meant to do.” It was hard to be frank. It was so much easier to banter and exchange witticisms. “I’d always thought— It was always just assumed that I would go out and do what my father would have done, if he could—that the whole point was to try to find the pieces that would prove the truth of the Homeric legends. Like Herr Schliemann at Troy. My father longed to find Achilles’s shield or the pieces of Penelope’s loom. But why should the loom have to be Penelope’s? Isn’t it just as important to find a loom that’s just a loom?”

“Or some kitchen things?” Monsieur de Robecourt offered quietly.

“Yes. That’s it exactly.” Betsy let out her breath in a big rush. “It sounds silly, but I feel like I’ve been traveling a very narrow path and now I see a whole vista before me.”

They had reached the base of the Sacred Way while the others still dawdled behind. Monsieur de Robecourt reined in his donkey. “Why should that sound silly? Most people blindly follow. It’s no easy thing to eschew the expectations of others and find one’s own way.”

Betsy drew up alongside him. “As you did?”

His lips twisted. “I didn’t so much find my way as stumble into it.” Dismounting, he turned it into a pretty compliment. “I haven’t your vision.”

He offered her his hand. Betsy hesitated for a moment and then told herself not to be a fool; helping her down from her donkey was what anyone would do, even Wingate.

But he wasn’t Wingate. The second their fingers touched, she was shamefully aware of the press of his fingers beneath his gloves, the muscles of his arm beneath his sleeve, the vibration of his throat beneath his collar.

Betsy swallowed hard. “Does your . . .” She’d meant to say “wife” but the word was a stone on her tongue. “Does your family also have an interest in archaeology?”

“No.” He released her hand. “To them, I am an oddity.”

“We’re oddities together, then. My brother always thought my father was selfish for educating me. He and his wife say it unfit me for womanhood.” Betsy tried to make a joke out of it, but it didn’t come out quite as she’d intended. As much as she despised Lavinia’s opinions, there was still a sting in it. “She thinks if I’d spent less time studying Greek, I’d be married by now.”

“Do you regret it?”

The direct question took her by surprise. “No. I shouldn’t want to marry anyone who didn’t want me for anything but what I am.”

Monsieur de Robecourt’s smile was like European chocolate, bitter and sweet at the same time. “I am glad you are nothing but what you are.” He gently touched her cheek. “The world has many Helens, but very few Circes.”

As Betsy stood there in complete confusion, he raised his voice, saying to someone behind Betsy, “Ah, there you are. We dismount here.”

As Monsieur de Robecourt went to give instructions to the rest of their party, Betsy stood where she was, her back to the others, hoping they would think she was in rapt contemplation of Mount Parnassus and not waiting for her flaming cheeks to return to a socially acceptable shade.

Had Monsieur de Robecourt just called her an enchantress?

Odysseus had left Circe and gone back to his wife, Betsy reminded herself. So much for enchantresses.

Monsieur de Robecourt fell tactfully back, letting the Americans marvel at the sheer scope of the excavations stretching up above them, from the remains of the Temple of Athena Pronaia through the zigzagging path up to the Sanctuary of Apollo. They tripped and scrambled their way up the Sacred Way, between the remains of the treasure houses where the great city-states of Greece had once piled their offerings to Apollo. Wingate had his battered copy of Pausanias out and read aloud from it as they walked, falling headlong over a pile of rubble in his abstraction and having to be hauled up again by Jenks.

It was, Betsy had to agree, majestic. It was incredible to think of all the triumphs commemorated here, all the city-states paying tribute here, all the prophecies uttered here—but she preferred Tiryns, with its homely baths and guardrooms, where people had lived and not just worshipped.

She looked around to tell Monsieur de Robecourt, but he had slipped away somewhere. Well, she couldn’t blame him, could she? If this were her site, she wouldn’t want to watch the nursery party blundering around and slaughtering passages of Pausanias he undoubtedly knew by heart already.

“Do you have your coffeepot on you?” asked Wingate hopefully, peering at Ethel’s pack.

Betsy was suddenly in a terrible mood. “You don’t think it’s a crime against Apollo to make coffee in his sanctuary?”

“Not if we do it just outside his sanctuary,” said Wingate. “Up there, way at the top, in the stadium. There’s bound to be a jolly view.”