Page 31 of Two Wars and a Wedding

Miss Barton made a show of smoothing back the hair from his brow. She turned to make sure all three reporters in her entourage were watching and intoned, “You are helping to make the history of your country now, poor fellow.”

“Yes, yes,” said the doctor, his smile rather fixed, as all three reporters diligently took down her words. “Shall we?”

Back on the State of Texas, Kit regarded her portable writing desk without enthusiasm. “I’d better write up my story so I can file it before Mrs. White and Miss Jennings get the scoop on me.”

Betsy gave a very unladylike snort. “I think the reporters traveling with the actual army have probably already done that.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” Kit balled up her white cap and threw it across the room with unexpected violence. “Here I am writing about Miss Barton touring a hospital ship when somewhere out there the real stories are happening. It makes me sick. I’d be out there if they’d let me.”

“Of course you would, but . . .”

Kit glared at her. “Don’t you care? Don’t you mind that we’re not allowed to do our jobs? They stop us getting the good stories and then they say we only cover trivialities because our minds are trivial. They refuse to give us passes and then they tell us we mustn’t be dedicated enough because if we were we would have gone where the story was. There’s no way to get it right. Whatever we do they’ll find a way to make sure we don’t do it.”

“Kit.” Betsy felt awful. Kit, usually so composed, was near tears. “I thought you were the one who told me all it took was sticking a foot in the door and keeping it there.”

“My foot is sore.” Kit dragged in a deep breath, mustering an entirely unconvincing smile. “Don’t mind me. I just can’t stand sitting around. It makes me wonder what I’m doing here.”

She was missing her children. She never said as much, but Betsy saw her, sometimes, taking out a much-handled photograph, two children, a boy and a girl. The boy, uncomfortable in his sailor suit, squirming to get out of the picture, looked an awful lot like Kit, right down to the freckles.

Betsy’s chest hurt. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself, struggling for control.

“What you’re doing is writing about the Red Cross visit to the naval ship Solace,” said Betsy briskly. She posed in her bulky uniform. “Aren’t we glamorous enough for you?”

“No one wants to read about the Red Cross. Not when the real action is over there.” Kit waved vaguely in the direction of Santiago. “Anything could be happening and we won’t know until we read the news in week-old papers written by other people.”

It felt very odd to be bucking Kit up rather than the other way around. “You’ll still have been to Cuba. We’re here, aren’t we?”

“Yes, moored in a bay like nuns in a convent.” Kit dropped her face into her hands, scrubbing her cheeks with her palms. “I have a daughter. I’ve always told her she can do anything she wants to do. That by the time she grows up, there’ll be women in all the professions. She was so proud that the paper was sending me to Cuba. What am I meant to tell her when I get home? That they sent me but they wouldn’t let me there on the ground because I’m a woman? At that rate, I might as well have stayed home with her and baked pie.”

“Do you bake pie?” asked Betsy, diverted.

“Sometimes. Doesn’t everyone like pie?” Kit shook her head as if to clear it. “I just—I feel like I’ve lied to her. I lied to myself. I thought it meant something that they were letting me come out here. But we’re just sailing around and around going nowhere. Our big excitement is a visit from our ship to another ship.”

“You didn’t lie. You just only told her part of the story. And you don’t know how this story is going to end yet.”

“With Teddy Roosevelt inviting me to ride with the Rough Riders?” Kit made a face. “I always knew it wasn’t going to be that easy. I just hadn’t thought it would be this hard. I thought I’d get a shot.”

Her words hit Betsy right in the gut. She remembered fighting with Ava back in Athens, accusing her of being defeatist, of just not wanting to try. It had never occurred to her, back then, that Ava might have been right

Betsy bit her lip. “You never know. Miss Barton seems determined to get us in on the action. She’s a national heroine. The Angel of the Battlefield.”

“Men prefer their angels cast in porcelain and set on the mantelpiece, not butting into their business,” said Kit bitterly. “You saw how they treated her back there. Like a joke. This whole plan—I should have known better.”

“Kit—” Betsy paused, not sure what to say.

Kit turned away. “I’m just having a fit of the doldrums. If this were my daughter, I’d tell her to stop feeling sorry for herself and get on with it. You can only do what you can do and you can’t fix what you can’t fix.”

Betsy cast about for a more encouraging aphorism. Unfortunately, she’d never been much for aphorisms. All she could remember was “least said, soonest mended,” which didn’t exactly seem applicable.

“Fortune favors the bold?” she ventured. It sounded better in Latin.

“Fortune favors the male. What?” shouted Kit, as someone banged on their door.

“Your presence is desired upstairs,” came the muffled voice of Sister Bettina. “Miss Barton has called a meeting.”

The Clara Barton waiting for them seemed like an entirely different person from the unhappy woman who had blustered and postured her way through their tour of the hospital ship. This Clara Barton seemed a good decade younger, her color high with excitement rather than rouge, her eyes snapping.

“A friend has brought word of a severe engagement that occurred today at Las Guasimas, where a Spanish contingent was guarding the road to Santiago.” Next to her, Betsy could see Kit grab for the notebook that lived in her apron pocket. “The wounded are even now being brought into the village of Siboney. He says they lack every necessity. The wounded need help. They need us.”