Page 68 of Two Wars and a Wedding

But he was away, in Cambridge, getting his degree. No, not Cambridge. Cuba. He was in Cuba and there in the vines was Paul’s friend, that girl, clad in white samite like the Lady of the Lake, reaching out a pale hand to him holding a . . . sponge?

“Your fever should have broken by now,” said the apparition. “Holt? Can you hear me? Private Holt? Drat.”

He was drifting on his back in a lake, staring up at the sun through the foliage. The rustling of leaves sounded like voices, voices close by.

“. . . mending nicely.”

“. . . fever?”

“Should break soon. I’d tell you to apply cold compresses, but we can’t spare the ice.”

“I’ll think of something.” For a tree, it sounded very determined. The rustling faded and Holt drifted away along his river, the water carrying him gently up and down.

Until he woke and found himself flat on his back on a rather lumpy straw mattress, staring up at a canvas awning. Holt tried to turn his head and found the movement exhausted him. His eyes burned as though they had grit in them. He was ravenously hungry. And his leg itched.

Holt reached down to investigate the itch. There was a flurry of fabric and a hand closed over his, quite firmly. “Stop that!” scolded a fury in a Red Cross uniform. “Don’t you dare pull at that dressing. Your wound is only just beginning to mend and I won’t have you tearing it open again.”

Holt blinked at her. “Miss . . . Hayes.”

So he really had seen her. It hadn’t all been a hallucination. Although he rather suspected some bits of it were. Like the white samite.

“That’s Nurse Hayes to you,” she said, but he could hear the relief in her voice. “You’ve been out for two days—no, three days.”

“Three days?” Holt made an attempt to sit up that ended with Miss Hayes having to grab him to keep him from toppling sideways off the cot. He didn’t remember being on a cot. The last he remembered, he’d been on a pallet. The last he remembered, sitting up didn’t feel like major physical exertion.

He vaguely remembered Paul dragging him all the way from San Juan Hill, but beyond that . . . everything was murky. A lot of what had happened before that was murky too.

“Don’t fuss, Rip Van Winkle. You haven’t missed much. Unless you wanted to see Private Jones over here do his guppy imitation.”

“It’s not a guppy, it’s a halibut,” protested the patient on the next cot in wounded tones.

“They all look the same on a plate,” Miss Hayes shot back.

This appeared to be a routine of some standing. Holt tugged at Miss Hayes’s sleeve. “Paul?”

“Full of coffee and prunes and back with the regiment,” said Miss Hayes crisply. “Undoubtedly flinging himself in front of people with firearms.”

“. . . news?” Holt’s tongue felt thick and fuzzy. It didn’t seem to want to form words properly.

Miss Hayes—Nurse Hayes—propped him up expertly with one arm and put a cup to his lips. “Last I heard, your lot were still holding San Juan Heights. Oh, and the Spanish fleet has been destroyed.”

“Well, that’s something,” Holt murmured, and fell asleep again, dreaming of ships on fire, buccaneers and conquistadors and Paul in a feathered hat.

Nurse Hayes appeared at some point in the guise of Elizabeth I, which, in his dream, made perfect sense. Holt tried to shake out his cloak for her across a ford filled with blood but she told him to stop that and keep his blankets on or he’d freeze in the night air, and Holt wasn’t entirely sure whether it was Queen Elizabeth talking or Betsy Hayes or both.

The next time he woke it was dusk. Paul’s Betsy—Nurse Hayes—was kneeling by his cot, unwinding cloth from around his thigh. His very bare thigh. Which was next to very bare other bits of him. Holt made a grab at the sheet.

Nurse Hayes grabbed back. “Stop that. There’s really no need for that sort of thing. This leg and I are old acquaintances. Once you’ve seen the inside of someone’s abscess . . . If you could just release your grip on the sheet—thank you.”

Holt did as she ordered, wishing that the unnamed Spaniard who had wounded him had aimed just a little lower down his leg. Or, of course, not hit him at all. But if he had to wound him, couldn’t he have done it in a more socially acceptable place?

Nurse Hayes rolled her eyes. “There’s no need to be missish, Private Holt. I’ve seen far worse. There. All done.” She pushed herself to her feet, then looked back down, a lock of fair hair falling out of her cap. “What sort of name is Holt, anyway? It’s halfway between halt and hilt.”

“My mother’s maiden name,” Holt said hoarsely. Damn. There went any pretense that it was his own. “If it were between halt and hilt it would be helt.”

“Details.” Nurse Hayes picked up her basket of dirty dressings. “I’m trying to cure you, not shelve you.”

“Thank you.” Holt surprised himself as well as her by grabbing her hand. There was something he needed to tell her and he didn’t know how else to say it. “Before you go— You were right.”