Page 70 of Two Wars and a Wedding

“But then there would be no story,” murmured Holt.

Nurse Hayes snorted. “Now you sound like Kit. Nurse Carson, I mean.” She sighed, looking away over his head, out the tent and far away. “That wasn’t the sort of story I was interested in. I had an idea that I was going to bring back the lives of normal people—the sort of people who got trampled when Odysseus passed through. Nausicaa washing her laundry on the rocks. Penelope at her loom. All the everyday things and people that are there in the background, ignored. A whole new sort of archaeology, a quest not for treasures but for vanished lives.”

This was a whole new Nurse Hayes. Holt was fascinated. “Then why didn’t you?”

“Because I went to war.” Nurse Hayes pushed herself up to her feet, reaching down for her basket, the conversation clearly over. “I should have stayed in Athens and studied for my exams. Instead I took a nursing class and went off to the front. I was foolish. And arrogant. And that’s the end of it.”

Holt’s hand brushed her sleeve. “But you did it.”

She looked sharply back over her shoulder. “What?”

“You nursed those men. The ones in—wherever it was.”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Not so foolish for them. Not so foolish for me.” It was an effort to speak, an effort to keep his eyes open. But he had to make sure she knew. “Whatever—went wrong, I’m sorry. But I’m glad you’re here.”

Siboney, Cuba

July 6, 1898

Private Holt was asleep almost before the words were out of his mouth.

I’m glad you’re here.

Betsy bit down hard on her lower lip to keep it from wobbling. She wasn’t the wobbling sort. She was just tired, that was all. But she paused to tuck the blankets more snugly under Private Holt’s chin. It got cold at night in Siboney, by the sea.

She hadn’t meant to talk to him about Greece.

About the men who had died who hadn’t had to, not because of necessity, but because of arrogance and pomposity and self-importance.

War she could understand. Not approve, but understand. Men had always settled their differences by seeing who could punch hardest; war was just another name for the same impulse. But what had happened after Velestinon—it was pure waste. Criminal irresponsibility.

That was what Ava had said to her, all those months ago, but Ava didn’t know the half of it.

Ava had no idea of just how right she’d been. About so many things.

Betsy looked at Private Holt, his face oddly peaceful in sleep. She’d shaved off the mustache while he was sleeping—not just because it annoyed her, but because that was what they did, they shaved off unnecessary havens for dirt and, all right, also maybe because it annoyed her—and his face looked younger, less tough. The fine-boned face of a scholar or a philosopher.

Not what he seemed, Paul had said.

She certainly would never have expected Hold ’Em Holt to quote Gilbert and Sullivan. Or Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

But as he’d pointed out, no one expected a classicist in a nurse’s uniform either.

You can’t put on a uniform and pretend you know what you’re doing, Ava had told her, but she didn’t have much choice, did she? Betsy wasn’t much, but she was what they had. She’d failed her men on the hospital ship Albania. And then, later, even worse . . .

Maybe this was her chance to redeem herself. Betsy wasn’t foolish enough to think that a life could balance a life. But it might help. A little.

She could help these men.

Or at least bring the dirty dressings to be boiled. Betsy made a face at herself and went back to doing what had to be done.

There was a great deal to be done over the next few days and very few people to do it. Sister Minnie and Sister Anna were both feeling poorly; there were rumors that a man in the Cuban hospital was suffering from yellow fever, but, then, there were always rumors about yellow fever. It was like the bogeyman, under everyone’s bed, and hopefully just as insubstantial.

But the men still stumbling in were real. A truce had been called, but even if the guns were temporarily silent, fever, heatstroke, and dysentery did the Spaniards’ work for them. The men being brought in for care were nothing like the hearty boys who had thronged the transports in Port Tampa only a month ago. They were walking skeletons, swollen with bug bites, infested with lice, debilitated by festering scratches, teeth loose from malnutrition.

And the truce wouldn’t last forever. They all knew it was a matter of days, at best, before the guns started up again and the carts jolted back down the Siboney road filled with men in even worse shape than last time.