Page 74 of Two Wars and a Wedding

“The latter. I didn’t even give him time to get his collar adjusted properly.” She pressed her eyes tightly shut, remembering, feeling it as if she were reliving it. “I just needed to talk to him—right away—to make him see—”

She swayed on her feet, and Charles put an arm around her, too worried for propriety. “My rooms aren’t far from here. Come.”

Betsy had never thought of where Charles lived. She knew he lived somewhere, of course, but it had never occurred to her to inquire. His rooms took up an entire floor of a neoclassical mansion. The nicest floor, of course; what the French called the bel-étage. That was hardly a surprise. Charles’s étage couldn’t be anything other than bel, thought Betsy, stifling a hysterical burst of laughter. The effort made her sway slightly.

Charles tightened his grip on her arm. “Is Aikaterini not looking after you?”

“She’s in Bad-somewhere,” said Betsy vaguely, as Charles brought her through a tiled foyer into a grand salon, the sun from long windows glinting off a truly staggering quantity of gold leaf.

Gold-framed portraits leered down from the walls; women in puffy petticoats swung in eternal glee over eighteenth-century shrubbery; devoted swains wheedled shepherdesses; and imposing Greek gods, not at all in the Greek style, disported themselves on the ceiling.

Betsy wandered in circles, reaching out a hand to touch a gilded clock, running her fingers across the marble top of a bombé chest, craning her neck to stare up at Aphrodite. “Good heavens. It’s like being in Paris. You’ve brought Paris to Athens.”

“It’s not at all like Paris,” said Charles decidedly. “Let me ring for coffee.”

“Where is Ethel when one needs her?” It seemed so strange to think that Ethel was undoubtedly still back at the American School, trying to figure out who stole Jane.

It seemed even stranger that the man who lived among these gilded relics had crouched over a campfire with her. This was all pure ancien régime. Betsy had no doubt that the powdered and bewigged characters who stared at her with pursed lips from the walls were actual ancestors and not the sort one bought secondhand to lend an impression of antiquity to recent wealth.

Betsy poked at a large bronze Hercules. “Did you leave anything in Paris?”

“Nothing that mattered.” Charles gave a sharp tug on a braided rope. He looked at Betsy. “Everything I care about is here in Athens.”

Betsy wasn’t entirely sure he was talking about the furnishings anymore. She seated herself carefully on a petit point settee far older than she was. “Doesn’t your wife mind?”

“Ah, Georgios.” The door opened, admitting a male servant. Charles spoke to him in rapid Greek that was much better than Betsy’s, ordering coffee and cakes. “We should have sustenance for you quite shortly.”

Sustenance. What was sustenance? Betsy shook her head distractedly. “How can I sit and eat cakes?”

“Much as you are,” Charles suggested, coming to join her on the settee, but Betsy was already on her feet, prowling distractedly around the room, pacing an uneven track across the Aubusson carpet.

“Yesterday—yesterday I was on a ship. Yesterday I was on a ship where six men died.” Betsy felt like an inkblot, the one disorderly note among all the harmony. She didn’t belong here in Charles’s jewel box, where everything was orderly and calm. “Six men.”

Charles leaned forward on the settee. “What happened?”

Betsy wove an erratic path around the furniture, faster and faster, as if she could outpace her own thoughts. “The medical officer on the Albania—he treated us all as though we were nothing, as though we didn’t matter. The Greek nurses were just peasants to him. And I—I was just a woman and an American and therefore of no account.”

“That I cannot believe. You are always of account.”

“You ought to have heard him. My dear girl.” Betsy viciously mimicked the officer’s veddy veddy British accent. “Do us the courtesy of assuming we know our own trade. But they didn’t. They didn’t. It was the arrogance of it.”

“Would you have been better off if there had been no ship at all?” Charles asked quietly.

“Yes! No. I don’t know. That’s what the minister said too, that it was a kindness of them. But if they hadn’t chartered a ship, maybe someone else would have. Or having chartered the ship, they might at least have listened to us.” Betsy stopped short next to a bust of a seventeenth-century worthy on a marble pedestal. “It was just so unnecessary. They didn’t have to die. It was such waste.”

“Il est défendu de tuer,” murmured Charles. “Tout meurtrier est puni, à moins qu’il n’ait tué en grande compagnie, et au son des trompettes.”

It is forbidden to murder unless one does it in a large company to the sound of bugles.

“Yes, but that’s the point,” said Betsy impatiently. “This wasn’t an act of war; this was an act of stupidity. These men survived the war. They fell prey to—oh, goodness, what does one even call it? Pure nitwittery! That’s what it was.”

“Folly has killed more men than cannon.”

Betsy narrowed her eyes at him. “Is that also Voltaire?”

“No. Merely an observation of my own.”

“Well, I won’t have it. Not if I’m there to stop it.” Never mind that Ava thought her the most foolish of all. At least Betsy knew better than to leave sick men lying exposed on the deck of a ship. “Next time. I’ll just have to speak louder, fight harder. I may not be much of a nurse, but I do know how to be a nuisance.”