Page 8 of Two Wars and a Wedding

Betsy left Ethel looking equal parts horrified and skeptical. Ava would have known she was joking. Ava would have told her what she thought of such frivolousness in no uncertain terms.

Goodness, she missed Ava. After four years together, being apart was like being without a piece of herself.

Betsy felt a surge of longing for Northampton and the glorious fellowship of women. Of course, she’d known the American School wouldn’t be like Smith—but she had rather thought the men would be more like her Yale prom date, Paul, ready to be teased and charmed, quick to bow to her superior wit, not convinced of their own.

Well, she would just have to win them over, Betsy told herself. There was no point in repining. She was in Greece! Just where she’d always meant to be. And she was late for tea.

Betsy quickened her step, stopping at the hotel just long enough to change her sensible shirtwaist—it was sensible, whatever Dr. Richardson might think—for one of her new Paris suits, a bright, defiant purple elaborately banded with scrolls of black braid. It was cut to perfection, giving her figure an illusion of the hourglass silhouette that nature had declined to bestow.

She pinned on the matching hat and retrieved her faithful bicycle from the hotel staff, swooping happily past carriages and carts, horses and donkeys.

It was a very short ride to Academy Street, to a house that—well, it wasn’t a house, really, was it? Not in the way Betsy understood houses, the narrow brownstones of her youth, with their three floors up and the area beneath the stairs where the cook would pop out above the railings when the butcher’s boy came calling. This was a mansion, of white marble, comparatively restrained in its facade, but a mansion nonetheless.

A maid took Betsy’s bicycle. Another maid led her across a mosaic so fine that she wanted to stare at it rather than step on it. An arched door opened into a thoroughly European drawing room replete with red velvet furniture and insistent aspidistras.

A woman reclined on a chaise longue in a gown that Betsy knew wouldn’t suit her in the slightest, but coveted all the same: a tea gown in the aesthetic style, with a red silk overdress embroidered in gold thread hanging open over a high-necked gown of cream-colored voile.

Betsy ventured into the room, completely flummoxed by the difference between the woman in her head and the one sitting before her.

“Mrs. MacHugh?”

This woman couldn’t be more than a decade older than Betsy, thirty or so to Betsy’s twenty-two. Her rich black hair was piled on top of her head in loops and coils and she rose with a sinuous ease—aided, no doubt, thought Betsy enviously, by the lack of corset. It made her Paris suit feel uncomfortably tight and fussy.

But for all that, there was something very big sisterly about the woman advancing toward her, who regarded her with frank interest.

“You must be our famous bicyclist—Elizabeth Hayes.” She pronounced it in the Greek way, with a hard t.

No one called her Elizabeth. It had been her mother’s name. Her brother had always made clear to her he felt she had no right to it; that having taken their mother’s life, she shouldn’t also have her name.

“Call me Betsy,” Betsy said quickly.

“Betsy,” her hostess repeated. “And I am Aikaterini.”

“Aikaterini MacHugh?” Betsy blurted out, before she had the sense to stop herself.

The amusement in her hostess’s eyes turned into a full-blown smile. “My husband is the Scotsman. As for me . . . my mother was maid of honor to Queen Amalia.”

Betsy didn’t know the slightest thing about any Greek monarchs more recent than Agamemnon. She had a vague idea that the current royal house was roughly as Greek as she was—German? Belgian? Danish?—but that was about the extent of it.

“Goodness,” she said, for lack of anything better. She sank into the seat her hostess indicated, feeling very American.

“You would like tea, I imagine? It is a dusty ride in the heat of the day. On your famous bicycle.” Her hostess rang a bell and a maid appeared almost on the instant, rolling a trolley piled high with sweetmeats of various kinds.

Betsy stripped off her gloves. “It’s really just a bicycle. I’m not famous.”

“You are to me,” said Mrs. MacHugh, calmly pouring tea. “When I saw your name, I knew you at once, and was delighted. Your father did me a great kindness.”

Her father had lived in Athens only in his dreams. Betsy accepted the cup her hostess handed her. “How did you know my father?”

Mrs. MacHugh settled comfortably back on her sofa with her own cup of tea. The soft folds of her dress moved with her. “He and my father were business partners—oh, a very long time ago! But the partnership was only prelude to a friendship that was valued, I think, far more than their profits.”

Yes, that had been her father. He had come to business reluctantly, bound to it by birth and driven onward by obligation, but he had reserved his energies for his studies, his circle of correspondents—and his daughter. Well, there had also been her brother, Alex. But Alex’s temperament and her father’s had never aligned. He’d resented their father’s passion for the antique past, and the time it took from his work and his children. Betsy had understood, as Alex hadn’t, that their father expressed his affection with articles and epigraphs. One of her earliest memories was sitting curled up in her father’s lap in his favorite chair as he read aloud to her in ancient Greek, his finger following under the letters, so that she had read Greek before she had read English.

Heathen, the maids called it.

Inappropriate, Alex called it.

But her father had never once suggested that Betsy was any less capable of learning than a man. He had been so terribly proud when Betsy had passed her entrance exams for Smith.