Page 81 of Two Wars and a Wedding

After Domokos, Dr. Kalopothakes invited me to nurse with her at a place on the western front called Vonitsa—you can’t imagine how much I’ve come to adore Dr. K. She scowls at me almost as feelingly as you do. But she admits I’ve come on rather nicely and the boys seem to like me even if my sheet corners never will tuck flat. It felt just like Vólos again, sleeping on the floor of a dirty old schoolhouse and being grudgingly praised by Dr. K.

We thought the Greeks would make another stand after Domokos . . . but they didn’t. And now we’re on a sort of pause. They call it a truce, which means everyone stands and glares and keeps their guns trained on the other side, ready to go off at a moment’s notice.

You’d think that would mean an end to casualties, wouldn’t you? But the fever has taken up where the Turks left off. I’m back to dear old Lamia, where the military hospital has now been largely given over to typhoid patients. . . . It’s July now, and I’m rather feeling the heat. Or maybe it’s just the twenty-four-hour shifts. I never thought I would miss Northampton in January! But I do. And I miss you.

Write me.

All my love,

Betsy

—Miss Betsy Hayes ’96 to Ava Saltonstall ’96

Lamia, Greece

July 1897

When Betsy climbed aboard the royal yacht, there was Charles.

The other three nurses to be honored with a royal invitation to supper were clattering around her, curtsying to Queen Olga and Prince Nicholas and the crown prince and Crown Princess Sophie. Betsy hastily bent her knees in a curtsy too, a rather belated and perfunctory one. The queen gave her an indulgent smile; Prince Nicholas made a joke about Americans and their democratic ways.

Betsy smiled by rote and answered by rote, because there, behind the royal family, among the sailors and courtiers, the officers and hangers-on, there was Charles in evening dress, everything formal and correct, his sun-streaked hair sleeked down, every inch the aristocrat, but when he looked at her, as she was looking at him, the corners of his eyes crinkled and he was her Charles again, and they were in his apartment in Athens with the afternoon sun slanting through the bedroom windows.

Betsy could feel her cheeks heat with a warmth that had nothing to do with the setting sun and everything to do with the man across the deck and the weight of a gold coin at the base of her throat.

She had worn that coin—for luck, for Charles—since Athens, never knowing whether it was a promise or a farewell.

That was the good thing about being ridiculously busy: it hadn’t given her much time to worry about being ruined. One didn’t fret about being fallen when one was surrounded by the actual fallen, with the Turks on the march and the sound of artillery loud in one’s ears. And there was very little energy left for musing about what was justified for love and was it love and if so what happened next when one was on shift for twenty-four hours at a time, taking temperatures and soothing the delirious. And perhaps, just perhaps, Charles was part of the reason for it all, because if she was careening from post to post, she wasn’t back in Athens, having to confront all the uncertainties from which the exigencies of war had saved her.

There was no future in it. Betsy knew there was no future in it, and yet, she had done what she had done, and now here they were, on the royal yacht, seeing one another for the first time since May under the eye of the royal family and assorted hangers-on. They were on the deck of a ship; there was no privacy and no hope of privacy.

And there was Charles, stepping forward, and the queen saying, with a twinkle in her eye, “But I know Miss Hayes needs no introduction to you, Monsieur de Robecourt.” Betsy had a horrible moment where she felt like a rabbit surprised in a field, before the queen added, “Or to anyone who studies the past.”

“I’m just a student still,” said Betsy, her throat very dry. She knew she should be looking at the queen, but her eyes were only for Charles. “Monsieur de Robecourt.”

“Miss Hayes.” He bent over her hand in the continental fashion, but he held it a moment longer than strictly necessary.

The queen moved on to be charming to one of the other nurses, an Athenian society girl who had taken the first aid course with Betsy, and actually passed it.

Charles was looking at Betsy. “I see you’ve kept your luck.”

Betsy put a hand to her neck, where the ribbon that held his token was poking just a bit above her collar.

“Yes. Close to my heart,” she said, and felt like the worst kind of sentimental fool.

They were en famille that night, the queen assured them, utterly informal, although informal to the royal family still meant a rather staggering degree of ceremony. The table had been set out on the upper deck, the lantern light glinting off silver and crystal; there was something about eating outdoors, almost a picnic, with the smell of the sea and the shadows settling close around that created an odd sense of intimacy. As a courtesy to Betsy, all the conversation at supper was in English, yet another mark of the queen’s regard. The queen had adopted Betsy as a sort of personal pet, her very own American who had chosen to nurse for Greece, whom the queen had championed and sent to the front when the doctors wouldn’t.

Betsy felt the pressure of that favor and did her best to be as charming as she could, telling stories of the ward, doing impressions of the men, jumping from topic to topic until she was dizzy with it. Although the queen seemed to approve, Charles just looked and looked and said little and Betsy couldn’t tell whether he was charmed or utterly put off and wondering what he’d ever seen in her.

“Did you receive the icon I had sent you?” the queen asked Betsy, as the savory was taken away and jellied sweets set out on the table.

“Oh, yes, the men adore it.” To the company at large, Betsy said, “We have a cursed bed, you see. First one man died in it, and then another, and after that . . . well, you can imagine. Even the sickest refused to be brought near it. They’d struggle and upset themselves. And we really don’t have the room to have a bed no one will use—they’re packed in like sardines as it is. So Her Majesty was kind enough to send us an icon. We made quite a show of installing it. It was carried in procession through the ward, and after that every single man in the place had to kiss it.”

It had seemed to her quite insanitary, but they all had typhoid anyway; it wasn’t as though they were spreading it beyond the confines of the ward. And it had been wonderful to see those haggard, wasted faces light up as the icon was brought to them. It had done more for them than any of the doctor’s doses.

Charles toyed with the stem of his wineglass, lifting it so the liquid within glowed with hidden depths where the lantern light touched it. “I thought you had little tolerance for signs and wonders, Miss Hayes.”

Betsy made herself address the party generally and not just Charles. “It isn’t my way, but—if there’s anything nursing has taught me, it’s that the most dangerous enemy isn’t the disease or the wound, but despair.”