Page 84 of Two Wars and a Wedding

“Say . . . unspoiled.”

“You know better than that,” Betsy shot back. She folded her arms across her chest. “Don’t you need to be getting back?”

It would have been easier to stay indignant if Charles didn’t look so stricken with remorse. “I’ve offended you.”

“I’m tired. And sticky.” And queasy. The rich food on the ship hadn’t sat well with her. Nothing sat well with her. Betsy suspected it was the heat, turning her stomach, making her lethargic and queasy. She didn’t have time to be lethargic and queasy.

“Will I see you on Thursday?”

It was impossible to stay angry with Charles. He was what he was, just as she was what she was, American and prickly. “Did you really think I would say no?”

He smiled ruefully at her. “With you, my thinking is not at its best.”

That was strange, because Betsy found the opposite to be true. When she was with Charles, she felt sharp and clever, as if she were a character on a stage playing to an appreciative audience. Not that it was a role, really. The role she was playing was herself, only more so. American, outspoken, just a bit daring. The same sort of role she played for the queen.

Right now the only role Betsy was meant to be playing, she reminded herself, was that of nurse. She had thirty-eight breakfasts to prepare and thirty-eight temperatures to take and she was already late. Taking herself firmly in hand, she marched off to wrangle with the cook over just how many peritonitis patients needed their gruel iced.

True to his word, Charles came for her on Thursday morning.

Betsy felt strange in her walking dress instead of her uniform, strange crossing the courtyard and going out into the street, strange leaving her charges behind, even for the day. Strange walking next to Charles, just Charles, rather than a group of nurses.

“I feel like I’m sneaking out,” Betsy confided to him as he helped her into a hired trap.

“Dereliction of duty?” Charles settled himself on the seat beside her, taking the reins in a practiced hand. His voice sounded a little flat.

Betsy snuck a look at him sideways. “No, not that. Not just that. When we first got here, whenever people would see us in our nurses’ uniforms, they would come running to us, begging for help.” Betsy shivered at the memory of those mothers with their hollow-eyed children, and the tiny bundles that, when unwrapped, turned out to be babies, too weak with hunger to cry. “We sent to the queen and she arranged for a doctor to be brought from Athens and a house taken as a hospital and dispensary. They distribute clothing too. I go there when I have the time. Some of those children . . . those poor children. They’ve scarcely had time to be children.”

“You cannot save everyone.” Was it her imagination or did Charles sound more impatient than sympathetic? He guided their trap around a cart. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

Betsy bit her lip. It was true. She hadn’t been feeling her best. But those children . . .

“Did you ever think what your life might have been had your home been invaded?” Betsy demanded, trying to get some sort of reaction.

Charles smiled faintly. “It was. In ’71. The Prussians had Paris under siege. I was sixteen. Too young to fight, but old enough to want to.”

Betsy hadn’t been born yet in 1871. “Yes, but you didn’t lose your home or your livelihood the way these people have.”

“Only my honor.” His face was bleak. “Ah, look. We arrive.”

Charles pulled the trap to the side of the road, looping the reins, before Betsy could ask him what he’d meant.

He never, she realized, as he helped her down from the trap, spoke of anything truly personal. She had told him about her father and a little bit of Alex and Smith and of her wretchedness over the Albania, but he never spoke of his father or family or childhood, or if he did, only obliquely. It wasn’t just his wife he avoided speaking of; that she could understand, just as she avoided discussing her rift with Ava. It was anything personal.

Maybe she was being silly to break life into boxes like that. Ideas were personal, philosophies were personal. So what if they spoke only in platonic allegories? They were scholars, both of them. The life of the mind was the life of the soul. Or something like that.

“Watch your step,” he warned her. “The highway was mined with dynamite. But we should be safe enough on the path into the hills.”

“Where are we?” Betsy asked. She felt that she ought to know. But she was so tired, so bleary after weeks of night watches.

“Where else?” said Charles, with an attempt at lightness that failed utterly. He lifted a handkerchief to his forehead. It was still early, but the day was already broiling and there had been little shade on the main road. “Thermopylae.”

Betsy looked at the pitted, war-scarred road behind them and the wooded hills ahead with a sudden superstitious chill. They had died to a man at Thermopylae. Gloriously, yes. But still. They’d died.

“I had thought you would like to see it,” said Charles a little unsteadily.

“I’ve wanted to see it, but I’ve been afraid to,” Betsy confessed. “The men talk of going to the hot springs at Thermopylae the way we would—oh, going to Atlantic City. It’s utterly mundane to them. But I keep thinking of Leonidas and his Spartans. I guess I don’t want to face the possibility of defeat.”

A curious expression crossed her lover’s face. Something like pity. “Didn’t you know it happened long ago?”