Page 85 of Two Wars and a Wedding

Betsy squinted up at him. “Thermopylae?”

“Defeat,” Charles said heavily. “Months ago. This truce—it is only a way of saving face. The war is over in all but name.”

Betsy didn’t want to hear it. If he was right, it had all been for nothing. All the men she’d nursed; all the men she’d seen die. All those children who’d lost their homes, who’d lost their fathers. All those babies, starving.

“Is the path that way?” she asked, without looking back. Her voice sounded high and strange.

She could hear Charles’s footsteps behind her as she plunged up the pass, between the encroaching trees. “My darling . . .”

Betsy turned sharply to face him. “Am I? Your darling?”

His face was gray and tired in the morning sun, the lines around his eyes deeper than usual. “Can you have any doubts?”

Her doubts had doubts. She scrunched up her face against the sun. “I was wondering if you had brought me here to tell me to my face that it was all . . . oh, I don’t know. A bit of madness.”

“A glorious madness.” He put his hands on her shoulders and she found herself leaning into him, into the familiar warmth and smell of him, his jacket beneath her cheek. Fleetingly she felt him rest his cheek against the top of her hat. She could feel him trembling; his shirt and waistcoat were damp with sweat. “If this is madness, I have no desire to be sane.”

Betsy pulled back and looked at him. That was all very well, but the world didn’t see it that way. She supposed they could live in glorious sin, but as wild as she might have been, part of her balked at that. She wasn’t sure she had it in her to be a scarlet woman, not really.

“Charles, what do we do?”

He sat down on a rock, drawing her down with him. “An annulment, I think. One will have to apply to the Pope. . . .”

Betsy stared at him. She could feel the rock sharp and uncomfortable beneath her skirt and underthings. “You mean—marriage?”

“What else? Why do you think I followed you here? Why do you think I stayed?” He dropped his head in remorse. “I ought to have asked you more elegantly.”

“It isn’t the manner of the asking that matters.” She hadn’t expected him to ask her at all. This was what she’d wanted, what she hadn’t even dared dream of, spending their lives together, excavating together, being together, but— “What about your wife? Won’t she mind?”

“My wife has not been my wife for a very long time,” Charles said brusquely. “It would have been different had she borne an heir. But as she has not . . .”

There was something about this that bothered Betsy deeply. “But what if she doesn’t agree?”

“I cannot imagine she will.” Charles gazed out at the pass along which the Spartans had once marched to death and glory. “It would be easier if she would. She might retire with honor to a nunnery. But even if she does not . . . these things can be arranged.”

“It seems . . . medieval. And cruel.”

“She would waste no sympathy on you.” Charles hunched forward. He was shivering, Betsy realized. The day was hot, but he was shivering. “It will be a scandal. But I have weathered scandal before. And you—I do not think you fear it.”

“Charles? Are you unwell?” Betsy asked, with sudden alarm.

“Do I need to be unwell to admit that I love you? I love you with every part of this frail and feeble form. I love you with my mind and my heart and my soul,” he said fiercely, and Betsy would have been far more moved by it had she not seen, with sudden horror, the glassiness of his eyes, the sheen of sweat on his forehead.

Betsy’s mouth was dry. She was a nurse; she ought to have seen it before. But she’d been too busy nursing her wounded pride. “Charles . . .”

Charles grasped her wrist in an unsteady clasp, his eyes brilliant and unfocused as he stared at her. “You give me new life. You give me my youth back.”

“You’re not that old.” He wasn’t that old, but something was terribly wrong. She’d noticed he wasn’t himself, but it had never occurred to her to wonder why. “You’re shaking.”

“Je vis, je meurs: je me brûle et me noie, / J’ai chaud extrême en endurant froidure . . .” Charles muttered.

I live, I die: I burn and I drown, I’m hot and cold . . .

It was a poem, a love poem, but this wasn’t love he was burning with.

Betsy lifted a hand to his head. “Charles. Charles, stop. You’re burning up.”

“With love,” he insisted, and tried to kiss her hand.