Page 94 of Two Wars and a Wedding

“She’s not as dreadful as she seems.”

“What?” Disoriented, Betsy realized Aikaterini was talking to her. She’d been lost in a nightmare where Alex had her baby stolen from her, given away, brought in a basket to an orphanage, leaving her child alone and unloved. He would, he and Lavinia both. They’d do anything to preserve their good name. They’d never think of the child as a person. Their children were people. Their children mattered. But not an illegitimate child. Not an inconvenience.

“The baroness,” said Aikaterini, entirely misunderstanding Betsy’s terror. “We took the waters together. Again and again, we took the waters. I may not care for her—not as I care for you—but she’s not so bad as all that. I do not think Charles ever knew just how much she minded not having a child. Or it might be that he knew and didn’t want to know.”

Aikaterini’s face was bleak. Betsy wondered if it was the baroness she was speaking of or herself. Either way, she didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t want to think of Charles and his wife. She wanted—oh, she wanted to go back. Back before Lamia. Back before the Albania. When everything was still simple.

“But it won’t be hers,” Betsy said huskily. She remembered how the woman had looked at her. A cerveline. With messy hair. “What if she’s cruel? What if she blames the child for me?”

“I think,” said Aikaterini carefully, “that Delphine is one of those people with the facility to believe that which she wishes to believe. If she tells the world the child is hers, it will be. And she will never allow herself to know otherwise.”

“You mean she’ll pretend,” said Betsy flatly.

“I mean that she will remember it as she wishes it to have been. A final reconciliation with Charles. The long-awaited heir.” Aikaterini allowed herself a moment of cynicism. “There is, of course, also the inheritance to be thought of. Under the Code civil, the widow gets a share, but there are other properties which go only to the heir—to Charles’s brother should he die without a son.”

Betsy’s head jerked up. “Charles has a brother?”

“Two of them. And three sisters.”

Betsy hadn’t known that. She’d thought she knew him, but—what had she known? That he had a fey streak. That he liked to wander. That he was charming. Nothing more. He’d never spoken about his family, about his life before Athens. He’d hinted at it, the Prussian invasion, his experiments with absinthe, his wanderings in Egypt. But he’d never elaborated. And Betsy had never asked. She ought to have asked.

“Your child has a dozen cousins, or more,” Aikaterini carried on, not realizing she was grinding salt into the wound. “Some are much older, of course. But this child will be the most senior of them, the head of the family.”

“And if he’s a girl?” Betsy asked hoarsely.

“Then she will have female cousins to share gossip and male cousins to defend her honor. She will have aunts to tell her what is comme il faut and uncles to slip her coins to buy ribbons and sweets.”

But not a mother. Not her real mother. But what sort of mother would Betsy be? She’d never had one of her own, not really. She wasn’t even sure what they were meant to do, although she had a vague idea, from watching Ava’s mother and reading Little Women over and over that they were meant to dispense wise counsel and mold character and provide clean handkerchiefs.

Betsy always forgot her handkerchiefs.

“To have a child out of wedlock . . . it would ruin your life and that of the child.” Aikaterini looked at Betsy with compassion. “I wish it were otherwise, but it is what it is. A son of the baroness will be heir to a great fortune. A daughter of the baroness will move only in the best circles. Your child will have a name, a history, a family.”

Charles’s coin lay discarded on a richly lacquered table, the ribbon limp and shabby. Betsy scooped it up, worrying the frayed ends between her fingers. “And if I keep the child—”

She didn’t need to say it. An outcast from birth, tainted by the sins of the mother.

“This is the best way. For you and the child.” Aikaterini put a pin back into Betsy’s chignon, her hands gentle. “You will have a holiday in Switzerland. Then you will come back to me and resume your work and we will be as we were.”

Betsy nodded obediently, but she knew it was a lie. They would never again be as they were.

And she could never come back.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“The afternoon the vessel sailed I heard that she was to evacuate a number of our wounded to the States. Being informed that no nurse was on board, I volunteered to go with them. I went first to the hospital, where I gathered up a great bag of such necessities as I believed could be spared. Why did I gather such things? I had had experience of evacuations before, in the war in Greece. No, I had no reason to believe the ship would be unprovisioned. I believed we were to sail on the hospital ship Relief. It was simply a matter of caution. You might call it instinct. No, I’m not claiming female intuition—just common sense. Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

[Testimony paused. Debate on whether women can be said to have sense omitted as immaterial to the purpose of the commission.]

“The ship on which we were put—the Seneca—was not at all prepared to receive sick and wounded. The poor fellows were put between decks in cattle pens. There’s no other way to describe them. Yes, I know they weren’t actually meant to hold cattle and that cattle can’t lie on bunks. I’m simply trying to describe the inhumane conditions in which these sick men found themselves.

“There was not a surgical instrument or thermometer aboard. . . .”

—Report of the Commission, vol. 7, p. 3542; testimony of Miss Elizabeth Hayes re: conditions on board the USS Seneca.

* * *

On board the Seneca