Page 121 of Two Wars and a Wedding

Betsy looked at him, at that familiar-unfamiliar face, with his smoothly shaved cheeks that were still too thin from all the weeks of privation and the scar she had cleaned and dressed. “I wasn’t the one who saved us all on the Seneca,” she said, in a voice that didn’t sound like her own. “That was you. You came up with the idea of moving people from their cabins—”

“You were the one who asked them.”

“Stop trying to give me the credit! You’re the best person I know.” Betsy couldn’t do this anymore. She couldn’t talk around it. She couldn’t pretend. A million thoughts and emotions jostled together, but all that came out was “I love you. I didn’t want to love you but I can’t imagine not loving you and I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Are you asking my advice on the matter?” It was very hard to tell what Holt was thinking.

Betsy felt strangely exhausted. “Well . . . yes. I suppose I am.”

“In that case . . .”

Holt’s cane clunked against the ground. He leaned forward and kissed her, right there in the middle of a path in Central Park, to the vast interest of half a dozen squirrels, two fascinated children, one horrified nursemaid, and Betsy.

When the trees stopped revolving around them, long after the outraged nursemaid had shooed her charges away, Betsy held on to Holt—after all, he’d dropped his cane, and she didn’t want him to fall—and said breathlessly, “Compromising me in Central Park is the solution?”

Holt grinned at her, resting his forehead briefly against hers. “It’s a start.”

Betsy scrunched her eyes shut at a particularly mortifying memory. “Kit did tell me I should make an honest man of you while I could.”

“Oh, did she?” said Holt. “When was this?”

“On Hoffman Island.” Betsy had blundered back into the room and flung herself down next to Kit’s cot. “I asked her why things couldn’t be simple. She told me if I wanted simple, they’d be simple, but I like making problems and you like solving them, and what could be better than that? There was a bit more to it than that, but that was the main point.”

Holt framed her face in his hands, smoothing his thumbs over her cheekbones. “If the problem is that you love me and I love you, then I think there’s an obvious answer.”

Betsy wrinkled her nose at him. “Does that answer involve orange flowers? I don’t know how to be a wife, Holt. All I know is how to translate dead languages.” Betsy thought for a moment. “And bandages. I’ve gotten quite good at bandages.”

Holt didn’t laugh. He never did when she wasn’t really joking. That was part of the joy of him. “All I know about being a husband is that whatever my father did, I want to do the opposite. I think we just go on being ourselves. But we go on being ourselves together.”

“You make it sound so simple,” said Betsy despairingly. Kit was going to gloat. Kit was going to gloat unbearably. She was probably going to gloat in print, no less.

“Oh, don’t worry.” Holt’s eyes crinkled at the corners as he looked down at her. “I’m sure you can find a way to make it complicated.”

“Hush,” said Betsy, thinking hard. “If you’re going to set up your practice in Massachusetts, I could teach at Smith during the winters. . . .”

She wasn’t sure if the classics faculty would be delighted or horrified at the notion. Either way, she was sure she could talk them around. It might be rather nice to have the opportunity to shape a new generation of scholars.

The boys at the American School would have no idea what hit them.

“I’ve heard Greece is lovely in the summer,” offered Holt.

Betsy rested her hands against the soft fabric of his brand-new suit. “It’s hot. It’s very hot. But you should be used to that after Cuba. And no one will be shooting at you. So there’s that.”

Holt looked tenderly at her. “If they do, you can bandage me.”

“You always have an answer for everything,” Betsy said thickly, scrubbing at her eyes with the back of her hand.

Holt reached into his pocket and held out a scrap that had once been part of her petticoat. “Handkerchief?”

Epilogue

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Ambrose Rutherford IV (née Betsy Hayes)

Archaeologist, Humanitarian, and War Nurse

Miss Elizabeth Hayes to Miss Katherine Carson

September 2, 1898