Page 83 of Two Wars and a Wedding

“He didn’t appreciate my trying to give him a dose of chloral but it took effect quickly enough. And there’s always an orderly to help.”

Betsy felt she was giving the wrong impression somehow. The men weren’t dangerous; they didn’t mean her harm. They were scared and suffering and it was her job to help them. Besides, she wasn’t such a delicate flower as all that. Even if she did feel vile just now.

“Here,” she said, anxious to change the subject. “Here’s the queen’s icon.”

It had been affixed with all due ceremony to the easternmost wall of the ward. With a mischievous look at Betsy, Charles leaned over and pressed his lips to the bright paint.

“Charles!” Betsy protested, and then looked around to make sure no one had heard. No one but all the men, of course. And her fellow nurse, Sophie, who was also on duty and very studiously not looking. Betsy dropped her voice. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

Charles turned his hat over in his hand. “Do you believe the saint intercedes only for the sick? There are illnesses other than those of the body.”

Was he sick for her or sick of her? Betsy couldn’t stand it anymore. “Come into the garden for a moment—and then you really must go. I’m meant to be taking the men their breakfasts and they all need something different depending on their condition.”

Betsy led Charles quickly into the walled garden, the sun dazzling after the determined gloom of the ward, the air rich with the scent of roses and hollyhocks, geraniums and begonias, driving out the stench of carbolic and death.

“It’s beautiful,” he said, looking around wonderingly at the flowers so carefully tended by the gardener, such a wonder after Sister Psara’s white ward.

“Yes, like one of your Fragonard paintings,” she said, and flushed at the memory of the last time she had been in Charles’s apartment, lingering kiss following lingering kiss as they had said goodbye only to say goodbye again and again and again.

“But more beautiful a garden than any of those for having you in it.” The compliment sounded awkward. It wasn’t like Charles to be awkward. He stood near her but not touching her. “You didn’t write.”

“I wasn’t sure you would want me to. After—well. You know.” The morning sun felt very warm, even in the cool of the garden. Betsy traced the contours of a rose, just the right side of overblown. “And I’ve been very busy.”

“I can see that,” Charles said drily.

Not too busy to write Ava. Not too busy to go on picnics with the other nurses. But he didn’t need to know any of that. Sometimes one had to hide not because one cared too little but because one cared too much. Betsy plucked a geranium, absently shredding the petals. He loves me, he loves me not . . .

“What was I to say?” What could she say? Once, they had been friends. One might write a friend. But once that line had been crossed—Betsy didn’t know what they were. What she was. None of the options were good.

Charles reached out and took her hands, shredded foliage and all. “May I see you again? Not here?”

What for? Betsy wanted to ask. She wasn’t sure they could go back, and, after last night, she knew they couldn’t go forward, not as they were.

Betsy’s throat felt very raw. “I’m about to start my twenty-four hours on—but I’ve off on Thursday. If you’ll be here that long.”

Four days from now. It felt like a test.

Charles didn’t budge. “I’ll be here as long as I need to be.”

Betsy wasn’t sure why that made her want to cry. She blinked hard, asking hoarsely, “What about Delphi? Isn’t it the season?”

Charles look at her curiously. “The war has stopped the excavations almost entirely. There are no workmen to dig,” he clarified.

“Oh.” Somehow, Betsy had never quite made the connection in her head. The war seemed a thing removed from that other Greece, the Greece of ruins and treks. It had never occurred to her that the men she nursed might be the same men who sifted the rubble from the buried monuments of Delphi.

It had been some consolation to think that while her world crumbled in flame and fever, back in the rest of Greece the peaceful march of scholarship went on, that tea and cakes were had and inscriptions discovered and debated.

She ought to have realized that was nonsense, but she hadn’t, and it hit her like a blow, like discovering what one thought was a solid wall was nothing but a painted backdrop, flimsy and false.

Betsy looked at Charles in sudden panic, not seeing her lover but her friend. “Was this a dreadful mistake? The war? It seemed such a good idea back in March, but . . . I’ve seen so many hurt, Charles. So many lives wasted. And now this truce! Was it all for nothing?”

Charles lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “Who can say? The history of the world is driven by blunders and misapprehensions—and actions that seemed like a good idea at the time.”

That wasn’t what she had wanted to hear. Betsy didn’t like that at all, the idea of history as an accumulation of accidents. “Maybe your history,” she said ungraciously. “Your revolution went all to blood and despotism. But ours stuck.”

“You’re young yet,” Charles said gently, “you and your country both. There is time yet for you to make your grand mistakes.”

“That’s cynical.” Betsy scowled up at him. “Is that how you think of me? In my infancy?”