Page 99 of Two Wars and a Wedding

Three days. She just had to keep everyone alive for three days.

Malted milk, beef tea, tiny sips of water. Betsy checked in on Kit whenever she could, but it was hard to force herself past the door of the cabin, hard to look at Kit without seeing Charles, Charles as they hadn’t let her see him at the end, delirious and muttering.

It was one thing to soothe a stranger in his delirium, quite another to have Kit grabbing at her hand and calling her Dorothy and telling her it was time to put her hat on. There were times when Betsy came in and Kit was having conversations with people who weren’t there, and Betsy had to pretend to fit into whatever story was playing out in her mind to get a few sips of beef tea into her.

And then there were the times when Kit wasn’t conscious at all, collapsed into a sort of coma, and those were worse still.

Betsy had been through this so many times with so many men. Usually, by the time they came to her, they were done with the first phase: the headache and the cough. Then came the distended stomach, the high fever, the delirium. After that—sometimes there wasn’t an after that. The biggest fear in Lamia had been peritonitis, the inflammation of the intestines. They’d had special food for the peritonitis patients. And doctors on hand, to try to save the patient if something ruptured.

They weren’t always successful.

The doctors treating Charles hadn’t been successful.

“Kit? I’ve got some beef tea for you.” Even with the best attempts at ventilation, the cabin smelled foul. Betsy yearned for Sister Psara’s white ward, for the carbolic, the laundry, the comfort of having Sister Psara there to tell her what to do.

Kit blinked at her. “Betsy,” she whispered.

“I’m here.” Sometimes Kit thought they were in Siboney and she was meant to be on shift. Other times she was helping Betsy find her way to the Tampa Bay Hotel, offering her candy that existed only in Kit’s imagination.

“I hurt.” Kit’s voice was the barest thread.

“I know.” Betsy knelt by Kit’s bed. In Lamia, they’d iced the food for peritonitis patients. But the ice was the only thing making the brackish water drinkable, and they had almost run out. So instead there was beef tea that Betsy had let sit out until it was as cool as the climate would allow, which wasn’t very cool at all. “I’m just going to give you a sip of something. Do you think you can swallow?”

“Betsy.” Kit stirred, or as much as she could. She was so weak that even that small movement exhausted her. Her eyes were hollows in her emaciated face. “Betsy, am I going to die?”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Dear Ava,

Please don’t go, whatever you do, please don’t go. I should never have said what I said back in Athens. I hadn’t the slightest notion. I didn’t know, I didn’t know anything at all about anything, but now I do and I can’t bear to think of you going off to nurse not knowing how quickly it can all happen, how quickly you can go from

There was nothing wrong with Charles and then

I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you. I’ll go for you, if you like. I’m not worth anything but you are. I’ll take your place. I don’t care what happens to me, but I care what happens to you. Please don’t go to Cuba, Ava. Please. I don’t want you to die. Let me take your place.

I don’t know if this letter will find you in time, so I’m coming to find you too. If you get this, know that I’ll be joining the Red Cross so you don’t have to. You can tell them I’m going in your place, so it’s all settled and there’s no trouble about releasing you. And if you don’t get this—I guess I’ll see you there and I can say this all in person.

But I hope you do get this and stay home safe in Concord.

With love,

Betsy

—Miss Betsy Hayes ’96 to Ava Saltonstall ’96

Loèche-les-Bains, Switzerland

January to May 1898

It would have been simpler if Betsy could have just died in childbirth, but, of course, she didn’t. She couldn’t even get that right.

Betsy’s baby was born at the end of January, in the midst of a terrible snowstorm that howled around the windows of the building that was part hotel and part hospital while being not quite either. A quiet place. A place where people could take the waters and rest. A place where a woman could, in the snowbound days of winter, give birth to an illegitimate child or pretend to give birth to a legitimate one.

It was a boy, that was all she knew. That was all they said before they took him away. They didn’t let her hold him. She had only the faintest glimpse of him, skinny limbs, a wrinkled face, a slick of hair dark with goo, as the midwife held him up and wiped him down and bundled him into the receiving blanket the baroness had supplied, a beautiful, soft, woolly receiving blanket embroidered with a coat of arms that dated back to somewhere around Charlemagne.

Betsy took an instant and unreasonable dislike to that blanket.

She wanted to pull it off him and wrap him into her arms instead. She wanted to gather him close and snuggle him and turn her body into his blanket as it had been these past however many months. But she was flat on a bed in a pile of soaking linen, exhausted and dizzy, and before she could sit up, before she could move, the blanket-covered bundle that had been her baby was whisked away, out the door, away to the woman who was covering him with her name as she had with that blanket.