Dear Ava,
Things have gone so terribly wrong—
I’ve done a terrible thing—
I’m not sure what to do. I wish I could make everything go away and start over again.
Ava, I don’t know what to do. I’ve made such a terrible mess.
—Miss Betsy Hayes ’96 to Ava Saltonstall ’96 (unsent)
Athens, Greece
August 1897
Betsy wanted to nurse Charles herself, but they wouldn’t let her.
The hospital was a military hospital and he was a civilian, and what right did she have? What right that anyone would recognize? Just a coin on a ribbon around her neck and a promise of marriage that sounded absurd given that he was quite married already and no one other than she had any idea he was contemplating annulments and papal intercessions. Sometimes Betsy wasn’t even sure of it. He’d been in the grip of a fever, a fever of 104. People said strange things in their delirium. Perhaps he’d meant it, perhaps he hadn’t, but whatever he’d said was between them and them alone.
And so the court physician had borne Charles back to Athens. Betsy hadn’t been with him as he doubled over with stomach pain. She hadn’t been with him as he coughed and gasped for breath. She hadn’t been with him as the red rash spread across his chest.
She hadn’t been with him when he died.
The word came to her in Lamia, in a carefully phrased letter from Aikaterini. The body had been sent back to France for burial. Body. Charles. Dead. Betsy couldn’t quite make the words make sense. They buzzed around in her head like mosquitoes, stinging her and whisking away again. Charles wasn’t that old. He had decades ahead of him yet. He couldn’t be dead.
But he was. He was dead and she had killed him.
Betsy began making mistakes. She was dizzy and confused. She overslept her shift. She stared at a thermometer trying to remember which end went where.
Overwork, they called it. She had been nursing nonstop, in various war zones, often going days without sleep, since April. Everyone was very kind about it, even Dr. Kalopothakes. They spoke about her valorous service and told her to get some rest; she’d done more than her share. Especially in a battle not her own.
They sent her back to Academy Street to recover, back to Aikaterini, the one person in the world who knew that Betsy’s collapse was nothing to do with her work—but who knew enough not to say too much.
In its own way, Athens was worse than Lamia. Except for that one brief moment, that one brief visit, Lamia was only Betsy’s. But Athens belonged to Charles.
Betsy saw him everywhere. She saw him on the velvet sofa in Aikaterini’s salon, helping himself to cakes. She saw him strolling across Syntagma Square, always just a few yards ahead, always just past that next person. She saw him in the hall of the American School in Athens, sprawled on the floor after she’d knocked him down.
He ought to have known after that. That she was trouble. That she would bring him down.
Maybe Charles had been right. Maybe everything was signs and wonders—and omens. Maybe knocking Charles over had been an omen of things to come.
What would have happened if they’d just gone their separate ways after that? What would have happened if Betsy had never gone to Aikaterini’s and met Charles over coffee and cakes? She might have ignored Aikaterini’s invitation to tea and gone to live with that Presbyterian minister like Ethel and annoyed Dr. Richardson, and Charles would still be alive and well and sifting through dirt at Delphi, looking for the next Charioteer.
Betsy went to his apartment. Not inside, of course. She had no idea who lived there now, if anyone. She stood outside and stared at those long windows, so elegantly draped, imagining that Charles was still there, sitting in his bit of Paris in Athens, beneath those frothy Fragonard romps, with his manservant bringing him macarons.
She could picture him there, writing letters at the escritoire, thumbing through a copy of the latest excavation reports, dressing to go to a reception.
There was a whole world in which they’d never met and Charles was still alive.
If Betsy had stayed where she was meant to be and Charles was still alive, might they have met in future? One day, years from now. Betsy spun an elaborate fantasy. An older Betsy, distinguished, wiser. A reception for—oh, something or other. And Charles there, in his evening clothes.
Looking through her, past her, not knowing her.
But alive. Safe.
Herakles faithfully polished Betsy’s bicycle, but it sat unused. Her books and papers lay piled where she’d left them in April. It was September now, and a new term would be starting soon at the American School, but Betsy hadn’t done anything about securing a place for herself or making up the work she’d missed at the end of last term.
Betsy felt like a broken watch, stopped permanently at that moment when Charles had died, the hands frozen in place.
After a month of letting Betsy drift about, Aikaterini appeared in Betsy’s room with a servant bearing coffee and iced cakes.
She waited until the coffee was poured and half the cakes eaten before delicately working her way around to the question of Betsy’s future. “Do you mean to go back to the American School?”
“I missed my exams,” said Betsy dully, picking up another cake and eating it. The exams had been in May, while Betsy was nursing in Vólos. Or possibly Vonitsa.
“You can take them again. I am sure if you asked the director . . .”
Betsy shrugged. It didn’t matter anymore.
Aikaterini set down her coffee cup. “Is it because of the baby?”
Betsy choked on a mouthful of French pastry. “The what?”
“You didn’t know.” Aikaterini’s face was a study, frozen somewhere between consternation and exasperation. “I’ve been so worried for you—I thought you knew—that you couldn’t bring yourself to tell me—”
“Tell you,” Betsy repeated. She had picked up another cake without thinking about it. She’d gone from being always queasy to always hungry. She looked at the cake and then at Aikaterini. “A baby?”
Betsy craned her head down to look at her stomach, which, to be fair, was looking a little rounder than usual in the loose tea gown she had taken to wearing around the house because it was more comfortable than her other clothes and the flowing Aesthetic style felt vaguely like wearing a nightdress. But whose stomach wouldn’t be rounder after lying around the house for weeks, eating tea cakes? “But I can’t—I don’t—”
“When did you last have your courses?” Aikaterini asked.
“Vólos,” said Betsy, her mouth suddenly dry. “In Vólos. In April.”
“Mmph,” said Aikaterini. “Then you are . . . four months along.”
Four months. The beginning of May. Sun slanting through Charles’s bedroom window, the feel of his skin beneath her fingertips, the taste of his lips. The utter shamelessness of it; the thrill of the forbidden, of giving up and flinging herself into her own ruin.
Her ruin. It had only been meant to be her ruin, not Charles’s.
If she hadn’t gone to bed with him, he would never have followed her to Lamia. It was all her fault. For not thinking, never thinking, just doing what she wanted to do and letting other people suffer the consequences. Her mother. Her father. Charles.
A baby?
“Oh my dear. There’s no need. Shhhhh.” Aikaterini scooted off her chair and onto the chaise, wrapping her arms around Betsy, stroking Betsy’s tousled hair, never minding the stains Betsy’s tears were making on the delicate silk of her dress. Somehow, that only made Betsy cry harder. “Shhh. Don’t worry. You’re not alone. I’ll find a way to make it right.”
Betsy shook her head numbly. It couldn’t be right. Nothing would ever be right again.
“I would take it myself, say it was mine—but people would know. Even if I claimed it was the waters. . . . We don’t look enough alike, you and I. And Charles was fair.”
Charles had had brown hair and eyes, although brown was too dull a word for either. His eyes had been like whiskey, lit with lamplight.
Tu m’enivres. You intoxicate me.
Betsy stopped going to Charles’s apartment. September blundered along, one day following miserably after the other. The papers announced an armistice. The war was over. Irreparably, irretrievably over. All those lives lost, all those brave Cypriots and Macedonians who had fought for freedom, the Italian Garibaldians who had come to lend their lives for the cause, the men who had perished on the Albania. Charles.
All gone and for nothing, worse than nothing. Not only was the Ottoman yoke still in place, but Greece, chastened, had to cede more territory to the Turks, more Greeks under Turkish rule, and pay a vast indemnity to boot.
September lurched into October. The gatherings in Aikaterini’s salon were muted. Betsy didn’t attend them anyway. She had better things to do, like write letters and tear them up again, or lie in bed, with Charles’s gold coin clutched in her hand. She couldn’t stop thinking about all those men, marching off so bravely. All those men who would never go home again. Men who limped home without limbs, men whose bodies had been broken by fever. Children left without homes; mothers with skeletal babies begging for scraps.
Her baby.
Charles.
Betsy tightened her hand around Charles’s coin, holding it until it hurt. Charles had given her his luck and she’d turned it against him. Not intentionally. She’d never meant to harm him. But she had anyway.
When Betsy opened her hand, she could see the imprint of the angel on her palm. Marking her. Maybe she should be marked. Didn’t they used to do that in France, to murderers? Brand them? Betsy folded her hand closed and opened it again, watching the marks fade. But she knew. She knew what she’d done. She wondered how she could explain to this baby, this child growing inside her, that she had killed its entire family. Its grandfather. And its grandmother.
And now Charles. But for her, he would never have been in Lamia. But for her, he would still be alive. Betsy wrapped her arms around herself, around the space where their child was growing, and rocked back and forth, her head pressed against her knees, her mouth opening and closing in mute misery.
There was only one conclusion. She carried death with her.
“I’m so sorry,” she murmured to her baby, Charles’s baby. “I’m so sorry.”
The baby pushed and kicked inside her. Six months along now and it was already trying to get away from her.
“Elisavet. Betsy? There is someone to see you.” Betsy knew it had to be important for Aikaterini to fetch her herself, rather than sending a servant.
Betsy shook out her crumpled tea dress and made a half-hearted effort to stick a few pins into the bird’s nest of her hair.
Dr. Richardson, she assumed. Come to make sure she didn’t intend to return to the American School. Or maybe Mrs. Richardson, sent as emissary.
But it was neither of those. A woman stood by the mantel, where Charles used to like to stand, a woman in a perfect dream of a dress, the very latest model in cut and color.
Betsy knew who it was, knew it deep in the pit of her stomach, even before Aikaterini pronounced the words. “I would like to present you to the Baronne de Robecourt.”
Charles’s wife was beautiful. Charles had never said she was beautiful. No, maybe not beautiful, but—lacquered, like an expensive box, all shiny finish and everything locked inside.
She was fair, like Betsy. Or maybe not like Betsy. Her hair wasn’t an ash-blond muddle last washed a week ago but smooth and shining, coaxed into curls and gleaming gold.
She was taller than Betsy. That wasn’t surprising. Everyone was taller than Betsy. She was tall and slender and wore her Paris gown the way the women in the fashion plates wore them, all long lines and perfect posture and not a seam out of place.
Betsy looked down at her battered Aesthetic gown. There was a dried splotch of honey on the bodice and what she thought might be coffee down the skirt.
From the way the baroness was looking at her, she didn’t think much of Betsy either.
“You are Miss Hayes.” The baroness’s accent was much thicker than Charles’s. “I understand you knew my husband.”
“Knew. Yes.” In the biblical sense. Why was Aikaterini doing this to her? “He was a remarkable man.”
“Yes,” said the baroness drily. “Remarkable.”
Were they just to repeat each other’s words like parrots? Betsy cast a look of entreaty at Aikaterini. Aikaterini guided Betsy to the settee, sitting down beside her in a fluid movement of silk and embroidery.
“I believe Madame de Robecourt might be able to help you in your difficulty,” Aikaterini said gently.
Help? The woman looked like she wanted to squish Betsy like a bug.
The baroness seated herself elegantly on the most elaborate chair in the room. “My husband left something with you. I will take it.”
It took Betsy a moment to figure out what she meant. Charles’s most prized possession. His luck.
Betsy’s hand went to the ribbon at her neck, fumbling on the bow. The ribbon was getting worn and frayed from the number of times she’d tied and untied it. She held it out by the ends, the gold coin, somewhat smudged from constant use, swaying gently in the middle.
“Here,” Betsy said dully. “Take it.”
The baroness eyed her askance. “I don’t want your trinkets.” Turning to Aikaterini, she said sharply, in French, “Is the girl a half-wit?”
Betsy bristled. Strange, what mattered when nothing else did. “I graduated from Smith with honors.”
The baroness cast Betsy a look of extreme distaste. “Les cervelines. Propre à rien. Le cerveau se développe au détriment du cœur.”
Bluestockings. Good for nothing. Nourishing their brains at the expense of their hearts.
If her heart was malformed, then why did it hurt so much?
“I do speak French,” Betsy said in that language.
“Good.” The baroness was even more terrifying in her own language. “Then let me speak plainly to you. I have come for the child. It is my husband’s, and for that it will be mine.”
It. Like an object. Betsy put her hands over her stomach.
Aikaterini took one of Betsy’s cold hands. “My dear. This could be the solution. Your child will have a home and a name—a noble name. And you can be as you were.”
Betsy stared at her dumbly, not sure how Aikaterini thought she could ever be as she was. Once a civilization was destroyed, it couldn’t be put right, only excavated from the ruins, a testament to what had been but no longer was.
“It is all quite easily arranged,” said the baroness briskly. She might have been talking about ordering a new hat. “There is a place in Switzerland. I will go there for my accouchement. A baby, at my age, in a time of mourning—it requires the utmost care and quiet.”
Aikaterini squeezed Betsy’s numb fingers. “Everyone knows you worked yourself into a decline, nursing our soldiers. There is no shame in taking a rest cure. A few months among the trees and the mountains, in utter peace and solitude—it is precisely what you need. The queen herself suggested something of the kind. She takes an interest in you, you know.”
“She doesn’t know—”
“No! Nothing of the sort. Her Majesty knows only that you nursed valiantly and has expressed her concern about your health.” Aikaterini hesitated a moment, and then added, “Her Majesty has mentioned her interest in seeing you happily settled, here in Athens, if possible. She suggested, perhaps, the court physician.”
Betsy stared at her in horror. “I don’t want to marry the court physician.”
“Then you won’t,” Aikaterini hastened to reassure her. “No one wants anything but your happiness. You don’t need to marry anyone if you don’t wish it. But this way, should you wish to marry someday . . . there will be no bar.”
Other than her own conscience.
The baroness rose, in a single, swift motion. She drew on her gloves. They were beautiful gloves. Pristine. “We are agreed, then. I shall make the arrangements and convey them to Madame MacHugh.” She looked directly at Betsy for the first time since the interview began. Her lip curled. “There is no need for us to meet again.”
And she was gone, leaving a subtle hint of French perfume and a distinct chill in the air. Like the witch in a fairy tale, thought Betsy irrelevantly, come to steal her baby and seal it in a tower.
But she wasn’t in a fairy tale. She was a modern American woman and no one could take her child without her saying so. Or could they? Betsy felt hot and cold at the same time. “I haven’t—I didn’t say I would.”
“But, my dear, what else are you to do? You cannot raise the child alone.”
“I could find a little cottage somewhere.” A hut deep in the woods surrounded by brambles. There she would tend the steaming cauldron while her child went out barefoot to collect berries, until one day a talking bear would appear at the door—or was it a frog? No, Betsy didn’t want to live in that sort of story. “Or an apartment in a city. One of the modern sort where you send a dumbwaiter down to the basement for meals and someone comes and cleans for you once a week. I could pretend to be a widow. I could tell my child her father died in the war.”
“You would be found out,” said Aikaterini, not unkindly. “Do you think there is any city you could go where someone would not know you?”
Betsy didn’t have an answer. It was true. In the sorts of cities that had universities where she might study and apartments with staff who lived in the basement, there would always be someone who knew her or her brother or her father. She might try to change her name, but it would come out. And how was she to pretend, as herself, that she had married during the war? Greece was a small place, in its way. Everyone she had nursed with would know that was nonsense. The queen would know that was nonsense.
Betsy had money of her own—but only so long as Alex continued to disburse it. Betsy wasn’t sure of the exact terms of her trust. She had never bothered to check. But she knew Alex. She knew how he valued his reputation, his precious respectability, always trying so hard to wash the stench of the Yonkers carpet factory out of his money so his Beacon Hill neighbors wouldn’t get a whiff of it. If Betsy were to turn up with a child—Alex would find a way to stop her funds. He’d have her declared incompetent, unfit.
What if he had her put away? He could. Alex was a lawyer, well-connected. Betsy had flouted him—she’d flouted him with glee—but he couldn’t very well declare her not of sound mind for studying the classics.
But if she were to come home with an illegitimate child . . . Betsy could feel the cold against the back of her neck. Alex would have her put away. He’d have her put away and her child taken from her.
Betsy crammed her fist into her mouth, trying to keep the panic inside.
“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.