Dedication

  To all the librarians,

  past, present, and yet to be.

  But most especially

  to my Angel of the Bibliography,

  Vicki Parsons,

  without whom this book would not be here.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Maps

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Lauren Willig

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Maps

  Chapter One

  Betsy,

  I had thought it best you hear from me before you read it in the Smith College Monthly. Now that our country has officially declared war on Spain (yes, I know you never read the papers: we’re at war with Spain, in case you haven’t noticed, which you probably haven’t), the New York Red Cross has put out a call for volunteer nurses.

  I have volunteered. We are to undertake a training course at the Red Cross Hospital in New York and all those who pass the course will then take ship for Florida, and from there to Cuba to serve in the coming conflict.

  I will be trained—properly trained—and we are to be paid for our services.

  I’m not saying what you said in Athens is right. But there might have been something in it.

  Now you won’t be able to tell me I didn’t try.

  Yours,

  Ava

  —From Miss Ava Saltonstall, Smith College ’96, to Miss Betsy Hayes ’96

  Tampa, Florida

  June 2, 1898

  Betsy Hayes arrived in Florida with a single carpetbag and sick on her skirt.

  The sick wasn’t hers. It was courtesy of a three-year-old who’d been in her compartment since Savannah. The one benefit to her noxious state, as far as she could see, was that the other passengers tended to give her a wide berth. Betsy’s dress felt stiff with sick and her legs felt stiff with sitting and her brain felt stiff with trying to make sense of a situation that didn’t make sense at all.

  Betsy wasn’t supposed to be in Florida, barreling toward a war she knew nothing about. She was supposed to be in Greece, digging up antiquities and showing the Harvard boys how it should be done. One minute, there she had been, a newly minted graduate of Smith College, one of only two women at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, all prepared to batter down the prejudices of the male establishment—but then it had all gone so very wrong and now here she was, on a train in the middle of nowhere, covered with someone else’s vomit, trying to stop her best friend from making the same mistakes she had made.

  She had to find Ava and stop her from sailing to Cuba.

  We’re at war with Spain, in case you haven’t noticed, which you probably haven’t, Ava had written, and, of course, Ava was right, as Ava so often was. From the chatter on the train from New York to Florida, Betsy gathered the war was something to do with the Spanish oppressing the Cubans. Or possibly something to do with the Spanish blowing up an American ship and then lying about it. Betsy didn’t like to ask and she didn’t much care. She’d learned in Greece that it wasn’t the cause that mattered; even the best of intentions wouldn’t stop wounds from festering and disease from spreading.

  Two miles to Tampa, the conductor had said. But that had been an hour ago, before the train had stopped with an abrupt jolt, and here they were still. Not moving. Stuck in the middle of nowhere in an endless night made hideous with the belch of coal smoke and enough shouting and clattering and clanking to keep even the most exhausted awake.

  “Hey diddle diddle, the train and the fiddle,” sang the loathsome tot who had been ill on Betsy’s skirt, singing the wrong words and then hooting as though he’d done something clever.

  The child’s mother was heavily pregnant and feeling it. As Betsy watched, the little boy bumped up against his mother’s arm and, green-faced, weary, the mother lifted her arm so he could snuggle against her, bump in the belly and all.

  Betsy’s eyes stung. With the smoke, the blasted smoke. Good heavens, did no one know how to open a window around here?

  Rising abruptly, Betsy grabbed her carpetbag off the rack overhead. She didn’t care if it was two miles to Tampa. What was two miles? She’d walk if she had to. If she didn’t get out of this compartment soon, they would clap her straight into one of those depressing places where they prescribed cold baths and electrical shocks and called it healing.

  The pregnant woman lifted her head from her son’s. Betsy could see the fine lines the boy’s hair had made on her cheek, imprinted on her. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m finding out what’s going on out there,” Betsy lied.

  The woman blinked at her. “With your case?”

  Betsy pretended not to hear. She swung herself out of the compartment and onto the ground. She had failed to take into account that there wasn’t a platform there, so it was a longer way down than she’d expected. She landed hard on her left foot and staggered before righting herself. The ground on the side of the track was dirt and scrub, studded with chunks of coal that bit through the thin soles of her boots.

  She wasn’t the only one taking a break from the train. Half the US Army appeared to have had the same idea. She could see them as dark shadows, as the red circles of cigar butts glowing in the darkness. But even if she hadn’t been able to see them, the smell of an army on the move was unmistakable: unwashed bodies and tinned beef; black powder and oiled leather.

  Despite the heat, Betsy was suddenly cold through, shivering in her sick-stained, sweat-soaked dress. Her hands felt numb and bloodless; she rubbed them together, dragging in tortured breaths of thick, smoke-clogged air. Florida. She was in Florida. Not Greece. Two miles from Tampa. Just two miles. Two miles to go.

  She drew herself up. She’d been traveling for days, from train to ship to train. Enough to make anyone dizzy. She was fine. Fit as a fiddle. She’d walk to Tampa if need be.

  Betsy flexed her hands, grabbed her carpetbag, and squinted down the track. By the light of the train lamps, she could vaguely make out semitropical trees and dense scrub, crowding close to the tracks. And ahead, as far as the eye could see, train after train after train, backed up all the way to Tampa.

  Well, that was it, then. All she had to do was follow the tracks.

  She’d scarcely gone more than a yard before one of the dark shapes peeled away from the shadows, blocking her path. “Ma’am. May I help you back into your compartment? This is no place for a lady.”

  Ha. She hadn’t been a lady in years. Possibly ever, if her brother was to be believed.

  Betsy straightened, trying to ignore the way her hair straggled down the back of her neck, half out of its pins. “It’s very kind of you, but . . . no. Good night.”

  Those particular cut-off consonants had always had great success in squashing the pretensions of university men who believed her to be a sweet little thing. Little, yes. Sweet, no. Unfortunately, this man seemed to be made of tougher stuff.

  “Let me help you back in,” he said, and made the mistake of reaching for her elbow. Betsy jerked her arm out of the way. The man stepped back, saying carefully, as to someone delicate and nervous, “Is your chaperone in the compartment?”

  Betsy had given up chaperones years ago, along with her illusions. “If you must make yourself useful, I need a cart or wheeled conveyance. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy. Just something sufficient to take me the two miles to Tampa.”

  The man looked at her as if trying to figure out if she was joking. “Ma’am, everyone is trying to get to Tampa.”

  “Yes, but there are a great number of you, and just one of me,” said Betsy, quite reasonably, she thought.

  Another man ambled up out of the darkness. “Holt, what are you—” He stopped abruptly, leaning practically double to squint at Betsy. “Betsy? Betsy Hayes?”

  Betsy’s stomach dropped. She’d know that loping walk anywhere. “Paul? What on earth are you doing here?”

  “What do you think I’m doing here? Fighting the Spaniards,” Paul said happily, the same way he might have said, “trouncing Harvard,” as if this were the Yale-Harvard game and not a war, not a hideous excuse for men to exterminate their fellow man and leave them bleeding. “I’m with the First United States Volunteer Cavalry.”

  He was bouncing on the balls of his feet with excitement. Betsy would have taken him by the shoulders and shaken him if they’d been alone. And if she could reach.

  “What made you do an idiot thing like that?”

  “Betsy! We�
�re going to free Cuba!” Paul laughed. He actually laughed, as though it were all a joke, as though they were in the dining room of Delmonico’s and not on a humid train siding somewhere in Florida. “What are you doing down here? Not that I’m not happy to see you, of course, just, it’s not the place for a lady.”

  Betsy rubbed a hand inelegantly across her nose. “So I’ve been told.”

  “Oh, I forgot to introduce you!” Paul clapped the other man on the back in an excess of hail-fellow-well-met. “Miss Hayes, may I present to you my comrade in arms Private Holt, also of the First United States Volunteer Cavalry. Holt, this is Miss Elizabeth Hayes of Smith College, who once did me the honor of being my guest for Yale prom.”

  The other man was slighter than Paul, but what he lacked in bulk, he made up for in sheer disapproval. “You’re a long way from New Haven, Miss Hayes.”

  “Really? I’d hardly noticed.”

  Paul gave a happy chuckle. “We’ve so many Yale men about you’d think you were at Mory’s. There’s Thede Miller—did you ever meet Thede? He was a year behind me. And Teddy Burke and David Goodrich. . . . We’ve more than our fair share of Harvard men here too, but we’ve decided to count them friends under the circumstances.”

  “Given that the same people will be shooting at both of you.” Betsy’s mouth felt very dry. All the chivalry of Yale and Harvard, to be turned to food for buzzards. Did men learn nothing through the generations? They’d died to a man at Thermopylae and called it honor.

  Paul ignored her, too buoyed up by his own excitement. “And then we’ve the real cowboys, like Holt here, men who’ve studied at the University of Experience.”

  “A degree in cattle rustling, I take it?”

  “Don’t be a snob, Bets. You must have heard of Private Holt. Hold ’Em Holt? The man who single-handedly hunted down the Jakes Brothers?”

  “It wasn’t single-handed,” interjected the object of Paul’s adoration.

  “As good as!” In the light of the train lamps, Paul’s eyes shone with hero worship. Paul’s enthusiasms, when they lasted, tended to be all-consuming. In her case, it had involved whole hothouses full of flowers and reams of letters speckled with detailed accounts of his sporting activities, which he had assumed, for some incomprehensible reason, must be of interest to her.

  It had suited them both, at the time. Paul had wanted a woman on his arm; Betsy had wanted an invitation to Yale prom, largely to annoy Ava. It had been such fun annoying Ava, and so ridiculously easy. Besides, Ava had enjoyed it too. Nothing made her happier than getting to be all purse-lipped and disapproving. It was how their friendship worked. Betsy did something appalling and Ava clucked at her and they both felt entirely themselves.

  Then. Back before it all went wrong. So very, very wrong.

  I’m not saying what you said in Athens is right. Betsy had Ava’s letter in her pocket, folded into eighths, read and reread until the scrap of paper had all but disintegrated. We are to undertake a training course . . . take ship for Florida . . .

  “Brilliant.” Betsy cut Paul off mid-encomium, something about hornswoggling or hog-tying, goodness only knew. “I’m sure Annie Oakley will be terribly impressed. Do you have Buffalo Bill here too?”

  “Did someone forget to feed you? Miss Hayes gets cranky when she’s hungry,” said Paul to his friend, which was all the more annoying because it tended to be true, she did get cranky when she was hungry, although she hadn’t felt properly hungry, not for months and months.

  Hunger felt like a betrayal, an obscene indulgence. There were times when she hated her legs for moving, her skin for being warm, herself for being here when others were not.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  Private Holt gave her a long look. “You’re on a train siding in the middle of the night.”

  Paul blinked. “That’s a good point. You never said why you’re here. Why are you here?”

  Betsy felt a rush of exasperated affection. The emotion felt rusty, but it was there, and she wasn’t sure if she liked it.

  “I’m with the Red Cross,” she said. It wasn’t entirely a lie. She’d worked with the Red Cross, the Greek branch. Now she just had to hope the American branch would take her. A Betsy for an Ava. The American branch was run by Miss Clara Barton, the famous Civil War angel of the battlefield. Betsy had never met her, but she’d seen her picture in the papers, which almost amounted to the same thing. “I need to report to Red Cross headquarters. So, you see, I really must get to Tampa.”

  “Ma’am.” It was that annoying man again. Holt. What kind of name was Holt? “If you want to get to Tampa, you need to get on the train. It will get there when it gets there.”

  “When’s that? Sometime after the Last Trump?”

  “Better than not getting there at all.”

  “It’s a straight walk down the train tracks. I’ve walked farther than that—” Hiking up the hills in Mycenae, drinking in the thin air like wine, laughing down at the stragglers below. Betsy lifted her head, swiping irritably at a plume of coal smoke. “I’ve walked farther than that in worse circumstances.”

  “In the dark?” The man sounded like he didn’t believe her. “There are alligators.”

  He was making the mistake of assuming she cared about her own safety. “And bears too, I have no doubt? Perhaps an enraged mongoose? A griffin or a basilisk?”

  “Only the odd hydra. Ma’am.” He held out his arm to her, and before she knew it, Betsy was back up in that compartment, carpetbag and all.

  She could have screamed with frustration. But that would have given the man far too much satisfaction.

  On an impulse, she leaned out the door. “Paul—”

  The words she wanted to say to him burned on her tongue: Go home. Get out. Run for the hills. Run away from the hills.

  But she couldn’t say any of them. Lamely, she raised a hand. “I’ll see you in Tampa?”

  Paul beamed at her, assuming her worry was on her own part, not his. Or just not hearing it at all. Men were very good at not hearing what they didn’t want to hear. “It will be like old times.”

  Only with more senseless death. “Quite.”

  Inside the compartment, the child had finally spent his energy, falling asleep curled up against his mother. He fit neatly into the space beneath her arm, his head on her swelling stomach. His mother had wrapped herself around him in sleep, sheltering him with her body.

  Betsy’s chest hurt. The smoke rasped at the back of her throat. Dragging a shawl from her carpetbag, she flung it over her head, the way she used to pull her covers up over her face as a child, as if the cloth could keep the ghosts at bay.

  Curling into a corner of the seat, she fell asleep to the sound of goods being moved, soldiers snoring, engineers shouting, and a little boy sighing in his sleep.

  Port Tampa, Florida

  June 3, 1898

  “We don’t take volunteers.” The nursing sister in charge, Sister Bettina, backed away from Betsy and the strange smells emanating from her garments.

  Betsy couldn’t blame her. It had taken Betsy hours to track down the Red Cross headquarters, which had turned out to be not in Tampa at all but on a ship. A ship confusingly called the State of Texas. It wasn’t in Texas. It wasn’t even near Texas. It was anchored in Port Tampa, which was all of eight miles from Tampa but might as well have been the moon as far as Betsy was concerned, with all the roads clogged with soldiers. Betsy had floundered around in the June heat, still lugging that dratted carpetbag, still with sick on her skirt, until she finally found a carriage willing to accept an exorbitant amount of money to take her.

  Betsy thrust a crumpled wad of paper at Sister Bettina. “Here—read this. You’ll see I have considerable experience.”

  “Have you?” Sister Bettina might have tried to sound happier about it.

  She had a hint of a foreign accent, something European. She was, Betsy realized, not much older than Betsy, and not much taller, but the uniform, the accent, and her uncompromising tidiness made Betsy feel like a schoolgirl brought before the headmistress.

  Betsy could see Sister Bettina taking in the Paris traveling suit, which had been beautifully fitted two years ago, when Betsy had stopped to shop in Paris on her way to Greece and academic glory. It hung from Betsy’s reduced frame.