him, her expression sweet in a way that charmed him.
“If you should find the time, I could use your help here, reading to my patients, or writing letters for them. Young men so far from home find comfort in ladies.” Heaven knows I do, he thought.
“Show me your ward,” she said.
She surprised him. He had asked other garrison ladies to do what he was asking her, but his efforts usually involved much cajoling. No one had asked to see the ward.
“Come along,” he said, opening the door quickly, before she changed her mind. “It’s only a twelve-bed ward.”
“And when women and children are ill?” Mrs. Hopkins asked, going with no hesitation through the door he held open.
“I treat them in their homes.” He gestured into the room, which had six metal cots on either side. “I also have an examination room in my quarters, where ambulatory civilians come.”
“And here?” she asked, looking around with interest.
“There is another examination room, but no operating bay. Anything needful in that realm I also do in the exam room. Mrs. Hopkins, meet my hospital steward, Sergeant Theodore Brown. He’s a better post surgeon than I am, or Captain Hartsuff.”
Brown looked up from a chart he was examining. “You, sir, will have people believing that, except I do not think Mrs. Hopkins is gullible.”
“Nor do I,” Joe replied, after a glance at her.
She held out her hand to his steward, who took it, and even favored her with a courtly little bow, which impressed Joe. After exchanging a pleasantry or two with his number-one man, she walked the length of the room, obviously unfazed by the broken jaw in bed six, the result of a horse barn misunderstanding, or the burn victim from the bake house, who looked with real terror on the steward.
To Joe’s further surprise, Mrs. Hopkins sat down beside the latter patient and took his unburned hand with no hesitation. She looked back at Joe. “There is a hospital in Shippensburg,” she told him. “I did this a lot last year, while my eye healed.”
She turned her attention to the private in the bed, speaking low to him while the hospital steward sat down with his tweezers and bowl on the man’s other side. Joe nodded to Sergeant Brown and wheeled over a hospital screen.
“Do you need me, Sergeant?” he asked.
“No, sir.” His steward glanced at Mrs. Hopkins, no more nonplussed than he was, which appeared to be not at all. “I’ll send her back to your office when we’re done.”
Well, well, Joe thought, as he looked at charts. People continually surprise me. He worked his way out of the ward and back into his office for another half hour of paperwork until the sun sank lower, the retreat gun sounded and his steward finished.
“Here she is, sir,” Brown said when he ushered in Mrs. Hopkins. “Our patient decided to be brave for the lady. You’ll come back?”
“I will. I can read to them.”
With a salute less casual than normal, the steward left.
“Mrs. Hopkins, you amaze me,” Joe said frankly.
She surprised him again. “Most people just want to have someone touch them kindly.”
He thought about that during their quiet walk to Officers Row. When she slowed down as they approached the Reeveses’ quarters, he slowed down, too. He couldn’t overlook her small sigh as she went up the steps, and the unconscious way she squared her shoulders.
“Good night, Mrs. Hopkins. I kept you away too long and worked you too hard today.”
“I didn’t mind,” she told him, her voice soft.
He walked to his own quarters. There were notes tacked to the little board he had nailed next to his front door. He removed them, reading them after he’d carried the lamp to his kitchen. He didn’t bother to heat the stew, because he didn’t care. He spread the messages in front of him and mentally planned tomorrow.
He held the note from Sergeant Rattigan in his hand for a long time. “It’s Maeve,” was all it said, but he needed nothing more. Another baby begun? he asked himself. That makes number seven since I’ve been here. Wouldn’t we all be pleased if one of them lived to term? I’m coming, Maeve, for whatever good I will do.
Chapter Seven
Susanna tried to trick herself into believing that the evening stretching before her would be easier this night. Maybe it was. Her cousin-in-law tried a little harder to be company, instead of hiding behind a months-old newspaper.