her. She resolved that no matter how badly her cousin had used her, she would do nothing more to cause fright.
“Emily, I didn’t mean to frighten you,” she said immediately. “I’m sorry for what I did.” Her glance took in Dan Reese, sitting almost as still as his wife. “I was just so discouraged that I thought I wanted to die. I won’t do that again.”
Susanna sat down beside her cousin. “I am going to be teaching in the school for enlisted men’s children. I will also be teaching reading and writing several nights a week to some of the enlisted men’s wives.” She waved off the comment she knew was coming. “It doesn’t matter that your friends talk and think me past redemption. I promise that when I have earned enough money to leave this place, I will.”
Cautiously, Emily nodded.
“In no time at all, you’ll forget I was ever here!” she said, unable to resist a little smile, because she knew it was true. “Do this for me, cousin, even if you have to pretend. Just … just entertain the notion that maybe I am not entirely at fault, and maybe you haven’t heard the whole story. Just do that, dearest, and we will manage. Can you?”
Emily nodded again, though not willingly. Susanna rose.
“That’s all I ask. If you have a spare lard can, I’d like to use that for my lunch bucket.”
“Could you find something more dignified?”
Susanna sighed inwardly—Emily and her appearances. “I have nothing,” she said with all the dignity she could muster. She nodded to them both and went to the stairs.
Someone had reattached the blanket that Major Randolph had ripped down that morning. It seemed so long ago now. Susanna stepped behind it and closed her eyes, tired and still weak. She prepared for bed, grateful the upstairs was warm. On impulse, she looked out the little window over the porch and saw Sergeant Rattigan walking back across the parade ground. He must have come from Major Randolph’s quarters, and she hoped Maeve hadn’t taken a sudden turn. No, he would be hurrying, and Major Randolph would be with him. It was more the stroll of a man with something on his mind.
For the first time in well over a year, she knelt beside her cot and prayed, first for Tommy, and then for the Rattigans and the O’Learys (she could hear an infant’s wail through the wall, and it warmed her). It was easy to pray for Private Benedict and his school that was hers, too, but less easy to pray for Major Randolph, who sometimes looked as though he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. She told herself it was foolish to be shy about prayer, since her words were probably going nowhere, and she was whispering into her pillow. “I pray not to be a nuisance to him,” she concluded. “That’s enough to ask.”
Chapter Thirteen
Susanna Hopkins woke up early. There was that moment of panic when she wondered where she was—whether Frederick was drunk, sober, demanding, compliant, suddenly sad or bent on mischief. Once the moment passed, she lay there and made a raft of decisions.
The first one was the most important, because she knew it affected all the others: on that morning in a place where she never thought her life would take her, Susanna decided to forgive her cousin Emily Reese for being stupid. She decided to overlook the enormous lie that Emily had concocted to make her divorced cousin somehow more palatable to censorious people who knew too much about each other. Emily was too stupid to think of consequences, and she had probably meant well.
“I can live with that,” Susanna mouthed more than whispered, not wanting to wake anyone. Of course, the only people awake were the O’Learys through the wall. She smiled and listened to the baby’s tiny wail, and then silence, followed by two parents talking softly to each other. The voices were indistinct, but they were a mother and father sharing a moment with Mary Rose O’Leary, the army’s newest dependent.
Susanna lay there and reminded herself that for a time, she and Frederick had done that after Tommy was born. She reminded herself that those had been wonderful, drowsy moments, shared with a baby she was getting acquainted with, created with a husband she loved. Matters may have gone terribly wrong five years later, when business concerns started to collapse and rye whiskey became an enticing substitute for reality, but they hadn’t