“I can live with that,” she murmured again. “We had good times.” She soothed herself with the fact that she never would have married a man she hadn’t loved. There was a time when Frederick Hopkins would have made any woman look twice. She knew, even now, that if he had not pushed her face into the mantelpiece, and blind instinct hadn’t made her flee for her own safety, she would be there still, protecting Tommy, as if nothing was the matter. She suspected there were many women in precisely her position.
“I can live with that, too, even though it is unfair to women,” she whispered. She had heard stories about women crusading against “Demon Rum,” and been aghast at such unladylike behavior. Didn’t those rabble-rousing women know that a woman’s sphere was the home? She understood that kind of courage now. Liquor had probably destroyed more homes and hopes than marital infidelity, and wives often suffered in silence. Bravo to the brave crusaders, she thought.
Time passed and both duplexes were silent now, Mary Rose back to sleep, maybe slumbering between her parents. On her side of the wall, Susanna heard Daniel Reese snoring, the sound more comforting than grating. She decided to forgive him for being light-headed, too. He loved his son and wife, and was probably a pretty good commander of a company of infantry, out here in the wilds of Wyoming Territory.
She took her thoughts to another level, right down into her own hesitant heart. She had begun her journey from Pennsylvania with hope and the promise of a useful life. Events had taken a terrible turn, but she was still alive, her brain was agile and she was beginning to suspect that she was a resourceful woman. She had a skill people needed. There were six young children in a commissary warehouse, sitting at packing crate desks, who needed her. There was a private teaching a school for fifty cents extra duty pay a day, and in over his head, who needed her. There was a post surgeon with sorrows at least as great as hers, perhaps greater, who was determined she would not give up on his watch. And there was Maeve Rattigan, denied the one thing she wanted most, who cared to read and write.
“I can live with this, because I have work to do,” she murmured, and closed her eyes, content. When she woke later to the sound of reveille, Susanna Hopkins made a conscious decision to live well. Maybe Major Randolph was right; maybe living well was the best revenge. Or maybe it was the right thing to do.
It was not so hard to make small talk that morning with her cousin, who only wanted to forget her disastrous part in Susanna’s ruin. She told Emily her plans for the garrison school, and her night school for women. “I came here to teach.” She said it firmly and not defensively, and in the saying, believed it.
Emily found her an empty lard bucket and made her laugh by drawing a flower on the tin lid. “To make it more genteel,” Emily said, with a grin that Susanna remembered from years ago, when they had been much younger. Bread and butter, dried apples and the everlasting raisins that made them look at each other and giggle went into the bucket, along with a cloth napkin and two small pieces of chocolate from Dan Reese’s secret stash.
“Thanks, Emily,” Susanna said after guard mount, which they watched together, Stanley between them, from the warmth of the parlor window. She put on her coat, wound her muffler tight and went out to slay dragons.
The task was made much simpler, because Nick Martin escorted her to the warehouse complex south of the parade ground.
“Major Randolph told me to make sure you got there and that’s all,” he confided. “I’d like to learn, too, but he needs me to sweep out the ward.”
We all need to be needed, she thought, touched. “I understand, Nick.” She looked at him more closely. “It is Nick, isn’t it? I expect Saint Paul is busy on those missionary journeys.”
“I expect he is,” Nick said. “I’ll ask him someday.”
Susanna thought about that. She nodded and looked back at Officers Row. The major in question stood on his own porch. He lifted his coffee mug to her and she waved.
Before she married Frederick and left the teaching profession, Susanna had taught at a private school in Carlisle. Her classroom had come with brocaded