draperies, a carpet on the floor and hand-turned desks bordering on elegant. She discovered that day in her warehouse school that packing-crate desks had a certain utility, and the fragrance of dried apples and raisins, stacked in kegs next to coffee beans, reminded her of favorite kitchens.
With all her heart and mind, she concentrated on her six pupils, finding out what they knew, and creating a term full of lesson plans in her head. At first, she knew Private Benedict was conscious of her quiet presence in the back of his classroom. By mess call, he had turned all his attention to his older students, and looked up with surprise when he heard the bugle.
“Compositions and recitations this afternoon,” he called after his pupils as they hurried home for lunch. He took his own back to her corner after she had ushered out her little ones and sat down again with her lunch. “I have permission to eat here, instead of in the mess hall,” he explained. “Sometimes there are children who stay.”
They spent the hour eating and discussing the morning’s work. Private Benedict had a few questions she answered, and he liked her suggestion that they teach together in the afternoon occasionally.
“I noticed in my … my first school how well-tuned to the local flora and fauna these children are,” she said. “Let’s have them tell us what they know, and build some lessons around it.”
Private Benedict looked at her with an expression she recognized: that of an educator with an idea. “We could spend a day or two outlining interesting topics such as buffalo, wolves and Indians, and have our students compose letters on these subjects to their friends in the States.”
“Bravo, Private Benedict,” she said. “That’s certainly more interesting than a mere composition! My pupils will draw and we can put together a letter of our own.”
She observed him then, investing more than just her mind in what he had said. Something in his face drew her attention, and there was no sense in hanging back, now that she had decided to live. “Private Benedict, something tells me you already send letters like that home to …”
“Connecticut,” he said, and there was no overlooking the blush that rose from his neck. “There’s a young lady in Hartford who gets letters like that.”
Susanna nodded. “I thought so. I hope she saves all of them. Think what a wonderful look at the West you are providing.”
“She sends them to the newspaper.” He stopped, his face fiery-red now. “Well, at least part of them. It’s become a regular column—Life and Times on the Frontier.”
“Bravo again!” Susanna said, delighted. “Tell me, is she a teacher, too?”
The look he gave her nearly took her breath away. There was everything in it of pride and gratitude. “So you really think I am a teacher?”
“I know you are,” she said quietly.
He drew a deep breath, and there was no overlooking that Private Benedict was a man in love and a man with a plan. “Yes, she’s a teacher. My enlistment is up at the end of summer. I’m going to attend the normal school in Hartford, after I marry her this fall.”
Susanna clapped her hands, then handed him one of Captain Reese’s prized chocolates and popped the other one in her mouth. She smiled at him in perfect charity and something else: for the first time in a long time, she was happy.
The post surgeon knew he should probably apologize to Hippocrates for his morning’s inattention. At least he had not splinted the wrong leg on a streetwalker, as one of his unfortunate fellow medical students had done at the University of Maryland. Joe still remembered the look of astonishment on the poor woman’s face as she swore a round oath worthy of a sailor and raised her hands in an appeal to the Almighty to protect her from malpractice. Joe’s malpractice that morning had amounted to no more than prescribing a purgative to the patient in bed three with the runs. Luckily, raised eyebrows from his hospital steward had rectified that wrong. Joe had been big enough to apologize to his steward later, and thank the gods of medicine that his steward had been good enough to follow him after Appomattox to Reconstruction duty in Louisiana, then exile to Outer Darkness in the Department of the Platte.
No doubt Joe had been woolgathering. Nick had told him earlier that Mrs. Hopkins had walked across the parade ground that morning with a certain spring in