but her eyes were filled with resolution. Would I be this brave, were our situations reversed? he asked himself. He doubted it supremely.
Jules ushered them into a tiny office, the desk overflowing with papers. In the corner sat a little girl with a doll in her lap. Joe smiled to see her, a child with big brown eyes, auburn hair neatly arranged and that look of patience he was familiar with from children in fraught situations. He had seen that look many times during the Civil War.
Susanna went to the child immediately, kneeling beside her chair, exercising those fine instincts of woman, mother and teacher he already appreciated, perhaps never with the intensity he did now.
“You’re Maddie Wilby?” she asked. “What a lovely doll. I am Mrs. Hopkins and I will be your teacher.”
He left the office quietly with Jules. They went to the adobe building next door that housed six prostitutes.
“I put her and Maddie out here because each crib has two rooms.”
Big of you, Joe wanted to say, but knew better.
Ecoffey knocked and then opened the door.
Only a blind man wouldn’t have seen the woman’s resemblance to the lovely child in the office. Only a blind man couldn’t have diagnosed her immediately. Joe didn’t even need to put his hand on her forehead. One look at her pale skin and exquisite frailty told him everything. He silently gave her a month and not one day more.
He sat beside her anyway, calling “Mrs. Wilby,” until her eyes fluttered open in surprise, perhaps that he knew she had a last name. “I am Major Randolph, Fort Laramie’s senior post surgeon. I brought a Mrs. Hopkins with me. She will be Maddie’s teacher. They are together in Mr. Ecoffey’s office right now.”
He should have been prepared for the tears that filled Claudine Wilby’s brown eyes, but he was not, compelling him to admit to his own prejudices and judgments around prostitutes. She loves her child, you idiot, he reminded himself, as he dabbed at the woman’s tears. He doubted she was much beyond her middle twenties, aged prematurely by the hard life he wouldn’t even have wished on so vile a woman as Mrs. Dunklin.
He took his patient’s hand and squeezed it. She tried to return the gesture, but could do no more than curl her delicate fingers around his for a brief moment. Her eyes closed again, signaling that minuscule effort had exhausted her. He revised his estimate and gave her two weeks, no more.
“Maddie will be in good hands in Mrs. Hopkins’s class,” he said, his lips close to her ear now. “You needn’t worry about her. Save your strength. I’m going to prescribe some powders for you.”
She nodded, then opened her mouth to say something. Nothing came out except a sigh, which relieved him of telling her that his puny powders would be monumentally ineffective against last stage consumption. Not that he would have; he could lie with the best of physicians, when confronted with death. He knew from experience that she might even rally a bit, thinking the medicine was doing some good.
She did not open her eyes again while he handed a packet to Ecoffey and instructed him in its use. To his credit, Ecoffey didn’t even blink when Joe insisted that the poor woman see no more clients.
“Can your other girls take turns sitting with her?” he asked, after pulling the coverlet higher on wasted shoulders.
“They already do,” Ecoffey replied, with considerable dignity. “And no, Major, she has seen no clients since the middle of January. We are not entirely devoid of feeling here.”
Joe accepted his quiet words as a well-deserved rebuke, and said nothing. As they walked back to the main building, Joe turned around when another door opened and a woman walked into Claudine’s crib. Look out for her, he thought, and for heaven’s sake, leave this deadly profession when you can.
He returned to the office to see Susanna sitting in Ecoffey’s swivel chair, reading to Maddie, who was snuggled on her lap. When she saw him and Ecoffey, she kissed the top of the child’s head and closed the book.
“We’ll have time for more reading tomorrow,” she whispered. Susanna spoke to Ecoffey. “Send her with a lunch, and a slate with chalk, if you have such things here. We’ll give her a good place to learn.”
Susanna waited until the ambulance door had shut behind her before giving Joe her spectacles and covering her face with her hands. She shivered and shook, beyond