tears, as he held her close. He told her what he had seen in the crib, and his diagnosis and prognosis. By the time they arrived at Fort Laramie, she had regained her spectacles and her composure, but made no objection to his arm around her slim shoulders, which were weighted with their own burdens.
When he helped her from the ambulance, she held his hand again for a long moment. “You say two weeks to a month?”
“No more.”
She turned to look into his face, giving him the full power of her own beautiful eyes. “I say more. No woman willingly surrenders a child, even for so unkind a visitor as death.”
He did not doubt her own prognosis.
Chapter Fifteen
Maddie Wilby fit into Susanna’s classroom as easily as though she had been there all term, reminding Susanna how flexible children could be. Maddie knew her letters and numbers already. By the end of the third day, the self-possessed child, obviously used to the company of adults, was helping the younger pupils with adding single columns.
“Monsieur Ecoffey lets me look at his ledgers,” Maddie had explained to her, in her matter-of-fact way. “Each morning I check his totals from the night’s business—two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve.”
“That’s a questionable way to learn to count by twos,” Susanna told Joe when she came to the hospital a few nights later to finish Little Women. “Joe, those women aren’t paid very much for services rendered.”
She knew she had shocked him with such a statement, but that he would see the humor of it.
“Susanna, do I see before me a rabble-rousing reformer?” he asked.
“I’m just a teacher,” she assured him.
“Just.” He took her hand, raised it to his lips, then turned back to the paperwork on his desk, as if such a gesture was something he did every day of his life.
“Are … are you practicing for Paris?” she asked, wishing she did not sound so breathless.
He just shook his head as a slow smile spread across his face. “Leave me alone. Go read to my vile patients! I love it when hardened veterans cry over Beth and worry about Amy.”
Susanna hoped every morning that Jules Ecoffey would be true to his word and get Maddie to school. And he did, depositing her at the warehouse and admonishing the child in quiet French to do her best for her mother’s sake.
The afternoon transfer was less reliable. Hand in hand with Rooney O’Leary, who had whispered to her earlier that he thought Maddie was pretty, Susanna walked the O’Leary’s son home, and then continued the quarter mile to the Rustic Hotel, a raw building that more than lived up to its name. She read to Maddie or sometimes just held her on her lap, until Ecoffey arrived.
He was invariably late. After the second day, Nick Martin accompanied her and sat with her as darkness fell. By the end of the week, the post surgeon came along, too, when Nick was busy. Once he rode out with Ecoffey and Maddie. When he came back hours later, he slipped a note under the Reeses’ door for her. “Claudine is holding her own,” the note read. “I believe your prognosis is better than mine. JR.”
In all the turmoil, Maddie Wilby held her own, too, calling no attention to herself, but capable in a way that made Private Benedict shake his head in wonder. She always came to school as neat as a pin, her hair arranged beautifully in styles too old for her years, but lovely. To her amusement, Susanna observed two distinct styles of coiffure, which made her suspect that at least two of the Three Mile Ranch women were competing.
Maddie’s clothes were equally lovely. Only the sharpest of needlewomen could have detected they were cut down from larger sizes, or so Maeve Rattigan told Susanna when they stopped at the Rattigans’ for an after-school cookie.
“There must be plenty of willing hands at Three Mile,” Maeve whispered to her. “So stylish.”
The cookie habit had begun almost as soon as Maddie arrived. After school one day, Susanna had walked both of her after-school charges to Suds Row to visit Maeve, who had been pulling cookies from the oven when they arrived. After two days of this, the children just naturally veered to the Rattigans’, and Maeve did not disappoint.
Susanna knew Joe made visits to Three Mile Ranch as Claudine’s condition worsened. He stopped by the Reeses’ quarters a week later, long after taps.