Her Hesitant Heart - By Carla Kelly Page 0,86

do,” he said with a straight face.

Susanna looked at her husband, loving him with a fierceness that she could never have imagined in that bleak January, the worst of her life.

“You have been paying my twenty dollars a months, plus the additional ten,” she said. She glanced at Townsend. “Should I take over the Randolph financial responsibilities?”

“Maybe you should.” Townsend leaned forward. “There’s a rumor that he has been buying expensive dresses in Cheyenne, too. Perhaps you should look into that, as well.”

“Oh, I think not,” she said immediately, which made both prevaricators laugh. “He has such good taste in women’s wear.”

Two days later, nothing felt better than to be home, even if the bed was lumpy, the kitchen woefully ill-equipped, and the sheets and towels threadbare. She looked around her new bedroom in the dining room, with the army blankets tacked up for blackout curtains, and called it good.

Her cup of plenty ran over when Emily came by for a hug, and was followed at intervals during the day by most of the officers’ wives, some bringing food, and others towels and good sheets. Where these gifts came from, considering the shortage of such items in the post trader’s store, she had no idea, but her thanks were sincere.

“Emily, why are they doing this?” she asked later in the afternoon, when they were alone.

“I organized a hen party last week. I suggested that we needed to atone for some real stupidity,” her cousin, that most clueless of women, told her. “We were all wrong.”

She helped Susanna remake the bed. “While you were in Cheyenne, I received a letter from Mama and newspaper clippings, and I shared those with the ladies.” Emily lowered her voice, as though all of Shippensburg crowded around her in the bedroom. “Susanna, Frederick left debts everywhere and seldom had a sober day.”

If that jury of the good men of Shippensburg had believed me, I would still have my son, Susanna thought, unwilling to say it out loud, because Emily seemed sufficiently remorseful. “Imagine,” she said instead, smoothing down the sheets that she knew would be quite rumpled before morning, if she and the post surgeon were of similar mind.

Emily sat down and smoothed out a pillow slip, remorse obvious in her eyes. “I also told them it was my idea to call you a Civil War widow. I never should have done that.”

Susanna sat beside her cousin and hugged her. “You just tried to do the right thing. I know you did.”

When Joe came home for supper that night, she told him about her day, and what Emily had said. He nodded, and there was no overlooking the admiration in his eyes.

“Why are you so pleased?” she asked, happy to sit on his lap when he tugged on her apron.

“It takes a strong person to apologize—I obviously underestimated your frivolous cousin—and it takes a stronger person to forgive. I’ve never underestimated you.”

She kissed him, and decided that the odor of carbolic must be an aphrodisiac. “I wish General Crook were a strong person.”

Joe kissed her back. “But then I would have to be a stronger person to forgive him.”

“You could,” she said simply.

“Did Mrs. Dunklin form part of today’s officers wives’ brigade?”

“No.” Susanna rested her head against Joe’s chest, her face warm again as she remembered that horrible evening. “Just as well, because I’m not certain I can forgive her yet. Maybe later.”

She watched time slip by in May, as more and more companies gathered at Fort Laramie. The flats by Suds Row bloomed with tents as the army took to canvas, in preparation for the coming roundup of Northern Roamers onto the Great Sioux Reservation. It became harder and harder to concentrate on school in the commissary storehouse, as more and more rations for the Big Horn Yellowstone Expedition piled into the building. And Private Benedict’s teaching days became numbered.

Finally Susanna and Anthony declared classroom learning over, and spent the rest of the week fine-tuning the play Our Century of Progress, which Susanna had written about famous inventions of the nineteenth century, from telegraph key to Colt.45. All the boys clamored to demonstrate the latter. Joe was happy to loan an old stethoscope to the student portraying Arthur Leared.

Rehearsals began in earnest as soon as the prisoners from the guardhouse finished the stage, which Susanna knew was an engineering marvel. Two corporals’ wives sewed a curtain from lightweight canvas, and Susanna assigned the student who simply couldn’t memorize anything to open and close it,