by Carla Kelly
“Oh,” she said, and felt her face grow warm.
“I occasionally have the unenviable duty of treating prostitutes and soldiers for venereal diseases, although I am not certain that mercury does the slightest good. Apparently one of the, uh, practitioners of the art of Venus has a daughter, age six, that Mr. Ecoffey would like to see in school.”
“She should be in school,” Susanna said. She looked at Major Townsend. “Sir, I have no objection, and I doubt Private Benedict has, either.”
“Not one, sir,” Anthony said. “We have room and Mrs. Hopkins is an exemplary teacher. But how …”
“How will I get her to you?” Ecoffey asked. He glanced at Major Townsend, too. “I propose to deliver her to this classroom every morning. Afternoons are more difficult, but if someone can see her to the Rustic Hotel, I can pick her up from there.”
“The Rustic …” Susanna looked at Ecoffey.
“It is the hotel John Collins is constructing, a quarter mile from here,” Joe explained, when Ecoffey said nothing. “Is it open?”
Ecoffey nodded. “Just barely. If I can retrieve Maddie from there, it would give me time to get back to the ranch for …” He paused, his face red now. “… the evening’s activity.”
“Heavens, where does the child go in the evening?” Susanna asked.
“She sits in my office until … until it quiets down,” the man said.
I am appalled, Susanna thought, unconsciously edging closer to her fellow teacher. “Such a place! Couldn’t we just keep her here?” She hadn’t meant to blurt it out, but the idea of a child at Three Mile Ranch made her blood run in chunks.
The look Jules Ecoffey gave her was a kindly one. “I know what you are thinking, but Maddie has a mother who loves her. Perhaps if you have children, you understand.”
She did, with a clarity that sliced right through her shock and disgust. “We will do the best we can, if … if … Major Townsend and Major Randolph allow it.”
“I can think of a hundred objections,” the post commander said. “There might be a huge outcry from the parents of these students, or from the officers’ families. Major Randolph?”
“I can’t think of a single objection,” he said firmly. “Would you be willing to pay some tuition?”
“I would,” Ecoffey said promptly. “Only name it.”
“Might I ask why you are doing this?” Susanna asked. “How long has …”
“Maddie Wilby,” Ecoffey said.
“… been there? And why?”
“She came with her mother from Denver before Christmas.” Ecoffey shrugged. “I did not know of the child until Claudine Wilby arrived. Why am I doing this?” He shrugged again. “Perhaps I care.” He glanced at the post surgeon. “There is more. We will talk.” He bowed to Susanna. “Madam, she is a charming child.”
“Is she your daughter?” Susanna asked, her voice soft.
Apparently not surprised by her question, even though Major Townsend stared in amazement, Ecoffey shrugged again. “I knew Claudine briefly in Denver. Who can tell? Good day, Mrs. Hopkins.”
The three men left. Susanna stared at Private Benedict. “I used to teach at an exclusive girls’ school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania,” she said.
“And I clerked in a store in Hartford, Connecticut,” Anthony said, his voice equally mystified. “Who knew the army would be so interesting? How much do you think Major Randolph will charge for tuition?”
“I rather hate to think where the money is coming from.”
She thought about Maddie Wilby while her night class members sounded out words to each other. When they left, she stayed in Maeve’s warm parlor, telling the sergeant’s wife what had happened that afternoon.
“Do you think the other families here on Suds Row will have objections?” Susanna asked.
Maeve shook her head. “What business is it of theirs? Poor child.”
My own child has no mother, Susanna thought. “Maybe not so poor. Maybe we should remind ourselves that she has a mother who loves her.” It was food for thought.
She was glad Joe Randolph came to escort her home by himself, without Nick.
“I put Saint Paul in charge of counting sheets in the linen closet,” Joe said as they started across the parade ground. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“What else did Ecoffey tell you?”
“He wants me to visit Claudine Wilby. Apparently she is ill. Will you come with me?”
“Me? Now?”
“You. Now.”
“I’m afraid.”
“You’re Maddie Wilby’s teacher. Let’s meet her.”
God knows he didn’t want to keep bullying Susanna Hopkins, but there was no overlooking her fright as they sat in the ambulance, bumping over the bad road between Fort Laramie and Three Mile Ranch. Maybe if he kept up some informative chatter she would be less intimidated.
“I hardly need to tell you that Three Mile Ranch is off-limits to all military personnel, but the boys have a way of sneaking off.”
Her faint smile encouraged him. “I’m surprised you could dredge up enough iron-willed soldiers to accompany this ambulance,” she said in a faint approximation of a joke.
“Ah, that is the beauty of having our cavalry troops gone north to fight Northern Roamers. Those men riding alongside are mounted infantry, and they are doing their dead level best to stay in the saddle. I also showed them several textbook pages of diseased organs before I got into the ambulance. I anticipate no trouble.”
“Major Randolph, you are amazing,” she said.
“Merely desperate,” he assured her. “Let me tell you about this place. Jules Ecoffey, an enterprising Swiss, runs it with his partner Adolf Cuny, another enterprising Swiss. They also operate Six Mile Ranch about …”
“Six miles from here in another direction,” Susanna said.
“My dear, you are wise beyond your years,” Joe teased. “Precisely. Both establishments have a legitimate purpose of supplying miners headed for the Black Hills. Prostitution is a side venture, apparently started a few years back when business was slow. I visit both places to stitch up bar fight wounds and treat the clap. I hope you are not too disappointed in me to know that post surgeons are the only persons at Fort Laramie officially allowed here. Al Hartsuff takes his turn, when he is here. Our contract surgeon, long gone, was too squeamish.”
“Have you visited Claudine before?” Susanna asked, then put her hands to her face. “Oh, you know what I mean!”
“Of course,” he replied with a chuckle. “No. Jules said she has been here only a month or two. I do not know what I will find.” But I suspect, he thought.
The ambulance driver took them directly to the large adobe building that Joe knew housed the saloon, restaurant and office. He held out his hand to help Susanna from the vehicle, and did not let go of it as he led her into the building.
It was early evening, and the saloon was nearly deserted. Joe had his own private chuckle to note how quickly the two men at the bar left the building. Those were two cases of drunkenness he would probably not have to treat tomorrow at sick call.
Jules Ecoffey appeared through a door beside the bar and gestured to them after a courtly bow so out of place in a hog ranch. Joe glanced at the woman who clung to his hand with a death grip. She was pale, 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 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.
“I know it’s late.” He nodded to Emily, whose eye were full of fright. “Now, now, Emily. No news from the field,” he soothed. “I just wanted
give Susanna something. Rest your mind.”
Susanna lowered her voice. “Is Claudine still alive?”
He handed her a note with delicate, spidery handwriting.
“‘Merci,’” Susanna read. “That’s all?”
“It took all her strength, Fifi said.”
“Fifi?”
“One of the girls,” he replied, and held out a book. “This was at the hospital addressed to you, and it’s from a more dignified source.”
Puzzled, she took the book and let out a whoop that made Emily look up from her knitting in surprise. “Little Men! Oh, my! Is there a note?”
“Look inside.”
She did. “‘I have heard through the infamous army grapevine that you just completed Little Women,’” she read. “‘We just finished this at our house, and it’s the book that follows Jo March’s adventures. Keep it as long as you need it.’” Susanna ran her finger over the signature. “‘Mrs. Andrew Burt.’” She looked at the post surgeon. “She is so kind.”
Emily looked, too. “Susanna, do you have a champion?” she asked, amazement in her voice.
“Just a nice lady. That’s all,” she replied quietly, when she really wanted to dance around the room. “Please tell her thank-you for me, Major.”
“Tell her yourself,” he said, as he opened the door again. He touched Susanna’s nose. “I told you it was just a matter of hanging on a little longer.”
“You did,” she agreed, wishing he would stay there. She put her hand on his arm to detain him. “We’ve heard rumors of battle, and Emily and Katie are on edge. If you know anything …”
“I’ll tell you immediately,” he whispered back, his eyes on Emily sitting with her knitting, staring at the wall. He kissed Susanna’s cheek quickly. “Chin up.”
She tried to be severe with him. “You would do better to conjugate a French verb or two, rather than kiss me on the cheek like a Frenchman.”