Charlotte showed Brewster and Ada the unused schoolroom. It seemed the perfect place, official yet private. The first letter-writings for the soldiers were awkward, Brewster admitted, because he was so young. But his hand flowed impressively across the page and one trusting customer passed that view on to another. Ada came upon a different sort of trouble. For her, the soldiers were often young and embarrassed about being in her presence, a pretty almost-grown girl, first because they required such help and then because of the sentiments they often wished to express in the letters to someone back home. She treated them with a newfound quiet and sympathy that also gained their trust. Charlotte only worried that a few of them might fall in love. When the mountain men wanted to write a letter, Charlotte gave notice that she was to be alerted and she showed up herself to take on the task.
Jeremy took complete charge of brushing the horses and milking the cow. Charlotte grew tender watching him. He was still only six.
Sometimes, later in the night, when Charlotte stepped out onto the porch for air, she could hear the muffled conversation in the bar and games room above the mess hall after all the bugling was done for the day. Just to amuse herself, she toyed lightly with the idea now and then of vastly improving some of their fortune at cards and maybe making a little more money of her own. But the thought of cards brought back deuces wild, the horses shuffling in the barn, his mouth, his hands, and she couldn’t bear it.
They read a chapter a night of a book about three Scottish boys shipwrecked on a Pacific Island.
“I’ll listen to it,” Ada said, “but don’t girls ever get shipwrecked?”
When they’d finished the island adventures, Charlotte found another about a man and a dog living outside a fort in the west.
“I think we could have written this book,” she said. “We just don’t have a dog, that’s all.”
“Maybe we could get one,” Jeremy offered.
There were mangy dogs roaming all over the fort. “Actually, forget I brought that up.”
Charlotte made sure they were learning, eating enough, keeping clean, staying busy. She didn’t try to relieve them of their sorrow. No one could do that. There was only one problem, Charlotte conceded, and it belonged to her.
She could manage reveille and Grace’s blue eyes opening right in front of her face at exactly the same moment every morning. She could manage breakfast, buckwheat cakes, sausage and apples, porridge with honey. After breakfast was what she couldn’t manage. Without any explanation, she would find herself running out the door, across the parade ground, out through the fort’s open gates and around the corner, past the latrines, hopefully down to the banks of the river and into the bushes before she lost whatever breakfast she’d just eaten.
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