Free Her Hesitant Heart by Carla Kelly Page B

Susanna said. “What duties does Saint Paul perform in your hospital? I mean, when he’s not helping Corinthians. Does he write letters? One would think Paul was good at that.”
    You are a wit
, Joe thought appreciatively. “Hejust sits there in the ward. No one seems to mind, or perhaps they’re too cowed to object. At any rate, I have an orderly hospital.”
    He watched her lively face, wondering what she was really making of his madman.
    “I hope his missionary duties are few this school term,” she said, as he opened the door to his office. “If he can’t read or write, I can probably teach him. That will make Romans through Hebrews easier to compose someday, don’t you think?”
    Joe laughed out loud. “Generations of earnest Christians will applaud you! The rest of us, not so much.”
    The door opened immediately and Nick brought in two cups of coffee. “Thank you, Saint Paul,” she told him. The door closed again.
    Joe took a sip, satisfied. “Nick makes the best coffee.” He leaned back in his swivel chair. “I don’t know what creates people like Nick Martin. I think he was a teamster who suffered hard usage of one sort or other, and found a better world in madness.” He thought of her own ill usage. “I imagine it is a safe place.”
    “Where does he live?”
    “Here. I have a storeroom with space for a cot in the alcove. He eats with my hospital steward. You may have noticed the small house beside the hospital.”
He eats better than I do
, Joe wanted to add, but he was not a man to play a sympathy card.
    “You’re a kind man.”
    “I couldn’t send him to an asylum.”
    Mrs. Hopkins sipped her coffee, breathing deeply of the government issue beans that Nick turned into something wonderful. Joe cleared his throat, and she looked at him, her expression sweet in a way that charmed him.
    “If you should find the time, I could use your help here, reading to my patients, or writing letters for them. Young men so far from home find comfort in ladies.”
Heaven knows I do
, he thought.
    “Show me your ward,” she said.
    She surprised him. He had asked other garrison ladies to do what he was asking her, but his efforts usually involved much cajoling. No one had asked to see the ward.
    “Come along,” he said, opening the door quickly, before she changed her mind. “It’s only a twelve-bed ward.”
    “And when women and children are ill?” Mrs. Hopkins asked, going with no hesitation through the door he held open.
    “I treat them in their homes.” He gestured into the room, which had six metal cots on either side. “I also have an examination room in my quarters, where ambulatory civilians come.”
    “And here?” she asked, looking around with interest.
    “There is another examination room, but no operating bay. Anything needful in that realm I also do in the exam room. Mrs. Hopkins, meet my hospital steward, Sergeant Theodore Brown.He’s a better post surgeon than I am, or Captain Hartsuff.”
    Brown looked up from a chart he was examining. “You, sir, will have people believing that, except I do not think Mrs. Hopkins is gullible.”
    “Nor do I,” Joe replied, after a glance at her.
    She held out her hand to his steward, who took it, and even favored her with a courtly little bow, which impressed Joe. After exchanging a pleasantry or two with his number-one man, she walked the length of the room, obviously unfazed by the broken jaw in bed six, the result of a horse barn misunderstanding, or the burn victim from the bake house, who looked with real terror on the steward.
    To Joe’s further surprise, Mrs. Hopkins sat down beside the latter patient and took his unburned hand with no hesitation. She looked back at Joe. “There is a hospital in Shippensburg,” she told him. “I did this a lot last year, while my eye healed.”
    She turned her attention to the private in the bed, speaking low to him while the hospital steward sat down with his tweezers and bowl on the man’s