"Are you ever going to give it to her?" Emma asked. She stood before him looking like a little Dresden china shepherdess and Jed wondered who had to spend the hours laundering the blood-stains out of her pale pink dress with its gauzy sleeves and little embroidered collar. Eliza had had dresses like that, wide skirts with deep flounces in voile and muslin for summer. Mary only wore serviceable muted plaids or darker colors that were less likely to show wear; he hadn't seen the figured calico she wore the day the deserter died since he'd held his palm to her cheek. He had had only a few words for her that day but he had found others since then. He wrote to her in the morning, when sleep abandoned him too early, or after a complicated surgery Hastings had competently assisted at when he still felt Mary's shape and shadow beside him. He wrote after early dinners with the cup of coffee she had handed him scenting the room and at night when he woke from dreams of her; she took off her bonnet, she shook her chestnut hair loose, she beckoned from his bed with her chemise bold on the floorboards. He wrote and wrote, letters to Mary, stuffed in his desk drawers, his trousers' pockets.
The letter Emma had handed him had fallen from the inside pocket of his blue vest. There was a seam coming loose he had noticed but hadn't bothered to fix; something Eliza would have attended to certainly, he could not fault her for the care she took of every aspect of their household. Emma had told him she'd found the letter beside Private Hampton's bed and though she had not meant to read it, she'd discovered it unfolded, without an envelope or seal. She had seen the address, "To my dearest Mary" and had read a little, she admitted, "but I did not mean to pry, Dr. Foster, I surely did not." He supposed he was lucky it was Emma and not Anne Hastings who had found it. He tried and failed to imagine Mary's face if she had—would she blanch or flush or bite her lip?
Emma was still a romantic child, for all her growing fortitude and imperturbability in the hospital. She saw a dashing hero denied his fair lady, not a middle-aged married man longing for the independent widow he could ruin with his affections, his desire, his recognition. He thought of Mary, how fine a person she was, how sweet and lovely and utterly undeserving of any shadow upon her virtue. He thought of how she had felt, the silken curve of her cheek and the shock of her hand upon his, holding him to her. How his heart had leapt! He thought of the letters and Eliza in California, what she expected and was owed, and Mary's dark eyes. He answered Emma.
"No."