“Poor Mrs. Pritchett,” murmurs Rosemary. “To bury a son. Not that it isn’t deeply affecting for you, Jennie, only you’re so young and sweet. Love will find you again. But Mrs. Pritchett is past forty. She has nothing to look forward to but the grave.”

“She has venom in her yet. She took back the ring Will gave me.”

“Nooo…” Flora’s primmed face reminds me of when, in our last year at Putterham School, we’d stuck a clothespin on her nose to try to straighten it last minute, before the end-of-year class portrait.

“She wrenched it off my finger. She nearly drew blood,” I embellish. “She despises me because she thought Father was common and Mother a heathen to marry him. Aunt Clara is a hideous, beastly thing.” After all these weeks of being shut in that house, my words huff like an engine whistle pitched high and strong.

Too high, too strong. In fact, Rosemary has broken her link through my elbow and drops pace so that our skirts no longer swish in tandem. “She is your guardian,” she murmurs, both arms crossed in the clutch of her Bible to her bosom. Flora’s teeth gnaw her thin bottom lip.

I have overstepped. These girls like to gossip but are easily cowed. Quickly I change the subject. “Is there news of your brother?”

The sisters’ words tumble over each other. “Silas is well ”

“And stationed in Franklin, Tennessee ”

“Quite far from the fray!”

Twenty minutes ago the congregation was voicing prayers for the Godspeed return of all our soldiers. My resentment of Silas Wortley’s safety is positively unchristian. “Well,” I say, fixing a smile to my face. “Thank heaven.”

“But tell us, Jennie. We hear from the servants that poor Quinn’s gone…off,” says Flora. “That he talks to himself and hides the family portraits, and that he roams the garden at unearthly hours!”