was an hour ago, when Major Randolph had touched her eye out of professional curiosity. His fingers had been gentle.
Her cousin made no move. There had been a time when they had shared secrets, and a bed when they went to visit their mutual grandmamma, a tough old boot from Gettysburg who had spent that battle frying doughnuts for whichever army happened to control the town on any particular day and tramped near her kitchen.
One of them had to speak, and Susanna knew she was the one with both gratitude and grievance. “Emily, I appreciate your arranging this teaching position,” she said, before the silence between them reached an awkward stage.
Emily turned startled eyes on her. “I had nothing to do with it,” she exclaimed. “Mama knows a lady in town who is a sister of the colonel of the regiment. Mama inquired about any teaching positions out here, and word eventually got to the colonel. Mama contacted me.” There was no ignoring her tiny sigh, until Emily put on her company face again. “I told her we didn’t have room, but you know my mama.”
“I appreciate your sacrifice,” Susanna said. She knew her aunt’s expertise in twisting Emily’s arm, even through the U.S. mail. “This is a fresh start for me.”
She should have left it there, but she couldn’t, not with her anxiety about Captain Dunklin and his wife from Carlisle. “Why did you tell people I am a widow?”
Emily’s company face vanished as her eyes grew smaller. “Do you think I want anyone to know that you abandoned your child, and your husband divorced you for neglect?” she whispered.
Susanna gasped. “Emily, what have you heard? If I hadn’t left the house, Frederick would have beaten me to death!” She closed her eyes, remembering the pain and terror, and Tommy’s mouth open in a scream on the other side of the window as he watched her stagger down the walkway. “I didn’t abandon him! I had to save myself!”
“The newspaper Papa sent me said abandonment,” Emily told her, sounding virtuous, superior and hurt at the same time. “Such a scandal! I had to say what I did, or you never would have been hired. You should thank me for thinking of it.”
“What the papers printed was a lie. My former husband—when he sobered up—hired a good lawyer and paid all the other lawyers in a fifty-mile radius not to take my case,” Susanna said, trying not to raise her voice. “You never had to say anything. I am just Mrs. Susanna Hopkins. All they want is a teacher.”
Emily looked at her with sad eyes. “What did you do to make him so angry?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Susanna replied, wanting to end this inquisition, because her cousin’s mind was already made up. Pennsylvania may have been miles away, but nothing had changed. “About five years ago, Frederick’s business began to fail and he started drinking to excess. After that, nothing I did was right. Nothing.”
She stopped, thinking of those afternoons she had come to dread, waiting for Frederick to return home. She’d always tried to gauge his attitude as he walked up the front steps. Was he going to be sober and withdrawn, ready to sulk in his study? Or would he be drunk and looking everywhere for something to touch off a beating or more humiliating behavior, once Tommy was asleep? She never knew which it would be.
For all his simplicity, Susanna knew Emily’s husband was a kind man and her cousin would never suffer such treatment. Emily hadn’t the imagination to think ill of Frederick, who could put on a company face as good as her own.
“I’m certain you meant well,” she told her cousin. “Captain Dunklin informed me that his wife is from Carlisle, too. Suppose she writes someone back home and mentions Susanna Hopkins?”
“Carlisle is so far away,” Emily said, locating it somewhere next to Versailles. “I’m sorry if I did the wrong thing, but you don’t know these women, Susanna! They’re so superior. If they knew you were a notorious divorcee, no one would receive me, and Captain Reese’s career would suffer. I had to tell that little lie!”
“Notorious divorcee?” Susanna said, stunned. “Emily, I am nothing of the sort! I have been wronged in the worst way, whether you believe it or not.”
They stared at each other, her cousin with a wounded expression, and Susanna wondering how Emily had become the victim.
“When did you start wearing spectacles?” Emily asked, obviously wanting to change the