Carla Kelly (32 page)

“Oh, please no!” he exclaimed, feeling such a measure of horror and revulsion that his stomach writhed. “No, Emma!” he declared, as though his words could take it away.

She held up her left hand to him, holding it with her right to steady it. “You've noticed my fingers, my lord?” she asked, her eyes glittering with a fierce anger that burned into his body almost.

“Yes,” he whispered. “They pulled out your fingernails, didn't they?”

“Aye.” She looked at her hand, the fingernails grown back, but with bumpy ridges. “I tried not to scream, but I couldn't help myself. I even bit through my lip.”

“Emma, don't,” he pleaded.

“You wanted to know,” she said calmly. “Well, now you will know. They told my father they were going to rape me right there. That was when Eamon confessed.”

“But …”

“Confessed to crimes he never committed, to spare me.” She stood up, and there was a dignity and majesty about her. “Now you begin to understand something of what drives me, my lord. It is not pretty, is it?”

O, IT IS NOT PRETTY, HE AGREED AFTER A night of twisting and turning in his bed until he was a prisoner of his sheets and weary with no sleep. As dawn was beginning to tinge the sky, he dragged himself to his armchair by the window and propped his bare feet on the ledge.
I wonder that she can endure. May the Lord smite me if I ever whine again.

The rest of her story was told in fits and starts. How Eamon had been ripped from them and thrown into a cell for the condemned. They heard gallows under construction for some and learned from their triumphant jailers of Robert Emmet's death by beheading. They begged, they pleaded, but the authorities did not bother to tell them who else had died, as though Irish grief was as dismissible as a gnat before the face.

On his lap again, Emma spoke of her escape, her voice still wondering at the mystery of it all. They had kept her in Prevot for another week, and then suddenly all the prisoners were removed to Marlborough Street Riding School, hurried along through the streets of Dublin as night was falling.

“It was typhus, and they moved everyone,” she explained into his soaked waistcoat. “Da and I were not chained together, and I know it must have been an oversight. When we passed a crowd and the guard wasn't looking, he pushed me into the mob and said, ‘Indenture,’ to the man who caught me.”

Her voice lost some of its tightness as she told of being hustled that very night to the Dublin docks and put aboard a ship bound for America and the West Indies. “And so I came to the Claridges,” she concluded. “I never thought I would have a chance to look for my family again, but when Mr. Claridge said he was sending Sally and Robert to England, I knew I had to come.”

“And you have been treated shabbily,” he concluded. “That will change tomorrow, Emma. We are returning to the Office of Criminal Business, and I assure you that Mr. Capper will see you.”

“You would do that for me?” she asked in surprise, not realizing how her spontaneous question deepened his own shame.

“I will do that for you, Emma.”

“I will do that for you,” he repeated at dawn to the window.
And then what? Will there be tidy lists of prisoners bound for Australia, or am I only letting Emma in for more frustration and heartache? Put baldly, is this a kindness?

He decided that it was as he watched, bleary-eyed an hour later, as the maid put more coal in the grate and started the fire. He knew he looked worse than usual, because of her darting glances and the way she almost ran from his room.
Even if Emma continues to be disappointed at every turn, at least she will know that we tried everything we could
, he reasoned.
This is far better than going through life never knowing.

Dressed and ready for the day, he came downstairs at six, surprising Lasker. “There is no breakfast yet, my lord,” he apologized, even as he hurried to light the candles in the breakfast room.

Lord Ragsdale shrugged. “Tea then, Lasker,” he said and sat down at the empty table with the newspaper. He looked up at his butler, whose face wore a quizzical expression. “Tell Emma to come here.”

“Yes, my lord.” The butler hesitated. “I do not believe she slept last night,” he said. “The scullery maid heard her crying in the next room.”

Emma, and I was not there to hold you?
he thought.
I would have. I was sleepless only one floor below you.
He considered the paper a moment, then rejected it, struck by the fact that he was the best friend she had at the moment. “She'll be awake, won't she?” he asked and turned back to the paper. “Bring two cups.”

She was there in a few minutes, pale and serious in the deep green wool dress he had commissioned for her. He gestured to a chair, but she did not sit. He looked up.

“My lord, it is not my place to sit here,” she reminded him.

“It is if I say so. Sit.”

She perched on the edge of the seat, as if ready for flight if another family member were to appear. He filled a teacup and pushed it toward her. She sipped it slowly, cradling her hands around the cup as though she were cold inside and out.

He read through the newspaper without comment, then folded it and looked at her. “I am remiss in something, Emma,” he said.

She looked at him then, curious.

“Do you remember when I asked you what would make you happy?”

Emma nodded. “That seems so long ago, my lord.”

“I think it was longer ago than either of us can really appreciate,” he murmured. “You have your own bed and your own room, do you not?”

She nodded again, mystified and wondering where he was leading.

He stood up and gestured for her to follow him. “I believe you also wanted to hear Mass. Let us go.”

She took him by the arm. “You don't need to do this, my lord,” she said.

He took her hand and pulled her after him into the hall. “Of course I do, my dear. I will take you to St. Stephens, where you will have ample time for confession first and then Mass.”

“You want me to tell this whole story to a priest,” she asked, but it was more of a statement.

“I do, indeed.” He allowed Lasker to help him into his overcoat, and then he waited for Emma to retrieve her cloak. “Unless I have been misjudging the Almighty all these years—and I probably have—you are about to discover that you have nothing to be forgiven for.”

She said nothing as they rode toward the city, only beginning to stir now with carters and other early risers. She stared straight ahead, but he knew it was not the angry, sullen mistrust of their earlier acquaintance. Again, he had the feeling that she was seeing things out of his vision. He looked down at her hands and noticed that they were balled into tight fists. He put his hand over hers.

“Don't worry, Emma. Have you ever considered the possibility that the Lord might be on your side?”

He could tell from her expression that she had not, and he wisely gave himself over to silence too.

There were only a few worshipers in St. Stephen's, a small Catholic church on the outskirts of the financial district that he knew about only from driving by on several occasions. The earlier Mass had just finished, and the smell of wax was strong in the low-ceilinged chapel. Emma took a deep breath of the mingled ecclesiastical odors and sighed.

“It has been so long, my lord,” she murmured as she started toward a confessional. She looked back at him once, real fear in her eyes, and he longed to follow her, but he only smiled and seated himself in the back of the church, crossing his fingers and hoping that the Lord was the kind of fellow Lord Ragsdale thought He was.

She was a long time in the confessional, but he knew it was a long story and felt no impatience. He was content to breathe deep himself and allow the aura of the place to work its way into his spirits. When she came out, he made room for her on the bench.

He wanted to speak to her, but she dropped immediately to her knees and began to recite the rosary, murmuring softly. She had no beads, so she ticked off the litany on her fingers. He watched Emma and resolved to find a rosary from somewhere for her.
What a paltry gift for someone who has given me so much,
he thought.

When she finished, she sat beside him. “You were right,” she whispered.

He leaned closer until their shoulders touched. “I thought so. Any penance?”

She smiled at him, and his heart flopped. There was nothing in her smile of reticence, calculation, or wariness this time, only a great relief probably visible to ships at sea or Indians in distant tepees. “He told me to recite one rosary.” she whispered back.

“Small penance, my dear,” he said, wishing she would turn her marvelous, incandescent gaze on some other man.

She grinned even wider. “Faith, my lord, he's an Irish priest.”

He burst into laughter, forgetting where he was. Heads turned, parishioners glowered. He rested his long legs on the prayer bench and sank down lower in the pew, stifling the laughter that still threatened, and thinking suddenly of Clarissa, who wouldn't recognize a joke if it said hello.

The Mass began. He nudged her. “You know, Emma, we're very much alike,” he commented.

She digested this, her attention divided between him and the priest at the altar. “Oh, we are?”

“I drowned myself in bitterness and alcohol, and you let yourself be captured by guilt. Such foolish damage we have done ourselves.”

She nodded and sighed. “I probably would have taken to the bottle, my lord, but I had no money like you.”

“Ah, my dear, the toils of the too wealthy …”

The parishioner in the pew in front of them turned around and put a finger to her lips. Lord Ragsdale winked at her, and she turned back swiftly.

“D'ye know, I think I will seek out the man I hate the most and give him the contents of my wine cellar,” he whispered to Emma. “And my first choice is the porter at the Office of Criminal Business.”

She laughed this time, and the priest paused momentarily, glaring at her. “Hush, my lord,” she insisted. “You are a bad influence on me. In another moment, I really will have something to confess, and it will be your fault.”

Lord Ragsdale behaved himself for the rest of the Mass, marveling at the prescience of the priest to deliver his homily on forgiveness. He watched, great peace in his heart, as Emma took the sacrament at the altar, then returned to kneel beside him. He knew she was crying, and he kept his hand on her shoulder for the remainder of the service.

“Well, my dear, can we face the porter now?” he asked her in front of the church as he helped her into another hackney.

“I can face anything,” she assured him.

“It may be that we learn little or nothing,” he warned her. “We may come away feeling worse.”

“I know, my lord,” she said quietly. “But at least we will know we are trying.”

Her hand tight in his, they approached the porter in the Office of Criminal Business, who practically threw himself off his stool and asked in unctuous, kindly tones if they would like to see Mr. Capper.

“Indeed we would,” Lord Ragsdale said. “You must want to keep your job.” He looked the cowering man in the eye. “Do you know, it probably wouldn't be too hard to get
you
transported.”