The Passions of Emma (17 page)
They followed an old, crumbling stone wall that ran its lonely, broken course through the woods. Great oaks threw tangles of light and shade across their path. Their shoes crunched on the gray moss.
They came to a spring stream blanketed with skunk cabbage. He splashed right through it. “Wait,” Emma called after him, but he didn’t slow or look back.
She lifted her skirts higher and waded into the stream. The icy water soaked right through her kid shoes, which had once been white but were now the brown-gray color of salt mud.
“This is madness,” she said aloud to herself. “You are a madman,” she said to the back of him that was fast walking away from her down the trail. “I am following a mad Irishman, who shoots the heads off birds, following him to God knows where, and I don’t even know his name.”
A gentleman, when first introduced to a lady, was supposed to bow without extending his hand. He hadn’t bowed to her; he had touched her ankle without even a by-your-leave and said mocking things to her. But he hadn’t bowed to her and he wasn’t a gentleman, and they hadn’t been introduced, and she thought she was
rather glad she didn’t know his name. It made her feel safe to think of him as nameless, a nobody.
rather glad she didn’t know his name. It made her feel safe to think of him as nameless, a nobody.
He stopped at the edge of a small meadow where a giant white pine straddled a rock. He turned and put a finger to his lips. He laid down his guns, squatted on his haunches behind the rock, and motioned for her to come.
She came and knelt beside him, and her organdy skirts—not nearly so crisp as they’d been earlier that morning—still crackled like tissue paper.
“God save us,” he said beneath his breath.
It was an ordinary clearing, and empty from what she could see. Red deer grass with clumps of scarlet pimpernel. Cattails and sedges that danced in the fitful breeze. A hedge of mountain laurel grew together to form a canopy over the entrance to an old woodchuck burrow.
He took the birds from her hand and threw them, one at a time, out into the clearing, about ten feet from the burrow. She wondered at the why behind what he had done, but she didn’t ask. She felt so intensely alive just to be where she was in this one moment out of time, and she didn’t want to think about the why of that either.
They were very close to each other. So close that part of her skirt fell in a soft fold over his thigh, and the shadow of his shoulders lay across her breast.
She didn’t know how long they knelt there behind the rock at the edge of the clearing. Long enough for the dampness in the ground to soak through her skirts. Long enough for a black-capped chickadee to decide they were part of the scenery and flit from branch to branch above their heads.
Her breath left her in a soft rush when he took her chin and turned her head slightly, so that she was looking not across the clearing but into it.
A fox’s head had poked out of the burrow, ears perked, nose quivering. The fox was very patient; an eternity passed before it
darted out of its earth. It paused to listen again, ears straight up, nose in the air, then it trotted dainty and light-footed, long tail floating proudly, out to where the dead snipes lay in the grass. It circled and sniffed, cocked its head, sniffed and circled.
darted out of its earth. It paused to listen again, ears straight up, nose in the air, then it trotted dainty and light-footed, long tail floating proudly, out to where the dead snipes lay in the grass. It circled and sniffed, cocked its head, sniffed and circled.
The fox barked, and four kits came tumbling out of the burrow, all gangly legs and huge ears. They fell on the birds, whining and yipping, tearing into flesh and feathers with their sharp little teeth. Except for one of the kits, which fancied itself a hunter. It crouched down, its plump and fluffy body wiggling and twitching, then it pounced. And Emma smiled.
She turned her head and caught him staring at her, and she found it odd that for once she didn’t mind. “Thank you,” she said, “for . . . this.” She waved her hand, encompassing the meadow and the foxes and all of the brave, strange world he was showing her, although he couldn’t know . . . How could he possibly know? “But why did you bring me here?”
He held her gaze a moment longer, then looked away. “Now as to that I am not sure. Haven’t you ever just done a thing without having a reason?”
“No, never. Why, if it isn’t a tradition backed by at least four generations of practice, it isn’t a done thing at all.”
He surprised her by laughing. People so rarely laughed at her little jokes that she’d begun to think her sense of humor was perverse. And then it was the strangest thing—she suddenly felt as though she could have talked to him, laughed with him, for a long time. Yet no sooner did the thought enter her head, than she was unable to come up with the first word to get started.
He picked up his guns and pushed to his feet. He walked back down the way they had come and he didn’t look to see if she followed after.
Back across the stream, he stopped at a place where a felled tree trunk lay across a gap in the stone wall. He sat down on the log and worked the lever on one of his rifles, ejecting an empty shell casing. He broke the gun open and peered into the breech.
Emma didn’t know if she was meant to go on her way, now that he no longer seemed to have a use for her, or if he wanted her to stay . . . Or if she wanted herself to stay. For the first time in her life, she knew of no rule that could tell her how to behave.
The fallen stones made something of a chair. She settled gracefully down upon them and folded her hands in her lap, as if she’d suddenly found herself in someone’s best parlor. Yet, the way she felt inside—it was like the shock of silence before the onslaught of a storm. That taut, breath-held moment just before the clouds opened up and the first raindrops fell.
He snapped the breech closed, cocked and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell on the empty chamber with a loud click. She was fascinated with his hands, with the size and shape of them and the way they moved. The way the sinews flexed, and the veins and bones stood out in stark relief against his skin.
“Why,” she said, her voice cracking a little, “do you need so many guns just to slaughter a few of our native waterfowl?”
He lifted the rifle and sighted along the barrel. “They’re just old Spencer repeaters left over from your great war that I’ve managed to rebuild with bits and pieces I’ve cadged here and there. I’m trying them out, so to speak, to make certain they won’t be misfiring and blowing off the hand of the first man to use them.”
Emma jerked back in alarm and then had to laugh at herself. “Isn’t that rather dangerous? What if one does misfire and yours is the hand that gets blown off ?”
“Then it would be my own bloody fault, wouldn’t it?”
“What will you do with them?” she said. “Discarded old rifles put back together again with bits and pieces.”
“Smuggle them into Ireland.” He slanted a look up at her, his eyes taunting. “Where maybe they’ll be used to shoot spoiled little rich British lasses who ask too many questions.”
He made her smile, the way he talked. “I might be spoiled and rich, but I beg to inform you, sir, that I am not British.”
“Hunh. The airs and graces you Rhode Island Yankees put on could give the
ould
queen herself a proper scare.”
ould
queen herself a proper scare.”
She’d noticed that the thickness of his brogue had a tendency to ebb and flow depending on his mood and the subject. But whether he was putting on the Irish or not, his voice always sounded tortured when he spoke. As if his throat had rusted shut and he had to grate the words out by force. She wanted to ask him how he had come by the scar on his neck, but that was too much. Even for this strange, brave new Emma that she had become.
Her gaze fell to her lap. She put a pleat in her skirt with her fingers, then smoothed it out with her palm. “That . . .” She saw that she’d gotten the snipes’ blood on her gloves—another pair ruined. “That vixen and her kits, they belonged to the fox that died.”
She didn’t say it as a question. Sometimes, when she really made herself, she could speak the truth.
“Ah, but that poor fox didn’t just die. Your lot ran him down and tore him to pieces,” he said, and she knew then that that was the real reason he’d brought her to the meadow.
He swung the rifle up to his shoulder and pulled the trigger. She heard the hammer fall on the empty chamber, again and then again, and each time she flinched. “They mate for life, do foxes,” he said. “I wonder, Miss Tremayne, do you think they feel love?”
She made herself look up again and meet his eyes. “I don’t know.”
“I found them a couple of days after the hunt, your fox’s vixen and their kits. She had ripped at her own fur with her teeth until it tore off in great bloody patches, and she’d paced back and forth in front of their earth until she’d worn a path, waiting for him to come home. Only he wasn’t ever coming and she might’ve just quit eating and drinking and died herself, but she has the four wee little ones to care for and there’s only herself now to hunt for them and so she had to go on.”
Emma lowered her head so that he couldn’t see the tears she was
holding back, for she knew he would think they had come too easily.
holding back, for she knew he would think they had come too easily.
She pushed the dead leaves and pine needles around with the mud-smeared patent toe of her shoe. A single tear fell, leaving a dark stain, like another drop of blood, on her lemon-yellow skirt. “I didn’t want . . . what happened.”
“You didn’t want it, so you say, and yet yon vixen’s mate still died and her loss hasn’t kept the wind from blowing through these trees or the sun from shining bright upon the harbor, or her kits from needing to be fed. And you were there, were you not?”
Her head came up proud. “So were you. And besides, we Tremaynes always attend the last hunt of the season.”
“Do you now?”
“I can’t help that,” she said. “I can’t help who I am.”
He looked back at her, saying nothing. In the tree-shadowed gloom his eyes glinted like broken beach glass.
She turned away from him. He was rude, hateful. An ignorant, bog-trotting, Irish smuggler who shot the heads off innocent birds and then had the brass to look down his broken nose at her for riding on a fox hunt. She would get up and leave him without even a see-you-later, and that would show him . . . show him . . .
She saw an aster blooming among the spill of rocks from the broken wall and she bent over to pick it. She twirled the stem, and the golden petals fluttered like a pinwheel. “Why do you dislike me so?”
“It’s flattering yourself, you are, to think I have any thoughts about you at all.”
“And it’s lying, you are, sir, to try and tell me otherwise,” she said, trying to mimic the Irish in his talk.
He laughed. “Lying—now there’s a word. Sure and you would never think of telling lies, would you? Especially to the likes of me. But you’ve spent all of your young life running away from the truth, and you are crushing that poor wee flower to bits in your hand.”
She opened her clenched fist and the aster fell, to lie broken among the leaves and pine needles.
“The other day,” she said, “while at my cousin’s farm, I went out to the kennels. A man there told me you had been dismissed.”
“Aye, I’m back to toiling in the onion fields again. Terrrrrible work, it is,” he said, rolling out the word with a flourish and laughing at her with his eyes. “The hoe gives you bloody blisters on your hands, and your back feels as if it’s going to break in two. Now, does it please you to hear of my suffering, Miss Tremayne?”
“You flatter yourself, sir, if you think I have any feelings about you at all.”
His face broke into a smile, and she couldn’t help smiling in return. The moment seemed to last forever, then ended abruptly when he stretched to his feet. He took her by the arm, helping her to stand.
“It’s time you were getting on home, Miss Tremayne,” he said in his raw, cracked voice. “Before someone thinks you’ve lost your way.”
She turned and walked away from him. The wind suddenly swirled through the treetops, pelting her with a hail of pine needles that smelled incredibly sweet. If she had any pride at all, she thought, she would not look back to see if he watched her.
She had no pride.
She whirled, but the path behind her was empty. The felled tree trunk was there, as was the gap in the stone wall, but he was gone. So completely had he vanished that she felt compelled to go back, to seek some evidence that he had been there.
And, yes, the leaf mulch was trampled flat where he’d planted his boots. A single shell casing glinted in the sun, and the air smelled faintly of gun oil.
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