The Passions of Emma (19 page)

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Authors: Penelope Williamson

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

BOOK: The Passions of Emma
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It pleased Emma perversely to think a certain Irish immigrant would never be invited. That no one would even think to invite him.
She danced with Geoffrey, and sometimes when he looked at her he made her feel beautiful and fragile, and a little breathless. Once, he led her out of the ballroom garden, through the French doors, and into the real garden. Wind rustled through the birches, and she could smell the sea. They walked down the piazza steps and out onto the lawn, and they danced a waltz to music she could barely hear above the pounding of her heart.
But when she came back inside she found Maddie huddled in her chair in the alcove beneath the stairs. Her sister’s eyes were wide and purple, the color of a bruise, and glassy from the chloral hydrate she had taken. “He didn’t come,” she said, over and over. “He’s never coming.”
Maddie had been allowed to attend the ball, and Stu Alcott had been invited. But he hadn’t come. His brother said that he had gone to New York for a time, but he would be back when he ran out of money.
The next morning Emma’s mother gave her paper and pen and told her she must write her father and beg him to come home, and this she did.
Afterward, she went down to the dock, where her sloop rocked in its slip and Willie’s boat was no longer. She sat down on the gray,
warped boards and wrapped her arms around her bent legs. She pressed her eyes hard into the bones of her knees, but she couldn’t stop herself from weeping.
The night after the ball, the wind blew wild and blustery, and Emma came suddenly awake, restless and excited.
The wind and the night drew her outside. The wrought-iron gates cast barred and scrolled shadows on the quahog-shell drive. The dark branches of the birches shook against the sky, the ferns and sedges shuddered in the dark. There was mystery in the air, but somehow still she knew what she would find when she got to the bay.
She smelled the water before she came in sight of it, heard its endless soft sighing. The moon was coming up pale and white over the surf.
In the distance, where the bay lapped black and oily in the dark, she saw a fishing dory’s running lights. And coming from it, a dinghy carrying the silhouettes of two men.
Standing there, where the birches met the beach, waiting for him to come, she felt like someone else.
She heard the slap of oars and the tap of the gunwale lightly hitting a piling. One of the men climbed out of the dinghy, then pushed it off. He was tall, and his shoulders blocked out the moon and most of the stars, and the wind caught at his black pea coat, making it flare darkly.
He walked light-footed down the dock, jumped off it, and strolled right up to her. The moonlight made a silver slash of the scar on his cheek.
She thought, for just the torn half of an instant, that he could hurt her. But she didn’t run or make a sound, not even when he took her hand and pulled her deeper into the birches. His palm was warm and rough, callused from an onion hoe.
Once they were enshrouded by the shadows of the trees, he let her go. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets. She could see nothing of his face. It was only another shadow in a night full of shadows.
“Why,” he said, “are you running around these woods in the middle of the bloody night and wearing nothing but your night rail?”
She looked down at her bare feet and then back up at him. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered, pretending to be cold, although what she really felt was disgraced and exposed. She was swaddled from neck to ankle in yards of linen and lace, but she might as well have been naked.
“Sweet saints,” he said. “How old are you?”
The question surprised her, coming out of nowhere. “Twenty-two. Don’t say that’s too young.”
He didn’t; he didn’t say anything. She wished she could see his face, but she liked the anonymity of the darkness for herself. It made her feel rather bold and daring, even though she was wearing only her night rail. “How old are you?” she said.
“Twenty-seven.”
“I thought you older.”
“We Irish are born old. And poor.”
“And proud of it, apparently.” She allowed herself to smile, since he wouldn’t be able to see it in the dark.
“Miss Tremayne, Miss Tremayne . . . What am I going to do with you?” he said, almost singing, and she thought he might have been smiling as well. “Out here where you don’t belong, seeing things you shouldn’t.”
“You could murder me, cut out my heart, and bury me deep in these woods where no one will ever find me.”
He laughed at that, which made her feel absurdly pleased with herself—that she seemed to have a talent for making him laugh.
“But then,” she went on, “you’d run the risk that my ghost would haunt you forever. Wherever you go, I’d be following in your wake
with my head tucked underneath my arm, dripping blood, and howling at the full moon.”
“I thought it was your heart I was going to cut out, not your head.
Dhia
, what a gruesome little miss you are.”
“If you’re going to turn all faint and squeamish at the least little mention of violence, you could simply extract a promise from me not to tell anyone about your nefarious activities.”
“Aye? And what nefarious activities might those be?”
“Why, gun smuggling, of course.”
“Shipping. It’s not called smuggling until they’re brought into Ireland, God save her.”
“Nevertheless, I’ll not tell on you, if you won’t tell on me.”
“What would I be telling?”
“My going out alone after dark, and without the proper accompaniments in either chaperons or wraps.”
“Ah, that,” he said.
“A heinous crime. And on a scale of wickedness, heinous must rank well above nefarious, surely.”
He laughed again, then took a swift and sudden step, bringing himself right up next to her. “There’s nothing for it,” he said, a smile lingering in his voice. “If we’re to be partners in our crimes, then we’ll have to swear a blood oath on it.”
He brought his hand out of his pocket, and she saw that he held a knife when he pressed a latch on the handle and the blade snapped open.
“Give me your hand,” he said.
She held her hand out to him as if she were presenting it to a gentleman to be bowed over, and it trembled only a little.
He pressed the edge of the knife blade to the heel of his palm, then he did it to hers. She flinched, more at the thought, for it was a small cut and she felt no pain. Her blood welled up shiny and black.
He pressed his bleeding palm against hers, flesh to flesh. It seemed as if her blood flowed into him and his into her.
“Now, we swear,” he said.
“What . . . what do we swear?”
“That we’ll never tell.”
We’ll never speak of it again.
She wondered if there was a meaning in his words beyond what was happening on this night, but if so she had no hope of understanding it, and for once she relished her ignorance.
Her lips formed the words before she spoke them. “I swear,” they said together, and this time her voice grated as roughly as his.
She didn’t remember parting from him. Suddenly she was standing before The Birches’ iron gates, looking through them to the scrolled and barred shadows that stretched far and deep across the lawn. The moon had risen and filled the night. Inside she felt sizzling and full of fire, as if she’d swallowed a bolt of lightning whole.
B
ristolians loved to tell a story on themselves and their hidebound ways—about a young man who left home for the California gold fields in the middle of a Sunday sermon in Saint Michael’s Episcopalian Church. When his fortune was made he came back to Bristol, walked into Saint Michael’s of another Sunday, and picked up the sermon in the exact same sentence where he’d left it all those many years before.
And things, Emma thought with a sigh she could feel all the way down to her toes, surely hadn’t changed in the years that had passed since. Well, the rector had changed, of course—the Reverend Shrewsbury having died of apoplexy some while ago. The Reverend Peele shepherded the flock now. He was considered a newcomer to Bristol, having lived and preached here for only the last fifteen years.
The rector, besides his having chosen somewhere else to be born, was faulted for his whiskers, which splayed out from his cheeks in a rather unruly fashion, like an untrimmed hedge. His loose, dewlapped cheeks flapped when he preached, punctuating his words. The essence of which, on this Sunday, appeared to be that God was an Episcopalian.
Emma wasn’t listening to the particulars, having heard them all before. She had just noticed how her Sunday dress, a lush shade of
cranberry velour frappé, clashed to an eye-watering degree with the turkey-red pew cushions. It wasn’t at all like her not to have been thinking that morning of where she was going, when she decided upon what she would be wearing.
Yet, the more she thought about it now, Emma felt perversely pleased with her faux pas. She saw the same people Sunday after Sunday, month after month, year after year. Indeed, she spent most of her hours doing the same things with the same people. If she never once did anything the least bit extraordinary and unexpected, then her life would become whittled down so smooth and straight there’d be nothing left of it.
She looked down at her right hand. Her pearl-button silk jersey glove fit smooth and tight, hiding the mark that man had put on her palm. It had been a small cut, only a nick really, and already it had healed. But she often thought she could feel her heart beating there, pulsing hard and fast, as if it lived right beneath her skin and struggled to get out.
She clenched her hand into a fist, then opened it again. She rubbed her palm on her knee and then looked up to find that the Carter sisters were watching her, and so she made herself be still.
At least no one sat beside her in the Tremayne box pew to take especial note of the flaws in her good form. Maddie hadn’t once left The Birches since the accident—not even to come to church, although she used to love singing in the choir. But her appearance at Saint Michael’s in her wheelchair would have called undue attention to herself and her unfortunate affliction and drawn shame upon the family, or so their mama had said, and so it would not do.
That morning, Mama herself had stayed in bed with a sick headache. Last week the Wilbur Nortons had returned home from a cruise to Florida full of stories about William Tremayne and the parties on his yacht with his latest mistress. In the past, Mama had always confronted her husband’s peccadilloes by refusing to
acknowledge that they existed. But this latest shame had been too much for her.
“It is your duty to put in an appearance in our pew,” she had said to Emma earlier that morning, as she lay in bed in a cascade of Brussels lace, propped up by silk pillows and surrounded by bottles of laudanum and smelling salts. “For the sake of our family’s dignity and good form. You are our only hope.”
You are our only hope . . .
Once Emma married, she would sit with Geoffrey and his grandmother in their family pew. At least, she thought, the view would be different from across the aisle, even if the sermons remained the same.
She glanced over at her intended now. He held his fine, narrow head erect on his shoulders, and the candleshine reflecting off the glazed cathedral glass made his face and hair look gilded. His gaze was fixed on the rector as if he hung on every word, but perhaps he was only absorbed by the man’s flapping dewlaps. Geoffrey wore a gardenia in the buttonhole of his gray frock coat, but then he had always been a dapper dresser. He’d probably never clashed with anything in his life.

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