The Passions of Emma (2 page)
The Bristol Hunt Club always gathered for the last hunt of the season in the stableyard of the old Hope Farm.
The farm had once belonged to the Tremaynes, but it had gone to a daughter who had married unwisely, and so it wasn’t as grand as it ought to have been. Most of its onion fields lay weed choked and fallow, and the house itself wore a tawdry air. It had been built of an exotic marbled stone, yellow like a cat’s eyes, brought out of the heart of Africa as ballast in a slave ship. The house was said to be haunted, although no one had ever actually seen or heard anything more sinister than bats in the attics.
Ghost riddled or not, the hunt took place there every Friday morning from November through the first week in April. Hope Farm and the surrounding countryside were nothing more than a sprawl of old mills, swamp and scrub, stagnant ponds, and poison ivy. But the first hunt had been held at Hope Farm over two hundred years ago, and the event had been repeated every winter Friday morning every year thereafter.
All the old Bristol families who mattered belonged to the club. The Great Folk, they called themselves—those old, moneyed families. The mill owners and boat builders, the bankers and lawyers, and all their sons and daughters and grandchildren, generation upon generation. They might not all ride to the hounds every winter Friday, but everyone who was anyone made it to the last hunt of the season. It was a tradition, and Bristol folk both great and ordinary had never been ones to let go of any tradition without a fight.
Like serving eggnog before the last hunt of the season was a tradition. The gentlemen and ladies of the hunt, in their polished boots would sit astride their polished horses, and mill in the yard, toasting themselves with eggnog served in sterling silver cups engraved with running foxes. When the master blew his horn, the
Hunt Club would ride through the gate and all the way to the first bend in the road. Where, with a hearty cheer, they would toss their empty cups over the hawthorn hedge.
Hunt Club would ride through the gate and all the way to the first bend in the road. Where, with a hearty cheer, they would toss their empty cups over the hawthorn hedge.
It was a gesture meant to show off Great Folk wealth and giddy extravagance. But everyone knew the servants were always given strict instructions to follow along after and gather up every silver cup, to be used again next year.
The gentlemen’s cups were always spiked with whiskey. Only on this particular morning Stuart Alcott had passed up the eggnog and was drinking his whiskey straight from a flask that was silver as well, but a battered and tarnished silver.
This was not the way things were done at all—to bring along one’s own whiskey flask to the hunt. Everyone was staring and frowning at him because of it, and this was irritating his brother, Geoffrey, no end. Geoffrey Alcott hated the thought of anyone bearing the family name being caught out in an impropriety.
As they rode together through the gate, Stu caught his brother’s eye and waved the flask toward Aloysius Carter. The master of the hunt and present-day owner of Hope Farm led the way, wallowing in his saddle like a leaky tugboat. Aloysius was so fat he filled the seat from bow to cantle, and he’d been inebriated for over thirty years.
“Look at him, drunk as a pickled skunk,” Stu said. “Yet I’ll wager you a short bit the old boy still makes it over every fence, and well ahead of the rest of us.”
Geoffrey sighed at the thought and took a swallow from his own cup, consoling himself with its sweet warmth. His cup, like the ladies’, was filled only with eggnog. He rarely drank spirits, and
he
certainly wasn’t going to go galloping across fields and flying over fences woozy-headed from booze.
he
certainly wasn’t going to go galloping across fields and flying over fences woozy-headed from booze.
He looked up and caught his brother watching him. Stu’s eyes were bright with whiskey shine and derisive laughter. “They’ll run like the very devil today. It’s just nippy enough,” Geoffrey said, for lack of anything better, and then felt himself flush. His brother
could still, after all these years, make him feel and behave like a fool.
could still, after all these years, make him feel and behave like a fool.
“Shit. It’s cold as the proverbial witch’s teat.” Stu took another long swallow of the booze and pretended to shudder. “Which is why, instead of glowering at me like a pinch-lipped parson every time I take a little nip, you ought to be congratulating me on my good sense. After all, a fellow’s blood can hardly freeze when it’s ninety proof.”
That won’t keep a fellow from breaking his damn fool drunken neck, Geoffrey thought, although he kept it to himself. But his brother, who could always read his mind, grinned and lifted his whiskey flask in a mocking toast.
Geoffrey set his jaw and looked away.
But a moment later his gaze had gone back to studying his brother. Stu’s was a handsome face, with its shapely patrician nose and high cheekbones, the wide mouth that held a certain wild charm even now when it was slack with drink. Geoffrey looked at that face, as familiar to him as his own, and felt something like fear roil up sour in his belly.
It was the way his brother had looked at Emma.
Not that everyone didn’t always look at Emma. She had walked out onto the gallery of the yellow stone farmhouse, and every man present had stopped talking, stopped moving. Even the horses had gone still. Emma had stood alone, framed between the gallery’s white wooden pillars, and her presence there had the power of a thunderclap on a clear day.
Geoffrey had heard his brother ease his breath out in a low, slow whistle and had looked around in time to catch the light flare in his brother’s pale eyes. “Good God,” Stu had said. “If it isn’t our dear little Emma, and my, how she has grown.”
“She’s mine,” Geoffrey shot back, surprising even himself with the force of his protest, so that of course he flushed.
Stu turned his head slowly away from the girl on the gallery and
cocked one pale eyebrow at his brother. “Ah, but does she know she’s yours?”
cocked one pale eyebrow at his brother. “Ah, but does she know she’s yours?”
“Stu, damn you . . . You can’t go gadding about the world for all these years only to show up back here and expect—” Geoffrey clamped his jaw shut so hard his teeth ached.
Stu laughed. “I don’t
expect
anything, brother mine. That is my one saving grace.”
expect
anything, brother mine. That is my one saving grace.”
Geoffrey couldn’t help laughing a little himself. “God, what a scapegrace you are. And you even have the audacity to admit it.”
“All right, so I have two saving graces.”
The brothers shared a smile. Then, as if of one accord, their gazes had been pulled back to the girl on the gallery. So young and lush, she was. But her beauty was surely more suggestive than real, something out of a man’s dreams. For they were too far away to see that beneath her black silk top hat her dark hair shone like lacquer. That the white linen ascot she wore was wrapped around a neck impossibly white and long. That the violet in the buttonhole at her breast quivered with some strong emotion that might have been fear or perhaps excitement.
They were too far away to see her eyes, which were neither gray nor green nor blue, but the color of seawater lit by a rising sun, bright and luminous and deep. Only Geoffrey, who loved her, knew that all the world’s longing was in those eyes. And that once you looked into them it was impossible to look away.
S
he smelled him first, pungent and musty.
he smelled him first, pungent and musty.
Then she saw him—crouched on top of a stone wall that was shadowed and webbed with old vines. He held himself still, as if mesmerized by the sight of her waiting for him there in the road.
His russet fur was molting, falling off in patches. The blood of some prey stained his cheek ruffs. His eyes were bright and black and staring right at her, and she had the strangest notion that he was begging her with those eyes not to give him away.
They had spread out along the edge of the woodland, the horses and their riders, waiting for the hounds to draw the covert and flush out the fox. Emma and her mare had wandered off by themselves to where a stone wall separated the birch woods from the fields of an onion farmer who was trying to wrest a poor living out of the briny marshland.
The fox crept slowly now out of the shadows, his belly low and brushing the rough stones of the wall. Then he went still again, and Emma realized that she and the fox weren’t so alone, after all. The Irishman and his horse stood among the slender gray trunks of the birches. She thought he had to have seen the fox as well, and she waited for him to do his duty as whipper-in—to stand up in his stirrups and shout the view holloa. But he did nothing, as if he were trying to give the fox a chance to get away.
They stared at each other, and the fox stared at the two of them, and it was as if a skein of something bright and electric, like lightning, had wrapped itself around them, holding them fast.
The fox moved first. He whirled and dashed along the top of the wall, his tail floating long and beautiful behind him. But with every step he took, the glands in the pads of his feet left a trail for the hounds to follow.
Emma and that man stayed caught by each other’s eyes long after the fox was gone. An eternity, or perhaps it was only a moment later, the hounds began to bay, crying out that they’d picked up the scent. She heard her cousin Aloysius cheer a shrill, “Holloa!” followed by three quick, pulsating notes from his horn.
The hounds were running.
Emma took the wall head-on, soaring, flying, landing clear. She galloped across a tussocked field, not chasing the fox so much as just riding, riding.
The wind roared past her ears. The mare’s strong back bunched and flowed, bunched and flowed, beneath her legs. Sky and earth and trees rushed through time and space to meet her.
She heard a shout and pounding hooves coming up hard behind her. It was he, she was sure of it, and she urged the mare to go faster, faster. She was running from him now, not chasing after, and her excitement sharpened, became tinged with fear.
They soared over a wide hedge with a steep drop into a salt meadow on the other side. She heard a yelp of surprise and saw out the corner of her eye a horse go down. It was a Thoroughbred bay, though, not a chestnut hack. It had been the bay behind her all along.
She looked back over her shoulder and saw Stu Alcott pull up to help the fallen rider. Slowly, she brought her own horse down to a squelchy canter, throwing up little splatters of water, and then to a walk. The mare’s belly heaved against Emma’s legs like bellows, and
white streams of breath shot from her nostrils. The air stopped rushing, and the world grew still.
white streams of breath shot from her nostrils. The air stopped rushing, and the world grew still.
They were in a clearing filled with cattails and asters surrounding a salt pond. Next to the pond stood an abandoned gristmill. Over the years the windmill’s sails had worn a deep rut in the wind-ruffled marsh that smelled of wet peat.
Close to the mill lay an old graveyard. A lone pine tree grew out through the collapsed roof of a crypt. There was no house here. Only tall grasses and swamp and the ghosts of Indians.
The clouds broke open and beams of sunlight shot through the holes in the sky. Emma tilted back her head and felt the warmth of the sun pour over her. The land had seemed locked in winter forever, but now the first breath of spring was here. For Emma spring always brought with it a faint disappointment. As if she expected her life to be changing along with the seasons, and yet it never did.
A branch cracked and she started, jerking around. A horse trotted into the clearing, a bay whose rider was splattered with mud.
She waited for him to ride up to her, feeling shy and yet strangely buoyant. When he was close enough she took a white linen square out of the hanky pocket of her saddle and leaned over to wipe the mud off his face, daring to tease him a little. “I’ve heard of throwing your heart over a fence,” she said, “but not your head.”
Geoffrey Alcott laughed and shrugged. “You ride as if there’s no tomorrow, Emma. You’re going to break your neck one of these days. Or I’ll break mine, trying to keep up with you.”
She pulled away from him, her gaze falling to the handkerchief she now held crushed in her fist. He might have laughed as he said it, but she hadn’t missed that barest hint of censure in his voice. It wasn’t proper, she knew. The way she rode.
She could hear from deep in the woods the confused baying of the hounds. The horn sounded, two long blasts, which meant the dogs had for the moment lost the scent, and she was glad, for this time she wanted the fox to get away.
“Emma . . .”
She continued to look down at her hands, but she made her voice be light and what she imagined was flirtatious. Although she’d never been much good at that. “Oh, dear. Now you’re going to scold me for larking over unnecessary fences and not following the hounds.”
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