The Passions of Emma (21 page)

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Authors: Penelope Williamson

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

BOOK: The Passions of Emma
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The rain flowed over the drugstore awning, so that it seemed to Emma she looked out at the now-deserted street through a waterfall. Strangely, she thought she heard humming.
Something moved beyond the curtain of rain . . . the child. She came closer, and Emma saw that she was smiling, although her copper curls were now soaked dark and plastered to her head, and the frayed ragwool sweater she wore streamed water.
The child reached out and touched Emma’s cheek with her
small, chilled hand. Then she rocked from foot to foot, humming loudly and fiercely, like a bee swarm.
If it weren’t for the woman’s wet, shuddering breaths, Emma would have thought her dead. Her flesh was white and cold—what there was of it. She was pathetically thin, except for her enormously distended belly.
Emma had bathed her in steaming hot towels, then dressed her in one of her own tatted lace and fine woolen night shifts. Only after the woman was seen to had Emma changed out of her own soaked dress and into a simple black skirt and white shirtwaist. Now the woman slept in Emma’s bed, between Swiss embroidered linen sheets that had been sprinkled with lavender water, and Emma paced the room.
The lamps had been lit for over an hour when the woman finally woke. She lay in utter stillness, staring up at the starched muslin canopy of the bed. While Emma watched from the shadows, feeling self-conscious and awkward.
The woman’s bright hair whispered over the silk-slipped pillows as she looked around the room, taking in the gaslights with their Tiffany glass globes, the marble fireplace with its coal fire burning hot in the grate. The yellow silk-papered walls, and the Chinese vases of hothouse roses that spilled their oily perfume into the air.
“Oh, my . . .” she said on a soft sigh, and Emma felt embarrassed, as if she’d just been caught putting on airs.
Emma cleared her throat and tried for a smile as she approached the bed. “You’re at The Birches, if you were wondering. You took ill during the Virgin statue’s procession.” She swallowed, breathed. “I saw you because I . . .” But she couldn’t really explain, even to herself, what impulse had driven her to seek out this woman.
“Look,” she said instead and made a nervous, jerking movement toward a Hepplewhite table that bore a silver tea service swaddled
in a quilted cozy. “I’ve been keeping the tea hot for when you awakened.”
The woman was staring at her with eyes as deep and dark and still as wells. “You brought me here, to your house?”
“I didn’t know what else to do. My uncle, Stanton Albertson? He’s a doctor. After you fainted in the street and your little girl fetched my carriage and driver, I took you straight to him, but he was out on another call, and his housekeeper was making such a fuss about it being Sunday, as if one is supposed to choose a more convenient and proper day of the week to fall ill . . .”
She gripped her hands together at her waist, then pulled them apart. She realized she’d neglected to pour the tea after making such a fuss about it, yet she remained standing where she was, in the middle of the Aubusson carpet.
The woman was trying frantically to push herself upright against the mound of pillows at her back. “Please, you mustn’t—” She coughed, her chest heaving. “I don’t need to see a doctor. It’s only a spring sickness I have.”
Emma’s gaze went to the bedstand, where lay a crumpled, bloodstained handkerchief and a brown bottle whose label read:
DR
.
KING
’
S NEW DISCOVERY FOR CONSUMPTION
.
The woman saw what Emma was looking at and she collapsed back against the pillows. Her breathing sawed raw and harsh in her throat. “
Dhia
, please, please don’t be telling any doctors about me. They’ll be sending me back to Ireland, tearing me away from my loved ones and sending me off to die alone. Or they’ll be making me drink from the black bottle, and I’ll die before my time.” She shut her eyes, but tears escaped from beneath her clenched eyelids to roll down the side of her face and into her hair. “I don’t want to die alone. I don’t want to die . . .”
Her voice trailed off. Hard rain clattered like fistfuls of pebbles against the windowpanes. The wind cried and moaned.
Emma had heard the rumor of the “black bottle,” from which physicians were supposed to administer the coup de grâce to
hopeless consumptives. And she’d had an aunt who’d died of the disease, her father’s younger sister. Charlotte Tremayne’s death hadn’t come from a bottle, though, but rather in a private sanitarium near Providence. Only once had they gone to visit her there. Emma remembered the curtainless windows and the empty white walls, the plain iron cots. “It’s the finest blossoms,” Mama had said, as she blotted up a single, perfect tear with her handkerchief, “that are nipped in the bud.”
But Emma had thought her aunt looked nothing like a blossom, but rather pale and wasted, and so very lonely. Only the rich could afford to die in the bare isolation of a sanitarium. The poor stayed home and passed the disease on to their loved ones.
Lightning flashed blue, and Emma found herself waiting for the thunder, which came much later. A low, slow rumble.
“I . . . I’ll not summon the doctor,” she finally said. “Or tell anyone. I promise.”
The woman’s thin chest rose and fell in a silent sigh.
“I don’t—” Emma’s voice cracked and she had to start over. “I don’t know where my manners are. I haven’t even introduced myself. I’m Emma Tremayne.”
The woman opened her eyes, and she stared so hard and long that Emma flushed. “Aye, I know,” she said. But then her mouth trembled at the corners, creasing into something close to a smile. “Though I’m pleased to be making your proper acquaintance, Miss Tremayne. And my name is Bria. Bria McKenna.” The smile widened, became real, lighting up her eyes. “It’s Mrs. McKenna, rather, and I should surely hope to say so—what with two little ones near to half grown already and another on the way.”
She started to laugh but it turned into a cough. She put her fist to her mouth, her shoulders shaking.
At last Emma got her legs to move, although they felt stiff as stilts. “Let me pour that tea. It’s red clover. And I had Cook steep it with linseed oil and honey. That’s supposed to be soothing to one who suffers from consu—the spring croup.”
She filled a rose-patterned Sèvres cup with the brew. But when she turned back to the woman in the bed, Emma saw that her eyes had grown wide and even darker. Her gaze went from the bone china cup to the canopy that spread, delicate and sheer as an angel’s wings above her head, and then back to Emma’s face. Her hands, lying flat and small on the silk counterpane, trembled.
And Emma knew the woman’s thoughts, for she’d had them so many times herself. It was as if you had suddenly stepped through the looking glass, and not only was your world not as it should be, but neither were you. You found yourself uneasy, even with the beat of your own heart.
Emma could feel her mouth smiling, yet there was a hollowness inside her, a yearning for something she couldn’t name. Maybe she simply wanted to say to this woman:
I know.
And then to have the words said back to her.
“I could hold the cup and saucer for you,” she said instead. “If you’d like.”
The woman swallowed, nodded, then let her eyes drift closed.
Emma sat on the bed. Her black taffeta skirts rustled, and the goose-down mattress softly sighed. The woman—Bria McKenna—was running her hand over and over her swollen belly. Emma knew little about babies and birthing, but she thought this one would be coming soon.
It seemed to Emma a sorrow too heavy to be borne. To bring a child into the world knowing you would soon be leaving it, to miss all those wondrous years of watching him grow. And knowing he was destined never to have the one thing he would need most—you.
The only pain worse, perhaps, would be to watch him grow old enough to be chewed up by a monstrous mill machine and then to watch him die, bleeding in your arms.
Emma’s throat hurt and her eyes burned, and she felt ashamed of her feelings. She hadn’t earned the right to feel pity.
She reached out to touch Bria McKenna’s hand, pulled back,
then did it after all. Their fingers entwined like the strands of a rope, and Emma felt the fragility of the woman’s bones beneath the thin, white skin.
“I’m sorry about your boy,” Emma said, so softly it was nearly a whisper.
The woman’s eyes flew open, and her face bled so pale it seemed transparent. Her fingers tightened around Emma’s, gripping hard. “But how . . . how could you know about him?”
“You brought him to us and he was dead. Padraic, you said his name was—so we would . . . know.”
The woman’s chest lifted as if she were suddenly drawing back in all the breath she had lost. “
Och
, no, no, that one wasn’t mine. Poor Mrs. Cartwright, widowed and losing a son all in the one year and in no fit state even to see to the wake and the burying. He just as easily could have been, though. I mean to say it just as easily could’ve been one of my girls.”
She brought their entwined hands up to her breast and struggled to sit up. A blue vein beat wildly in her temple. “That woman who carried poor wee Padraic’s dead body to the hunt—she wasn’t me. It was a momentary madness, born of despair, you understand? She wasn’t . . .” She stared hard into Emma’s face, searching. “It wasn’t myself doing that.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Emma said. “I understand. I . . .”
Know.
Bria McKenna fell back, her breaths coming hard and shallow, and she let go of Emma’s hand. “I’d like that tea now, if you would be so kind.”
Emma wasn’t sure why she smiled just then, but she did. And when Bria McKenna smiled back at her, the warmth of it spread down deep inside her. “My mother once spent an entire summer training me how to properly serve tea,” she said, “and now here I can’t seem to get it done when it’s needed the most.”
Yet, she was surprised at her own efficiency and the ease she felt inside herself, the lack of shyness, as she stacked the pillows up under the woman’s back. It did cross her mind that the woman’s
disease was supposed to be contagious, but she couldn’t very well behave as though it were and still be mannerly. And good manners, Emma’s mother had taught her, were to be valued above all things.
Emma poured a fresh cup of the tea, holding it so that it could be drunk with only a slight tip of the head. Bria McKenna took a small, careful sip, then looked up to stare for the longest time at Emma with eyes that seemed at once both sweet and sad. And Emma stared back. For the first time in her life, she stared back.
“It’s sorry I am now for what I said to you that day,” Bria finally said. “I was sorely wrong, for you’ve a kindness in your heart. Taking me in and caring for me like you’ve done.”
Emma flushed a little, and her gaze fell to her lap. “I saw you fall, so I could hardly leave you lying there. Then, too, some of the credit must go to your little girl. I was all for driving you all the way up to the doctor in Warren, but she insisted I was to take you home with me instead—to my silver house, she called it. She said the fairies wanted it done that way.”
“Where—” Bria coughed, her whole body jerking violently. A trickle of blood leaked from one corner of her mouth. “She . . .”
“She isn’t here with us now, your little girl,” Emma said as she set down the cup and saucer. She handed Bria a fresh handkerchief and helped her settle back into the pillows. “But you needn’t fret over her. She said she had to tell her father where I’d taken you and she ran off to find him, I suspect.”
Bria sighed. Her eyelids drooped heavily and then closed, and Emma thought she slept.
But then she lifted her hand, though she did so slowly and with effort, as if it bore the weight of the world. “The fairies again . . .” And she made a sound that began as a laugh and ended in another chest-rattling cough. “Only fancy our Noreen saying and doing such a thing.”
Emma stood up, smoothing the sheet, tucking in pillows, wanting to brush the bright hair off Bria McKenna’s forehead and not
daring to, for that was the sort of thing one did for a friend, not a stranger.
“A pretty child with copper-colored curls? She told me her name was Merry.”
“Not our Merry, surely.” Bria’s eyes opened, dark and blurred, then drifted closed again. “Merry doesn’t talk.”

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