The Passions of Emma (32 page)

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Authors: Penelope Williamson

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

BOOK: The Passions of Emma
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“Some of us can’t get back up,” he said, so softly she barely heard him. “Some of us will never walk again.”
Dinner that night at The Birches was a formal affair.
The table was set with a Roman punch, a centerpiece of jacqueminot roses and maidenhair, and bonbons in open silver-work baskets between the George III candelabra. The party favors were sterling silver roses from Tiffany’s. The menu was printed on gilt-edged cards, two dishes for each course. And these delicacies—
oysters, partridge, lobster, roast chicken with caper sauce, and twelve-egg soufflés—were being washed down with White Seal champagne and wine bottled before the French Revolution.
The feast was being presented on a banquet table that had once belonged to a Tudor king of England, in a room with silken walls and fluted columns embellished with gold leaf. A massive bronze chandelier hung from a ceiling festooned like a wedding cake.
The room did have one peculiarity, which every guest, out of deference to the hostess and general good form, was careful to ignore. Above the black walnut mantelpiece hung an enormous oil painting of the family’s Cuban plantation house—the very house where William Tremayne now lived with his mistress du jour. When he wasn’t giving wild parties on his yacht.
The painting could have been replaced with a barroom’s naked lady and Geoffrey Alcott wouldn’t have noticed. He had eyes only for the woman who would be his wife. His Emma had never seemed finer or fairer to him than she did that night, and he felt a warm glow of proprietorship as he watched the other men’s glances seek her out again and again.
Tonight she looked particularly fetching in a pale green gown that was all silk and lace and that bared her neck and shoulders . . . and perhaps a bit more of her bosom than he would have allowed as her husband. The other women at the table dripped jewels, but she wore only the betrothal ring he had given her. It flashed on her finger quick and bright as a falling star.
She brought her wineglass to her lips, and he watched her drink. Watched as her head fell back to expose her impossibly long white neck, and the round bared slopes of her breasts lifted as she swallowed.
He wanted her. God, how he wanted her. So desperately he sometimes forgot himself when he was alone with her. He always seemed on the verge of frightening her with his kisses, but then that was to be expected. A man should know that his wife’s desires and passions would never be as strong as his.
He looked at her again, his Emma, and this time their gazes met across the table. Geoffrey felt his smile tighten a little. Her eyes seemed even more changeling than usual tonight, like dark and restless seas.
It always worried him when she became like this, for then he couldn’t know what she was thinking. He couldn’t predict what she would do or say, and so he always felt as though he were out of tune with her, thinking black when she meant white, hearing yes when she’d said no.
He loved her so much; he wanted nothing more than to make her happy. But lately . . . lately, he’d had this terrible lost feeling that he was forever disappointing her.
Emma watched her intended sip his consommé doublé out of the white Sèvres soup plate. Watched his lips open and pucker slightly, just the way they did when he kissed her.
He had kissed her earlier, when they had gone for a walk in the garden. When he’d wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her hard against him, and covered her mouth with his, she had wanted to stop breathing, to surrender. She wanted desperately to believe she had everything she wanted, that
he
could be everything she wanted. That he could be . . . someone else.
Shay.
And Bria.
She should never have allowed them to become separate in her mind, for they had become separate in her heart as well. And she had been left smashed and feeling sick and hollow with longing and a terrible, terrible guilt.
I love him.
I will love him not.
She couldn’t allow this wrong, impossible love. This betrayal of the one person who mattered most to her in this world. She would
have to stay far, far away from him, and then no one would ever know. It would be her secret to keep, another one of those things she couldn’t speak of, or think about. Or feel.
It had been nearly a week since she’d been to the house on Thames Street. She would never be able to go there again. Bria would be hurt by that alone, at first, but eventually she would decide that Emma Tremayne had simply become bored with playing peasant after all.
But how could she go to Bria and say:
I can’t be near you anymore, dearest, and only, friend, because where you are, so is Shay, and I have fallen in love with him. I am in love with your husband.
She looked again at Geoffrey Alcott. Her intended. He was impeccably dressed tonight as always. His black cutaway managed somehow to be both understated and yet obviously expensive. His matching black pearl vest buttons, cuff links, and tie pin were elegant but didn’t attract undo attention. Geoffrey, she’d heard her mother say to her uncle the doctor just moments before, was as solid as the bricks on the mills he owned.
But she was behaving unfairly, she knew, blaming Geoffrey for being exactly the sort of man he was meant to be.
Emma reached for her wine, caught her mother’s frown, and so she set the glass back down. Good form dictated that she take two sips per course and no more, and tonight Mama was apparently counting.
Her mother was so encrusted with diamonds she glittered white like the Milky Way. Diamond rings, diamond bracelets, a diamond-studded brooch, a diamond tiara. And the biggest sparkler of all—a twelve-strand diamond necklace cascading over her bosom. Perhaps, Emma thought with a tinge of weary sadness, Mama was hoping all that dazzle would hide the holes in the family left by those who had run away. Or been made to stay away.
But she would as always do her duty, would Mama, no matter who was hurt by it, no matter what the cost. Emma had heard Geoffrey’s grandmother whisper to Mrs. Longworth that duty was
preserving Bethel Tremayne like a salt mackerel, and so she was likely to outlive them all.
Her own duty, Emma knew, was to marry well, to marry money, to be the sort of wife a brick-solid gentleman like Geoffrey Alcott would be proud to have on his arm. To have the kind of life with him that she was meant to have.
She could hear Geoffrey talking now in his soft flat voice to the man seated next to him, about how he would be spending the summer up in Maine, building a foundry. Had he told her that? She couldn’t remember. She had found during the course of this spring that they could be in the same room for hours on end, she and Geoffrey, without exchanging a word. Of course, no one when out in society spoke with one’s husband or intended. Like laughing at one’s own little jokes, or yawning in church, or staring at strangers—it simply wasn’t done.
They would live in the same house, she and Geoffrey. They would go to soirees and garden parties together, and to church of a Sunday, and never would they speak about the things that really mattered. She would watch him carefully, but silently, to see what choices he made, since his choices would determine the whole of her life. He would expect her to be content with his choices, as long as he kept her properly adorned in Worth gowns and Fabergé jewels.
And so she would be on a glittering carousel, going round and round, unable to get off and yet going nowhere, and always knowing exactly how her life would unfold. No one would expect them to be passionately in love, she and Geoffrey. It simply wasn’t done.
B
ria’s shoes crunched on the shingled sand as she walked along the beach. It was a sweet May night, with the breeze blowing warm and soft. And not nearly loud enough to drown out her own labored breathing.
She’d been walking here for the last hour, back and forth over her little patch of the world. From time to time she would stop and look out across the harbor to Poppasquash Point. Tonight the silver house was ablaze with lights.
It seemed a wonder to think of Emma in that place, dancing in a gilded ballroom with diamonds in her hair. Not the Emma she knew, who’d boiled sheets with her and picked raspberries. Who had spoken of mirrored hearts and held her hand when she’d cried.
She hadn’t seen Emma in over a week, and she wondered some why this was so. But then Emma did have another life, her
real
life, as she liked to call it. A life of duties and social obligations. Of dances in gilded ballrooms with diamonds in her hair.
It was just . . . just that she wished Emma was here with her now, this very moment. To hold her hand if she should have to cry.
As soon as Bria thought this, the pains came again, gripping her lower back and spreading around to clench her belly. She paused in her walking, her breath going shallower.
It would come tonight, this babe of hers.
This babe. What a strange thing it was, Bria thought, that the acts of love and passion and rape and whoring could all end the same—with a babe growing big and full of life in your belly.
After the resident magistrate had taken her like a dog, bent over a stone wall, she had made a pilgrimage to the shrine at Slea Head. There she drank from the holy well and prayed, begging God to make her bleed. She tied her rosary to the fairy thorn and walked three times around the cross toward the sunrise, and begged God to make her bleed. She did this for three days, and on the last day she bled, and so she knew there would be no child of rape. That time.
Now, three years later, she prayed for something else. She prayed that God would give this babe she carried the black hair and green eyes of his father . . . who might not be his father.
His father—the man who might be his father—had had fair hair and gray eyes. She could remember that much about him, but nothing of his face. Whenever she made herself try to picture his face, all she could see was the smiling white-lipped face of a clown. A clown’s face on a vaudeville calendar, hanging on a door in Castle Garden.
Castle Garden—the place where the immigrants passed through into New York, into America. Such a stewpot of smells it had been. The spice of an old woman’s garlic sausage poking out the top of her string bag. The sweet milky smell of a new mother putting her babe to her breast. The stink of a toddler with soiled drawers.
And such a tumult of noise. Bells and whistles and horns. Shouts of anger, fear, and joy, all in a babel of tongues. All echoing through the open rafters of the huge round brownstone fort. And everywhere there were men in blue serge suits, pushing and pointing them into lines.
So many lines and questions. Where are you from? Where are you going? Have you family here? Do you have work waiting for you?
She’d felt smug for having all the right answers. She had a husband and a brother who were Americans already, and a home waiting for her in a place called Bristol, Rhode Island. For two years her husband had worked in the onion fields there, and then a month ago he’d sent her an American ticket, a paper with an eagle on it that was as good as money, and she’d used it to pay for their ship’s passage, for her and her two girls, and now here they were. In America.
Bria had begun to feel confident with all her right answers, until she got into the line for the medical examination.

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