The Passions of Emma (35 page)
Whatever was to happen . . . Her own ignorance frightened her. She could recite all the rules of etiquette for presenting a formal dinner for thirty-four. But a seven-year-old child knew more than she did about such an elemental part of life as childbirth.
But then it didn’t come soon, after all—whatever was to happen.
Bria clung to Emma’s hand, squeezing hard, crushing flesh and bone, while the cramping pains came and went, came and went, on and on, through the night’s long hours. The newspapers that had been slipped between Bria’s hips and the sheets became soaked with watery blood and the smell of it filled the room, rank as spoiled fruit, and still the babe didn’t come. And the waiting for it to end, and the fear that it would end badly, became like a scream in Emma’s mind.
Then at last, at last, she heard Shay say, “If you could push just a wee bit more now, darlin’. Its head is showing.”
Huffing and panting, Bria was trying to push herself up on her elbows, as if she would look between her legs to see what was happening. “Emma, tell me . . . what color hair does he have?”
Emma looked between Bria’s legs. The baby’s head was indeed emerging out of Bria’s womb. A real baby’s head with hair and skin and veins, wet with mucus and blood, moving with life. Never had Emma seen such an awesome, frightening, beautiful thing.
“It’s red, I think. It’s red and curly and there’s lots of it . . . Oh, Bria, he’ll be having your hair!”
Bria fell back against the pillows, laughing, gasping. “
Och
, the poor wee lad . . . to come into the world with such an affliction.”
Och
, the poor wee lad . . . to come into the world with such an affliction.”
Emma watched in wonder and awe as the baby was born from his mother’s body, first his head and then one shoulder and an arm, and then all of him was there, cradled in his father’s waiting hands, while Emma laughed and wept and stared at them with heartaching joy, and Bria’s new son squawked as he took his first breaths of life.
Bria lay on the white iron bed, so drained of strength she looked shrunken. Her hair was plastered to her head in wet, sticky strands. Her face was drawn and impossibly pale. But as she lay gazing up at her husband and their newborn child, there was still all that fire, all that life in her dark eyes.
“Does he have all his bits and pieces, Shay?” she said, and her voice matched what was in her eyes.
His smile was like hot sunshine, breaking across his face. And even though it wasn’t meant for her, it plucked at Emma’s soul and cracked open her heart.
“He’s perfection itself, m’love. You’ve given me a fine son.”
“Let me see him, let me see—No, wait. Give him to Emma first.”
“Oh, no, I shouldn’t . . . I might drop him,” Emma said, but Shay was already putting the baby into her arms. He was wet with the birth blood, his skin all wrinkled and purple, his tiny face scrunched up tight as an angry fist. “Oh, my,” she whispered, as more tears mingled with her smile.
Her arms trembled as she oh-so carefully laid the baby onto her friend’s breast. Bria’s mouth broke open into a smile of her own that went from her man to Emma and then widened to embrace the whole world.
“He’s beautiful,” she said.
Shay McKenna dropped onto his knees beside the bed. His back bowed and his head came down and he pressed his face into his wife’s breast, next to his squirming son. “Ah, darlin’, darlin’ . . .”
Slowly, Emma got up from the chair and left them alone with their son, and their love.
The girls were sitting together on the front stoop. Merry had fallen asleep with her head in her sister’s lap, and she didn’t wake when Emma opened the door. Noreen looked up, fear and hope warring it out in her eyes.
“You have a new baby brother and your mama is just fine,” Emma said. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears, too stiff and formal. She tried to make her mouth smile. “You should wait a few minutes before you go in and see them, though. Your papa will be needing to make him all nice for company.”
She left them then, walking down the path to the street. But when she saw the milk wagon she realized she had no way of getting herself home, so she walked around the house and down to the rocky, shingled beach.
The moonlight on the bay had grown old. The tide slept, caught between the old night and the new day. She stood alone at the water’s edge. It was so still, all she could hear was the ocean noises of her own heart.
Dawn was just beginning to leach the dark out of the sky when she heard the scraping of a shoe on the rocks behind her. She turned and watched him come.
He stopped before her and searched her face, and she searched his.
“She’s sleeping,” he finally said. “They’re both sleeping, her and the babe.”
So many things to say to him . . . She had a lifetime of things to say, and so few were allowed. Even fewer would be welcome.
“Later,” he said, “when she comes awake, she’ll be wanting to thank you.”
“But I didn’t do anything.”
He took her by the wrist, lifting her hand. Even in the pale light, the bruises and nail marks were livid on her flesh. “You came,” he said.
He let go of her, and her hand floated down to her side as if weightless. It was as if her hand suddenly didn’t feel a part of her at all, but rather a thing disconnected from herself.
He looked away from her, toward the bay. The rising sun was painting watercolor splashes of red and yellow across the sky. “It can be a joyous thing, sometimes, to see the sun rise up on a new day.” His gaze came back to meet hers, and his smile broke across his face brighter than any sunrise. “Would you not say so, Miss Tremayne?”
She knew his smile for the gift that it was, no more and no less, and so she gave it back to him. “I would say, Mr. McKenna, that a new day can be the most joyous thing in the world.”
The sun was rising golden and voluptuous over the gabled roofs of The Birches by the time Emma climbed the piazza steps and walked through the coffered ebony doors. The house was hushed in an early-morning stillness, the marbled hall gray and cold as a mausoleum.
Emma closed the heavy doors gently behind her and walked on light feet across the hall toward the oak staircase. But as she passed
the great mirror, she caught the flashing reflection of a pale wraith floating next to the white jade newel post, where the Tremayne daughter had burned to death so many years ago.
the great mirror, she caught the flashing reflection of a pale wraith floating next to the white jade newel post, where the Tremayne daughter had burned to death so many years ago.
“Mama?” Emma said, fear putting a creak in her voice. She would rather have faced a dozen ghosts than be caught out in an impropriety by her mother.
“How could you, Emma? How could you do this to me?”
Emma’s steps had faltered at seeing her mother, but now she made herself go on, all the way to the foot of the staircase. I’m not a child anymore, she thought. I can’t be beaten, or locked up in the cellars, and this time I know in my heart I’ve done nothing wrong.
“Didn’t I tell you to keep your drawers buttoned and your knees together until after a ring was on your finger,” her mother was saying in a Georgia drawl so thick Emma could barely understand it.
“Mama, you never . . . What are you saying?”
“You are ruined, disgraced. The entire family is ruined. You’ve up and given him just what he wanted, haven’t you? He’ll never marry you now. You—” Bethel’s face suddenly blanched white and haggard. “God in heaven, did he force you?”
Emma looked down at herself, following the direction of her mother’s horrified stare. Her green silk chiffon evening gown was streaked rusty red in the front with dried blood. For a moment she couldn’t think how Bria’s blood had come to be on her, and then she remembered that she’d held the baby just after he was born.
“Oh!” Emma exclaimed, flushing hot, as the full implication of her mother’s words finally struck her. “It’s not what you’re thinking at all, not at all. Mrs. McKenna had her baby tonight. I’ve been with her, not Geoffrey.”
Her mother staggered forward and then she swayed, collapsing onto the wide bottom tread of the sweeping stairs. She hugged her knees and rocked once, twice. When she looked up again at Emma, tears silvered wetly on her face. The blue of her eyes, Emma saw, was nearly swallowed up by the black centers.
“Not what I think, not what I think . . . What else was I
supposed
to think?” Bethel said, a shudder in her voice. “I discover your bed empty in the dead of night, and you’re nowhere to be found. You say you’re feeling faint and must leave the party early, and then Mr. Alcott suddenly discovers he has pressing business and must leave as well, and naturally the first thought that leaps to one’s mind is . . . Why, by this afternoon the whole of society will be talking about your little ‘fainting spell.’ There’ll be whispers and sly innuendos bantered about for weeks. We’ll be watched carefully—oh yes, we’ll all be watched. And it won’t let up, not even when it becomes obvious that their worst suspicions won’t be realized. They
won’t
be realized, will they, Emma?”
supposed
to think?” Bethel said, a shudder in her voice. “I discover your bed empty in the dead of night, and you’re nowhere to be found. You say you’re feeling faint and must leave the party early, and then Mr. Alcott suddenly discovers he has pressing business and must leave as well, and naturally the first thought that leaps to one’s mind is . . . Why, by this afternoon the whole of society will be talking about your little ‘fainting spell.’ There’ll be whispers and sly innuendos bantered about for weeks. We’ll be watched carefully—oh yes, we’ll all be watched. And it won’t let up, not even when it becomes obvious that their worst suspicions won’t be realized. They
won’t
be realized, will they, Emma?”
“No, Mama,” Emma said, flushing again, for surely this was one of those things they ought never to be talking about.
But then she had never seen her mother like this. She looked like a child awakened from a bad dream, shaking, hugging herself and rocking back and forth, wrapped up in a white quilted robe and with her hair up in pins. Her eyes so wide and staring and dark.
Emma sat on the stairs beside her. She almost laid her arm across her mother’s shoulders, but in the end she didn’t. She was too afraid it wouldn’t be welcome. She was sitting close enough, though, to feel the fine trembling going on inside the other woman.
“Mama, have you been taking Maddie’s medicine?”
Bethel gave a hard shudder and gripped her knees tighter. “My nerves have been so frazzled lately. You can’t appreciate what it’s like, the constant
vigilance
. . . I’ve always had such a delicate constitution, you know that, and yet still you’re cruel to me, to have given me such a scare. All of my children have always been so cruel to me.”
vigilance
. . . I’ve always had such a delicate constitution, you know that, and yet still you’re cruel to me, to have given me such a scare. All of my children have always been so cruel to me.”
“I’m sorry, Mama. I would’ve told you where I was going, but . . .”
You would have tried to stop me, and I would have had to defy you, and there would have been one of those scenes you dread so much.
“But there wasn’t time.”
You would have tried to stop me, and I would have had to defy you, and there would have been one of those scenes you dread so much.
“But there wasn’t time.”
Bethel lifted her head and stiffened her shoulders, for a moment
more of her old self. “That woman is a bad influence on you, Emma. I knew no good would come of it.”
more of her old self. “That woman is a bad influence on you, Emma. I knew no good would come of it.”
“It was all my own fault—I should have told you . . . Here, let me help you up to your room,” Emma said. But she hesitated a moment before wrapping her arm around her mother’s waist and half-lifting her to her feet. They began to climb the stairs slowly. Her mother leaned in to her for the first two steps and then began to pull away.
“Shall I send Jewell up with some breakfast?” Emma said. “You need to eat something. All those lovely courses at dinner last night and you didn’t have more than a bite from any of them.”
Bethel shook her head so hard her whole body shuddered. “No, no. No more eating. I’m too fat, and you know how your father cannot abide fat women. He’ll be coming home for your wedding, and I’ll have my slender figure back by then. He’ll be able to see that I’ve changed, and then he’ll stay. You watch and see if he doesn’t stay.”
“Yes, Mama,” Emma said, fighting back a sudden need to cry. Tears. It seemed she had shed so many of them lately, both happy and sad, and yet the well seemed never to empty.
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