The Passions of Emma (39 page)

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Authors: Penelope Williamson

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

BOOK: The Passions of Emma
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For Emma to marry Shay and be a mother to her girls, her son . . . But for Emma Tremayne to marry an Irish fisherman would be as disgraceful a thing as marrying a tinker’s son would have been a disgrace for Bria O’Reilly. It would mean for Emma the loss of everything in her world. It would take a powerful love to bear such a cost for its own fulfillment. But Emma had such a love, Bria was sure of it. She had seen it in Emma’s eyes.
For Emma to marry Shay . . . It hurt to think of it—how could it not? But all Bria had to do was think of him, of their children, and a fierce and terrible love would seize her heart. A love that was as strong and as old as the earth itself, and would go on long after her dying was a finished thing. It was hard, hard, sometimes, to think of them living on without her. But to know that someday they all could find happiness again, to be assured of that, she would do anything, bear anything.
They had been walking for a good ways now and Bria was finding it harder and harder to hide how weak she was feeling of a sudden, how her breath had grown so short and ragged.
The cardinal flowers that blazed among the trees blurred dizzily before her eyes. Shay pointed out a black porcupine with
white-tipped quills that lay dozing on a rock, making the most of the sun, and Bria nodded and smiled, and clenched her teeth to keep them from rattling. She could see the sun blazing white upon the water, and she knew it was hot, but she felt cold, so cold.
The coughs came tearing up her chest and out her mouth—wet, gurgling coughs, laced with blood. She hunched over beneath the force of them, trying to stop them with her handkerchief. When she was done, she looked up and saw those she loved staring back at her with fear and pain etched starkly on their faces.
Shay and Emma stood next to each other, too far apart to touch. While she lived they would always stand apart, but she was dying, soon she would be dead, and they would need each other to see them through it.
In Ireland, it was said that a dying bard could pass on the gift of his music. But only to a beloved friend.
A gang of ragged and rowdy boys ran across the sun-parched grass of the Bristol Common, blowing on fish horns and conch shells. One of them threw a lit lady cracker underneath the bandstand. It went off with a loud and smoky bang, shredding the red, white, and blue bunting.
Emma jumped at the noise it made, and then laughed at herself.
“My poor darling,” Geoffrey said, giving the hand she had placed on his arm a solicitous pat. “Were you frightened badly?”
He glared at the wrecked bandstand. Judging from its condition, the lady cracker wasn’t the first attack it had suffered that day. “These wretched mill rats—such is what comes of giving them a holiday off from work. There ought to be a law against setting off firecrackers where they can endanger public property and frighten the ladies.”
“Oh, Geoffrey, you would spoil all the fun.” Emma laughed again as she tilted back her head to watch a red balloon float up
into a white bronze sky and entangle itself in the branches of a big lofty elm. “Would you buy me one of those big cannon crackers, please? I should like to set it off during the mayor’s speech. When he gets to that part where the cannons of freedom are booming down through the ages—that would be the perfect time to do it, don’t you think?”
“You are funning with me again,” Geoffrey said after a moment of silence.
“Yes, Geoffrey.”
She leaned in to him to straighten his blue and white polka-dot tie, even though it would never have dared to be crooked while around Geoffrey Alcott’s neck. She smiled at the very thought and would have kissed his cheek, but he frowned on public displays of affection.
“Geoffrey, are you enjoying the day?” she said. “Really enjoying it?”
“Of course I’m enjoying the day. It’s the Bristol Fourth—why wouldn’t I enjoy the day?”
“Indeed, it is a Bristolian’s veritable
duty
to enjoy his Fourth, and you, my dearest Geoffrey, would never shirk your duty,” she said, smiling at him so that he would know she was funning.
After all, he had come all this way from his new foundry in Maine, just to be with her on this day. She wondered if she enjoyed Geoffrey’s company better now that she wasn’t seeing so much of him. It was not a comfortable thought. But then there were other times when she could make herself believe they would be happy, she and Geoffrey, as man and wife. She knew what to expect from him now, and so she would be wise enough not to expect him to be something he was not.
Because the kind of man she wanted, the kind of man she could love with
all
her heart, instead of just a part of it—that man didn’t exist in her world.
Because that man, the man she loved, was Seamus McKenna, and she could never have him.
There, it was said, said flat out in all its wrongness. She loved him, even though she didn’t want to, had tried so hard not to. But wanting and trying hadn’t changed what was. And she sometimes feared what harm such a secret love, even buried deep, would one day do to Geoffrey and their marriage.
Geoffrey placed her hand back on his arm and they resumed their stroll, stopping from time to time to greet people they had seen just moments before while watching the parade.
Every Fourth, for as long as anyone could remember, the Alcotts had held open house during the parade, although nobody but other Great Folk would have dared to walk in without an invitation. They would all stroll out to the street with punch glass and orange cake in hand to watch the brass bands, the war veterans, and fire engines go marching by. Then they would all stroll back inside again to discuss what they had seen and what the weather had been like while they were seeing it.
Like holding the last fox hunt of the season at Hope Farm, watching the Fourth of July parade from the marble piazza of the Alcotts’ Hope Street mansion was a Great Folk tradition.
And the weather was providing even more than usual conversational interest this year, for it was so hot the air seemed to be crackling. The sun had pounded hard on the common all morning, and now the yellow dust was rising to settle over the tables loaded with baked beans, clam chowder, codfish cakes, johnnycake, and apple pie.
When you are in love with a man, Emma thought as she walked arm in arm with Geoffrey, you see him everywhere. You see him in a pair of broad shoulders walking away from you. In the hair sliding black and too long from beneath an Irish tweed scally cap. In the flash of white teeth in a brash smile.
That day she thought she saw him coming out of a yellow-striped tent with an ice cream cone in his hand. She thought she saw him among the crowd that was cheering on a boy chasing a
greased pig. She thought she saw him carrying a basket of oysters to the shucking contest.
And each time she saw him, in that caught-breath instant before she realized that it wasn’t he, after all, her face would flush and her heart would feel all fat and warm and heavy in her chest.
And then she did see him, for real.
He was lifting Merry onto the back of a dragon, a carousel dragon with green scales and orange fire coming out its flared nostrils. Noreen was already mounted on a camel wearing a red fez.
As Emma watched, he grabbed a pole and swung off the platform, laughing. Music spilled out of the steam calliope, and the carousel began to turn, and Emma’s own head began to spin, sun motes dancing before her eyes.
She looked for Bria and found her, holding little Jacko in one arm and waving at the whirling menagerie. But Bria must have sensed her presence, for she turned and their gazes met, and the smile of joy and welcome she gave to Emma came from the heart.
Emma would never have gone up to Shay alone, for so many reasons. But with Bria there, she had no thought now of not going. She would never cut her friend—not in front of Geoffrey, not in front of the world.
Emma slid her hand down Geoffrey’s arm to take his hand and pull him along after her. “Geoffrey, here is Mrs. McKenna, whom I’ve told you about—my new friend who just had a baby? It’s about time the two of you met, don’t you think?”
Geoffrey looked around in obvious bewilderment before he noticed the woman with the baby, who was smiling and holding out her hand to Emma. And the giant of a man in shirtsleeves and worn corduroy britches who had just come up to put his arm around the woman’s waist.
“
She
is your friend?” Geoffrey said. “I had somehow thought . . .” He didn’t finish, but Emma knew what he had somehow thought: that the Mrs. McKenna he’d heard about was lace, not shanty, Irish.
“My dearest, best friend in the world,” Emma said, as she took
Bria’s hand, their fingers entwining. She leaned forward to press her cheek against Bria’s and kiss the baby’s forehead. Bria’s dark eyes were bright and laughing. Her cheeks glowed like dew-kissed roses, but Emma knew they were blossoms of a false health. Only yesterday Shay had had to carry her home from their walk. They’d never known her to cough up so much blood before.
“Bria,” Emma said, giving her friend’s hand a gentle squeeze. “I would like for you to meet my fiancé, Geoffrey Alcott. Geoffrey, these are the McKennas, Bria and her husband, Seamus. And this,” she said, peeling the blanket back from the baby’s face so that he could have a better look, “is little Jacko, over a month old now and thriving.”
“It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, madam,” Geoffrey said, bowing in Bria’s direction. If he recognized her as the mill woman who had brought a dead child to the last fox hunt of the season, he wasn’t letting on. “Sir,” he said to Shay. “And little sir,” he said, bestowing a small smile on the sleeping Jacko.
“How d’you do, Mr. Alcott,” Bria said, looking him over with a forthright curiosity in turn, and Emma suddenly found herself a little embarrassed on behalf of her intended husband, although she could not for the life of her have said why. He cut a fine figure as usual in his white linen suit and straw boater. His behavior was, as always, the epitome of Great Folk propriety.
“It’s rather warm today, is it not?” Geoffrey said, to fill the small silence that had fallen after the introductions.
“Terrrribly warm,” Shay said, his stage Irish brogue turning thick as mulligan stew. “But it would be queer if it wasn’t, what with the sun shining in an empty sky and nary a breath of wind to be had for a prayer.” His face was set serious, but for the quickest of moments his gaze met hers, and Emma saw the laughter lurking there.
“McKenna, McKenna,” she heard Geoffrey say. “Ah, yes. You’re the Irish fellow who’s going to be fighting James Parker, our Harvard champion, later this evening.”
“Aye, that I am.” Shay hooked his thumb in his pocket and cocked his hip in a bit of a masculine pose. “I hope to be making a decent match of it.”
Geoffrey’s lips pulled back in a long-toothed smile. “I understand you won a few prizefights during your heyday, some while back.” He looked Shay slowly up and down, as if the Irishman had long ago gone to seed. “But you’ll have your hands full taking on our Harvard champ. He’s captain of the football team and rows number seven on the crew. It’s a matter of racial stock and breeding, you understand. A matter of the keener eye, the steadier hand, in riding, shooting, boxing—whatever. The man of pure Yankee stock is simply the better animal.”
“
Och
, the better animal, do you say?” Bria had planted onto her hip the hand that wasn’t full of baby, and she was making her eyes go round with mock surprise. “And silly me, with the notion that having a soul was what made all of us, no matter what the breeding, rise above the beasts. Now you’re telling me it is only we Irish who’ve been blessed with such a thing.”
The carousel’s calliope wound down into a silence that was raucously broken by a string of popping firecrackers. A man walked past, carrying a big pail with a dipper in the middle and a half dozen tin cups hanging on the rim, and chanting: “Cold lemonade, made in the shade, stirred with a stick by an ugly old maid.”
“Mrs. McKenna,” Shay said, “has always been the one for having the keen and steady tongue on her.”
“Indeed,” Geoffrey said, forcing a smile that made his mouth pull white at the corners. He bowed and tipped his hat at Bria. “Regretfully, we are expected momentarily in the mayor’s tent, and so we must bid you a good day and a happy Fourth.”
Afterward, Emma was to wonder why she had done nothing, said nothing, been nothing. She’d simply let Geoffrey lead her away. She’d felt so empty, as if a great airy space had blown up inside her. Blown her all away.

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