The Passions of Emma (40 page)

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Authors: Penelope Williamson

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

BOOK: The Passions of Emma
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The sun had slipped behind the birches on Poppasquash Point when the referee drew a line in chalk down the center of the ring and summoned the pugilists to scratch in the Bristol Fourth of July’s First Annual Prizefighting Exhibition.
A cloud of smoke from the flaring, oil-soaked torches already thickened the air over the ring, which had been pitched in the center of the common. The ring was made of stakes hewn from pines out of the Tanyard Woods and ropes from a ship’s rigging. A canvas flooring sewn of old sails had been stretched over the grass.
The fighters had already tossed their hats into the ring and tossed a coin for the corners, and now Shay was standing in his corner, shaking his arms and legs to loosen the muscles, breathing deeply to stretch his lungs. And his gaze searching the milling, shifting crowd for his wife, and not certain that it would find her.
Though they hadn’t spoken much of it, he knew she was some bitter in her heart for what he was about to do. For breaking the promise he had once made to her, and for breaking the promise a man should always be making to himself: to behave honorably in all things.
There—he’d found her after all, standing next to the bandstand with its shredded bunting. So she’d come, then. But she was alone.
She’d said she was going to ask their neighbor, the widow Mrs. Hale, who was a swamp Yankee but a kindly woman for all that, to help the girls watch over the baby back at the Thames Street house. She’d told him flat out that she wouldn’t be allowing their children to watch the prizefighting exhibition.
“There would be no shame coming to them or to you,” she’d said, “for watching you lose a match fairly fought. But to see their father sell his honor for money, that I could not be bearing.”
“It’s the children I am doing this for,” he’d said back to her.
He’d thought for a moment that she was going to hit him, such
was her anger. “Don’t you lie to me, Seamus McKenna,” she’d said, her words all the more cutting because they’d been spoken softly, not shouted. “You’re doing it for Ireland, and what is Ireland to your son who wasn’t even born there, to your girls who barely remember it? Ireland is only a place on the map to them. When are you going to put them first above Ireland, Shay? When are you going to put me first? Will you finally be thinking of it, maybe, after I am dead?”
He’d wrapped his arms around her then, trying to hold her close. “Bria, sweet Jesus. Don’t say that. You know I love you above all else.”
She’d held herself stiffly but a moment longer, before her arms were around him and she was laying her head on his chest, giving him the sweet comfort of her body as she always had. “I never said you didn’t love me.”
He’d felt a weighty shame to hear her words then, and he felt that shame still. Shame and a sorrow at knowing how sorely he was disappointing her. Honor was everything to his Bria. Maybe the only thing she valued more than honor was the love she bore for him and their children.
Although at the moment she wasn’t giving him much of a loving look. He could intimidate most men with his size alone, but his wife had always stood up to him, matched him toe to toe and word for word. Bria O’Reilly McKenna had the fear of the Lord, but Shay doubted she had any other fear in her.
So when he caught her eye he smiled at her. The smile he’d often used on her when he’d get a sudden hankering for some bed play, and she busy with her endless women’s chores and not in the mood . . . until he would hit her with his roundhouse punch of a smile.
But maybe this time his smile wasn’t going to work. Then, as he watched, her whole body seemed to soften. Though he couldn’t see her that well, with all the space and people that separated them, he thought that a warmth would be coming into her eyes, the
welcoming warmth of a well-fed fire on a bitter night. That a smile would be curving the edges of her mouth, the kind of smile a man would want to capture with a kiss. That her face would be wearing the look of a woman who went on loving and forgiving her man even when she knew she shouldn’t.
And Shay’s throat suddenly felt tight and scratchy, the way it had as a boy when he’d needed to cry but known he was too old.
It had been a long time since he’d thought of those early days on the beaches of Gortadoo. But he thought of them now. Of how he had admired the strength he found in her, even before he’d come to know the true depths of that strength. Admired the play of muscles in her back as she spread his heavy nets out over the rocks, the way she would splay her bare feet wide and dig them deep into the sand, plant them in the sand. All of her always planted firmly, not caught up in foolish dreams as he had been.
Of how his body had felt, the hunger in his body, standing with his chest against her back and his hands laced under her breasts, while they watched the sun sink slowly into a purple sea, and the wind would blow her hair into his face and he would smell her and his heart would lose its sense of direction, forget to beat.
Of how her face had looked floating above his in the dark and secret cave of their desires, while her thighs gripped his hips and her breasts pressed against his chest, and her tears fell salty and warm on his cheeks, and himself saying, “I am going to be a priest.” He had been lying even then.
A hand slapped him hard on the back, jerking his gaze and his thoughts off his wife with a wrench that was physical. And he found himself looking into his brother-in-law’s frowning face.
“I don’t know,” Donagh was saying, “down what roads your thoughts had gone a-wandering, boyo. But you’d better give them a whistle on back, or you’ll be finding yourself knocked flat on your arse ten seconds into the first round.”
“You look to your own end of things,” Shay said, “and leave me to deal with mine.”
Donagh’s chin shot into the air. “Sure I’ve me sponges all nicely soaking in their bucket and me towels all handy, and myself playing second to a man who’s forgotten how to be the champion that he is.”
A flush rose high and hot in Shay’s face. “Ah,
Dhia
, Donagh. What I should’ve said is that you’re a good man for being in a fellow’s corner. And it’s grateful I am to have you there.”
Donagh sighed and shrugged, flushing a little. “Aye, well . . . we’ve the bishop, wise man that he is, to be thanking for that.”
Father O’Reilly’s bishop hadn’t been at all pleased to hear that one of his priests was going to be serving as second at a boxing exhibition. Until he’d heard as well that more than a wee bit of the prize money would be finding its way into the Saint Mary’s poor box.
Just then the referee called the combatants into the center of the ring to shake hands. Both men would fight stripped to the waist and clad in ankle-length white tights and leather shoes. But the Harvard champ trotted into the middle of the ring wrapped up in a green and blue Turkish silk bathrobe that drew from Father O’Reilly a most unpriestly remark.
Shay looked his opponent full in the face for the first time. James Parker was a fine-boned young man with large, widely spaced eyes and one of those long and narrow Yankee noses. The nose was a little too straight in that pampered, trust-fund face, and Shay vowed right then to break it for the lad. Before he himself went down for Ireland, God bless her, in the fourth round.
Then as they shook hands, Shay looked deeply into the other man’s eyes and saw his fear.
There was always fear in the ring. Fear you could taste, as bitter and sharp as acid on your tongue. Fear you could smell rank in your own sweat. The secret to winning was to hurl yourself at the fear. To hate the fear you found inside you more than you hated the man who faced you across the ring.
The referee broke apart their clasped hands, and they retired to
their respective corners. Shay held his hands out to Donagh so that the priest could tighten the laces on the thin leather coaching gloves that bound his knuckles.
The gloves were being worn to give lip service to the law that required such things even in exhibition fights and public sparring matches. In Ireland he’d fought with bare fists that he’d soaked in walnut juice. In those days, his hands had been as tough and hard as tree burls. They weren’t in such condition now, and he knew that even with wearing the gloves, by the end of the night his hands would be a swollen, shredded mess.
Donagh knotted the last of the laces and looked up at him. “You’ve a plan, then,” he said, keeping his voice low, “for how you’re going to do it.”
“Aye.” Shay would fight hard for three rounds, to give the crowd the exhibition it was expecting. They would be fighting under the Marquess of Queensberry Rules, which disqualified any boxer who went down without being hit, even if he only slipped. By the fourth round the canvas would be wet enough with blood and sweat for Shay to make a “slip” convincing.
“I’ll be making it—”
Convincing
, he was about to say. Except he never got the word out, for out of the mass of Fourth of July revelers surrounding the ring, he’d suddenly seen Emma.
She stood with her hand on the arm of her intended husband, the handsome and wealthy Geoffrey Alcott. But even from this distance he could tell that her gaze was riveted on the ring, and he wondered what she saw. If she saw Shay McKenna as the Irish brawler who conquered men with his fists, or the knight-errant he fancied himself to be. He wondered if she would care whether he fought tough and fair or threw away his honor for the money to buy guns for Ireland and the rising.
God above . . . It was hard enough having to bear the sore knowledge that his wife thought less of him for what he was about to do, without having to fret over the likes of Miss Emma Tremayne’s thoughts. Yet to his surprise, he realized that he did care. He didn’t
like to think he’d be shaming himself, shaming his honor, in front of her.
Donagh startled him by shoving a leather mouthpiece hard between his teeth. “It would be nice, Seamus lad, if you’d be putting your mind to the business at hand,” he said, and he gave Shay a stinging slap on his shoulder, and a shove, sending him out into the middle of the ring to toe the scratch line with the Harvard boy.
The crowd grew breathlessly silent, then exploded into a cheer that was as loud as any cannon cracker when Shay sent a whistling right cross into Parker’s neck, smashing him just behind the ear, and knocking him so hard into the ropes the hemp stripped the skin off his back.
The men fought evenly matched for seven brutal minutes after that, before Shay let loose with a clubbing right that landed smack in the middle of Parker’s face. The man went down onto one knee, just as the bell sounded, ending the round.
Shay allowed himself a smile, for he had broken the Harvard champ’s perfect nose.
But Shay had taken punishment as well. His lip was split, and his upper chest was bruised and welted. Donagh dabbed at the cut lip with a sponge, and his face screwed into a grimace as he looked over at the enemy’s corner. Parker’s second was sucking blood from the smashed nose and spitting it out onto the canvas.
“Sweet saints,” Donagh said, shaking his head. “You know that I love you dearly, Seamus lad. But I don’t think I could do that. And you with a honker on you that’s such a grand target it fairly begs for a belting.”
Shay’s laughter was cut short by the ringing of the bell. “Keep your guard tight and your elbows close to your ribs,” Donagh shouted after him, as he propelled himself out of his corner, charging. Parker came out fast as well, but Shay could see within the first minute that his opponent’s punches now lacked snap and timing. He began to flinch even at the blows that didn’t land.
A man fought as much with his head as with his hands. For although the fear was always with him, he couldn’t let it out. He couldn’t let himself know the fear of getting hurt, for as soon as he did, he would be hurt for certain. And he would lose.
James Parker smelled his own defeat in the sweat of his fear and so he began to cheat. He flailed all over the ring, trying to trip up Shay’s feet to bring him down. He landed two under-the-belt blows that drew boos from the crowd.
Shay began to think he was going to have to start pulling some of his own punches, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to make the fight last until the fourth round.
Then Parker feinted and let fly with a left that Shay easily ducked. But Shay slipped on a clot of blood, and although he didn’t go down then, his guard dropped long enough for him to be clubbed down by a blow to his neck. His legs felt as loose as Italian noodles as he staggered upright, and it was all he could do to keep bobbing and weaving and ducking punches until the bell rang.

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