The Passions of Emma (44 page)

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Authors: Penelope Williamson

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

BOOK: The Passions of Emma
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The Emma of this evening had retreated across the kitchen, to the stove. She used a red-striped huck towel to lift the lid off the black pot that steamed on the fire, and the earthy smell of boiling potatoes filled the air. It was a strange sight she made there in his kitchen, in her dress that seemed all lace and satin bows, the pale yellow of fresh cream.
“Father O’Reilly stopped by for tea with us today,” she was saying. “He was telling us such stories of Bria, about when she was a girl in Gortadoo. He had us laughing so, and it seemed such a good thing—to give the girls memories of their mama to tuck away in their hearts.” She glanced back at him over her shoulder. She had
twisted the towel up into a knot in her hands. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Stop saying that.”
The words had come out harsher than he’d meant them. He drew in a deep breath and cleared his throat. “Stop saying you hope I don’t mind, because I don’t.”
She had turned her back to him and was laying the towel on the slopstone, folding it carefully. “It’s only that I promised Bria I would . . .”
He stood up, spilling Gorgeous onto the floor. The cat streaked off into the bedroom with an aggrieved yowl and a flash of its tail. Emma spun back around, her eyes wide and luminous.
“Sweet saints, Miss Tremayne,” he said. “Why shouldn’t you come as often as you like?”
She backed up as if she expected him to spring at her, although he hadn’t taken a step. “Thank you,” she said. “I—I should be leaving now, though.” She cast a look out the window. “It’s grown quite dark.”
She had set her hat and gloves on the small table next to the holy-water font. He watched her put them on. A white straw hat with a wide yellow ribbon that she tied at a jaunty angle under her chin. Gloves of so delicate a lace he could see through it to the pale skin of her hands.
She put her lace-gloved palm on the latch and opened the door, but before she walked on through it, she turned and gave him a sweet, tremulous smile. “Good evening, Mr. McKenna.”
“Good evening, Miss Tremayne,” he said. But she was already gone.
Slowly, he sat back down. He picked up the book that she had given to Noreen, then he set it down again. He thought he should get up and take the potatoes off the fire before they boiled to mush. He thought about going to the cupboard and taking out the jar of
poitín.
His mouth was as dry as thatch.
“
Dhia
. What a grand sort of liar you are, Seamus McKenna. Tellin’ her, and tellin’ yourself, that you don’t mind.”
It was hard for Emma, coming back to the house on Thames Street, knowing now that he might be there. For she could no longer separate herself from how she felt about him, and he would always belong to Bria.
She nearly stayed away after that, would have stayed away if not for the promise she had made.
Even so, she let some time pass before she came again, and she chose a day of little wind, when she knew it would take him some hours to sail home. It had been a hot day, of brassy yellow sunshine and moist, hazy air. One of those Bristol summer days when Emma thought she could almost hear the heat, sweating and panting and dripping.
It was hot inside the house that evening. Emma left the door open, remembering how Bria had always craved the light so.
She had just taken off her hat and gloves and set them on the table when it happened: She looked up and saw Bria standing at the stove.
Standing at the stove with her hand on the teakettle. With her hand wrapped up in a huck towel, as though she feared the handle would be too hot, for steam was coming out the kettle’s spout.
She had on the batiste night rail that Emma had given her, the one with the spills of lace at the wrists. She was wearing her riotous hair as she often did, tied back with a piece of twine, but tendrils of it had pulled loose and were sticking to her damp cheeks. Ribbons of sunlight unfurled from the open door across the floor to wrap around her bare feet. The night rail was too short; Emma could see the white, knobby bones of her ankles.
“Bria . . .” Emma whispered, aching.
Bria, the Bria at the stove, turned and smiled, her dark eyes lighting up as she saw Emma.
And then she disappeared.
“That was Mam.”
Emma whirled so fast she had to grasp the back of the ladderback chair to keep from falling. Her heart pounded hard and violently in her ears, like a hurricane surf.
Merry stood in the doorway. She looked every bit the mill rat with cotton lint and threads clinging to her clothes and hair, her bare feet black and greasy.
“You saw her,” Emma said, or thought she said. She couldn’t get her lungs to work.
Merry hummed and nodded.
Emma turned back to the stove. She took a step toward it, her legs trembling. No one was there. The kettle sat on the hob, and the fire was out.
But Bria had been so real standing there at the stove; in that one white flash of an instant she had been real. A woman wearing a night rail that was too short for her, holding a steaming teakettle in her towel-wrapped hand. Not some amorphous, gauzy figure floating in the air. She’d been sweating.
Emma swallowed, breathed. She closed her eyes and opened them again. There was still no woman standing at the stove. Merry came up to her and took her hand.
Emma’s hand trembled. She tried to stop it, but she couldn’t. And she couldn’t stop her voice from trembling, either. “Have you seen her . . . seen your mama before this?”
“Sometimes,” Merry said, talking the word, not humming it. “She comes when Da is crying for her. He sits here at the table real late at night sometimes, not doing anything, just sitting. And he talks to her, talks to Mam. He says, ‘Bria darlin’, why did you go and leave me?’ and then he cries. That’s when she comes and stands behind him and touches his hair.”
“Does . . . does your father see her?”
Merry hummed a
no.
She drew in a deep breath and hummed again, loud and long. Then her mouth opened, and Emma thought she would speak in words again, but Noreen came bursting into the kitchen just then, chattering like a magpie and carrying little Jacko in her arms.
“Mrs. Hale said he was sweet as a sugar tit today, and I said, ‘When is he never?’ Like the o’erseer was mean as a polecat today, and when is he never? He whipped Nate O’Hara’s legs with a rope ’cause he spilled his bobbins, so Merry’s gone and put a fairy’s curse on him, on the o’erseer, and now his weenie’s gonna fall off. Only he don’t know it yet. Do you want for me to fire up the kettle, Miss Emma?”
“What? Oh, no, it’s much too hot today,” Emma said, her voice still quavering a little. “I’ll make us some effervescent lemon instead.” She took the baby from his sister’s arms. She hugged him tightly to her breast, breathing in his baby smell of talcum and milk. She rubbed her cheek against his soft red hair, his mother’s hair.
A foot landed on the wooden stoop, making it creak. A shadow fell across the sun-washed floor. She looked up as Shay McKenna filled the doorway. Their gazes held for one taut moment, then he took a step back and looked away.
“There’s work that needs doing out on the dory,” he said. “I thought I’d let you . . . let the girls know where I am.”
Emma laid her cheek against the baby’s head and listened to Shay walk away. The baby’s back rose and fell beneath her hand with his breathing. He made soft suckling sounds against her shoulder.
Emma rubbed her mouth over his hair in a soft kiss and then she gave him back to Noreen and went after his father.
He wasn’t working on his dory. He was on the gray shingled beach, sitting among the rocks and rubbery strands of seaweed, in the place where Bria had died. Emma gathered up the skirt of her white muslin summer dress and sat down next to him.
He kept his face averted from hers, watching a pair of tongers rake the deep water for quahogs. Grief and the wind had etched the lines deeper at the corners of his eyes. A jar of
poitín
dangled from the fingers of one hand, but he didn’t seem to be drinking from it.
He smelled of the sea and summer wind, and she wanted to touch him. Simply touch him.
“Merry talks to me,” she said.
“Merry hasn’t spoken a word in three years.”
“She does to me.”
He turned his head to look at her. She saw pain and a raw guilt, but no disbelief in his eyes. “But why? Why you?” His mouth twisted down at one corner. “I didn’t mean that how it sounded. I only—”
“You meant why me, and not Bria.” Emma shook her head, shrugging a little. “That I can’t tell you. It’s a strange thing when it happens. It’s as though she suddenly finds her words and then loses them again.”
He turned away from her. He looked down between his spread knees; he pushed at a wet clump of rockweed with his boot. “And did Bria tell you how it came to be, how it was my daughter lost her words?”
She wanted to tell him that such was the way she had fallen in love with him. Through Bria’s telling her. “Yes,” she said.
He lifted the jar as though he would drink from it, but then he didn’t. “There’s some as say that God gave the Irish whiskey to keep them from ruling the world.”
The wind came up suddenly, spangling the harbor into a million diamonds and lifting his hair where it lay long on the back of his neck. She wanted to tangle her fingers in his hair and pull his head to her until it lay against her breast.
“I fancied myself man enough to rule the world, surely. I fancied myself the brave and brawny lad, living for Ireland, fighting for Ireland, dreaming always of the grand and glorious day when the
rising would come. And my Bria, she used to say to me that I spent precious little time thinking of what would come after. Of what me and Ireland would do with our freedom once we had it.”
His mouth had gone hard and gaunt. She wanted to press her lips fiercely against that mouth, press until the kiss became painful.
“I killed the land agent who drove my mother into the sea, and like a fool I didn’t plan for what would come after.
Dhia
, there was myself, behaving as though it were all a music-hall farce, all the way down to the martyred hero who gets up and walks off the stage at the end. And leaving my wife and girls to pay the bitter price of it.”
She sensed a hard trembling going on deep inside him, and she wanted to wrap her arms around him and hold him until it stopped.
“I know what you think of me,” she said. “That I am young and pampered and ignorant of the real world, and you would be right. But I know how Bria died and some of how she lived, and she did both as though she believed that honor is what shapes our souls. You wouldn’t be who you are, Shay McKenna, if you didn’t fight for Ireland and yourself. And you wouldn’t be the man that Bria loved.”
He had fallen silent and wasn’t looking at her, but she didn’t care. She listened to the gentle slap of the water against the pier pilings and the whir of the mill spindles in the distance. She watched a seagull feed off the leftovers of someone’s corned beef sandwich.
She wanted to tell him that he was the man she loved. She wanted to tell him that he was her first thought in the morning and the last before she slept. That because of him, and Bria before him, her whole life had come undone.
“Mother of God!”
The words came out of him on a tearing gasp, as if something had broken inside him. His head bowed, and the jar of whiskey fell
from his hands, and his back shuddered, hard. Shuddered with harsh, silent, wrenching sobs.
She wanted to . . .
Her hand hovered over his hair, and then she touched him. And then he turned in to her, and her arms went around him, and she was holding him, holding him close while he wept.
A
aaagh . . . Go chase yerself!”
Father Donagh O’Reilly snatched the hat off his head and slapped it against his thigh. “He goes and lays such a fat one right over the plate, the blessed Saint Patrick himself could’ve sent it for a ride on a straw. I’m tellin’ you, Miss Tremayne, that lad couldn’t pitch his way out of a wet sack.”

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