The Passions of Emma (49 page)
“Noreen! Merry!”
Shay pushed his way through the crush of people in the mill yard. He nearly fell over a snaking tangle of fire hoses and he stopped for a moment, swaying on his feet as if the shouts and bellows and screams he heard were physical blows that buffeted him.
He flung his head back, looking up, up at the pall of ocherous smoke floating overhead. At the orange and yellow lights dancing, reflecting in the glass panes of the high, narrow windows of the spinning room.
At the flight of iron-plated stairs and the two men wearing yellow oilskin slickers, who were swinging axes at a tin-plated door. Axes that rang loudly as their blades struck the metal plates and left moon-sized dents, and did nothing more.
And then he locks us in until after the shift is over.
Shay hurled himself toward the stairs, shouting and cursing. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a fireman come stumbling out the wide-mouthed entrance to the mill. The man carried a woman in his arms, but he set her down as soon as he was clear of the smoke, and then he was running and shouting, and waving a black key ring high above his head.
Shay followed the fireman up the stairs, their boots rattling on the iron rungs. It seemed to take forever, for the man to fit the key into the lock, to turn the tumblers, to lift the latch, and then at last, at last, the door swung open. Oily black smoke and women and children spilled out of it, choking and gasping, eyes streaming, and their hands in front of their faces to feel their way. One after the other they came stumbling through the door, pushing and shoving in their desperate fear to get out . . . children, so many children.
And none of them his.
Shay wedged his way through them, onto the catwalk, searching frantically through those still inside, but the smoke was so thick it was hard to see. The catwalk’s iron grille floor shook beneath his feet. Little hands reached out to him, grabbing for him, and he guided them toward the open door, and looking, all the while looking, for his girls, and screaming, screaming inside his head.
He peered down into the room below. The spinning frames were still running, clattering and clanging, but no one was tending them now. The far wall was on fire. The old wood crackled and spat hissing, smoky flames that were spreading quickly in streamers along the greasy floorboards, raising blisters that popped and bubbled like boiling soup.
A hand grabbed at his pantleg. “Da!”
Shay spun around, snatching Noreen up into his arms all in one
motion, and Merry was there too, and he grabbed her up, and he was through the door with them in his arms just as one of the machines below caught fire, exploding into fiery red pinwheels and shooting blue sparks.
motion, and Merry was there too, and he grabbed her up, and he was through the door with them in his arms just as one of the machines below caught fire, exploding into fiery red pinwheels and shooting blue sparks.
He was down the stairs with his girls safe in his arms.
He carried them out to the far end of the courtyard, well clear of the smoke and flying cinders. He set them down and ran his hands over them, over every inch of them. They were frightened and choking from the smoke, but they weren’t hurt anywhere that he could see. Yet, he couldn’t stop touching them. He kept having to touch them, to feel the warmth of their living flesh. His girls—he’d nearly lost his girls. If he had lost them . . .
A woman came running at them from out of the crowd of gawkers and mill workers, running and shouting their names. A woman dripping water and wearing only a ragged petticoat for skirts, and with tears leaving white tracks in her sooty face.
The woman that fireman had carried out of the burning mill.
Emma.
“She came for us, Da. Just like Merry said she would.”
“I know, m’love.” Shay sat down on the bed and brushed the damp hair off Noreen’s forehead. He leaned over and kissed the heat-flushed skin. But not burned, thank God, thank God.
“It’s getting some sleep the both of you should be doing now,” he said when he was able. “You know how your mam always said there’s nothing a good sleep won’t cure.”
Noreen gave him a tremulous smile, but Merry only looked at him with wide, haunted eyes. She hadn’t hummed once since he’d carried her out of that burning mill. He’d had a hard time convincing her to let go of Emma’s hand, though.
“She came for us, Da,” Noreen said. “Just like she promised.”
“I know.”
He had to make his eyes as wide as possible to hold back the tears. He leaned over and wrapped his arms around both of his girls and held them tight, tight. In spite of long, soaking baths, they still smelled of smoke, and he shook to think of it. He couldn’t stop shaking.
“I love you, my darlin’s,” he said, whispering the words for they were already asleep. And those were hard words for a man to say sometimes, even to his daughters.
He got up from the bed, careful not to wake them, and went to look at his son, who was asleep in the cradle he’d made out of old Arbuckle coffee cases. With his lips he traced the fatness of his baby’s cheek, then kissed the soft spot on his head. He went to leave the bedroom then, padding quietly in his stocking feet, but he paused at the door and looked back at his son in his makeshift cradle, at his girls asleep now in the white iron bed. He spent a long, sweet, suspended time just watching them, and shaking inside from the power of what he felt for them.
He was surprised to see when he stepped through the door and into the kitchen that it was now blue with the shadows of the coming night.
Emma sat in the rocker, beneath the window.
Even in the confusion of the mill yard, even looking like a rescued mill rat herself, she had been recognized. Both as Miss Tremayne and as the woman who had run into the burning mill to get the keys that unlocked the door to the spinning room, saving the lives of those women and children trapped inside. But she appeared almost frightened by the attention and she kept insisting she hadn’t done anything, that a fireman had come for the key practically on her heels, and she had only wound up needing to be rescued herself.
No one had thought yet to question what she’d been doing there. But he knew from the words she’d sobbed and whispered as she’d knelt on the bricks of the yard and clutched his girls to her chest; he knew that she’d been at the mill trying to open the door
well before the alarm sounded. And then there was Merry, knowing about it before it had ever happened.
well before the alarm sounded. And then there was Merry, knowing about it before it had ever happened.
He wasn’t going to dwell on thoughts about the strangeness of it, though. The Irish had a saying about how those questions having no answers were either miracles or mysteries, and both had to be taken on faith.
Shay’s one thought, once the girls were out, had been to get them safely home. Emma had come with them, as though she belonged with them. But then, Merry wasn’t letting go of her hand.
She had helped him to get the girls settled out of their fear and into bed. She had heated the kettle for their baths and poured hot comfrey down their throats. She had wrapped them up in flannel night rails and put a beer jug full of hot water into the bed with them, for comfort as much as warmth.
Now she sat in the rocker by the stove in his kitchen. As if she belonged there.
Her white lawn shirtwaist was gray with soot and pocked with cinder burns. Her petticoat was in worse shape, ripped ragged in places and water stained. She was still modestly covered from neck almost to ankle, but he doubted that any man had ever before seen Miss Emma Tremayne in her petticoat.
She was holding one hand inside the other in her lap, as if it pained her.
He went to her and knelt, and he picked up her hand, turning it over. A red welt lay like a rope across her palm, but it wasn’t blistering. He could see her heart beating in the blue veins of her wrist.
He looked up at her, but he didn’t know what to say. He’d said “thank you,” but that wasn’t enough, and yet there weren’t any other words.
“You burned your hand,” he said.
“Only a little. I wasn’t wearing any gloves,” she said, in that way she had that was such a strange mixture of haughtiness and naughtiness. Her eyebrows and the front of her hair were singed some,
giving her a wide-eyed, startled look. “See, that is what comes of leaving the house without one’s gloves.”
giving her a wide-eyed, startled look. “See, that is what comes of leaving the house without one’s gloves.”
He smiled, but the smile cracked midway and became something else. He could feel each separate, slender bone in her hand. “Miss Tremayne . . .”
“I really must insist now that you call me Emma.” Her hand trembled just a little. “I cannot be Miss Tremayne when I am sitting in your kitchen in only my petticoat and without my eyebrows. It just won’t do.”
He didn’t know when he had let go of her hand, and he didn’t know when she leaned in to him and he reached for her. But somehow his hands were in her hair now, and she was sliding off the chair down onto her knees in front of him, and his mouth was in her hair and her face was in the curve of his throat.
He gripped her shoulders and set her gently away from him. Her head came up, and her eyes were two wide, dark green pools in her face. He could see nothing in them but himself, reflected into eternity.
He got back onto his feet somehow, for he couldn’t seem to feel his legs. He backed away from her, first one step and then another and another, until his shoulders were flat against the wall.
She knelt on the floor where he had left her. Her eyes swallowed him, swallowed the world.
“I was sitting here remembering,” she said, “that day we paid a call on the widowed vixen and her kits. And I was thinking . . .” She stopped, swallowing as if her throat hurt. He could see the pulse beating in her neck. “I was thinking that what I really wanted was to go back to the meadow and see how they are fairing. I’ll go this Sunday I think, after church. I haven’t any guns made from bits and pieces to shoot at the poor snipes with, so I suppose I’ll have to bring a basket of something from The Birches kitchens.”
He could imagine her arriving at the meadow with a wicker basket full of orange-glazed chicken and terrined pheasant. He nearly
smiled, except that his own heart was beating too fast and his chest was too tight even for breathing.
smiled, except that his own heart was beating too fast and his chest was too tight even for breathing.
“And I was wondering if . . .” She rubbed her neck where the pulse beat, above the high lacy collar of her ruined shirtwaist. “Will you meet me there?”
“No,” he said, or thought he said. He didn’t know wanting her could feel this way. So deep inside there was nothing to do but give in to it.
“Shay,” she said, her voice breaking now. “You know what I—”
“Oh, aye. I know, I know.”
“I want you to . . .” Her hands had been lying palms up on her thighs, but now she lifted them, spreading them as if in supplication. “There, you see how ridiculous and narrow and hollow my life is—I don’t even know the
words
for what I want. All those books, male and female, segregated on their neat little shelves in the Roger’s Free Library, and none of them have the words I need to tell you what I want.”
words
for what I want. All those books, male and female, segregated on their neat little shelves in the Roger’s Free Library, and none of them have the words I need to tell you what I want.”
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t say it.”
She bowed her head. She stayed that way a moment, her back curved and taut, the nape of her neck showing white beneath the dark swell of her hair. He clenched his hands into fists, digging his nails into his palms.
She got slowly, gracefully, to her feet and looked at him, and now her eyes were soft and gray and cool as a dawn sky. “Sunday,” she said. “I’ll be waiting for you at the vixen’s meadow.”
“I’ll never be going to that place again,” he said back to her, and wondered to himself where he would find the strength not to make it a lie.
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