The Passions of Emma (5 page)
The pump handle squealed, and water splashed into the sink. “Yes, Mama. Only just let me wrap my model up in a wet cloth, or it will dry out.”
Against her will, Bethel’s gaze slid over to the clay model. A naked man . . . She shuddered. She absolutely would not abide such goings-on. It would not do.
Tonight, after her daughter had gone to bed, she would come out here and take up one of those mallets and smash that disgraceful thing into so many pieces it could never be put back together again.
She had grown up with the sweat sour on her skin, in a place so hot the sun bled the sky bone white. A place of red dust and yellow cotton, and a two-room shack with a rotting front porch.
When the war came it first took away all the men, and then it took the mule they’d used to pull the plow. That was when Bethel’s mama had held the back of a tin pie plate up to her face and said, “You’re prettier’n a July mornin’, honey, the prettiest lil’ gal in all of Sparta. You can go far, Bethel Lane. As far as the back of the moon, if you but put your mind to it.”
Mazie sold the plow, and one of the first things she bought with
the money was a
Beadle’s Dime Book of Practical Etiquette.
The way Mazie had it figured, the war was going to change things, to bust things wide open. Even for the child of a dirt-poor cotton farmer who lived in a weather-rotted shack at the end of a dust-palled road in the heart of Georgia. Especially if that child was possessed of a face and body that could send a man’s thoughts sinking right down to the hunger between his legs.
the money was a
Beadle’s Dime Book of Practical Etiquette.
The way Mazie had it figured, the war was going to change things, to bust things wide open. Even for the child of a dirt-poor cotton farmer who lived in a weather-rotted shack at the end of a dust-palled road in the heart of Georgia. Especially if that child was possessed of a face and body that could send a man’s thoughts sinking right down to the hunger between his legs.
Mazie set about teaching her daughter every bit of knowledge there was to be found in Beadle’s book. Bethel learned to say, “Be quiet, please,” instead of, “Shut your golblamed mouth.” She learned how to crook her little finger when she drank a cup of tea, although she always complained that it gave her a cramp. She learned to keep her knees pressed together at all times, even when sitting on the privy house hole, and not to belch when she swallowed air.
By the time they’d gotten to the last page of Beadle’s book, the war was over and Sparta had long since given up on itself and the glorious cause of Southern independence. And a Yankee by the name of Jonathan Alcott had come to town.
He was said to own a whole fleet of mills up north somewhere and had come down to encourage the planting of cotton on the battle-ravaged land. To introduce himself and his grandiose plans he decided to give a ball, and the whole of Sparta was to be invited.
The Lane women planned for that event as though it were a military campaign. Mazie took the last of the plow money and went to a secondhand shop, where she bought a white brocade wedding dress that she made over into a ball gown. She borrowed some marabou feathers off an old hat and used them to fancy up the gown’s scalloped neckline, while Bethel spent the hours practicing her curtsey and waltzing with a broom.
On the night of the ball, Mazie wove two perfect white gardenias into her daughter’s hair. “Lord, child, you are so beautiful you make my heart ache,” she said, and the tears softened her tired, washed-out eyes, making her for a moment look young and pretty,
as well. “You’re gonna have every man there at your feet, see if you don’t. Only you remember what I told you about keeping your drawers buttoned and your knees together until after a ring is on your finger.”
as well. “You’re gonna have every man there at your feet, see if you don’t. Only you remember what I told you about keeping your drawers buttoned and your knees together until after a ring is on your finger.”
The ball was being held in Sparta’s grand old hotel, and Bethel floated there on clouds of pride and joy. It was everything she had dreamed it would be. Chandeliers glowing with the warmth and dazzle of a hundred suns. A string quartet playing lilting tunes as sweet as any meadowlark had ever sung. Lace-covered tables groaning beneath the weight of so much food it made Bethel dizzy just to look at it.
Oh, the ball was indeed everything she had dreamed it would be . . . until she heard the whispers:
“Do you believe the gall of Bethel Lane, bringing herself here in that made-up dress? And those feathers! Why, they look plucked right off the hind end of a swamp duck.”
“That’s what comes of inviting just any-old-body to your to-do. But then he’s a Yankee, so he can’t be expected to know better.”
“If he lets share-cropper trash like Bethel Lane come waltzin’ through the door, then I’m surprised we aren’t rubbin’ elbows with the coloreds, as well.”
“Land, even a Yankee’s got more sense than that.”
Bethel sat alone on a chair against the wall, smiling, smiling, smiling until the tears she kept swallowing grew like a tumor in her throat, and her eyes shone fever-bright with agony.
And then she saw him. Or rather he saw her.
He was a boyhood friend of Jonathan Alcott’s and he’d accompanied the man on his trip to Georgia as a lark, or so he’d said. Later, she understood pity and a soft heart had drawn him across that room to bow over her hand. Then, she thought it was her bluebell eyes and sunshine yellow curls, and the pretty face she’d first seen reflected in the back of a tin pie plate.
She had laughed and charmed him and said, “How you do go on,” every time he complimented her. By the end of their first dance, she’d discovered his New England blood was bluer than ink,
and he had bank accounts and portfolios stuffed plumb full with good ol’ Yankee greenback dollars.
and he had bank accounts and portfolios stuffed plumb full with good ol’ Yankee greenback dollars.
She would have fallen in love with him anyway, even without his society connections and all that beautiful money. For he was tall and slender with golden, sun-tinted skin and a head of raven-black hair. And when he touched her, she felt the way the air got in the dead heat of summer right before it was fixing to thunderstorm. Crackling and heavy, charged with both promise and danger.
But Mazie Lane had taught her daughter well. Bethel was sure enough going to keep her drawers buttoned and her knees together until a ring was on her finger.
He had only intended to be in Sparta for three days. By the end of two weeks she had him so desperate for her he was down on his knees. She didn’t give him what he was begging for, though—not until they’d eloped across the county line and woken up a judge to pronounce her officially Mrs. William Tremayne.
And so that was how Bethel Lane, of Sparta, Georgia, came to live in a fine northern mansion called The Birches on Poppasquash Point, in the state of Rhode Island and her Providence Plantations. How she came to find herself part of a family known as the “wild and wicked” Tremaynes. A family that had made the first of its many fortunes off slave trading, rum, and privateering, and whom all the world believed cursed because of it. Tragedy, so it was said, had claimed a victim of the Tremaynes at least once in every generation.
It amused Bethel’s secret Confederate heart to discover that her husband’s proud and venerable Yankee family had built the foundation of its great wealth on trading in black flesh. Especially since the Lanes themselves had never owned any slaves, being too poor most years to count even a plow among their meager possessions, let alone the mule to pull it. Nor was she fazed by stories of any ol’ curse—where she came from, bad luck was as common as fleas.
And if the family had once been dashing and reckless, and if maybe their blood was tainted still—the way Bethel saw it, the
Tremaynes had already put a lot of good time and effort into scrubbing themselves clean as a new pair of drawers. For two hundred years they’d cultivated respectability as diligently and carefully as they tended to the hothouse blooms that filled their house year after year. Bethel promised herself, from the moment she became a Tremayne, that she would never let the cause down. The Lanes might never have amounted to much themselves, but Bethel Lane Tremayne would do her new family proud.
Tremaynes had already put a lot of good time and effort into scrubbing themselves clean as a new pair of drawers. For two hundred years they’d cultivated respectability as diligently and carefully as they tended to the hothouse blooms that filled their house year after year. Bethel promised herself, from the moment she became a Tremayne, that she would never let the cause down. The Lanes might never have amounted to much themselves, but Bethel Lane Tremayne would do her new family proud.
She surely could not have dreamed up a place like The Birches, with its gables and towers and wraparound piazzas, with its iron lace gates and acres of birch stands and green velvet lawns stretching to the bay. She had ridden in William’s fancy new landau, with all its gilt and velvet and leather, through those massive wrought-iron gates and down a lane that was as white and smooth as a fresh snowfall. She found out later the lane was paved with the crushed shells of thousands of little clams called quahogs, and she had been awed with the utter wonder of it all. She felt that by coming north, to this place, she had indeed gone as far away as the back of the moon.
To her it was an alien world of sailboats and clam bakes and long-faced people with a way of talking flatly through their long noses. A world where the old, rich families had the audacity to call themselves the Great Folk and then go on and live right up to it. A world defined and ordered by an enormity of rules and traditions not found in Beadle’s etiquette book.
Up north here, only William knew she’d come from a two-room shack at the end of a backcountry road. It was a gilded world her husband had brought her to. A world where appearances and rituals were all, and the real thing was never said or done or even thought.
She had to work so hard to fit in, and with a ruthlessness that frazzled her soul and left her in the silent darkness of her bed at night shaking with fear that she would be found out, found out . . . Day by day, year by year, she scrubbed away the outer layers of
herself as if she were washing the red dust of Georgia off her skin. Scrubbed and scrubbed until all that was left of Bethel Lane was her cane-syrup drawl and a taste for coffee made with chicory.
herself as if she were washing the red dust of Georgia off her skin. Scrubbed and scrubbed until all that was left of Bethel Lane was her cane-syrup drawl and a taste for coffee made with chicory.
Bethel learned how to be one of the Great Folk by observing how they walked through their carefully orchestrated lives. She learned how any deviation from the expected thing, the done thing, was so swiftly punished.
She saw what happened to the banker’s daughter who was caught kissing the fishmonger’s son beneath one of the Thames Street piers that Fourth of July. She saw what happened to the young wife who appeared at the yacht club’s private beach in a bathing costume that revealed too much of her naked calves. She saw what happened to the matron who lost her composure and quarreled openly with her husband’s mistress in the middle of High Street one winter’s drizzly afternoon.
Bethel saw what happened when you flaunted the conventions and courted scandal, what happened when you were found out, and she carved those lessons into her heart. The gilded world was ruthless to those who defied it. Once you entered that world, once you submitted to it, then you had no choice but to abide by its rules.
Or be ostracized forever.
Sometimes, though, Bethel would wake in the middle of the night with her face wet with tears and a hollow, heavy ache in her chest. In the silence of those dark hours she would remember dazzling sun-scorched days of wading barefoot through a tea-colored creek, the oily smell of cotton bolls dripping in the hot air, and a pair of loving hands weaving gardenias in her hair.
“I’ll send for you, Mama,” she’d scrawled on the note she’d left for Mazie on the night she’d run off with her Yankee gentleman.
I’ll send for you, Mama
, she had promised.
I’ll send for you, Mama
, she had promised.
But she never did.
I
t was strange, Bethel thought, that her heart would be so full up with memories of her mama today. Or perhaps not so strange, what with her head so full of plans for her own daughter’s wedding. Getting married was, after all, the biggest thing that would ever happen in a girl’s life.
t was strange, Bethel thought, that her heart would be so full up with memories of her mama today. Or perhaps not so strange, what with her head so full of plans for her own daughter’s wedding. Getting married was, after all, the biggest thing that would ever happen in a girl’s life.
At least Emma, with all her peculiarities and that streak of Tremayne wildness, had had the sense to make a splendid match.
Geoffrey Alcott . . . Bethel breathed a little hum of satisfaction. Geoffrey Alcott of the
New York
Alcotts. The family had lived in Bristol for over a hundred years, but they were called the New York Alcotts because the first Alcotts had been born there, in New York. Folk in Bristol had always had long memories and unforgiving natures, and they were suspicious of newcomers.
New York
Alcotts. The family had lived in Bristol for over a hundred years, but they were called the New York Alcotts because the first Alcotts had been born there, in New York. Folk in Bristol had always had long memories and unforgiving natures, and they were suspicious of newcomers.
Still, Geoffrey Alcott was manly in looks, possessed of good manners, and unfailingly civil to his elders. A true gentleman by blood and birth. And wealth, of course.
Well, perhaps his method of proposing left a bit to be desired—popping the question on a fox hunt, no less. Bethel didn’t approve of such shortcuts through the conventions; they made her nervous, for who knew of what other, worse things they could lead to. It would be up to her now to ensure that the wedding overcame the groom’s small breach of etiquette and tradition.
“It will be the wedding of the century,” Bethel vowed, and her words echoed over and over like a chanted prayer in the vast black and white marble foyer of The Birches.
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