The Passions of Emma (26 page)
She felt Bria come up behind her to look out the window, as well. “He’s been running,” Bria said.
He’d been standing with his hands on his hips, watching the road while he got his breath back, but now he turned around and looked toward the house.
Emma jerked back out of sight behind the yellow gingham curtains, a blush stinging her cheeks. “But what is he running from?”
“Just running in circles and getting nowhere. Typical man.”
Bria drew closer to the window and touched the glass pane. Touched it gently with her fingers, as she would touch the man, and Emma was caught up in the change that came over her friend’s face. Love shone from it, as blinding as a white desert sun.
Emma wondered if she had ever looked at Geoffrey in such a way. She doubted so, because she already knew that never in her life had her heart felt a thing that deeply.
“He’s in training, as he calls it,” Bria said. “Building his wind up for an exhibition of the science of bare-knuckle boxing. He’ll be doing it here in Bristol on your Fourth of July.”
“But why?” Emma exclaimed, horrified by the very thought. She knew it for a barbaric sport, violent and lawless and patronized only by the dregs of society.
“For the prize money, of course. Or so he says.” Bria lifted her fingers off the glass. She curled her hand into a fist before she brought it back down to her side. “Always fighting something, is Seamus McKenna, one way or t’other. I sometimes wonder if men don’t just fight for the love of it.”
She turned to the washstand where little Merry waited, still caught fast in that odd stillness, her hair dripping water now instead of kerosene. Bria wrapped a towel around the child’s head, rubbing it dry.
Emma was drawn to look back out the window, at the man in the yard. He had put on a blue chambray shirt that was worn thin from repeated washings. Already he’d sweated through it, so that it clung to his back and shoulders. He does have a brawler’s body, she thought, hardened, battered . . . brutal.
“Prizefighting,” she said aloud. “Imagine such a thing.”
“He once was bare-knuckle champion of Ireland, was my Shay,” Bria said, pride coloring her voice a bit.
She had gone to sit in her rocking chair so that she could put Merry between her splayed knees and comb out the damp, tangled curls. But the child squirmed loose and ran out the door, banging it hard behind her.
Bria stared at the closed door, but Emma thought she was seeing beyond it, to the man outside. “For a lark one morning, at the horse fair over t’ Shannon way, he stepped into a ring to go a round with some fellow who was being billed as the champion of Dublin. Shay laid him out flat with his second punch, and the next thing we knew he was being paid good coin to take on any and all contenders himself.”
Her gaze fell to the comb she still held in her hand, gripped so tightly now that the teeth bit into her flesh. “Paid to get his poor self pounded bloody every summer’s Sunday afternoon.” Sighing,
she dropped the comb into her big apron pocket and pushed heavily to her feet. “But then as Shay himself used to say, a champion is only the poor
slieveen
who’s left standing at the end of it.”
she dropped the comb into her big apron pocket and pushed heavily to her feet. “But then as Shay himself used to say, a champion is only the poor
slieveen
who’s left standing at the end of it.”
Bria came back to the window again. She looked at him, at her man, and she touched him with her eyes the way she’d touched the glass a moment before.
“At every fair and race day throughout Ireland he fought, until that sorrow’s own day when he killed a man with those fists of his.”
Emma nearly gasped aloud. Her eyes, of their own accord, searched for Shay McKenna out in the yard. But he was gone now.
“He kept getting back up, you see,” Bria went on, although her voice was strangely flat now, as if she were reading the words from a newspaper account. “Shay would knock him down, and he would get back up, and so Shay would hit him again, hurt him bad, and so down he would go, and back up he would come, again and again, until Shay hit him one time too many or one time too hard, and then he didn’t get back up. And maybe Shay hadn’t set out to kill him, but surely at the end of it the poor fool of a man was still stone dead.”
She looked around at Emma, and the pain in her eyes seemed to have swallowed the world. “We are all of us both light and dark, do you not find it so, Miss Tremayne? Wanting in our hearts to do right and able to do wrong. And so it’s the choices we’ve made, surely, that make of us what we are—”
Bria’s last word broke apart as a thick, ragged cough tore out of her chest, then another and another and another. Emma wrapped her arm around Bria’s waist, taking her weight while her shoulders shook and heaved.
And when the coughing finally subsided, she brushed the fever-damp hair off Bria’s forehead and held her closer.
The door opened, and they pulled slowly apart.
Shay McKenna stood at the threshold with Merry in the crook
of one arm, her legs wrapped around his hips. Noreen held on tight to his other hand, and she was looking up at him as if he’d just hung the moon and the stars.
of one arm, her legs wrapped around his hips. Noreen held on tight to his other hand, and she was looking up at him as if he’d just hung the moon and the stars.
Merry hummed a bright little tune. She tugged at her father’s ear, turning his head so that she could plant a loud, smacking kiss on his cheek.
“Just look at who I found hanging around our front yard, Mam,” Noreen said, her dark eyes shining with laughter. “He says he’s hungry enough to eat a bear, tooth and claws and hair!”
Bria thrust her handkerchief with its bloody smears into her apron pocket, but not before her husband saw it. His face seemed to turn darker, harder, and his eyes grew shadowed. Bria averted her head, as though she couldn’t bear to meet those eyes.
And Emma, standing there watching them, wondered how they could bear it.
“Oh, mercy,” Bria said, trying to tuck flyaway curls back into the thick roll of hair at the nape of her neck. “You’ve gone and caught me with the wash on to boil, instead of the tea.”
“Neverrr you be minding that,” Shay McKenna said, lapsing into his stage Irish brogue. He came all the way inside, leaving the door open. He set Merry on her feet and herded the girls toward the washstand. “You lot scrub up and have a sit down, and I’ll be seeing if I can’t put me hands around a kettle without burnin’ all ten of me thumbs.”
Both the girls giggled, and he flashed a grin at them. Then his gaze went back to his wife and he smiled at her, as well, and Emma saw how his eyes burned with love and a sweet tenderness. She wondered if Geoffrey had ever looked at her like that. She thought she would give up all she had in the world to have a man look at her like that.
He passed by Emma on his way to the stove. “Good day to you, Miss Tremayne,” he said. She realized he had yet to look at her, and he didn’t do so now.
“Good afternoon, Mr. McKenna,” she said in her drawing-room voice, though she found it odd to say his name.
He was only an ordinary man; she knew that now. An immigrant fisherman with a wife and two little girls and another babe on the way. She knew him for what he was, so she couldn’t understand why her heart was beating so crazily, as if he’d come to her again from out of her own wild imaginings.
“I . . . I really ought to be leaving,” Emma said.
Bria linked arms with her, pulling her over to the table. “No, you really ought not to. You’ll come take tea with us. All of us.”
Emma would think about it often in the days to come. While playing tennis with Geoffrey on his court at the Hope Street mansion, and going with Miss Liluth on Tuesday to wait for the train to Providence. While dining alone at The Birches with only the clink of sterling silver against bone china for company . . . She would think about that hour she’d spent having tea with the McKenna family. All of the McKennas.
She sat with Bria and the girls at the table, watching him put the kettle on to boil. When he brought a loaf of brown bread to the table he stopped to rub Merry’s marigold curls. When he laid out the cups and saucers he paused to squeeze his wife’s shoulder and lean over to whisper something in her ear that made her smile. He teased Noreen about her giving some boy named Rory a bloody nose, and then gave the girl’s own nose a playful pinch as they laughed together. Emma had never known a man, never known anyone, for laughing and teasing and touching the way he did.
She wondered if Geoffrey would ever behave in such a way with her and their children; but of course he would not. It wasn’t done—to display your feelings so openly before the world. Not even your own heart was allowed to know the secrets of its deep affections and fond hopes. Its dark desires.
She tried to remember if she’d ever felt the touch of her own father’s hand in her hair. When she shut her eyes she saw only a tall man in an elegant black frock coat and top hat. To Emma, her
father’s eyes had always seemed focused on exotic distances no one else could see, on dreams no one else could share. Except . . . except for that one magical summer when he’d taught her to sail. Only then had he seemed of this world, and she had been there with him. Those rare blue days on the little racing sloop he’d had built especially for her, running before the wind. They had been happy together in those moments, the two of them. She could remember that.
father’s eyes had always seemed focused on exotic distances no one else could see, on dreams no one else could share. Except . . . except for that one magical summer when he’d taught her to sail. Only then had he seemed of this world, and she had been there with him. Those rare blue days on the little racing sloop he’d had built especially for her, running before the wind. They had been happy together in those moments, the two of them. She could remember that.
And her own father had never sent her to work in a mill.
She looked at Shay McKenna, at his scarred and battered face, at his eyes so startling in their intensity. He still looked like the dark marauder of her wild imaginings, but he was not that man. She understood that now.
This was a man who had to watch his wife die a little more with her every breath and his children go off to toil in a cotton mill, and yet he still gave to those he believed needed it more. A rebel who fought on for a land, a place of black rock and bogs and thatched-roofed hovels, that he would likely never see again. A man of violence who had once killed with his bare hands, the same hands that so tenderly touched his daughter’s hair.
This man she had come to know through Bria’s eyes, through Bria’s words:
“I was wild for the lad, and him forever with his nose in a book and the love of every other girl in the breast of his shirt.”
“It was how he earned our living back home in Ireland—with a curragh and a string of nets.”
“It’s not happy, he is, if he’s not living with his heart in his throat and the wild words always on the tip of his tongue.”
“He has fists the size of pie plates, but he’s never raised them in anger to me or the girls. Not even when he has the drop in him.”
“The dog’s leg was hopelessly caught in the rocks and Squire Varney was all for shooting it, when my Shay opens his mouth and next I know we’ve a three-legged hound taking up the warmest spot in front of our fire.”
“He could’ve forgiven God his father’s death, but not hers. I sometimes fear that when he put her in that black hole, he buried his faith in there along with her.”
Only an ordinary man.
But not to Bria.
These last days, the hours and moments of talk and sharing, and still Emma hadn’t truly understood until now. How Bria’s love for her man, her need for him, pumped like life blood through the whole of her—elemental, essential, eternal. Shay McKenna was the sun of her world. And when she spoke of him, her face blossomed like a flower.
Emma wondered what her own face looked like when she spoke of Geoffrey. But then she thought: I have never spoken of Geoffrey in this house. Not once had she talked with Bria about the man she would marry and the life they would have together and the dreams they would share, and she wondered now why this was so.
Tea splashed into the cup in front of her, releasing a pungent steam that bathed her face. Lost in her thoughts, she looked up and into Shay McKenna’s face. For the length of a breath, he smiled at her.
“Th-thank you,” she said. “I mean, for the tea,” she added, flushing.
“You are welcome,” he said. “For the tea.”
Her gaze fell away from his, down to the blue-checked napkin spread across her lap. His smile had disturbed her. She couldn’t measure its meaning or her reaction to it. It had soothed and frightened her at the same time.
Shay sat down at the table, which he’d laid out with a simple meal of brown bread, head cheese, and
chourice
—the spicy sausage the
bravas
sold from their dimly lit stores smelling of olive oil.
chourice
—the spicy sausage the
bravas
sold from their dimly lit stores smelling of olive oil.
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