The Passions of Emma (3 page)
“Marry me, Emma.”
She thought her heart might have stopped. And when it started up again, it beat in unsteady lurches. She had been waiting for months for this moment, and now that it was here she didn’t know what to do with it.
She risked a look up at him.
His eyes were the clear gray of pond ice, his hair the pale brown of sun-steeped tea. He was considered a handsome man by all who knew him. She had known him all her life, and she had no idea at all whether she loved him or not.
“I didn’t mean to go and blurt it out like that,” he said.
“You wish to take it back?”
“No!” He flashed a rueful smile. He wasn’t as handsome when he smiled, for he had long, slightly protruding teeth. Yet, Emma had always liked his smile best of all. It had a touch of sweet whimsicality about it that made her feel warm inside, as though they shared something precious.
“I’m willing to shout it from the rooftops if I must,” he said. “Although I’d just as soon not have the whole world listening for your answer—in case it should be a refusal.”
But he didn’t really expect her to turn him down; she could tell by the way he was looking at her, with possessiveness and a bright expectancy, and something else. A raw and powerful thing akin to hunger that both frightened and excited her.
She wondered if he was going to say he loved her. It was probably numbered among the rules that so carefully governed their lives—that moment when he could first say the words. Perhaps on their wedding night he would be allowed to proclaim his devotion. She hoped so, for it often seemed in the world in which she lived that after one or two years of marriage there was little devotion left to proclaim.
“Emma,” he said again, impatient now. She couldn’t look at him anymore but she felt his gaze hard on her, on her mouth, as if he could will the words into being. He was known for getting what he wanted, was Geoffrey Alcott, and apparently he wanted her.
“I suppose I should have properly requested permission from your father first, but given as how he isn’t here . . . and we’ve known each other all our lives, and you’re already twenty-two, and it’s 1890, after all, and you’re such a modern girl, I thought . . .”
Emma lowered her head to hide her smile. Geoffrey Alcott was actually babbling. Did he really think of her as a modern girl? And she
was
twenty-two, a veritable old maid. How Mama would shudder to hear those sentiments spoken aloud.
was
twenty-two, a veritable old maid. How Mama would shudder to hear those sentiments spoken aloud.
“Emma, you have me in torment, waiting for your answer,” he said, but then he laughed so she would know he teased. Geoffrey never allowed himself to be in torment over anything.
Yet, when he reached up and stroked her lips once with the pad of his thumb, she felt breathless of a sudden, the way she got when she was soaring over fences. Perhaps she did love him after all.
“Yes,” she said, surprised at how her voice sounded, such a breakable thing. “I will marry you, Geoffrey Alcott.”
She looked up at him at last and she smiled, feeling happy and shy. She thought he might kiss her, and she waited for it, still a little breathless, so that she jumped when he took her hand.
Slowly, one by one, he opened the three dainty jet buttons of her riding glove. He brought her hand up to his mouth and pressed his lips to the inside of her wrist, where the blue veins pulsed hard and fast beneath her skin.
The fox had scrambled up the lightning-scarred trunk of a downed cedar tree. He was off the ground, just out of the dogs’ reach, but he was trapped now. The hounds surged and leaped at him, their teeth
biting at the air. They hadn’t been fed that day, and their hunger gave their baying a savage edge.
biting at the air. They hadn’t been fed that day, and their hunger gave their baying a savage edge.
“Let the dogs have at ’im!” Aloysius Carter bellowed to his whipper-in. “I said, let the dogs have at him, damn your dirty bog-trotting Irish hide!”
But the Irishman, Emma saw, wasn’t listening. Cracking his whip above his head, he had ridden into the middle of the pack and was trying to force the hounds back, away from the downed tree. The dogs, excited though they were, hungry though they were, obeyed—until the fox’s claws slipped on the mist-wet wood of the rotting log.
For an instant he hung suspended in the air, then he fell into the middle of twenty snarling, snapping jaws.
The fox gave one great cry as the first set of teeth fastened onto his throat. For a moment, all that could be seen of him was the white tip of his tail flailing at the air, then all of him was smothered by the dogs.
The horn blew, one long mournful note, sounding the mort.
Emma had looked away as soon as the fox fell, but she could still hear her cousin Aloysius shouting at the dogs now to, “Tear at ’im, boys! Kill him!”
She and Geoffrey sat side by side on their blowing horses. He was watching the fox die, but she couldn’t tell by his face how he felt about it.
“Geoffrey? Don’t you sometimes hope the fox would get away?”
He looked at her as if she’d just been prattling at him in Chinese. “What?”
“The fox. I wanted him to get away.”
A tender look lightened his face. He leaned over and patted the leg-of-mutton sleeve of her riding habit. “My poor darling,” he said. “Such a soft little heart you have.”
Emma’s eyes ached, as if she were about to cry. She slipped her arm out from beneath his touch and backed her horse away from his, although she didn’t know why. Geoffrey was no more or less responsible for the fox’s death than she was.
Geoffrey saw his brother and hailed him over. “Stu! Miss Tremayne has just done me the honor of agreeing to become my wife.”
Stu’s laugh had a sharp sound to it. “On a fox hunt? Good gad, Geoff—such marvelous spontaneity. I didn’t think you had it in you.”
She was being careful not to look at him anymore, at that man, but now he was watching her. She could feel it, just the way she could feel the pulse beating hard at the base of her throat.
“Who is that man?” she blurted out.
“Who?” Geoffrey twisted around in his saddle. “Him? The whipper-in?” he said, as if surprised that she had noticed a servant. They were invisible, usually; they didn’t even have names.
Geoffrey tried to stare the man down, but he stared back. At her.
“Apparently,” Geoffrey said with a curl to his lip, “he’s a stableboy who seems to be using the day to get above himself. I’ll have a word with him. He has no right to look at you.”
It was an absurd thing to say, Emma thought, for the man had a right to look anywhere he wanted. And what’s more, she was the one who had been looking at him. Yet she said nothing, for she hoped Geoffrey would speak to him. She wanted that man . . . she wasn’t sure what she wanted. For him not to be there for her to look at, she supposed.
Stuart Alcott rode up to her. From one elegantly gloved fist swung the fox’s tail—a wet, matted mess of bloody red fur. It was no longer beautiful at all.
“The belle of the day deserves the brush, wouldn’t you say?” he announced loud enough for all to hear, and there was a hint of meanness in his smile.
There was more than a hint of crowing in Geoffrey’s answering smile. “She deserves the world.”
“And instead she gets you,” Stu said.
But Geoffrey only laughed and took the brush from his brother’s outstretched hand.
“Geoffrey, I don’t want it,” she said.
But her betrothed was already draping the bloody fox tail over the pommel of Emma Tremayne’s saddle.
A woman waited for them back at the gate to Hope Farm. She had a dead child in her arms.
A whale’s giant jawbone had stood sentinel by the gate for over a century, put there by a long-ago Tremayne sea captain. The jawbone had weathered to the pale gray of driftwood, and the woman seemed to hover before it like a burning bush. A mass of long, flaming red hair obscured her face, and she was enveloped in a pumpkin-colored coat that looked plucked out of the dustbin. Shabby and frayed at the hem and much too big for her.
The woman was small and frail and she staggered beneath the weight in her arms. There was no doubt the child was dead, for he was
mangled.
His arm had been torn from its socket so violently the shoulder bone showed white through the bleeding flesh. His head gaped open and bloody where his hair had been.
mangled.
His arm had been torn from its socket so violently the shoulder bone showed white through the bleeding flesh. His head gaped open and bloody where his hair had been.
The woman’s dark, haunted gaze went from one Alcott brother to the other. “And which one of you, then, is the fine, fair gentleman who owns the Thames Street mill?”
“Hell’s fire, don’t look at me,” Stu drawled into the raw silence that had followed the woman’s words. He cocked a thumb at his brother. “I only spend the money. He’s the one who makes it.”
A few of the men actually laughed. Although their laughter cut off abruptly when the woman took a single, lurching step toward them.
“Murderers!” she screamed. “All of you are wicked murderers!” Her wild gaze snapped over to Geoffrey Alcott. “But it’s you especially I’ve come here to see.”
Geoffrey blanched a little, but then he bowed his head as if acknowledging a parlor introduction. “At your service, madam.”
She tried to lift the child’s body up to Geoffrey as if presenting it
to him as a gift. For a moment it seemed she would fall over backward under the weight of it.
to him as a gift. For a moment it seemed she would fall over backward under the weight of it.
Tears poured in steady streams from her dark eyes, but now her words were gentle and lilting, as if she were crooning a lullaby. “He fell into one of your ring spinners. Slipped and went flying, he did, right into the spinner, while hurrying with his bobbins like the wee good lad that he was. I thought you’d want to see what your great black monster of a machine did to him afore we put him in the ground.”
Emma couldn’t look at the dead child, but she couldn’t look away either. Her gaze fastened onto a thin bare foot that was black with dirt and grease.
“It took his arm, did the spinner. And ripped the pretty yellow curls right off his head. Scalped him, it did, like one of your red Indians.”
Geoffrey cleared his throat. “I deeply regret your loss, madam,” he said, and Emma noticed that his voice had taken on that gentling tone he often used with her. “But I must remind you that when you sent your boy to work in the mill, you put your mark on a document agreeing to make no claim for any damages or injuries that might result from his own inexperience and carelessness.”
A ragged sob burst out the woman’s throat. “
Aaugh
, carelessness, you say. And was it carelessness that made his bare feet slip on the greasy floor that’s doubtless never seen broom or mop in all the years you’ve owned it? Was it careless of him to be carting your bobbins back and forth for hours at a stretch and with nary a rest nor hope of one, ’til his poor legs got so wore out they couldn’t hold him up no longer? Maybe it was careless of him to slave all his darlin’ life for a pittance and then die so’s to make you rich Great Folk all the richer.”
Aaugh
, carelessness, you say. And was it carelessness that made his bare feet slip on the greasy floor that’s doubtless never seen broom or mop in all the years you’ve owned it? Was it careless of him to be carting your bobbins back and forth for hours at a stretch and with nary a rest nor hope of one, ’til his poor legs got so wore out they couldn’t hold him up no longer? Maybe it was careless of him to slave all his darlin’ life for a pittance and then die so’s to make you rich Great Folk all the richer.”
To Emma’s horror, the woman’s gaze suddenly shifted onto her. “
A mhuire
. And would you look at your fine lady sitting up there on her fancy horse. Wearing her fine clothes woven of such a misery as the deaths of poor wee children, and her not caring a jot for it.”
A mhuire
. And would you look at your fine lady sitting up there on her fancy horse. Wearing her fine clothes woven of such a misery as the deaths of poor wee children, and her not caring a jot for it.”
The woman’s eyes, her whole face, bled pain. Emma’s head bowed
before her fierce gaze. She looked down . . . and saw blood dripping from the fox tail’s gory stump onto the polished black toe of her riding boot.
before her fierce gaze. She looked down . . . and saw blood dripping from the fox tail’s gory stump onto the polished black toe of her riding boot.
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