The Passions of Emma (38 page)

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Authors: Penelope Williamson

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

BOOK: The Passions of Emma
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“Oh, Bria.” Emma actually managed a laugh, although it did quiver a little at the edges. “It’s just that . . .”
It’s just that, Bria thought, you are finding it harder and harder,
mo bhanacharaid
, to be near him, to be within sight and touch of him.
To be within loving distance of him, and yet unable to let yourself love him.
Bria straightened up and laid her hand on Emma’s arm. She made her eyes go all soft and pleading, although inside she felt so ill she couldn’t get the words out. It seemed such a sly thing, what she was doing, and it was hard. It was too hard.
But then Noreen, bless her, said, “Let’s please go get Da, Miss Emma.” And Merry chimed in with a mewling hum.
Emma bit her lip and looked down at the hands she had clasped together at her waist. “Well . . .”
Bria let a long trembling breath go and looped her arm through Emma’s. “That’s settled, then. Noreen, love, you can push the pram for me. Here, Merry, you take hold of my hand.” And they all walked together down the violet-bordered path of the Thames Street house, turning uptown.
It had been a week since the clambake, a week since Bria had waited for them on the beach, waited with her feet wedged in the sand, braced against the push of the wind.
It had frightened her when the wind began to gust so. She could see the sloop; she’d been watching it the whole time. But suddenly it had tilted so far over, the sails seemed to be skimming along the white-capped water.
Bria had held little Jacko so tightly in her arms he began to cry, and Merry had stood beside her, humming madly. Noreen was on the dock, jumping up and down and waving as the sloop dropped her sails and drifted toward the pilings.
“Da!” she shouted, her voice rising shrilly above the wind. “We’ve been watching you sail. Once the wind came up you went so fast! But Mam said there was no one as good a sailor as yourself.”
“And there’s not,” Bria heard him say. “Except maybe for Miss Tremayne, who has sea water for blood and the wind for a kind lover.”
Bria had watched Shay jump out and make the boat fast, had
heard the squeak of a pulley and the slap of a rope on canvas. Emma stood on deck, hanging on to the shrouds. Her cheeks were flushed, but that could have been from the wind.
Shay walked off the dock and came up to Bria and he kissed her on the mouth, kissed her hard and hungrily. “What are these for?” he said, rubbing his thumbs over her cheeks as if he would gather up all her tears for safekeeping.
“It got so windy and I was afraid. I was afraid I’d lose you both.”
She thought she’d seen something shift deep in his eyes then, but it was there and gone so fast she knew she would never be sure. “Well, you didn’t,” he said. “You haven’t.”
“No, I haven’t, have I?”
She knew him so well, knew them both so well. She had known when she sent them out alone together that nothing would happen.
And that someday everything could happen.
The gymnasium had been a Quaker meetinghouse long ago. But instead of praises sung to the Lord that Sunday afternoon, the massive cross-timbered ceiling echoed with the smack of a fist hitting leather, the slap of a jumping rope on the old puncheon floor, the clatter-clang of dropped barbells. The cavernous old meeting hall was hazy with cigar smoke and reeked of male sweat.
They found Shay working on the punching bag, his feet dancing, his shoulders bobbing and weaving, muscles flexing and bunching. His fists hammered like pistons, faster than the eye could follow, making a
tha-thumping
sound that mimicked the heartbeat of life.
“He’s not flab bellied,” Bria said.
“No,” Emma said, but she wasn’t looking at him.
Shay finished with his punching and grabbed the bag with his leather-wrapped hands to stop it from swinging. He was breathing hard and deep, the way he did sometimes, Bria thought, when they
made love. Sweat gleamed on his skin, matting his dark chest hair into swirls around his nipples and trickling in slow rivulets down his shuddering belly to disappear into the wet patch on the waistband of his britches.
“Bria, darlin’,” he said. He’d been glaring so ugly at the punching bag, as if it were an enemy he had to pummel into submission, but now his face lightened and he smiled. “What are you doing here?”
She smiled back at him, although her eyes surprised her by blurring with tears. It was just that she loved him so much, so much. “Myself, I’ve turned into a lust-crazed jezebel what’s going to ravish you. Afterward, though, we’ll all be taking you with us to the minstrels’ parade.”
“Ravish me, you do say?” He advanced on her, screwing his face into a particularly lecherous leer. “Kiss me instead.”
Bria put her hands up in front of her face and pretended to reel back in horror. “Faith, he’ll have everyone thinking I’m in love with the man.”
Shay turned to his girls instead, smothering them with sweaty hugs that had them squealing and laughing. And that was when Emma looked at him.
She looked at him for only a moment.
But in that one moment she wrote a love song with her eyes. And then Bria was the one who had to turn away.
The pain,
Dhia
, it was like sticking your hand in a fire, almost on a dare, to see if you could feel it, to see if you could bear it. But then she thought it must be hard for Emma as well. Poor Emma’s heart, to have been snared by this unasked-for love.
As for Shay—whatever he was feeling, Bria doubted she would ever come to know, not for a certainty. His deepest feelings had always lived behind the hardness that was buried inside him, the place she had never been able to reach. Sometimes he would take such care, as Emma did with him, not to look, holding his head stiff the way he did the morning after he drank too much
poitín.
But
at other times he would be all friendly like and teasing, treating her as he would one of his daughters, or a favorite sister.
He never touched her, though, not even in any innocent way.
And so Bria thought that for as long as she lived, he would bend all of his considerable will toward feeling nothing at all. But afterward . . . Oh, it was thinking of the afterward, of what might become, that always brought her such hope, and such pain.
“Hurry up, Da,” Noreen said. “We’ll be missing the parade.”
Shay rested his hand on his daughter’s head, and Bria saw that it was badly swollen. “Why don’t you go on out and wait for it, and I’ll be catching up to you soon as I’ve washed up.”
He scooped a towel off a wooden folding chair and draped it over his bare shoulders. “And a good afternoon to you, too, Miss Tremayne,” he said with a grin, then he walked off in that sauntering, lean-hipped way of his, and they all watched him go. Even Emma watched him, and it was as if her beautiful self had been turned to marble.
They went back out onto Thames Street then, for the parade was supposed to be passing by that way from the railroad depot. Already they could hear fiddle music and hornpipes and the rapid, rhythmic heel-toe tapping of Irish step dancing.
The sun beat down hot on the bay, turning it to steam, and heat shimmered in waves off the packed dirt. A man pushed a cart through the crowd, selling salted Spanish peanuts and popcorn balls, and filling the air with wonderful smells.
The parade had just come into view when Shay joined them. He was in shirtsleeves, with his coat hooked over one shoulder, but he’d put on a collar and tie in honor of it being Sunday. The ends of his hair were wet, and his cheeks shone ruddy from a fresh shave. He looked so fine when he came up beside her and wrapped his arm around her waist that Bria wanted to stop breathing, to stop the world altogether.
The parade was little more than a way for the Primrose Minstrels—who would be performing on the common during
tomorrow’s Fourth of July celebration—to show off their dancing skills. And show them off they did: tapping their way down the street with their faces shining black with burnt cork, the metal caps on their shoes beating out a rhythm to stir the blood of the Irish.
So it wasn’t long before the Irish in the crowd had joined the Irish vaudeville act, dancing to the wail of the pipes and scrape of the fiddle, and Shay tossed his coat at Bria and joined them.
He held his back straight and still, his arms close to his sides, while his feet flashed high and fast, clicking, tapping, heel and toe, heel and toe, making shoe music that was as old as Ireland herself. Noreen’s eyes fairly sparkled with delight to see him, Merry hummed and tried to do a jig of her own, and little Jacko crowed and pumped his legs in the air.
Too soon the minstrels had danced on by, and Shay fell out, laughing and breathless. They all were laughing, even Emma.
The crowd began to spill into the middle of the street, following in the minstrels’ wake. The whole town was already taking on the atmosphere of the next day’s holiday. Bristolians, it seemed, had begun celebrating Independence Day before it was even won, back in 1777, and they took pride in putting on the grandest Fourth in the country. Bria overheard many say how tomorrow’s parade would be the most spectacular show they were ever likely to see.
Somehow they found themselves strolling out into the countryside, down the Ferry Road. Shay pushed the pram, and Bria put her arm around his waist, feeling the movement of his hips as she walked beside him. She liked this New England custom of these long Sunday-afternoon walks. In Ireland, a wife and her man walked together only once—to church on the day they got married.
Sunshine beat down on their heads from a hazy sky. The air was thick and still, the few sailboats out on the bay bobbing like fishing corks.
Emma walked ahead of them with the girls on either side of her. She looked like a baker’s spun-sugar confection in a white dress with big puffy leg-of-mutton sleeves and a big, square collar of
crocheted lace. Her white straw hat was decorated with red, white, and blue plumes and long, trailing blue ribbons. Her white lace parasol freckled her back and shoulders with stipples of light and shadow.
Bria was just about to point out to Shay what a stunning picture her friend made, when he reached over to cup the back of her neck with his hand and, lightly, sweetly, caressed the lobe of her ear with his thumb. “Have I told you,” he said, “how lovely you are looking today, Bria McKenna? Like a field of blooming heather.”
Bria wondered if the man was uncanny, sensing somehow her wounded, tender heart. Or if he truly did have eyes only for her. She did feel pretty herself, in her new lilac muslin. But then her brother, Donagh, was often saying how Shay had such a gift of the blarney he could negotiate with God and get the best share.
Bria could hear Noreen’s chatter and Merry’s bright humming, and she smiled to think of how at ease her girls were with Emma now. Emma seemed to have a gift with them, a way of listening that made them feel special and chosen.
Just then Noreen grabbed Emma’s hand and pointed into the thicket of elms and birches that lined the road. “Look, Miss Emma, there’s a toadstool ring. Come along, let’s see if we can catch ourselves a leprechaun.”
“If you catch one,” Bria called out, “don’t let him go until he shows you his treasure.”
Emma had started to follow Noreen into the trees, but she turned around, one hand lifting her skirts, the other tilting back her lace-scalloped parasol to reveal her smiling face. “I fear I’m more likely to catch a bad case of poison ivy,” she said with such a sweet laugh it caught at Bria’s heart.
Emma followed the girls into the woods, bending over to watch while Noreen peered under each toadstool. Noreen kept up a bit of blarney herself on the living habits of leprechauns. Merry kept her mouth closed, as usual, but happiness curled her lips at the corners.
If you catch a leprechaun
. . . But Emma Tremayne already had herself so many treasures, what would she need with another one? It was when she remembered Emma’s money, when she remembered her position in Great Folk society, that Bria understood what wild things were her thoughts. How foolish were the dreams that lurked and trembled in her heart.
Emma marrying Shay and making him happy in the way a woman who loves a man, desperately and exclusively, can make him happy. Emma being a mother to her girls, taking them out of the mill and sending them to school, dressing them in lace and satin and finding decent, well-to-do young men for them to marry. Emma raising little Jacko in her place, raising him up to be a gentleman, with all of a gentleman’s fine ways and manners, and all of a gentleman’s advantages in the world.

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