The Passions of Emma (45 page)

Read The Passions of Emma Online

Authors: Penelope Williamson

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

BOOK: The Passions of Emma
10.13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
He jammed his hat back on his head and resumed his seat on the bottom row of the makeshift bleachers, while the batter trotted around the diamond that had been scratched into the dun-colored grass of the Bristol Common. The Philadelphia Athletics were playing the New York Mutuals in an exhibition of professional baseball, and the crowd had adopted the Mutuals as their home team. The Mutuals were losing eight runs to two.
The Athletic batter was taking his sweet time touring the bases, accompanied by hoots and birdcalls. Merry jumped up and began dancing from foot to foot, humming fiercely.
“She’s laying a fairy curse on him,” Noreen said. “So’s his—”
“Teeth and hair will fall out by morning,” Emma quickly put in. She was careful not to look Father O’Reilly’s way, but from his knowing chuckle she suspected he had a good idea of the true nature of Merry McKenna’s curses.
Emma flapped her palmetto fan so hard it lifted the brim of her
white leghorn straw hat. Although the sky was clotted with clouds as gray as pewter, it was hot. A pall hung over the common, thick with the smells of summer-scorched grass and burnt rubber from the nearby factory. The lofty elms drooped heavy in the steamy air.
A
brava
strolled past the bleachers, selling
chourice
on strings. Father O’Reilly was up and after him, taking the girls with him. He’d already treated them all to watermelon slices, roasted peanuts, buttered popcorn, and pickles on a stick. She would have to remind him that when they had hatched the plan of making this off-Saturday a special one for the girls, it hadn’t included eating their way into a bellyache.
The Mutual pitcher finally made an out, and the crowd gave him a derisive ovation. Emma spotted Judith Patterson and Grace Attwater strolling arm in arm around the edge of the outfield. She waved at them, but they didn’t seem to see her. She waited a moment and waved again. That time she was sure they saw her, but they slowly turned their backs to her and walked away.
Emma bit her lip and looked off toward the empty bandstand, blinking against a sting of tears. She should have been able to predict this moment. She had become used to the Great Folk thinking of her friendship with an Irish immigrant family as a peculiar form of Tremayne wildness, rather like her sculpting. But now, apparently, some invisible line had been crossed, and she had ventured into the realm of bad form.
Emma told herself she didn’t care, but the truth was she did. Much as she had always hated going out in society, at least she had been welcomed and accepted there. The stares she’d received had been ones of admiration, not of censure and disgust. Now only the awesome weight of her name and Mr. Geoffrey Alcott’s ring on her finger would keep her from being ostracized permanently and completely.
And lately her mother’s tolerance had been wearing thin as well. This morning, when Emma had mentioned she was taking the McKenna children to the baseball game, that haunted look had
come into Mama’s eyes, and her hand had shook so that she’d spilled coffee onto her slice of dry toast, which was all she allowed herself anymore for breakfast.
“I can’t help worrying,” Bethel had said, “how your turning those Irish waifs into your pet charity project will be received, Emma. Such a
personal
involvement on your part can hardly be the done thing.”
Emma passed her mother the tray of toast, hoping to distract her. “Did you notice, Mama, that you’ve spilled coffee on your plate? Have another—”
Bethel pushed the toast away. “You know I cannot, when every bite I eat shows itself upon my person. You have no appreciation, Emma, of the sacrifices I am making on your behalf . . .” Then her mother had gone on to enumerate those sacrifices, and the baseball game was forgotten about.
It was just as well, Emma thought, that she hadn’t mentioned an Irish Catholic priest would be rounding out the party. Yet she’d felt a shiver of apprehension even then. She wasn’t going to be able to go on living in two worlds indefinitely. Someday, someone—Mama, Geoffrey, or the likes of Judith Patterson and Grace Attwater—would make her choose. Between the Emma who dwelled in straitlaced luxury at The Birches and was the family’s only hope, and the Emma who had been Bria McKenna’s
banacharaid.
The elms sighed and dipped their heads now in the hot, damp wind. She was thinking how lonely a bandstand could look, empty on a cloudy summer’s day, when she saw Shay McKenna come walking around it, cutting across the sun-browned grass of the common.
He was dressed as if he’d just come off his dory, with his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows and no collar on his shirt. She watched him walk toward her in the loose, confident way he had. She watched him walk toward her, and her heart seemed to leap in expectation.
He touched his finger to the brim of his scally cap as he came
up to her. “Good day to you, Miss Tremayne,” he said, taking Father O’Reilly’s seat next to her on the bleachers. He waved to his daughters, who had gotten sidetracked by a group of boys trading baseball cards.
Sometimes she felt as though her skin would catch fire if only he would touch her, but of course he never touched her. She hadn’t even seen him since that evening on the beach, when she’d held him while he cried for the wife he had lost.
He caught Father O’Reilly’s eyes, over by the
chourice
man, and pointed to a red-and-white-striped tent that was selling buckets of beer. To Emma, he said, “The good father hasn’t been trying to convert you, has he?”
She gave him a shy smile and shook her head. “He’s a quiet man. When he’s not shouting at the ballplayers.”
Shay widened his eyes a little. Eyes that were the deep green of sunlight on marsh water. “Quiet, is he? I’ve known Donagh to tie a woman’s tongue in knots, but never the other way about. But then it’s a rare thing for the lad to come face to face with someone prettier than he is.”
As compliments went, it wasn’t much. Yet she felt herself blushing, as if he’d just told her she was the most beautiful creature in the universe.
A silence settled between them. Out on the diamond, the Mutuals turned a double play and the crowd cheered, but Emma wasn’t watching. Thunder rumbled in the distance; the skies had grown darker. She thought he could probably hear her heart beating.
“Were you really going to be a priest yourself ?”
“Bria told you that too, did she?” He was sitting with his elbows resting on his thighs, his hands hanging loose between his knees. He bent over and plucked a blade of grass to twirl between his fingers. “When I was a boy I loved the Mass with all its holy mysteries and ceremonies. For a time, in them, I found a meaning for my life. And then . . .” He shrugged. “I didn’t anymore.”
Then you found a meaning for your life in Bria, she thought.
And now you’ve lost her, as well. That day on the beach, when he had let her hold him while he wept, she hadn’t been able to think of what to say to him, and so she had said nothing, only held him. But now . . .
“Mr. McKenna?” He turned his head to look at her, but his face showed her nothing of what he was thinking. She hoped he could see nothing in hers. “There’s a thing I’ve been meaning to tell you for some time now, and I don’t know as how I’ll get another chance . . . I wanted to say that whatever happens to me in the rest of my life, I know I will be a different, a
better
, person from having known your wife. She taught me how to be a friend and how to have one. And how to live and love unconditionally.”
He wasn’t looking at her anymore, but she saw his throat work as he swallowed hard. He was watching Bria’s brother leave the refreshment tent with two buckets of beer in one hand and strings of
chourice
in the other. But then the priest stopped to talk to a man in a wrinkled linen suit and a straw boater.
What Emma said next she hadn’t planned on saying. It just came out before she could stop it: “Sometimes . . . sometimes I don’t think I should marry Mr. Alcott, for I doubt he and I will ever have what you and Bria had.”
A moment passed when she didn’t think he would answer her at all. “A marriage isn’t made with the proposal of it,” he finally said. “It’s a thing that’s done living one day at a time together. Glorious days like the one when you watch your wife put your firstborn babe to her breast. Or those sorrow’s own days, when you’d sooner be giving the stupid, stubborn ass of a fellow you’ve married a great clout on the ear as look at him.” He flashed her a sudden, startling smile. “And simple days, like this one, when you’re watching a baseball game together, and wondering if you’re going to get rained on before your dawdling fool of a brother-in-law makes it back with the beer.”
She smiled back at him, but she wanted to tell him that she knew
already she would never have a day like this with Geoffrey and any children they might have.
Still, perhaps he read her thoughts on her face, for he said, “Your life will be what you’ll make of it, Emma Tremayne . . . And I do believe that it will be a grand one.”
He was being kind, and kindness wasn’t what she wanted from him. And she thought, but didn’t say, that for all he loved his Bria and she loved him, Bria’s life was still what
he
had made of it.
She heard the crack of a baseball leaving the bat and then she realized that the people around them were shouting and waving their arms. She looked around and up . . . and saw the ball coming at her on a long, high arc through the air.
She didn’t have time to duck. She threw up her hands and the ball smacked right into them, stinging her lace-gloved palms something fierce, but Emma barely felt it. She was that surprised and excited, and overall pleased with herself.
“I caught it!” she exclaimed, laughing, turning to him. “Did you see, Mr. McKenna, I . . .”
He was looking at her, looking at her hard, and she saw something flash in his eyes—a sort of wild and desperate hunger. And she felt the piercing sweetness of suddenly losing her way, of being utterly and magnificently lost in that look in his eyes.
But then it began to rain, big drops that rattled on the bleachers like dried peas, and what she had seen—whatever she’d thought she had seen—was no longer there.
“Merry!” he suddenly shouted, his gaze shifting beyond her. “Bloody hell. What is she doing?”
Emma looked around. Noreen and Father O’Reilly were hurrying toward them, and Noreen was holding her hands over her head, trying to shelter it from the splattering rain. But Merry was running
away
, around back of the bandstand and toward State Street and the harbor.
Then the clouds seemed to collapse, and the rain fell in sheets and torrents, and the little girl was lost from sight.
“Merry!” Shay shouted again, and took off running after her. Emma gathered up her skirts and followed, almost slipping on the wet grass. The rain, driving in from the bay, scourged their faces as they ran. The wind sounded like sails flapping.
Merry was all the way to the Thames Street wharves when they caught up with her. She had climbed onto a pier, and for a moment Emma had the horrible fear she was going to jump into the water. The storm was whipping the bay into white-fringed waves that spewed foam onto the gray, weathered boards.
Merry went all the way to the edge of the pier, and then she stopped and turned around and seemed to be waiting for them. She was humming so hard her whole body shook with it.
Shay got to her first, scooping her up into his arms. But she began to buck and writhe, her humming now so high-pitched it was like the whine of an overturned beehive.
Noreen came running up, with Father O’Reilly on her heels, still carrying the beer and sausages forgotten in his hands. Merry reared so violently in her father’s arms, he nearly dropped her. Her humming turned into a screech.
“Nory,” Shay said, panting. Rainwater streamed down from his cap and hair into his eyes. His face was white. “God save us. Nory, what’s she saying?”
Noreen’s eyes seemed to swell and fill her face like two black wells. She was shuddering so hard her teeth rattled. “She’s . . . she’s saying the mill’s on fire, and Miss Emma has to come for us, to get us out.”
They could see the mill clearly from where they were. With its granite stone walls and gray slate roof and tall brick chimney, it looked as hulking and forbidding as a prison in the rain, but there were no flames or smoke.
“It’s not on fire,” Shay said. He tried to turn the hysterical child so she could see for herself, but she kicked and flailed her arms, and hummed. “Look, m’love, you can see from here how it’s not on fire.”
“She says Miss Emma’s got to come for us,” Noreen repeated, her voice breaking over the fear that lived always within her, just beneath the surface.
Emma held out her arms and Merry came into them, wrapping her legs around Emma’s hips, gripping her tightly, and the frantic humming slowly subsided. Emma held her close, although she staggered a little under the child’s weight. “I’ll come,” she said into the little girl’s wet and shivering neck. “I promise, I will come.”

Other books

Hot Rocks by Rawls, Randy
Julie & Kishore by Jackson, Carol
Sunset Sunrise Sun by Chanelle CleoPatra
Undercurrent by Pauline Rowson
GOG by Giovanni Papini