The Passions of Emma (47 page)

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Authors: Penelope Williamson

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

BOOK: The Passions of Emma
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Emma and Geoffrey exchanged smiles with their eyes, as they
settled into chairs beside the old woman. There had been a dearth of deaths among the Great Folk over the summer. “Grandmama,” Geoffrey had warned Emma earlier, “has been in a positive frenzy of boredom. Yesterday, she telephoned the editor of the
Phoenix
to complain about the paucity of obituaries in his newspaper.”
“They said she died of water on the brain,” Eunice Alcott was saying. “Hunh. First they refuse to print any deaths whatsoever, for days on end, and then when they do manage to scrounge one up, they lie about the cause of it. Water on the brain. How does it get there? I ask you. You can’t tell me Prue had taken to standing on her head, for I will not believe it. Not when she could barely stand on her two feet without tipping over, although that had more to do with the glasses of sherry she was always sneaking at all hours . . . but never mind that. No, the truth is, she died of a broken heart.”
“I didn’t know Mrs. Dupres had suffered a tragedy lately,” Emma said.
The old woman leaned over to whisper in Emma’s ear, but since she was deaf, everyone on the grounds of the Hope Street mansion heard her. “Mr. Dupres had a torrid fling with a vaudeville floozy but a month before they were married.”
“Grandmama . . .” Geoffrey sighed. “That particular scandal occurred over sixty years ago. And the man more than redeemed himself by going on to father six children and twenty-seven grandchildren.”
Mrs. Alcott rapped Emma’s arm with her ivory fan. “That is what comes when one marries beneath one—heartbreak and an early death.”
“But I didn’t know Mr. Dupres was—”
“He was
French
, my dear. That tells one quite everything, does it not? We all warned Prudence she would be sorry one day, and now see if she isn’t. Dead in the paper of a broken heart.” She sighed and narrowed her eyes to stare at the linden trees, which were whispering sweetly in the breeze. “Didn’t I say to you, Geoffrey, that the sun would shine today?”
“You told me it would rain.”
Mrs. Alcott patted Emma with her fan again and leaned in to her to whisper loudly, “He always sees rain, even when there’s not a cloud in the sky. Such a regrettable tendency toward pessimism. I can’t imagine how he comes by it—” She cut herself off, her eyes narrowing on the marble-paved lane, her chin jutting. “How dare he! How dare he use that poor child to draw attention to himself ?”
Emma and Geoffrey turned to see who was daring what, and Geoffrey sucked in a sharp breath of shock and surprise.
“Maddie!” Emma cried, and she was up and running down the lane shaded by linden trees, running so hard she had to lift her skirts above her ankles, and not caring that the whole of Great Folk society was there to see her bad form. Running toward her sister, who was being pushed in her chair by Stuart Alcott.
Maddie wore a white nainsook dress sprigged with tiny forget-me-nots, and she looked so pretty and happy, her eyes bright, her cheeks flushed, her mouth smiling. “I have come, Emma,” she said, her voice curling up on the corners like rose petals.
Emma stumbled to a stop in front of her, and she was laughing and crying, both at once. “So I see. Oh, Maddie, so I see.”
Stu leaned, arms braced straight out, on the handgrips of her chair. He was more than flushed; he was sweating. His tie was awry, and the starch in his shirt had wilted. Brandy fumes clung to him like oily smoke.
“Well, Maddie child,” he drawled. “You have come, and you are here, and now pray will you excuse me? I believe I hear a champagne cocktail calling my name.”
Maddie watched him saunter away, shadows already dulling the excited joy in her eyes. She clenched her hands so tightly in her lap the knuckles turned the color of old wax.
Emma reached down and took one of those hands in hers. “Maddie . . .”
“Do you think Mama will be terribly angry?” Maddie said in a small voice.
“She’ll never let on while in company, if she is. And I’ll help you to weather the storm later.”
Emma let go of her sister’s hand and began to push the chair toward the refreshment tent, where most of the party was gathered. She looked for their mother but didn’t see her. She remembered noticing her earlier, with Uncle Stanton and Mrs. Norton, strolling around to the south side of the house, where lay the pride of the Alcott gardens—its rose beds of thirty-seven varieties. Emma supposed she was still there, hoped she was still there. For Maddie was going to find this initial plunge into Great Folk societal waters difficult enough without trying to do it under Mama’s deep blue frown.
“Oh!” Maddie exclaimed softly as the wheels of her chair bounced and rattled over a crack in the marble flagstones. “I’m beginning to understand now why you dread these things so. It’s as if all my thoughts have suddenly been scattered to the winds like a dandelion puff, and I feel sure that at any moment I’m going to do or say the wrong thing.”
“Why don’t you leave that to me,” Emma said a little too brightly. “I’ve become quite the expert lately at doing and saying the wrong things.”
The conversational chatter and laughter hushed as they drew closer to the tent.
“They are all staring, Emma,” Maddie said. Her voice sounded high and tight, like a clock too tightly wound.
“They are doing no such thing.”
“No, it’s worse than that. They look, then they look away and pretend they haven’t just seen what they did see.”
“It’s only because they’ve grown unused to seeing you away from The Birches,” Emma said. “There’s bound to be an initial awkwardness, but things will ease with time.”
“If Mama allows me another time.”
Emma stopped the chair and leaned over her sister’s shoulder to
take her hand again, gripping it hard. “Maddie, I am so glad you came. I am so
proud
of you for coming.”
Maddie twisted her head around to look up at her, her eyes glittering with tears barely held back. “Are you, Emma? Are you truly?”
“Truly.”
Maddie pulled her hand free and clasped the armrest of her chair. Emma could see her sister’s pulse beating high and hard in the veins of her neck. Two taut white lines bracketed her mouth.
“Then would you push me over there beneath that willow and go ask Stu to bring me a glass of punch? Go, please,” she said as Emma hesitated. “I can be by myself for a few minutes, and besides, I see your dear Geoffrey wending his way here to save me from being an utter wallflower.”
Still, Emma waited until Geoffrey had joined them before she slipped away. She could trust Geoffrey to take care of her sister. His loyalty and his sensibilities toward doing the right thing had always been as unassailable as his gentlemanly manners.
The same could hardly be said of Geoffrey’s brother, Emma thought. She found him standing before the fountain, scowling at the water-spewing cupids as if they offered him some insult. At the sound of her step on the stones, he turned to face her, swaying a little. He held an empty champagne glass in his hand.
“Ah, Emma. Come to fetch me already, have you? Is she feeling neglected? Scrutinized? Criticized? Demoralized? I did warn her, honest and truly I did. I reminded her of how we Great Folk have developed to a high art the ignoring of the unusual and the unpleasant.”
She looked at Stuart Alcott’s face. He was still handsome in spite of the puffy flesh around the bloodshot eyes and the slack, drunken mouth. “Stu, if you are going to be like this, then why did you—?”
“Why did I what? Bring her here? Because she begged it of me, and I have somewhat of a penchant for lost causes, being one
myself.” He shrugged and staggered, nearly landing in the fountain. “On the proverbial other hand, if you are trying to ascertain whether my general intentions toward your sister are honorable ones, I’ll tell you straight out: I have no intentions. I’m a gambler, a drunkard, and a womanizer of considerable repute, and those are the vices I’ll admit to in mixed company. And my lack of intentions includes inflicting myself on any woman for longer than a night. Our Maddie, being virginal and an old friend, shall be spared even that.”
He started to walk away from her, but she grabbed his arm. He pulled free, but she had touched him long enough to feel the hard trembling going on inside him. “You can’t come home for a summer, turn her life upside down, and then have nothing more to do with her.”
“Can’t I?” He threw the champagne glass at a cupid’s head. He simply lobbed it as though he were tossing a tennis ball, but it shattered nonetheless, sparkling like dewdrops in the sun. “Indeed, I rather think that having nothing more to do with her is the greatest act of kindness I can show to Miss Madeleine Tremayne.”
“Stu, please,” Emma said. “Please. Don’t hurt her.”
He turned and stared at her a moment, then he brushed the back of his hand against her cheek. “I can’t help it, child.
Life
hurts.”
His gaze lifted and focused on something beyond her, and although Emma didn’t turn around she knew he was seeing her sister. And that the sight of Maddie—sitting in her chair beneath the shade of the linden trees—hurt him in some terrible and fundamental way.
He walked past her without another word, and this time Emma let him go.
What happens when you live solely for a moment that comes and goes, and you find afterward that nothing has changed?
Summer oozed, hot and sticky, into September. Emma continued to keep her promise. And every time she opened the door to the Thames Street house, her heart would catch a little in expectation that she would see Bria standing at the stove. But she never did.
She began to sculpt again, a joy and an agony that she had put aside during those final weeks of Bria’s life. She spent hours out in the old orangery, searching for the artery that led from her heart to her hands, but she felt as though she was using a dull knife to do it with. She would cut herself, but she wouldn’t bleed, and most of what she created out of the cold, wet clay, she threw away.
One day, along with the single white rose that still came every morning, Geoffrey sent her a letter from Maine. He told her in meticulous detail how the work on the foundry was progressing. At the end of it he wrote: “As I sit this evening in this shabby, soulless parlor of my boardinghouse (I shall not give it the dignity of naming it a drawing room) and write to you—now is when my arms ache most to hold you, and I long for the time when I can name
you
most pridefully and earnestly: My Wife.”
It was the closest he’d ever come to telling her he loved her. She knew his letter should please her, but instead she felt weighted with guilt. She had promised to marry him, she was letting him fall in love with her, and all the while she loved someone else. Someone she couldn’t have.
In that place in the heart where secrets are kept, where you know right from wrong, good from evil, and honor from dishonor, she knew she had to end it. One thing or the other had to end.
And then one Tuesday afternoon, as she turned up the path of the Thames Street house, she saw that the violets she and Bria had planted had died.
She knelt and began to pick them, one by one, as if she could make a bouquet of them, only they were dead. She knew they were dead, yet she went on picking them, frantically, tearing them up by
the roots now, throwing them into her lap, and raining dirt all over herself.
Her hands stilled, and she shut her eyes. A single tear fell onto the dry and faded purple petals in her lap, followed by another tear and then another, and then she had to press her hands hard to her face to stifle the noise of her weeping.
When it was over, she threw back her head and stared with aching eyes up into a sky of wind-tossed clouds, and she felt as though she’d torn loose from the earth and was flying around up there, lonely and sad and scared.
Then she realized she must be making a spectacle of herself, sitting there at the bottom of the stoop, covered with dirt and dead violets, within sight and sound of Thames Street. So she got up and went into the house, but no one was there, and it was a while yet before the shift whistle would blow.
She stirred up a pitcher of effervescent lemon to go with the jelly roll she’d brought for the girls. She went to little Jacko’s cradle, empty now, for he was over at Mrs. Hale’s. She picked up his blanket and rubbed it against her cheek, breathing in his baby smell. But then she put the blanket back in the cradle, for it triggered an aching, hollow yearning in her for things she didn’t understand.

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