The Passions of Emma (51 page)

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Authors: Penelope Williamson

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

BOOK: The Passions of Emma
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She turned the equipage over to a groom and then stood alone
in the drive, looking back to the big scrolled gates. The wrought-iron bars cast deep blue and purple shadows over the lawn. This summer, wild rose bushes had suddenly grown up on the bay side of the gates. And now, in that evening’s warm wind, their white petals were falling silently to the grass like pearl teardrops.
She thought,
I have been with my lover.
And it made her smile to think this. But when she turned her face toward the bay, and the wind stroked her like her lover’s fingers, she found that her cheeks were wet with tears.
She turned and walked up the stairs, across the wide piazza, and through the coffered ebony doors, walked carefully as if treading on ice.
Carrews, their butler, appeared before her in his silent, unobtrusive way as she was about to go up the stairs. “They are awaiting you in the front drawing room, Miss Emma,” he said.
She thought she was probably staring at him strangely. She felt strange, dazed and disoriented, as if she’d suddenly been plucked up and then set down again and in a place she’d never been before. “But there were to be no guests at dinner tonight,” she finally said.
Carrews tucked in his chin and lowered his eyebrows, a gesture he made when the conventions were not being followed to his satisfaction. “I am under the impression that there is only Mr. Alcott present at the moment, and he is not dressed for dinner.”
It was indeed Geoffrey’s soft, flat voice that she heard as she approached the damask-swagged doors to the drawing room. They were slightly ajar, and for a moment she stood hidden by the heavy green portieres, looking in on her mother and the man she had promised to marry.
They were sitting in the ribbon-backed Chippendale chairs. The antique Chinese rosewood chest supported an elaborate silver George II coffeepot, freshly brewed, Emma knew, for its spout was steaming. They were drinking out of the Sèvres, which meant that Mama had felt the occasion important enough to warrant the best, even if Geoffrey for once wasn’t dressed for it.
Indeed, his white linen suit was, incredibly for him, smudged with soot. He sat with his straw boater balanced on his knee, and its brim was bent up on one side, as if he’d crushed it with his fist.
He had been up in Maine when the fire happened, and it would have taken him this while to get here. He must, she thought, have just come from the mill, which had been badly damaged by the smoke and flames. But she knew, for Mama had told her, that the premises, the machinery, had all been insured. Mama—fearing the social embarrassment of her daughter’s fiancé suddenly going bankrupt—had already had their banker-cousin investigate.
Yet it seemed strange to see him, Geoffrey Alcott, her intended, here in the drawing room. To find that life should be going on in its old way when she herself had changed so much. When beneath the white lawn and lace of her dress bodice, beneath her jersey webbed corset and her French chemise with its embroidered tucking . . . beneath all the accoutrements that went with being Miss Emma Tremayne was a red mark on the slope of her right breast put there by Shay McKenna’s mouth.
To find life going on in its old way when she was still wet between her legs where he had been. When she could smell him on herself.
She must have made some sound just then, for Geoffrey looked up and saw her. He didn’t leap to his feet and rush to meet her, for that would have been inappropriate behavior, even for a man who hadn’t seen his intended bride in over two weeks. Rather, he rose in a gentlemanly fashion and came forward to take her hands and lead her into the room.
“Emma, darling,” he said. “I hastened here as soon as I heard. You weren’t hurt, were you? Tell me you’re all right.”
She stumbled a little so that he had to support her with a hand beneath her elbow. She looked up at him, feeling dazed and dizzy again, and then she realized he was talking about the fire. “No, I . . . I only burned my hand a little. A fireman came in right after me and he carried me out. Everyone got out.”
He led her over to a medallion-backed, brocade sofa. He sat on it with her, keeping her hand. She looked down and saw that one of the pearl buttons on her glove was missing. She could feel her pulse beating hard and fast on the wrist that Shay McKenna had kissed and kissed and kissed.
And she felt her mother’s deep blue frown on her. It was the talk about the fire. Her “act of bravery” had been written about in the
Bristol Phoenix
, and that wasn’t at all the done thing. A lady’s name should appear in the newspapers only twice in her life: upon her marriage and upon her death.
“Apparently some bobbin boys in the mule room were dousing bugs with oil and setting them alight—that’s how the fire got started,” Geoffrey was saying. “I just don’t understand how you came to be there.”
Emma’s hand trembled in his. She tried to pull it free, but he tightened his grip, just enough to keep it, and so she surrendered. “I was passing and I saw the smoke, and I remembered having seen the keys in Mr. Stipple’s office,” she said. It was what she told everyone. She hated to think what they said about her. Her act of bravery. All she’d thought about, all she’d wanted, was to get Bria’s daughters out.
“At least no harm was done,” Geoffrey said.
“No harm done.” Emma began to shake inside herself, deep, deep inside; she shook so hard it made her voice tremble. “Will you tell me just one thing, Geoffrey? That door was the only way out of the spinning room. Why was it kept locked?”
His mouth tightened at the corners, and a muscle twitched beneath his right eye. “The spinners, especially the young girls—they were using that door to sneak out early before the end of their shifts.”
Emma laughed. She laughed because if she hadn’t laughed she would have screamed. But her laughter was loud and laced with hysteria, even she could hear it.
Her mother set down her coffee cup with a sharp click that
seemed to disturb the genteel ambiance in the room more than Emma’s laughter had. “I declare the child
would
insist on going out and about in the middle of the day in this dreadful weather. I don’t ever remember it being so hot this late in September before. I fear, Mr. Alcott, that your dearest Emma is suffering from a touch of the heat stroke.” She turned to Emma, her smile brittling at the edges. The shadows that had haunted her eyes all summer were there again. “Perhaps you ought to go up and lie down for a bit before dinner.”
Emma lowered her head, hiding her own eyes. “Yes, Mama,” she said. She got to her feet, gathering up her skirts.
“Emma, wait . . .” Geoffrey reached for her hand again and stood up with her. “I fear I must have seemed callous to you just now. Of course I care about those women and children and what could have happened to them. There will be reforms, I promise you. Indeed, the superintendent has already been dismissed because of his unavailability during the crisis.”
Geoffrey’s face as he looked back at her was tender, solicitous. But his gray eyes were like a flat pond in which she saw only the sky and her own face reflected back at her. She had given up believing she would ever come to understand him, to know him, and she had convinced herself that not only was it unnecessary for a Great Folk wife to know or understand or even love her husband—it just wasn’t done.
So she wasn’t angry with him so much as disappointed. She now understood fully that from the day of the fox hunt, when he had asked her to be his wife, he had been destined to disappoint her. It was a startling thought. That the things that were wrong between them could be his fault as well as hers.
“I really am feeling unwell, Geoffrey,” she said.
“Yes, of course you are.” He patted her hand. “The strain, the stress . . . You have such a brave and generous heart, my dear. And there is this dreadful heat.”
He walked her to the drawing-room doors, where he kissed her
cheek before letting her go. Emma went up and lay down on her bed as if she truly had suffered a heat stroke—and perhaps she had.
She brought her knees up and wrapped her arms around her legs, hugging herself. She closed her eyes and pressed her face hard into the bones of her drawn-up knees, making herself into a tight ball. But inside, Emma’s heart was beating wild and fast and scared. Like a racing sloop sailing on a broad reach across an ocean with no shore in sight, or hope or promise of one.
Sailing into a world of infinite possibilities.
T
he stars paled and then vanished, and although the sun had not yet risen, it was a new day.
Shay McKenna was making a sweet time of the early morning, getting the dory ready for a day on the bay. He’d filled the bait buckets, and a pot of freshly brewed coffee was in the little galley below.
He’d just bow-lined the starboard sheet to the jib, and was bent over, reaching for the mooring line to cast off, when he heard the dock creak, felt it rock. And a pair of elegant, high-button tan kid shoes appeared before him on the gray weathered boards.
“Miss Tremayne,” he said, and sighed. “Would it be troubling you too much to tell me what in bloody hell you’re doing here?”
She took a step forward and looked down on him from under the brim of another adorable little hat. This one was of dark blue straw trimmed with a heron feather that pointed jauntily toward the heavens. “I’ve come to spend the day with you.”
“
Dhia
. The day, she says.” He looked up and down the beach, but only the fish hawks and gulls were there to see them. For the moment. “What are you thinking, child?”
Her chin came up a bit and her eyes narrowed. “Don’t call me a child.”
He gave her the look he gave Noreen when she was being
difficult. “And I suppose your little black carriage is parked outside my house this time of the morn’ for all the world to see and know that Miss Emma Tremayne has taken herself an Irish lover?”
Her chin went up another notch. “Of course not. I walked.”
“Glory. And I suppose you did your walking right down the middle of Hope Street, too.”
He held out his hand to her, though, so that she could climb aboard before anyone did see her standing there bold as you please on his dock, and with the sun not yet up. His was a big, shallow draft boat, fitted out with a trawl coiled in two tubs, lobster traps, and some handlines and bait for rock cod and haddock. He swabbed it down at the end of every day, but it still stank of fish, and it was hardly in the same universe as her little racing sloop.
The boat was rocking in the tide, but she stood on the deck with that athletic grace she’d always shown at sea. His hand came to rest on the small of her back and lingered there a moment. He put his lips close to her ear, just so he could have the pleasure of smelling her hair.
“Maybe you should be staying below until we’re out of the harbor,” he said.
She turned her head so that she could have the pleasure of feeling his lips brush her cheekbone. Then she smiled at him with her eyes and disappeared down the companionway. And well she should be looking pleased with herself, he thought, since she’d just gotten her own bloody dangerous way.
On a September morning, Bristol harbor could be as flat as a pond. Shay hoisted the sails, but they drifted for a while, until the canvas finally caught the wind.
The sun came up fiery, painting red slashes over seas of nickel. Shay was laboring with the jib, which was luffing badly, when she came up from below, wearing his pea coat and slouch hat—Miss Emma Tremayne’s version of a disguise, he supposed. Hunh. And maybe on some other planet there might be a pair of eyes
mistaking her for a Bristol fisherman. The essence of what it meant to be a lady, born and bred, clung to her like a perfumed cloud.
She looked around, getting her bearings, checking to see what tack they were on, and then she swung around to him, and he saw something much like real despair on her face.
“Don’t take me home,” she said.
He frowned at her, since that’s exactly what he’d been about to do—sail right over to Poppasquash Point and put her ashore, where she belonged.
Except . . . except he kept feeling this sweet, throat-aching joy to be having her with him.
He didn’t say anything. But he let out the mainsheet, setting the boat on a broad reach toward the middle of Narragansett Bay.
She took a seat in the cockpit out of the way and turned her face to the wind. He wasn’t used to having company on the dory with him, but she didn’t seem to mind his silence, and she answered it with a stillness of her own. The world filled with the gentle rush of the morning wind over the sails and the laughing spill of the water over the bow.
The sun was full up in all its glory when she said his name. And the way she said it, as if the edges were broken, made him look around at her. She sat like a child with her feet tucked under her and her arms wrapped around her knees. Her cheeks were flushed, and her mouth had that bruised look.
“Shay? When are we going to lie with each other again?”
He breathed a flat, aching laugh. “It’s terribly brave you’re getting now with your words, Emma darlin’.”

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