The Passions of Emma (53 page)
“And what of the promise you made to your Mr. Alcott? What of your duty to—”
She shook her head, and her mouth brushed across his hand again, and yet again. “I know what duty is. I’ve lived with duty all my life.” She took his hand and began to lower it down the length
of her body, down her throat, and over her breasts and the swell of her belly. “Duty is all those endless things you have to do and keep on doing forever and ever, even when you don’t want to do them anymore. Even when you can no longer bear doing them.”
of her body, down her throat, and over her breasts and the swell of her belly. “Duty is all those endless things you have to do and keep on doing forever and ever, even when you don’t want to do them anymore. Even when you can no longer bear doing them.”
She put his hand in the warm, dark place between her thighs. “Set me free of it, Shay. Please set me free.”
He wanted to say, I started out not daring to hope for anything, and now here I am hoping for it all.
“I can’t be doing that for you, Emma Tremayne,” he said instead, “because I’ll always be a poor lad from Gortadoo. And I’ll always love Bria.”
She leaned in to him and brushed her lips across his cheek in a sigh of a kiss, as tender and ethereal as a rose petal falling to the grass. “I know that. It’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’ll always love you.”
She loved him.
She loved him while she was calling on the Carter sisters, sipping tea and talking of the weather. She loved him while she played chess with Maddie and looked over couture plates with Mama. She went to the Sunday service at Saint Michael’s and sat in the turkey-red pew, wearing beige this time, and she loved him. She took a breath, and felt herself loving him.
A fir standing in a splash of sunlight would remind her of his eyes. The grate of a saw pulling through wood would cut through her like his voice. The deep, rich gurgle of seawater spilling over the bow of her boat would become his laugh.
It is a kind of madness, she thought, what I feel for him. A love madness. She would tell herself she wouldn’t think of him for a while, she wouldn’t remember him for a while.
And then she would do all those things, endlessly.
She wasn’t going to let him go, anyway, not until the world came
to an end, and then she waited with her heart in her throat, beating like a wild thing in her throat, for the world to do just that. To end.
to an end, and then she waited with her heart in her throat, beating like a wild thing in her throat, for the world to do just that. To end.
Every day she would wake to see a perfect white rose sitting on her dressing table. I must tell him, she thought. As soon as he comes home, I must tell him. She tried out words in her head. Geoffrey, you are a dear friend, but I have found that we can’t be anything more to each other than friends. Geoffrey, I can’t be the wife you deserve and so I am setting you free. Geoffrey, I love another.
I have taken a lover and, oh, by the by, he is a poor lad from Gortadoo.
So many words she could choose to say to him, but she’d never been good with words, and she couldn’t imagine saying those things to him without imagining the hurt in his eyes.
She would walk through The Birches, from room to room, looking at her reflection in gilt-framed mirrors and pier glasses, rubbing her hands over the backs of Chippendale chairs and along ormolu-studded bureaus. She held a sterling silver fork in her hand and rested her cheek on a satin pillowcase, and she thought, I can live without all this.
But then she would look at her mother, sitting at the breakfast table and having only black coffee of a morning anymore. Mama, getting thinner and thinner, her heart anxiously set on the return of the husband who would not be coming if there was no wedding.
And one day she found Maddie in the library with her eyes staring wild and unblinking, lost in that dreamworld that seemed more and more lately to have a claim on her soul. Stuart Alcott had left Bristol again the day after the garden party, and Maddie hadn’t ventured out of The Birches since. This is what comes, Emma thought, of loving unwisely. This is what they always say will come. But what if this is still what you want?
She hadn’t lain with him since that last time in the fox meadow. She told herself he had his fish to catch, and she knew that to
sneak off to be with him on his dory was a foolhardy thing she could never do again. And she had her Great Folk duties to perform, her appearances to keep up at tennis parties and whist games and charity cake sales. Only once, when she visited the girls and little Jacko at the Thames Street house, was he there.
sneak off to be with him on his dory was a foolhardy thing she could never do again. And she had her Great Folk duties to perform, her appearances to keep up at tennis parties and whist games and charity cake sales. Only once, when she visited the girls and little Jacko at the Thames Street house, was he there.
That evening they made a family. They ate
colcannon
and soda bread for supper, sitting at the table with its brown, well-scrubbed oilcloth. She could almost make herself feel that she had walked into that kitchen with its faded bird-of-paradise wallpaper and taken Bria’s place, there at the stove, with the teakettle in her hand.
colcannon
and soda bread for supper, sitting at the table with its brown, well-scrubbed oilcloth. She could almost make herself feel that she had walked into that kitchen with its faded bird-of-paradise wallpaper and taken Bria’s place, there at the stove, with the teakettle in her hand.
Father O’Reilly dropped by, and the five of them walked a way together down Ferry Road, with Noreen pushing little Jacko in his carriage. She and Shay walked side by side, but not so close that her skirt could so much as brush his leg.
The sugar maples were now aflame against the sky. The ferns had turned a rich bronze, the reeds and sedges a tawny yellow. She showed them the Yankee custom of putting the first horse chestnuts of the season into your pocket to ward off the rheumatism. And she told the girls to save theirs to bury in snowballs come winter.
Once, when Father O’Reilly and the girls pulled a little ahead of them, Shay said to her, his voice barely above a whisper, “I want you.”
He was staring at her, his eyes green and sudden, startling her with the hunger she saw in them. She felt her breasts, taut and aching, press against all the layers of her clothes. Her legs, encased in silk stockings and drawers, quivered as if they were naked.
“I want you more,” she said.
He jerked his gaze away from her, and she heard him draw in a deep, shuddering breath. “This is like the Púca,” he said.
She felt her mouth twist into a funny little smile; her heart was pounding. “The what?”
“The Púca. She’s a white fairy horse with horns. You’ll only be finding her on a lonely road, or rather she’ll find you. She’ll stop
and ask if you want a ride on her. And when she gets you on her back, away she’ll go galloping with you, over a cliff.”
and ask if you want a ride on her. And when she gets you on her back, away she’ll go galloping with you, over a cliff.”
“I want to jump over a cliff with you, Shay McKenna. I think it would be like flying.”
On the walk back they watched the moon rise over the bay. That night from her bedroom window, she looked out and saw the moon there in the sky, as though it had followed her home.
She waited for him outside the scrolled wrought-iron gates.
When he came it was from around back, by way of the birch woods. He came in a hurry, with his pea coat flaring in the wind and his slouch hat shading his face. She was more than a little afraid he would be angry, because of what she’d done.
“I came from right off the dory,” he said, as he drew close to her. “Quick as Noreen gave me your letter. Are you all right, then? What’s happened?”
She clasped her hands behind her back and held herself tall. “Nothing’s happened. I only want to show you something.”
“To show . . .” He swung away from her, wrapping his hands around the gate’s iron bars, leaning in to them. He shut his eyes. “God save us. I thought we’d been found out.”
“Would that be so terrible?”
He swung around to stare at her. He grew cold when angry, she was discovering. And hard. His eyes were as hard as the granite rocks that littered the harbor beaches. “You know it would be,” he said. “Don’t play the child, Emma.”
And in the way of a child, she suddenly wanted to weep. “I’m sorry. I only . . . I couldn’t think of any other way of getting you out here. You’d never have come if I’d asked, even if I’d sent around an engraved invitation.”
“Sure and I would not have. One of us has to have some sense.”
He started to push himself off the gate, but she laid a hand on his arm.
He started to push himself off the gate, but she laid a hand on his arm.
“Don’t go, please. I have something . . . It would mean so very much to me if you’d allow me to give it to you. And there’ll be nothing scandalous for anyone to find out. Mama is in Providence today, with her Ladies’ Luncheon Club, and Maddie always naps in the afternoon.”
He looked around him, raising his eyebrows in mock wonder. “And have you no servants around a place this grand? You do it all yourself, then—scrub all the marble floors, polish all the silver teapots?”
“We have fifteen servants at The Birches,” she said, and then flushed a little at how that had sounded coming out. “I’m only taking you out to the old orangery, not into the front drawing room or, God forbid, up to lie on my tester bed. If they see you with me in the orangery, they’ll think you’re a stonemason come to deliver. And now I’m done with excuses and apologies and explanations, Shay McKenna. You can either come with me, or not.”
She walked through the gates without looking to see if he followed. At first she didn’t hear his step on the quahog-shell drive behind her, and then she did.
Sea light spilled through the glazed glass walls of the orangery, flickering on the black-and-white-tiled floor like tiny waves. She had known she would love having him in this place that she had made her own, that was uniquely hers.
She left him to look around while she wheeled a stand out from deep in one of the corners. On the stand was a piece she had done, shrouded in canvas.
She stood before him, nervous and yet excited. Until now, the only thing she had given him was her body. This was made of the blood of her heart. “I did this for you,” she said. “Well, no, actually I did it for myself. But it is meant for you to have. If you want it, that is. You don’t need to accept it just to be polite.”
“Very lovely,” he said, teasing now. He was looking at a clay-stained, paint-splattered drop cloth as if he beheld a masterpiece.
She gripped the edges of the cloth and lifted it slowly, and she thought she could hear the beat of her heart suddenly filling the room.
His hand came up, hovering before the sculpture, but didn’t touch it.
“Mo bhean,”
he whispered, his ruined voice breaking rougher. “Bria, lass . . .”
“Mo bhean,”
he whispered, his ruined voice breaking rougher. “Bria, lass . . .”
It was Bria. Bria’s face as she’d once imagined doing it, a mask of her face with those extraordinary bones there, strong, so strong, but invisible, existing in the infinity of space and in the mind’s eye, invisible behind her face that was a shell of bronze as thin as crepe paper.
It was three times life-size and set on the smallest pedestal she could have and still adhere to the laws of physics, so that it seemed to be floating in the air.
Shay’s hand began to shake and he let it fall to his side. Emma looked away, for it hurt to see his face. To see the love and the pain that shone wet in his eyes and pulled at his mouth.
She left him alone with Bria’s face for a long time, left him in silence to be with Bria’s spirit. She looked through the salt-scummed panes. She watched the tide gobble up the pebbly beach, watched the wind stir the yellow leaves of the birches. They were ripe, those leaves. They would be gone, she thought, with one wild blow from the sea.
She left him alone with Bria until the silence in that vast place of glass became unbearable. “It’s a bronze done in the lost-wax technique,” she finally said, “which begins with a mold made of clay, and so I can cast others. I can do one for each of the girls to have, and Jacko, and Father O’Reilly, if he wishes.”
Not to look at him, she decided, was worse. She turned and found that he was staring at her. The last time she’d seen such a look on his face had been the night his son was born.
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