The Passions of Emma (55 page)

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Authors: Penelope Williamson

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

BOOK: The Passions of Emma
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He pushed his breath out in a deep, harsh sigh. “It can’t be, Emma. Some things, no matter how badly we might want them, just can’t be.”
A shock of rain suddenly beat a hard and rapid tattoo on the shack’s roof. They both started and looked out the window, but they could see nothing now but water washing down the panes.
“You are a coward, Shay McKenna,” she said, her voice nearly drowned out by the noise the rain made. “Afraid to try.”
“Aye, I admit it. It’s scared I am of hurting you and of being hurt myself. Of having to watch my girls and my baby son, who could all come to love you for a mother, suffer the loss of you when you walk out of our world and go back to your old one.”
“We can make our own world, Shay, our own special place. Together.”
“Ah, darlin’ . . .” He shook his head, his mouth softening into a smile that broke what was left of her heart. “And what sort of place would it be, really? You’re too high for me to reach for, and I’d only be dragging you down.”
The storm had filled the room with a strange yellow light. The light sought him out, catching the sheen of wetness in his eyes, the tick of a muscle along his jaw.
And she understood how, in the way of men, he had decided to make all the choices his.
She understood, but she wasn’t going to accept it. If he went to New York, she would follow. She would crawl to him there on her hands and knees if need be, and then she would make him let her stay.
“You—” His voice broke, and he had to start over. “You should be knowing, Emma . . . There’ll never be anyone else for me. I love you with all my heart, and I’ll be doing it forever,
mo chridh
.”
She began to gather up her clothes, to dress in silence. She got as far as the door before she looked at him. He stood just inside the kitchen, wearing only his britches, and with the top buttons still undone. His hair was mussed, and his cheeks were flushed, and
he had a kiss mark on his throat. He looked like some woman’s lover, just come from her bed.
“I love you, and you love me,” she said. “So perhaps you can explain to your heart why I am leaving.”
He said her name once, but she kept on walking through the door.
The afternoon had darkened to a gray twilight now, and the wind prowled the sky. Spume rose, foamy, off the bay. The rain came down in white flashes, making a beating sound like sheets snapping on a line.
She had started down the beach when she heard him shouting, his feet pounding after her. She wasn’t going to turn around, but then she did.
He ran up to her. She was shocked to see how the rain had drenched him, and then she realized that she must look the same.
The wind made a sound like a cow lowing, and then she heard him say, “Emma, you didn’t sail here, did you?”
“No,” she lied, not sure why she did. She wanted only to get away from him now, away, away. “I drove the carriage and parked it in front of the library.”
For so long, for forever, they stared at each other through the driving rain.
“Goodbye, then, and take care,” he said.
And then he left her.
He left her and went back into his empty house, back into his empty bedroom, and lay down on his empty bed. He lay on his side and stared at the wall. The rain beat at the window, the wind cried wild.
He put his hand on the place in the bed where she had been. But it was cold.
“Darlin’,” he said.
But he wasn’t sure which loss, which woman, he was crying for.
The
Icarus
groaned like a thing in agony as she bucked and climbed the waves, her sails curving and gripping the wind. The sky was shrouded and furious. Lightning struck in blistering flashes, flooding every crack and corner of the world.
Emma fought hard with both hands to hold the tiller, as the rain lashed her face, blinding her. The lee rail was two feet under white water; the wind howled and shrieked through the rigging. The storm was terrible and it was beautiful, so terrible and beautiful it made everything else in life seem useless and tawdry. But not love, she thought. Love stood up to it.
She threw back her head and screamed with the wind, “I did this of my own free will! I choose this, Shay McKenna! I choose
this
!”
The whole sky exploded in a dense cobweb of lightning. In that flash of brilliance, before the world was swallowed back by the driving wind and rain, Emma saw a thing that stopped her heart.
A wave. A wave meant for an ocean, not a small Rhode Island bay. Even above the roar of the wind and rain, she heard the hoarse whisper a big sea makes as it prepares to curl and break.
“Oh, please, God, no . . .”
But already the
Icarus
was soaring up its black face. The bow pointed to the seething sky, leaping into the roiling darkness, reaching, reaching. . . . For one suspended moment they hung there, the brave little sloop groaning and shuddering, and Emma with her soul stripped naked . . . hanging there on the edge of eternity.
And then they plunged, plunged into a trough as deep and black as hell. Plunged with such force the sloop’s hull thundered as it struck the bottom and the mainmast bent like a bow.
A wall of water crashed over them, pummeling them, beating them down . . . and then it was gone.
Within moments, the gale ended as suddenly as it had started. The rain still poured and the sky was still dark, but the danger had followed after the wind.
Emma sat in the sloop, trembling, gasping, more afraid now that it was over. But she felt triumphant as well. She had not won, she thought; she’d done something better. She had survived.
Only a glimmer of gaslight shone on the upper landing of the dark house. Emma’s legs shook with exhaustion as she climbed the stairs. She was soaked and chilled through to the bone, and shuddering with it.
If she’d cared she would have thought to wonder why the house was so dark and silent, so possessed of such a soul-freezing emptiness. But all she could think of was how tired she was, so tired.
She opened the door to her bedroom, then shut it carefully behind her and leaned against it, shaking. She suddenly felt an almost irresistible urge to laugh. She wanted to lift up her skirts and spin around and around, making herself dizzy, laughing, until she collapsed in a heap on the floor the way she used to do when she was a child and she’d been banished up here to her room as a punishment.
Something stirred in one of the rose silk armchairs that sat before the fire. “Mama?” she said.
Her mother stood up, and then a man shuffled ponderously to his feet out of the other chair. It was Uncle Stanton, the doctor, coming to stand beside her mother. It was so quiet Emma could hear the rain and seawater dripping from the hem of her skirts.
Her uncle’s face was drawn, worried, and now Emma smelled the sharp, sour odor of chloral hydrate.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “Has something happened to Maddie?”
Her mother’s eyes were staring at Emma, wide and haunted in
her too-thin face. Emma took a step toward her. “Is it you, Mama? Have you taken ill?”
“I will not allow this to happen,” her mother said. “I will not let you do this to me.”
S
hay McKenna stood before the heavy wrought-iron gates and looked through the scrolled bars at the grandeur that was The Birches. The big, sprawling house shimmered under the October sun, with all its gables and bay windows and piazzas. Its weathered shingles were like the taut scales of a snake.
A spider had woven a web over one of the gate’s leafy scrolls. Its fine threads had caught only dewdrops so far, although they sparkled like diamonds. Shay started to lift his hand to break the web, to destroy it and restore perfection to the gate’s elegant symmetry, but then he let it be.
He wrapped his fists around the bars instead, pushed the gate open, and walked down the long white quahog-shell drive.
He’d always thought of himself as a bold-as-you-please sort of man. Aye, so bold he was, and with his heart hammering so violently in his chest, it was a wonder he didn’t crack a few ribs.
For although he didn’t expect to see her, his gaze still searched the garden with its urns and nymphs and marble fountain, hungry for the sight of a girl in white lawn and a straw hat with a wide blue ribbon floating in the breeze. And by the time he knocked on the big coffered ebony doors, his mind hadn’t had to do much of a running leap before he was drinking in the smell of her and feeling her hair in his hands. . . . And when the doors opened, he
thought, In another moment I’ll see her, and she will smile and say—
“Sir?” said a sour-mouthed man with haughty eyebrows.
Shay stated his business and, not to his surprise—after the visitor he himself had had last evening—he was led across the black-and-white marble floor and into the interior of the house.
The times he had been here before, Shay had had other things on his mind besides admiring the grandness of it all. But today his gaze took in the festooned domed ceiling and fluted columns embellished with gold leaf, the grand double oak staircase and the massive gold-framed mirror above the massive white marble fireplace. There was even a suit of armor in one corner, polished to a nickel-plated shine. When he was a boy back in Gortadoo, playing “castle and knights” with Donagh, he’d never imagined such a place as this.
The sour-mouthed man led Shay into a room with yellow silk damask walls and white and gilded paneling. A woman with pale hair was dressed to match the sumptuous interior in a yellow gown of such stiff cloth she seemed to rustle even though she was sitting still.
The woman, his Emma’s mother, was sitting at a shell-carved secretary, writing on a piece of gold-edged paper with an ivory pen. She waited through ten ticks of the ormolu clock on the mantel before she looked up and turned to face him. She had the bluest eyes he’d ever seen.
“I have been expecting you, sir,” she said in a soft, drawling voice that made Shay think of hot nights and sultry winds. “I’m afraid you’ve arrived just when I was about to compile today’s menus. If you would be so kind as to wait for just a moment . . .”
She turned her back to him, and picked up the ivory pen with a hand that was as white and graceful as a dove’s wing. She was sitting in a chair with a small engraved silver clock set into its back. Shay had never known such a marvel in his life. It was a beautiful thing, but what good did it do you to have a clock in a place that
was always behind you, where you couldn’t see it? It was like so much of Emma’s world, he thought—beautiful and glamorous and, in strangely perverted ways, useless.

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