The Passions of Emma (56 page)
Emma’s mother had at last finished with her menus and now gave him her blue-eyed, silken attention. “So? Apparently our first offer was not enough,” she said, “and you’ve decided that coming directly to the source might be the easier way of getting more?”
Shay stared back at her. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand the question—he’d even expected it. But the hearing of it rose the temper up in him, so hot and full of bile that for a moment he couldn’t speak.
“As my lawyer has explained to you,” Emma’s mother went on, “I am willing to give you a certain amount to resettle in another place, so that you are forever out of our lives. But I warn you, sir, that you will not be allowed to bleed us.”
“Faith and begorra. Will I not?” he said, exaggerating his brogue, and looking around the room as if calculating its worth, with all the wide-eyed wonder of a lad from Gortadoo and the bog still stinking on his shoes.
“A fellow with the word
esquire
tacked onto his name, he comes along yesterday and offers me a thousand dollars if only I’ll go away and never admit to a soul I’ve ever seen or heard of the likes of Miss Emma Tremayne. And so I’m thinking we’ve been found out—and wasn’t I always after telling her that would happen. And I’m thinking, too, I’ll not be smashing in the face of the esquire if he’ll only be taking his money and himself out of my house.”
esquire
tacked onto his name, he comes along yesterday and offers me a thousand dollars if only I’ll go away and never admit to a soul I’ve ever seen or heard of the likes of Miss Emma Tremayne. And so I’m thinking we’ve been found out—and wasn’t I always after telling her that would happen. And I’m thinking, too, I’ll not be smashing in the face of the esquire if he’ll only be taking his money and himself out of my house.”
He went up to her, close enough to intimidate her with the big size of him. “But then this esquire, he tells me she’s been packed off for a little visit with some cousins who live in a grand house in a place called Georgia. And so now I’m thinking she’s pregnant, and if she is, then I’ll be taking the babe and her both, and to bloody hell with the lot of you.”
He took another step, and the woman shrank down in her
wonder of a chair. “Is that why she’s been packed off to this plantation place? She never mentioned having such cousins to me.”
wonder of a chair. “Is that why she’s been packed off to this plantation place? She never mentioned having such cousins to me.”
A tight, nervous smile pulled at the woman’s perfect, rosebud mouth. “Are you implying the two of you actually
talked
? I was under the impression . . .” Her hand, white and fragile, waved through the air. “Well, never mind. There is no child, and for that you both should be grateful to whichever of the gods watches over fools. Nor has she been ‘packed off,’ as you put it. She has gone of her own free will.”
talked
? I was under the impression . . .” Her hand, white and fragile, waved through the air. “Well, never mind. There is no child, and for that you both should be grateful to whichever of the gods watches over fools. Nor has she been ‘packed off,’ as you put it. She has gone of her own free will.”
Emma’s mother rose gracefully to her feet in a rustle of stiff yellow silk and slipped around him, putting distance between them again. “Perhaps she saw leaving Bristol for a time as the only tolerable way to end what she had come to think was an intolerable mistake.”
“Perhaps. More likely, though, you were sitting there on your silk-covered arse and lying through your gold-plated teeth.”
She was tougher than he’d given her credit for. She stood before him straight as a mast, her face so calm it seemed empty. But then he saw fear in her eyes, shadows that moved like storm clouds flying before the wind.
And why should she not be afraid? he thought. When to her way of figuring, her daughter had nearly gone and ruined everything.
“It is possible you cared for her,” said Emma’s mother. “You might even have convinced yourself you loved her. If that is so, then you ought to be thinking of her. Let her go, Mr. McKenna. For her own sake, let her go. What can you possibly offer her but unhappiness?”
Shay looked around the room with its silk and gold walls and its chair with the pretty, pointless clock. “I’m thinking the words sounded truer,” he said, “when I was saying them to her.”
He left the gilded woman and the gilded room and the gilded house with his hands and belly clenched tight. But he didn’t leave The Birches, not right away.
He followed the path through the trees to the beach where
Emma docked her little sloop. The
Icarus
was there, her sails lowered but not furled, the sheets in tangles on her deck, puddles of saltwater slopping in her cockpit . . . and the worry came gnawing back at him.
Emma docked her little sloop. The
Icarus
was there, her sails lowered but not furled, the sheets in tangles on her deck, puddles of saltwater slopping in her cockpit . . . and the worry came gnawing back at him.
The Emma he knew was too good a sailor to go gallivanting off to some cotton plantation for the winter and leave her boat to rot away in such a sorry state.
But what of the Miss Emma Tremayne who lived in that gilded house, the daughter of that cold, gilded woman? That Emma could doubtless buy a dozen little racing sloops and not feel the pinch.
He was about to leave when a thing lying on the gray, warped boards of the dock caught his eye. It was one of her gloves. He bent over and picked it up, brought it to his face, rubbed the soft leather of it over his open mouth . . . breathing her in.
He started to take it away with him and then he changed his mind and left it there. But in the days and weeks that followed, he couldn’t get the smell of her out of his throat.
They kept giving her chloral hydrate to make her sleep.
Some nights Emma refused to take it, so she was strapped into a chair and her head was yanked back by the hair. One of the attendants leaned on her, his knee pressing hard into her belly, while he pushed a wooden wedge between her lips and teeth, prying her mouth open. The matron forced a black rubber tube down her throat, and then funneled the drug, mixed with warm, stale water, down the tube.
Emma couldn’t swallow fast enough, and she began to choke and gag and gasp for air. Her chest burned as the water poured into her lungs, and she cried. She kept promising herself she wouldn’t cry, no matter how they hurt her, but she always cried.
For after the chloral hydrate was forced down her throat, she was put into a muff—a pair of leather mittens, buckled to hold the
hands together, which in turn was buckled to a stout leather belt they had cinched around her waist. Then they put her into a contraption they called a “crib.”
hands together, which in turn was buckled to a stout leather belt they had cinched around her waist. Then they put her into a contraption they called a “crib.”
The crib was a square wooden box, like a coffin. “That,” the matron would say, bringing her mouth so close her spittle would spray Emma’s face, “that ought to teach you to behave.” And then she would close the lid, and Emma would lie there with a scream trapped in her raw throat, until the drugged sleep overcame her.
The matron had heavy-lidded eyes like a frog’s, and gray hairs sprouted from her ears and nostrils. Emma learned to hate and fear her.
But more than she feared the matron, Emma feared the unimaginable things that hadn’t yet been done to her. She heard such screams, especially at night, such maniacal shrieks. Screams that sounded as though they came from the souls of the damned.
After she had been in the asylum a week, she was taken into another part of the big gray stone building. Taken into a wood-paneled, book-lined room that could have been a library in a Hope Street mansion. Her uncle Stanton was there, with another man he said was a doctor whose specialty was diseases of the mind. They told her she’d been put in this place for her own good, to be cured of her “excitable” nature.
Her uncle still bore the scratch marks she’d put on his cheek the night of the storm, when he’d pushed a syringe into her arm. That night before she had woken up in this place.
Emma sat on her hands, so they couldn’t see them shaking, with her knees pressed close together. “Would you bring Mama to see me,” she said to her uncle, and she saw something shift in his eyes before he looked away. Mama doesn’t know the true nature of this place, she thought. Surely, Mama would never have done this to me if she had known.
“It is better for you if your dear mother stays away for a time,” said the doctor whose specialty was diseases of the mind. “It is easier to facilitate a cure when the patient has a complete break with
the familiar. When she is removed entirely from the environment which has led to her excitability.”
the familiar. When she is removed entirely from the environment which has led to her excitability.”
“This is a place for mad people,” Emma said, struggling hard to keep her voice sounding calm . . . sane. “And I am not mad.”
The two doctors exchanged knowing looks, and then something snapped inside Emma. She lunged out of the chair, screaming at them, “I am not mad! I am not, I’m not, I’m not mad!”
The matron barged into the room with two attendants in tow. They put a straitjacket on her and dragged her out, and her all the while screaming how she wasn’t mad.
“It’s hall number twelve for you, my girl,” the matron said.
She was put into a cell that was no bigger than her clothes press back home at The Birches. They ran chains from the buckles on her straitjacket to a ring set into the stone floor, fastening her so that she could neither lie straight down nor stand up.
The matron slammed shut the iron door and turned a key in the lock, and the last thing Emma saw before she was enveloped by the cold and the dark was the matron’s eyes peering at her through the grate, and then that, too, was slammed shut.
Emma screamed, then—screamed and rattled the chains and tried to wrench herself out of the straitjacket, straining her muscles and bones unbearably and not even feeling it, screaming, screaming, screaming . . . until the iron door clanged open and a bucket of cold water was dashed in her face.
She sat in the dank blackness, wet and shivering, and whispering over and over to herself, “I am not mad, I am not mad,” and then she thought,
They will make me mad.
And so she stopped even whispering.
They will make me mad.
And so she stopped even whispering.
But the screams were still there, building, building, inside her, and the terror was like a wild thing, a mad thing. Such a mad thing that if she let the screams out now, if she let just one out, then she wouldn’t be able to stop screaming. She would scream and scream until the screams swallowed up her mind.
When the matron finally came back an eternity later, she said to Emma, “You are going to behave.”
And Emma looked down at the floor, humbled, broken, and said, “Yes, matron,” in a small, trembly voice she would never have recognized as her own.
“You’ll eat and drink what you are given, without making a fuss, and you’ll do as you are told.”
“Yes, matron.”
“You will be put in the fifth hall, then. For as long as you behave. And if you don’t behave, it’s back to the close room you’ll go.”
“I’ll behave.”
The fifth hall was behind a solid, massive, spring-bolted door that the matron unlocked and then locked again with the set of keys that jangled and dangled from the braided cord she always wore around her thick waist.
The “hall” was indeed just that—a wide hall that had six small dormitories feeding off it, each with six iron cots. Along the walls of the hall were wooden benches, with small, barred windows set in high above them.
The hall was crowded with women. Some merely sat quietly on the benches. Others paced frantically back and forth, waving their arms, pulling at their hair, moaning and screaming aloud, some screaming silently, others talking gibberish and cursing foully. One woman was strapped to a wheelchair. She stared at Emma with vacant eyes, her mouth hanging open, drooling.
The matron gave Emma a shove in the back and pointed to an empty place on one of the benches, next to a filthy, wild-eyed, straggle-haired woman who was sitting in a puddle of urine. “Now you park yourself there and behave.”
Emma’s legs all but collapsed beneath her as she obeyed the matron’s pointing finger. The stench in the hall was as rank as spoiled fruit.
Across the way from her, a woman was chained to the bench
with her arms bound in a straitjacket. She was beating her head back against the wall, hard, over and over. Her face was a mess of purpling bruises, and Emma wondered how it had gotten that way, when it was the back of her head that she was beating.
with her arms bound in a straitjacket. She was beating her head back against the wall, hard, over and over. Her face was a mess of purpling bruises, and Emma wondered how it had gotten that way, when it was the back of her head that she was beating.
But just then the matron went up to the woman and slammed the ring of iron keys into her mouth. Blood spurted from the woman’s pulpy lips.
The woman uttered not a sound, but Emma moaned. She sat on the bench, afraid to move, after that. But after a long while, when she felt certain that she wasn’t being watched, she stood up on the bench so she could look out the window. The glass was framed and grated in iron, but she could still see through it. A green lawn sloped down to a grove of birch trees so much like the ones at home. Their yellow leaves and white trunks shimmered silver against the clear blue sky.
Hours passed . . . Emma never knew how many because she had already learned that time had no meaning in this place. A bell rang, summoning them to another, smaller hall, where they were seated on wooden benches at wooden trestle tables and fed cold corned beef and cold boiled potatoes. When the woman next to her began smearing the potatoes in her face and hair, Emma’s stomach revolted and she couldn’t eat. But when she went back to her bench beneath the window, her stomach cramped with hunger.
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