The Passions of Emma (61 page)

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Authors: Penelope Williamson

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

BOOK: The Passions of Emma
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Bethel Tremayne caught herself reflected over and over in the beautiful room’s many pier glasses. Even in the soft yellow haze of gaslight she could see the exposed crests of her breasts lifting and falling, rapidly, like the wings of a trapped bird.
He had come.
It was the evening before her daughter’s wedding, and William had come home. Just as she had known he would.
He had come sailing on his yacht into Bristol harbor this morning. As soon as she heard the news, Bethel had sent a servant to the Bristol Yacht Club bearing a perfumed note, inviting him to come for an informal supper, just the two of them. Reminding him, discreetly of course, that he still had a bedroom here at The Birches.
She had dithered over where she would first greet him, finally settling on this small, intimate sitting room next to the library. She had chosen the room mainly because of its two lamps that flanked
the sienna marble fireplace. The lamps, with their salmon-pink Burmese glass shades, had always cast a becoming glow on her pale complexion. And she liked as well the effect of the room’s many pier glasses, which would reflect her beauty to him again and again.
At five minutes before the hour, she had arranged herself on the midnight-black horsehair sofa. It was uncomfortable, but she knew the opaque material complemented the whiteness of her skin and the bright gold of her hair.
And now at last, at last, the grandfather clock began to strike, its gong banging ponderously. Seven o’clock, the hour she had told him to come. A brassy queasiness suddenly flooded Bethel’s throat. What if . . . But no, she was prepared for everything. She had filled the house with flowers, and Cook had prepared a supper of all his favorite foods. She was dressed in her most becoming gown, a watered silk the color of attar of roses.
And she had starved herself until she was as slender and lithe as she had ever been.
When he came into the room, she would leap up to embrace him. Perhaps that was not quite the thing to do, not a thing a Great Folk lady would do. But the young girl he had met on that ballroom floor in Sparta, Georgia, would probably have done such a thing. The girl who had worn gardenias in her hair.
The clock finished striking and fell back into its tick-marked silence. Bethel waited and waited. . . . She waited through the clock striking eight and then nine o’clock. When the door finally opened, she stumbled to her feet, stiff legged and numb. But it was only Carrews. Carrews bearing a piece of folded notepaper on a silver tray.
Bethel’s heart was beating in slow, agonized thuds, and her fingers shook as she unfolded the note. But then her eyes blurred so badly with tears, it was a while before she could read it.
He would, William wrote, be residing on his yacht while in Bristol, and dining at the club.
Once . . . once she had danced with him beneath chandeliers
that glowed with the warmth and dazzle of a thousand suns. She could remember that night so vividly. So why then couldn’t she remember the moment she had lost him?
She heard a sound and looked up. Her daughter Emma stood in the doorway, watching her with those changeling eyes. Standing there with that face that was so much more beautiful than hers had ever been.
She wished Emma would come into the room and sit down beside her, hold her, maybe . . . comfort her. But she didn’t know how to ask, and she didn’t think Emma would come. Not after what she had done, even though all that had only been for the girl’s own good. And the cure had worked, after all. Emma was marrying Geoffrey Alcott tomorrow. She had come to her senses.
“Mama?” Emma said. “Are you feeling all right?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, making her smile and her voice go bright. “I was only sitting here thinking about your wedding tomorrow, going over all those endless lists that have been whirling through my head these past months.”
The girl started to turn away, but Bethel stopped her, crying out her name so sharply that she startled them both. And then the strangest words came out of her, coming from a place, from a feeling, she had no idea even existed, although they hurt terribly, the words did, cutting her throat like tiny knives.
“I’ve lived a silly life,” Bethel Tremayne said to her daughter. “I had nothing, and then I had everything, and now I have nothing again.”
O
n the day of Emma Tremayne’s wedding, the sun rose in a glory of red and gold and orange.
Emma rose with the sun, so restless she left the house and went for a walk through the birches and down to the water. The trees were fully leafed now, shiny green and full of promise. She found the landscape of the beach had been changed by the winter, but that was always the way of it. Storms ravaged and wasted the shingled sands. The frost killed some trees, and the cold froze the rocks and broke them. Each spring was never quite the same as it had been the spring before.
As she walked back across the rolling lawn, she stopped to look at the house, shining silver in the sun. She felt a sad wrenching to think of leaving this place, as if she would be gone forever, even though she would not.
She had started to climb the steps to the piazza when she saw her father standing there among the palms and wicker chairs.
This stranger who was her father.
Tall and slender, with mahogany-tinted skin and the white cap and blue blazer of a yachtsman, he stood with his feet braced apart and his hands clasped at the small of his back, as if he stood on the quarterdeck.
She finished climbing the steps, but stopped when she was still
a ways from him. “Hello, Papa,” she said, unsure what to make of him. Unsure what he would make of her. “Thank you for coming.”
His teeth flashed white in his face as he smiled, and then he startled her by stepping up and embracing her in a crushing hug. “I wouldn’t miss my little girl’s wedding for the world.” He set her at arm’s length and looked her over slowly, up and down, still smiling. “Except you aren’t so little anymore, are you?”
She had nothing she could say to that. She hadn’t grown any inches since he’d last seen her, at sixteen. Where she had grown was inside, where he couldn’t see.
“My little girl . . .” He reached up as if he would touch her face, but then he let his hand fall, and she saw that there were tears in his eyes. “I’ve missed you, Emma.”
She had nothing she could say to that either. She had missed him too, but he was the one who had left.
He let her go and turned away, putting distance between them, and she realized that a moment of closeness with her father—the first she’d ever had with him—had come and gone. She had let it go.
He had turned his face back to the sea breeze, and his gray-green eyes had taken on a faraway look. He has grown older, she thought. His hair was all white now, the wrinkles on his face etched deeply into the skin.
“Would you like to go for a sail, Papa?” she asked.
He lifted his head, sniffing out the wind just the way he used to do when she was a little girl. To see it made her feel sad, even as she smiled. “Not much wind to speak of at the moment,” he said. “There’s promise of a fine blow later, though.”
“But later I’ll be married to Geoffrey.”
He turned, his gaze searching her face. “And will you be putting away all your toys after that, my little Emma? No more dreams, no more adventures?”
She felt a sudden and frightening desire to cry, and she had to swallow hard. “S-shouldn’t I?”
“The world says you should, certainly.”
She had so many questions she wanted to ask him, but they were of things that were never to be spoken of. But then she realized that in these last moments she had shared more real words with him than she had in the whole of her life before this. And she had a startling thought as she looked at him—that he had changed inside, as well, where she couldn’t see.
“Papa?” she said. “Why did you marry Mama?”
His mouth pulled into a wry smile. “Now there’s a question I’ve often asked myself.”
He paused a moment, as if he’d become lost in thoughts, or memories. Then he shrugged. “I wish I had an answer for you, Emma. The closest I can come to a reason is that I was struck when I met her with how strong and courageous and
certain
she seemed . . . All the things that I wasn’t and thought I should have been. You know the Tremayne family motto: He Conquers Who Endures? Your mother has always been able to live it far better than I do. Perhaps that’s why I married her—so that she could be the man I wasn’t.” He breathed a soft, and somewhat bitter, laugh. “We all must admit she’s filled the role admirably.”
“So then if you . . . admire her so, why did you leave?”
She thought he would say it was because of Willie’s suicide, because of what they had all done to drive his only son off into the storm that night.
“There came a time,” he said, “when I realized I didn’t have the least understanding or liking of her, and that I didn’t really want either to understand or like her, and so I left.”
It couldn’t be that simple, Emma thought. It should not have to be that simple. Poor Mama, plotting and scheming and starving herself all these months to win him back, when she had lost him irrevocably a long time ago.
When she had never even had him in the way that mattered, because she was never the woman he could have loved. Bethel Lane hadn’t changed, but the way he looked at her had.
Her father was gazing out over the water again, and it was as if she knew already in her heart what he would say.
“No, I’m wrong to be blaming it on your mother. It wasn’t only her. I left because I was so unhappy in my life, and nothing she could do or not do was ever going to change that. Suddenly, it seemed terrible to me to always be so wretchedly unhappy.”
Emma took a step toward him, and then another. She wrapped her arms around his waist and she smelled his warm neck and throat.
“We will have that sail later,” he said. “Whether you are Mrs. Geoffrey Alcott or not.”
“Yes. Later,” she said, pulling away from him.
She stopped in the doorway before going inside and looked back at him. But he was the one who spoke. “Are
you
happy, Emma?”
She replied without thinking. “Of course, I’m happy, Papa,” she lied. “After all, today is my wedding day . . . I thought I’d have some coffee. Do you want any?”
“I’ve had some already,” he said, and that smile flashed across his face again. The smile that belonged now to her father, this stranger still. “Thank you, though.”
She tried to smile herself, but her eyes blurred instead, so that she nearly stumbled over the threshold on her way into the house.
She went into the breakfast room for the coffee and found her mother there. Bethel sat at the lace-covered table surrounded by bone china and sterling silver. She was dressed as always in a close-buttoned, high-collared shirtwaist, her hair carefully arranged in an elegant pouf.
She looked the epitome of grace and refinement . . . except for the scone dripping with cream that she held in her hand and the dollop of strawberry jam that clung to her lower lip.
“Mama? Are you . . . are you feeling well?”
Bethel set down the scone and fingered the jeweled basket brooch pinned to her neck. “Of course I’m feeling well. It’s your
wedding day, after all, and getting married is the biggest thing that will ever happen in a girl’s life.”
“Will it be the biggest thing ever to happen to Geoffrey?” Emma asked.
Her mama’s hand went still for a moment, and then she said, “It’s different for men.”
Emma started to tell her that Papa was out on the piazza, but then she looked at the scone and the crumb-littered plate and the strawberry jam, and she realized her mother already knew.
Emma took the sloop out by herself. Before she left she stole one of the white roses from her bridal bouquet.
A thin mist lay over the water, as though a cloud had fallen from the sky. But there was enough wind now to fill the sails. She went out to the place where Willie’s boat had been found, stove against the rocks. Where Willie had chosen to give up not only his wedding day but all of his tomorrows.

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