She stood up and strode away from him. Then turned and came back and sat down again. “The law that forbids children under the age of twelve to work in the mills. Geoffrey, if there was a child there
over
the age of twelve, I would be surprised.”
“Their parents stipulate to their ages. They don’t exactly arrive here from Ireland with their certificates of birth pinned to their chests. And besides, most are probably older than they look.”
“A diet of potato scraps,” Stu said, “does tend to stunt one’s growth a bit.”
Geoffrey thought about telling his brother to shut up. Instead he reached for Emma’s hand again, and this time she allowed him to have it.
Her hand trembled like a broken-winged bird in his. Her feelings were flashing over her face almost quicker than he could read them—blame, sorrow, pain. He had a sudden and somewhat frightening realization that perhaps he had never understood her as well as he’d thought he did. To him, she always seemed as if she were only waiting for something, and up until this very moment he had always assumed that something was he.
“Don’t treat me as if I’m a fool,” she said. “That little bobbin boy who was killed couldn’t have been over six.”
He covered her hand with his other one, stilling it. “It so happens that I’ve commissioned a report to be done on ways to improve conditions at the mills,” he said, and it was the truth, although the report was to focus on areas of productivity and efficiency. Still, he wasn’t averse to broadening its scope, if that would please his Emma.
He rubbed his thumb along the seam of her glove. “When it’s finished, perhaps you would be so kind as to read it over and offer your suggestions. From a woman’s perspective.” Smiling, he reached up with his free hand to trace the delicate shell of her ear. “Gentle feminine eyes and ears often see and hear things we callous men do miss.”
“If I’d eaten any breakfast,” Stu said, “I would be losing it long about now.”
“Are you being truthful with me, Geoffrey?” She was studying his face, and something shifted behind her eyes again, turning them grayer, flintier. “Because I’ve already thought about it some, about
things that can be done. Something as simple, for instance, as bringing in more light, for the place is as dark and dingy as a prison with only those grimy, narrow little windows.”
“Darling . . . Will you believe me when I tell you that I’m not a heartless monster, that the lives of my workers are already better by far than most? What happened to that boy was an accident—unfortunate, terrible even, but an accident.”
She let a long, trembling breath go. “I want to believe you, Geoffrey.” Her gaze fell to their entwined hands, her mouth softening, deepening at the corners. “I
can
be useful to you in this way, Geoffrey, after we are married.”
“Of course you can,” he said, giving her another tender smile. He was confident that once they were married she would be too busy being his wife to concern herself with the plight of the working Irish. “Now, will you stay and take luncheon with us?”
She came gracefully to her feet with a rustle of taffeta petticoats. “Thank you for asking, but I must start for home. I came here in my sloop and you know how Mama always frets when I do that.”
He looked out through the French doors. The lime-green leaves of the lindens shuddered and flapped in the wind. “Surely it’s become too blustery of a day for you to manage the boat on your own. Let me drive you back to The Birches in the landau.”
But she was already walking away from him. “Now, don’t you, too, be fretting over me, Geoffrey. If I sailed myself here, I can surely sail myself home.”
He went with her to the door and watched her walk down the marble flagstones, between the trees, passing through sunlight and shadow, sunlight and shadow, and with sweet yellow petals drifting through the air to kiss her cheeks and hair.
Tears started in Geoffrey’s eyes. He didn’t think it was possible to love her more than he did in that one perfect moment of a blossom-filled spring day.
S
ure and isn’t the day a grand one—so blue and brawny? It was on such a May Day as this, or so it is said, that the Irish invented dancing.”
Bria McKenna picked up her skirts and tried to do a little jig. But her big pregnant belly had her so front-heavy she teetered like a spent top.
She might have fallen if her daughter Noreen hadn’t caught her with a thin but sturdy arm around her thighs. “Mam!” The girl gave Bria an imploring look, her face blushing fire and her words coming out in a strangled whisper. “Mam, what are you doing? Everybody’s watching.”
“And so what if they are, then?” Bria said, laughing so she was breathless with it.
She stopped her silliness, though, for she remembered what it was like to be ten years old and certain the whole world had nothing better to do than await the next moment when you and yours would be playing the fool.
She smoothed down her skirts. She gathered up her flyaway curls, trying to tuck them into the knot of twine at the back of her neck, but they only sprang out again. “There now,” she said. “Sober as a magistrate’s wife.” She laughed and patted her protruding belly. “And big enough to shade an elephant.”
She put her hands on her hips and looked down into her daughters’ upturned faces. Noreen’s mouth was so flat and tight it looked stitched shut. Little Merry wasn’t smiling either; but then Merry rarely smiled anymore. Yet, Bria saw to her delight that the girl’s blue eyes, usually so big and sad, were sparkling with silent laughter.
She pushed her fingers through her younger daughter’s marigold curls. “Merry’s not ashamed of her poor daft mother, are you,
m’eudail
?”
Merry shook her head and hummed a soft little note that was like the coo of a morning dove.
Noreen whirled and stalked away from them, through the cotton mill’s wide brick-arched gate, her tin lunch pail banging against her leg.
Bria swallowed down a sigh. She wanted to take Noreen by her shoulders and give her a little shake and
make
her look up at the big empty blue bowl of the sky, and all of it there for the sun to shine in. She wanted her daughter to suck the joy right out of the day, like you would a soda fountain drink. For so rare could they be, days such as this, moments such as this, and so precious, and you could never know when you’d see their like again.
Sweet mercy, it wasn’t so often the girls were even able to turn their little faces up to the sunlight. Awakened by the shrill blast of the mill whistle and off to work they went before dawn, and not home again until after dark. Only one Saturday a month did they get a half day off, and for once it wasn’t snowing or raining or blowing up a gale.
She felt a tug on her skirt, and she looked down. Merry slipped a sweaty hand into hers, and Bria smiled through a sudden prickling of tears.
They walked out the mill gate and down Thames Street, toward home. Laughter gusted out the open doors of the waterfront taverns. The tide was out, and the smell of the clam banks was strong on the breeze.
Merry began to hum, long and lilting, the way you do when
you’ve forgotten the words to a song. Bria could only smile and nod and say, “Aye, m’love. You’ve the right of it there, m’love.”
Once, the child had been so full of laughter and bright chatter, they had taken to calling her Merry. But then came that terrible day, the day the resident magistrate and his constables had paid the McKennas’ poor stone cottage a visit and changed all their lives forever. That day Bria had warned her daughters to keep their mouths shut so tight not a peep could come out, no matter what happened—and what happened had been terrible indeed.
And little Merry McKenna had never spoken again.
She hummed all her words now instead, and the only one who could understand a bit of it was her sister. But as to whether Noreen always got it right, who was to really say? For sometimes the child would hum a long discourse and then her sister would say the most outlandish thing, such as:
Merry spoke to the elves that live in the coal box, and we’re to be leaving them a bit of soda bread for supper every night.
Though sure enough Merry’s solemn little face would nod, as if that truly was what all the humming had been about.
Well then, and who was to argue differently? Bria thought. For surely the world was full of miracles and mysteries, full of wondrous things.
Full of joyful things.
Before that day . . .
Before that day, their Noreen had been a brave, saucy lass, with the eyes of her always looking you over and the tongue on her bold as you please. She knew what she knew, did Noreen McKenna, and it didn’t matter a jot what anyone said or thought. She would’ve danced a jig with her mam and laughed about it.
Before that day . . .
The baby gave a sudden kick and Bria grunted with surprise. She pressed her palm against her belly, feeling the life shift within her, but she didn’t smile. Before that day, she thought, I was someone different as well.
A throbbing pain shot up Bria’s arm, and she let go of Merry’s
hand to rub her shoulder, then rubbed her aching back while she was about it. Day after day of twelve hours working a spinning ring frame took its toll, it did, and there was another mixed blessing on this particular day. For when she went to punch out her time card this afternoon, Mr. Stipple told her she’d been given the sack. For deserting her post, he’d said.
Sure and she’d been bound to lose the job soon enough anyway, what with her belly getting so big it looked as though she’d swallowed not one pumpkin but the whole bloomin’ patch. The trouble was, they would be having one more mouth to feed before long, and three dollars less a week coming in the door.
But she had a few coins making music in her pocket at the moment, and suddenly a euphoric recklessness seized her. She wanted to spend today in the belief that the heavens would be raining pennies tomorrow.
She spotted a girl selling ears of corn from a cast-iron pot of boiling water set up on the corner. She called her daughters over and bought a couple of the steaming treats.
“Let’s take them on down to the bay shore to eat,” she said. “We’ll make a right little picnic out of it.”
Merry wrapped her grimy fist around the ear of corn and ran ahead, down through an alley, toward the water. Noreen, after a moment’s hesitation, ran after. Their tattered, feed-sack shifts slapped at their calves as their bare feet niftily dodged the geese droppings that littered the way.
A harbor gull swooped and dove at Noreen, trying to steal her corn, and though Bria would have thought she’d cringe in fear, she actually laughed. A glorious froggy belly laugh that made Bria’s eyes fill up with tears again.
The girls sat down on the rocks to eat. Bria stood beside them, looking down at their bent heads. Merry’s hair flaming and coiling wild, so like her mam’s, and that would be a curse to her surely when she grew older. Noreen’s darker, a leaf brown with only a bit
of Irish red and curl in it. Bria looked at them, her darling girls, and felt such a love she hurt with it.
She blinked and looked up, out at the gilded waves. The air down here had a punch to it, full of salt and privet, and the stink of rotting fish shining in the sun on the mudflats. Far out on the bay a sailboat was on a last tack toward Poppasquash Point, its wake cutting a blue line through the silver water.
Bria felt the cough first as a tickle in her chest, and she tried to fight it by tamping down her breath. But there was never any stopping it, not anymore, and she couldn’t hold her breath forever.
When she opened her mouth to pull in air, the coughs tore out of her and it felt as if they were ripping and pulling her chest inside out. Coughing, coughing, coughing until it seemed a giant’s fist was squeezing her ribs and twisting all her bones.
She pressed one hand to her breast, right below her racing heart, while with the other she took a small brown glass bottle out of her pocket and drank from it, and after a moment the coughing eased.
Her lungs still felt thick and wet, but her chest would be quiet now. For a time it would be quiet. The patent medicine was a wonder, surely, although its cure lasted for only an hour or two.
Suddenly Merry stood up and began to dance from foot to foot, her humming high-pitched and excited. She pointed a finger, wet with corn juice, toward Poppasquash Point and the gray-shingled mansion that shone brightly beneath the sun.
Bria looked, squinting against the mirror dazzle of the water. With the white shimmer of sky and bay, the house seemed to be floating like a silver cloud. “Why, how like a fairy’s castle it is, surely,” she said.
But then she saw that Noreen was staring up at her little sister with dark brown eyes big as cartwheels in her face. “What?” Bria said. “What is she saying, then?”
Noreen turned those eyes onto her mother. “She . . . she says the angel who came to the mill today lives in that big silver house on the water and . . .”
Merry hummed, and nodded her head so hard her curls shook.