Emma walked through Saint Michael’s polished ash doors and breathed deeply of the wet, gray air. She buttoned her long sealskin coat up under her chin and thrust her hands into a small, round ermine muff. After such a warm early spring the weather had turned chilly and unsettling again.
And thus providing, she thought with another small sigh, ample fodder for Great Folk conversation.
Geoffrey came up to her, setting his top hat squarely on his head and adjusting the cuffs of his gray gloves. He smiled broadly, showing off his long teeth. She used to think she liked his smile . . . and
she still did. Yes, she did. She was only irritated with him for some reason she couldn’t fathom.
“A splendid sermon today, wasn’t it, my dear?” he said. “Very uplifting.”
“It’s the same sermon he gives every year at this time.”
Emma felt as though she were being smothered by a wet wool blanket. He was going to be her husband, and she wanted to ask him what he had really spent the last hour thinking. But the social conventions didn’t allow them to speak of intimate things, such as thoughts and feelings.
“Geoffrey,” she said, “do you believe in God?”
He took her arm, his fingers grasping her elbow just a little too tightly as he led her over to the side portal and out of the way of listening ears. “What kind of a thing is that to say right here on the steps of Saint Michael’s on a Sunday morning?”
“Yes, you’re right. Of course you believe, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. You certainly wouldn’t be here simply because this is where everyone else is, would you, Geoffrey? I suppose the more appropriate question is: How can you be so certain that He’s Episcopalian?”
A gust of wind blew down Church Street, ruffling the ivy that climbed the stone wall at their backs. And carrying with it the sounds of Gregorian chanting, shuffling feet, and ringing bells. It must be, Emma thought, that Sunday in May when the Catholic girls of Saint Mary’s dressed up all in white and paraded a plaster statue of their Virgin around the common and down to the bay. When she was a little girl, Emma had always wanted to join in the procession, but of course it was unthinkable.
Saint Michael’s, as if not to be outdone, began to toll its big copper bell. Geoffrey tugged on the gold chain that swagged his stomach, pulling out his hunter’s watch. He flipped open the lid and studied its face a moment, then glanced back up, giving Emma a scattered look. “Am I certain who’s Episcopalian?”
“God.”
“Of course He’s Episcopalian,” Geoffrey protested, although he did smile.
The procession rounded the corner coming into view. A strikingly handsome young priest led the way, swinging a bowl of smoking incense and chanting Latin phrases in a beautiful tenor voice. He was flanked on both sides by a bevy of nuns in their starched white cowls and stiff black habits. Their skirts flared like the lips of the bells they rang in rhythm with the priest’s chanting.
Six men followed more slowly, dressed like pallbearers and carrying a wooden platform that supported the plaster Virgin. The statue was surrounded by shocks of white lilies and burning votive candles, and Emma thought it a pretty thing. The Virgin wore a crown woven of tiny pink rosebuds and blue forget-me-nots. She had a pink, smiling mouth that gave her an air of coquettish mystery. Her blue-painted robe was only a little chipped at the hem.
The young girls came after her, in their white dresses with blue sashes. And with wreaths on their heads like the Virgin’s. Many carried baskets of flowers, and some waved large green and white banners decorated with harps and shamrocks. They sang, “Oh, Mary, we cover you with blossoms today, Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May . . .”
“Well, they,” Emma said, nodding at the procession, since pointing was not good form, “probably think He’s both Catholic and Irish.”
“Emma!” Geoffrey exclaimed, genuine shock in his voice. He looked around to make certain no one had heard her. And Emma, having at last gotten what she wanted out of him, now for some strange reason felt like crying.
“You’re funning with me again, aren’t you?” he said, but now he wasn’t smiling. Apparently funning too much with one’s fiancé was not good form either.
Emma blinked tears out of her eyes. She looked up at a sky clotted with clouds that were gray as pewter. “I do believe it’s going to rain today. Dark clouds always bring wet weather.”
Geoffrey made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a sigh, but he was clearly pleased to be back on familiar conversational ground. “You’re beginning to sound like my grandmother,” he said, “always predicting rain.”
“Clear skies, on the other hand, often mean the sun will shine.”
He wasn’t really listening to her, of course. He often didn’t, as long as she spoke as she ought to and looked out for her good form. “Speaking of Grandmama,” he said, “she’s gone to inspect the cemetery to see which families are tending properly to their plots and which are being sadly neglectful. And if there is so much as a stray leaf or frayed blade of grass on Grandpapa’s final resting place, I’ll be hearing about it all through luncheon.”
He took Emma’s arm again and began to lead her down the church steps. “Would you be a darling and distract the old dear for a moment, while I have a quick word with my banker.”
Geoffrey’s grandmother was indeed walking among the gravestones and crypts, and peering at them through a pearl-rimmed lorgnette. Although she used a cane, she was not bent over. Perhaps it was her regal but diminutive size and the pale blue coat she wore, but she reminded Emma of the plaster Virgin. Except that instead of a flower crown she sported a hat with a long black feather that stabbed at the sky.
Emma had always sought out the company of Geoffrey’s grandmother while out in society, mainly because she’d never felt scrutinized and judged in the old woman’s presence. Eunice Alcott wasn’t interested in anyone under the age of sixty.
“Good morning, ma’am,” Emma said with a shy smile as she joined her. “You are looking well.”
The old woman drew in such a deep breath she snorted. “Certainly I am looking well. One can’t, however, say the same about Gladys Longworth.” Geoffrey’s grandmother had a nose that turned up on the end like a slipper and she pointed it at a well-padded matron who leaned heavily on a pair of canes as she made her laborious way down Saint Michael’s granite steps. “Will you
just look at her? Wasted down to skin and bones, she is. Not enough left of her to make a shadow. You mark if she isn’t lying in her coffin, cold and shriveled as a dead cod, before the end of summer.”
“We can only hope not, Mrs. Alcott.”
“
You
might hope not, my dear. I, on the other hand, have learned to bow to the inevitable.” She peered around Emma’s shoulder to shoot a deadly glare at the stout, gray-haired man who had just offered his arm as support for the tottering old lady. “And there’s that boy of Gladys’s, hounding her into her grave so’s he can get his paws on her money, and she’s letting him do it, the mewly hearted fool. Gladys never did have gumption enough to spit in a privy.”
The Catholic procession was passing the church now. The incense smoke eddied and swirled, its exotic scent following the wind. The Virgin Mary seemed to be floating above the heads of the people, on a cloud of lilies and dancing candle flames. Someone had begun to play the pipes—wailing, mournful music.
Geoffrey and his banker were walking toward them, and Emma heard the banker say, “The Irish are the scum of creation. I say the solution to the problem of this country’s deserving poor is obvious. Encourage every Irishman to kill a Negro and then hang him for it.”
Geoffrey’s high-arched nose sniffed as if offended. But whether at the sight of the procession or at the other man’s words, she wasn’t sure which.
Just then Emma picked out the fiery-haired mill woman in her pumpkin-colored coat from among the crowd watching the procession. She stood at the curb, in front of Pardon Hardy’s Drugstore, waving to one of the young girls in white dresses and blue sashes. The woman had another, smaller child by the hand. The little girl’s own curls, bright as a new copper penny, danced and swirled around her flushed face. She seemed excited or angry about something, for even as Emma watched, she jerked free of the
woman and ran to join the tag end of the older girls who followed the floating Virgin.
The woman tried to go after her, but she had to stop and grab on to a lamppost as a fit of coughing seized her.
“Please excuse me, Mrs. Alcott,” Emma said, although she was already walking away. “I see a . . . friend.”
Then she heard Geoffrey call her name. She almost kept going, but she was afraid he’d come after her, so she turned and went back. She made herself smile, although she could feel her pulse beating hard and fast in her neck. She didn’t know what was compelling her to do this. It was as if she had suddenly become someone else.
“I thought to visit a sick friend this afternoon,” she said to her betrothed. “But you needn’t concern yourself, for I’ve my carriage and a driver to see me home.”
Geoffrey’s mouth tightened a little at the corners. “But I had hoped you would join Grandmama and me for luncheon. I realize I haven’t issued you a formal invitation, but I’d supposed . . .” He lifted his hand, then let it fall.
“That’s very kind of you, Geoffrey. It’s just that she’s had so little company this past week . . . my friend.”
“It’s not Judith Patterson, is it?” His frown deepened. “I heard she was struck with a particularly virulent form of measles. Are you certain—”
She leaned in to him and patted the lapel of his frock coat, then smoothed its nap, surprising them both, for she had never before deliberately and so intimately touched him first. “I’ve already had the measles, Geoffrey. I can only catch them once.”
He gave her one of his wistful smiles and took the hand that still rested on his coat, bringing it up to his lips. “Of course you must pay your call on a sick, and doubtless lonely, friend. And never mind my abominable selfishness. There’ll be many a luncheon in our future. After all, we have the rest of our lives to spend together.”
Guilt sent the color rushing hot to her face, and her hand
trembled in his. She wondered what kind of terrible person she was, for she had never been more fond of him than during this very moment when she was deceiving him.
“Yes, we do, don’t we—have the rest of our lives? Geoffrey, I . . . Thank you,” she said, and left him quickly, before she could say more.
She cut across the cemetery, wending her way through the tall elms and crumbling old gravestones. She shook inside with fear and shame, and a wonder at herself. What am I doing? she thought.
Oh, mercy, Emma Tremayne, what are you doing?
The Queen of May procession had passed by, turning the corner and going out of sight up Thames Street. Most of the crowd had followed after it, and Emma easily spotted the woman on the nearly empty sidewalk. She had let go of the lamppost and stood now in front of the drugstore window, with her forehead pressed against the glass, as if she were trying to read the ads there for digestive tablets and hair dye. But then she started coughing again, bending over almost double, and her back shook as if it were being pummeled with fists. When she straightened up, she swayed heavily, nearly falling.
She was leaning with her shoulder up against the drugstore window by the time Emma got to her side. The woman turned to face her and her dark eyes widened, as if in fear. Then they glazed over, and she slid slowly to the sidewalk, a heap of orange wool and wild, flaming hair.
Emma knelt beside her. The woman’s face was sheened with sweat and unearthly pale. Her breath came in soggy, shallow gasps. She had a bloody handkerchief and a small brown bottle clutched tightly in her hand.
“Well, of all things!”
Emma looked around behind her. A man was there, a tubby little man with a face plump and soft as a bun and two black raisins for eyes. He looked familiar to her although she couldn’t place his name. He wasn’t one of the Great Folk.
“Please, sir,” she said. “Will you be so kind as to help me? This woman appears to have—”
“Miss Tremayne!” the man exclaimed. He leaned over, peering into her face, as if he couldn’t quite believe the evidence of his own eyes. “You shouldn’t be concerning yourself with some little no’count mill chit. Inebriated, she is. And on a Sunday. The very shame of it.”
“She’s not drunk. She’s ill.”
“All the worse, then. No telling what infectious diseases she might be carrying.” And as if suddenly reminded of his own mortality, the man stepped quickly backward, pulling out a handkerchief to cover his face.
The skies chose that moment to crack open and pour rain. The fat man and the few other passersby who had stopped to watch now hurried off with umbrellas and newspapers held over their heads.
The woman groaned and stirred, then fell into a deeper faint. Emma’s carriage and driver were waiting back at Saint Michael’s, but she didn’t want to go fetch them and leave the woman here alone, lying on the sidewalk with the rain pouring over her as if she were only so much rubbish.
The rain sliced down on them in wind-driven sheets. The woman shivered so hard her teeth rattled, although her eyes were sunken into her face in a deathlike sleep. Emma put her ermine muff beneath the woman’s head and then took off her own sealskin coat and laid it over her.