Read The Passions of Emma Online

Authors: Penelope Williamson

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

The Passions of Emma (22 page)

Emma watched the woman sleep. Bria McKenna . . . Emma liked the name, for it had a brave, ringing sound to it. A brightness, like her hair.
Bria McKenna. Her dark red eyebrows were thick and uncompromising. Her mouth was wide and too full. She wasn’t beautiful, but she had a striking face. It was her bones, what one saw in her bones—raw strength tempered by suffering. Hers was a warrior’s face.
Emma’s fingers trembled with the need to sculpt those bones. She would do a model in clay first, only of the front of the head. Then when she had that right she would cast just the face in the thinnest sheet of copper, like a mask. So that the bones would forever be hidden from the eye and yet felt with the heart.
But in the meantime, when Bria McKenna awoke again, she would need something more substantial than tea. Chicken soup was supposed to be good. They’d had pheasant consommé for dinner yesterday, Emma remembered—there had been a whole tureen of it. Perhaps the soup didn’t have to be made with a chicken precisely, she thought. Perhaps any manner of fowl would do.
She started to ring the bell for a servant and then decided she would go down to the kitchen and fetch it herself.
The hall below was dark, lit only by a pair of gas sconces that flanked the enormous, fluted gold-framed mirror hanging on the back wall. Years ago, in the last century, the great sweeping double oak staircase had been illuminated by hundreds of burning tapers.
One night, a Tremayne daughter had tripped and fallen into the tapers, setting herself on fire. The fashionable steel panniers she wore beneath her raw silk skirts had prevented her frantic father from smothering the flames, and she had burned to death. She wasn’t the first, or the last, to add to the Tremayne legend of a curse, and it was said that her ghost still haunted the great hall. But no one in Emma’s memory had claimed to have seen her.
Emma got as far as the middle landing of the staircase when she stopped. The house did have a strange feel to it tonight. But more than ghostly, it felt empty, abandoned. As if of all the wild and wicked and cursed Tremaynes who had lived and died here, not even a scrap of their souls was left to haunt the place. Not even the memories that they had been.
Emma shook her head. She was imagining things only because it was a stormy night, all the servants were belowstairs, and both her mother and sister slept, lost in laudanum dreams.
Her kid slippers moved silently down the polished oak treads. Shadows writhed up the stairwell. Lightning flashed and was broken into a million shards by the beveled glass panes of the fanlight above the door.
Emma stopped again, her hand gripping the banister, waiting. But she barely had time to draw a breath before the thunder cracked open the night, and rolled and rolled and rolled, seeming to last forever.
And then Emma realized she was no longer hearing thunder, but someone lifting and pounding the brass lion’s head knocker onto the doors’ thick ebony panels.
She stepped down another tread.
The doors burst open, slamming against the marble-faced walls. The crash rebounded around the domed ceiling, louder than any clap of thunder. Wind gusted into the hall. The gas jets in the sconces wavered and dimmed, nearly going out. But not before she saw his reflection in the mirror.
His black pea coat flared open, his slouch hat and hair dripped
water. Behind him, in the lantern-shine out on the piazza, the rain slashed like silver knives.
He must have seen the flash of her white shirtwaist in the mirror, for his gaze went there first and locked with hers. They stared at each other across a world of marble and silvered glass and fractured gaslight.
He has come, she thought
He had come. For her. He wanted her, and so he had come for her. He was her infinite possibility and he had come to tear her life out by the roots, and this time she would let it happen.
He took a step toward her, and she moaned. A moan filled with fear and wonder and expectation.
“I’ve come,” he said, “for my wife.”
E
mma Tremayne sat on the maroon leather seat of her black-lacquered shay. She was properly attired for paying a morning call, in a French promenade dress of moiré taffeta the colors of a pigeon’s wing, trimmed with a cascade of Belgian lace at the throat and a broad white satin ribbon at the waist. Her accessories were proper as well: doeskin driving gloves, a taffeta and lace parasol, and a hat of reseda straw trimmed with satin roses and a tuft of ostrich feathers.
Yet she couldn’t have felt more conspicuous and out of place.
She didn’t come often to this end of Thames Street. Indeed, she couldn’t remember ever having driven past here, let alone pulling up alongside the weathered boardwalk to stop among steaming piles of horse droppings beneath a listing lamppost.
Not many people were out and about at this time of morning, this being a working neighborhood. But the two who were—a fisherman sitting on his front stoop mending a lobster trap and a ragpicker pushing his cart home from the rubbish heap—had stopped to gape and stare.
She was in plain view because she had the top of the shay folded down, but then everything wouldn’t have fit into it otherwise. On the seat next to her was a calico-lined picnic basket filled with tongue sandwiches, delicate fillets of beef, terrapin, pâté de foie gras, and truffled turkey. Stuffed in the back were carpetbags and
striped bandboxes overflowing with clothes she’d never worn. And wedged next to her feet was a steamer trunk packed with dolls and other toys she’d found in The Birches’ attics but couldn’t remember ever playing with.
Indeed, the shay was so crowded she had to stand up for a better look at the house she was visiting, a tiny clapboard shack perched high on stilts at the edge of a gray shingle beach.
Emma alighted from the shay and walked toward the house on a path that was really nothing more than a bald rut worn into a patch of cattails and asters. With each step her courage nearly failed her. She had never done this before, never sought out another’s company. People had always courted her.
The front door opened and Bria McKenna stepped out onto the tall front stoop, wiping her hands on her apron. Her gaze went from Emma out to the street, where the shay waited, stuffed with the picnic basket and bandboxes and trunk. Anger flared deep and bright in the woman’s eyes.
And Emma knew instantly her mistake.
“Good morning!” she exclaimed, her voice sounding breathy, as if she’d swallowed too much air. “I was . . .” She waved her hand back at the overflowing carriage. “I was on my way to drop off some charitable donations to Saint Michael’s and I thought, as I was passing, that I would call first and see how you were fairing.”
A flush slowly suffused Bria’s face. She nodded stiffly and stepped to the side of the oak plank door. “Won’t you come in, then, Miss Tremayne. I was just about to put the kettle on.”
Emma picked up her skirts and climbed the steep steps, with legs that shook so she nearly stumbled. The kitchen smelled wonderful, of fresh baking bread and the wild buttercups that filled a tomato can set in the middle of the table. The bird-of-paradise wallpaper might have been faded and watermarked, but its orange and blue flowers gave the room a cheerful air. The cracked linoleum floor, once a dark brown, had been bleached nearly white by a
scrub brush and was covered in one corner with a colorful hooked-rag rug.
Emma stood in the middle of the floor, uncertain of what to do with herself.
“It’s lucky you are you caught me t’home,” Bria said as she set a battered copper kettle onto the stove. “I’m supposed to be housekeeping for my brother at the rectory—he’s the priest to Saint Mary’s parish. But why he ever took me on I don’t know, since he won’t let me do a thing. I spend more time in my own kitchen these days than in his.”
She turned from the stove, a smile breaking wide across her mouth. “Why don’t you set yourself down and—Oh, shoo away, you old lazy cat!” She waved her arms, advancing on one of the ladderback chairs whose woven seat was filled with a huge, shaggy brown creature. “You! You get on outside, Gorgeous. Go catch yourself some mice like you’re supposed to be doing.”
The cat sprang off the chair with a hiss. But then it sauntered slowly, very slowly, out the open door.
Emma stared after the creature. Its ears were chewed at the ends, its tail was bent in three places like a corkscrew, and it appeared to be molting. “‘Gorgeous?’”
Bria laughed, surprising Emma, for her laugh was all cinnamon and spice, and it didn’t go at all with those oh-so-solemn eyes.
“Shay named him that because he’s so bloomin’ ugly. Myself, I’d have named him Brilliant, since near as I can tell he hasn’t got the smarts to scratch an itch.”
Bria laughed again and turned around to the stove to take off the kettle, a lightness to her step. She wasn’t coughing today. Life bloomed deep pink like late summer roses in her cheeks.
Emma sat down in the chair left warm by Gorgeous. It felt strange yet rather pleasant to be doing this. As if she were a neighbor—no, a friend, who often dropped by of a morning to share a cup of tea and a bit of a gossip. After the initial awkwardness, Bria McKenna now seemed totally at ease with her unexpected visitor.
Emma wished she could be that way, because her own tongue was sticking to the roof of her mouth and her palms were growing hot and wet inside her doeskin driving gloves.
Bria fell into a silence, though, while she prepared the tea things. Emma tried not to notice that the patterns on the clayware cups didn’t match their saucers. That the spoons were made of tin, and the milk came from one, and molasses would be the sweetener instead of sugar.
By the time Bria had poured the tea, put a plate of sliced brown bread and a crock of oleo on the table, and sat down across from her, Emma was feeling such a pressing obligation to say something, anything, that she was nearly choking with it.
“There’s not a cloud in the sky today,” she said, “and the sun is already quite warm. Perhaps spring has finally settled in.”
“Why, so it has,” Bria said. She craned her head to peer out the open door, as if the sun shining in a clear blue sky warranted a look. “A lot different, surely, than Sunday last, when I played the fool, fainting in front of Pardon Hardy’s Drugstore.”
Emma spread the thin cotton blue-checkered napkin across her lap and drank a swallow of tea. She broke a slice of the brown bread into four proper pieces, but then didn’t eat it. When she caught herself tracing a pattern on the table’s brown oilcloth, she made herself stop and pull in a deep breath.
“On this day six years ago,” she said, “there was another terrible lightning and thunder storm. My brother, Willie, took his sloop out onto the bay and he never came back.”
She heard Bria’s sharp, sucked-in breath, and she pressed her fingers to her own lips as if she were stopping a scream. The words had come blurting out of her, exploded out of her like a cork out of a champagne bottle. She thought the words must have been stuck right there in her throat for years, fermenting, waiting for a chance to blow.
They weren’t to speak of it, though, not even amongst themselves, not even to their own grieving hearts . . . Willie’s death. Such
an embarrassment to the family, such a scandal. Such an unpleasantness to have brought up over tea.
But she wanted to speak of it—she had to or she would go mad.
An act born of madness and despair.
She felt Bria move, heard the dull ring of clayware, and then their fingers were curling together, resting a moment on the table’s shiny brown oilcloth.
“Oh, Miss Tremayne. It’s that sorry I am.”
“Something like that happens,” Emma said into the kitchen with its faded wallpaper and cracked linoleum, “and it leaves a well of pain that goes down deep inside you, deep where your heart is, I suppose. A well that feels so wretchedly empty. And whenever anything else bad happens to you, even things that are just a little hurtful, it always seems to lead right to that well that’s just sitting there waiting.”
Emma thought she probably wasn’t making a lot of sense, but she wasn’t going to stop until she got to the end of it. “For the longest time after . . . after it happened, I used to think: If he’s not around then why should I live, why should I matter? Why should anything matter?”

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