Read The Passions of Emma Online

Authors: Penelope Williamson

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

The Passions of Emma (24 page)

“Why isn’t it done?”
Bethel turned, her face bearing a strangely haunted look. “It isn’t done,” she finally said, “because the lower races have learned to keep their humble distance from us Great Folk, as well they should.”
“Perhaps it’s never done because they believe us to be a bunch of boring snobs, and they are right in their assumption. But Mrs. McKenna has twice graciously asked me into her home, and I have accepted. She is a respectable married woman—”
“Respectable! She is
Irish
.”
Emma set down the hairbrush and opened a tortoiseshell hairpin box. She gathered up her hair and began to arrange it in a smooth seashell pouf. But there was such a trembling going on inside her, the loose bodice of her kimono quivered with it.
“I shall ask Geoffrey what he thinks,” she said, calling once again on her newfound power as Geoffrey Alcott’s betrothed and the Tremayne family’s only, and soon-to-be-realized, hope. “He, at least, seems to approve of the things I do.”
He wouldn’t approve of this thing, though. As little as she thought she knew of him at times, that much she did know. Geoffrey had strong feelings about one’s place in the world and the proper order of things, and he did not like them questioned or disturbed.
Emma braved a glance at her mother in the mirror. Bethel had tangled her fingers in her jet necklace and was staring hard at the cabbage roses on the carpet. She spoke as though to herself, “Whispers . . . there’ll be whispering again, like at the ball. And what if we’re found out? We can’t be found out.”
“What? Find out what?” Emma had never seen her mother in such a distracted state, but then she had lately taken to dosing herself not only with laudanum but with Maddie’s chloral hydrate. She claimed it dulled her appetite. “Mama? Are you . . . are you feeling well?”
Bethel jerked, swinging around. “Never mind, then,” she said, waving a trembling hand through the air. “Never mind.”
Emma let out a deep, shaky breath. She wasn’t sure herself just how much she’d been bluffing, but she wouldn’t have to find out yet, because her mama wasn’t going to call it.
Bethel thrust her shoulders back and marched toward her
daughter. “Here, let me do that, for heaven’s sake,” she said, taking the ivory hairpins from Emma’s hand. “You are making an utter mess of it. You don’t know how fortunate you are to have such long, thick hair to work with, when the rest of us must make do with rats and switches and falls.”
She stabbed the pins so hard into Emma’s hair she pricked the scalp. “Poor Mr. Alcott might be besotted with you for the moment, but he can hardly be expected to indulge your eccentricities indefinitely, and neither can society. I declare, Emma, it has always been a struggle to get you to conduct yourself appropriately to your station in life. You go out sailing by yourself for hours at a time, and never mind that you’re a Bristolian and a Tremayne, it is still hoydenish behavior for a girl of twenty-two. And what you do out in the old orangery—I’ll not call it art, for it certainly is not. Disgraceful is what it is. But this latest. Befriending this non-person—an
Irish
woman. It is so . . . so undignified.”
“It is a kindness,” Emma said, and she felt a twinge of shame. For if anyone was being kind and indulgent it was Bria McKenna. “Mrs. McKenna is new to Bristol and so she has few friends. What’s more, she can’t go out much, for she is in a delicate condition.”
“She sounds as common as clay.” Her mama’s hands fell onto Emma’s shoulders and she gripped them hard, twisting Emma around on the stool. “Why are you doing this to me? It’s because of what happened that night, isn’t it? You’re trying to punish me like your father is punishing me.”
Her mother’s words so shocked Emma that for a moment she couldn’t speak. “I’m not trying to punish you, Mama,” she finally said, her voice breaking at the edges. Because maybe she did want her mother punished, and herself punished as well. “You . . . you said we are not to talk about it.”
Her mother’s fingers dug into her shoulders, hard, and then she pushed away. She pressed the back of her hand against her
forehead. “I don’t know how I shall survive these months until you are safely married.”
“If I really wanted to be a trial to you, I could become one of those ‘new women’ the newspapers and magazines have been going on about. I could take up smoking cigarettes and bicycling. Or I could organize a girl’s baseball team right here in Bristol and we could all wear bloomers. Do you think Monsieur Worth would design me a pair?”
Bethel shuddered, and the face she turned to her daughter was soft and yellow as old wax. Emma felt mean for having done that, tormenting her mother with words even if she hadn’t meant them. Mama had always been as scared of scandal as people used to be afraid of catching smallpox.
Emma’s gaze fell to the fingers she had clutched in her lap. “I was only joking, Mama.”
“I do not find you the least bit amusing in such a mood, Emma.” Her mother turned on her heel and walked stiffly to the door. “You hurry up and finish dressing. We’re going to be unpardonably late as it is.”
Emma watched the door close behind her mother’s back. She was a tumble of feelings: guilt and fear, and a wild sort of excitement. She might not be a new woman, but she felt like a new Emma.
She heard the hum and click of Maddie’s wheelchair and she looked around to find that her sister was being pushed through the door by her maid from the sitting room they shared.
The maid guided the chair up onto the plush carpet and over next to the big tester bed. Maddie dismissed the girl with a nod and a quiet thank-you and then cocked her head, pretending to study her sister carefully. “You are a paradox, Emma Tremayne. I’ve seen you blush six shades of violet when someone you’ve known for twenty years so much as wishes you a good morning. Yet you just stood up to our formidable mama without turning an eyelash.”
“That’s because my eyelashes were too frozen with fear to turn,”
Emma said. They shared a smile, then, although Emma’s lips trembled.
She wondered how much Maddie had heard, if she’d understood what their mama had meant when she’d spoken of punishment. Willie and what had happened the night he drowned was a subject she and her sister had never broached. Maddie never spoke of Willie at all, for he had been responsible for the accident that had put her in a wheelchair. And Emma thought that even with him dead, Maddie had yet to forgive him.
Maddie leaned over to touch the white lace and crepe bib on the lilac muslin tea dress that was laid out on the bed, along with a fresh set of silk and lace underthings. “You and Mama are going out?”
“To tea at Mrs. Hamilton’s.”
Emma got up and went to sit on the bed, facing her sister’s chair. She picked up a sheer lisle stocking and leaned back to pull it onto her leg. “And, oh, I do so not want to go. She will serve day-old pastries, even though she’s rich enough to buy the contents of a dozen bakeries. And she’ll entertain us, as she does every time, by playing the same Chopin interlude on a piano that hasn’t been tuned in forty years. We’ll be seeing the same people we saw yesterday and the day before that . . .” Emma rolled the top of the stocking down over a pink silk garter. “You would hate it, Maddie.”
At the silence that followed this pronouncement, Emma looked up. Although Maddie had averted her face, Emma thought she saw a sheen of tears in her sister’s eyes.
“No, I wouldn’t,” Maddie said softly.
Emma’s gaze fell back to her lap. She put a pleat in her kimono robe, then smoothed it out again. “No, probably not.” She pushed her breath out in a small sigh. “It’s just me being foolish, I suppose. And it’s gotten worse since I’ve become engaged to Geoffrey. I feel on display everywhere I go, like some butterfly on a pin. Everyone always stares so, and you know how I hate that.”
“They stare because you’re beautiful, Emma, and you seem to have grown more so ever since you and Geoffrey proclaimed your devotion to the world. You can quite take one’s breath away when one glances up to catch you in certain poses—”
“I don’t
pose
,” Emma protested, her cheeks flaming.
“Perhaps not consciously. But no matter what you’re doing, all your limbs somehow manage to arrange themselves in the most graceful way possible. And there’s always such a play of feelings on your face—it’s as though one were watching a rose burst into blossom all at once, from bud to full and glorious bloom.” Maddie’s mouth curved into an impish smile. “Having said that, I now expect you to go to Mrs. Hamilton’s and behave the whole afternoon in a perfectly ordinary manner.”
Emma couldn’t help smiling as well, although her face still burned with embarrassment. “Perhaps I’ll do something audacious and outrageous instead,” she said. “Perhaps I’ll beg Mrs. Hamilton for some fresh cream to go along with my stale scone.”
They laughed together, but Maddie was the first to fall quiet. She cocked her head to stare at Emma again.
“You’re changing, Em. I do believe it must come from being so much in love.”
It was a startling thought to Emma—that Geoffrey had done this to her. That her feelings for him could be so powerful that they would change what she was inside herself.
“I wish I knew for certain what it felt like to be in love,” she said. “There are moments when I feel so lighthearted and giddy, and I smile for no reason, and I want to twirl around and around until I make myself dizzy, except that I’m already dizzy. And then there are other moments when there’s such a fierce and lonely ache in my chest, and I find myself mourning things I can’t even name, and wishing for things that seem wild and crazy and impossible . . .”
She leaned forward and seized Maddie’s hands, which were clasped together on her lap rug. “Oh, Maddie, do you think that’s love?”
Maddie’s gaze fell away from Emma. She looked down at their entwined fingers, hiding her thoughts. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”
As if to establish her privilege to do so, Emma paid another visit to the house on Thames Street the very next day—the third in a row. But this time Bria wasn’t at home.
As a matter of habit, Emma opened her black lizard chatelaine bag and took out one of her gilt-edged, embossed calling cards. It was only when she was looking around for a place to put it that Emma had to laugh at herself. As if there would be a silver tray sitting on Bria McKenna’s front stoop where one could leave a bit of pasteboard as proof of one’s proper intentions.
She came calling again, though, late the very next afternoon. On her way home from a couple of hours spent with Geoffrey attending a travelogue at the lyceum on the wonders of Indonesia. She hadn’t realized it was an off-Saturday, when the day shift ended early at the mill, until the door opened at her knock and she was looking down into a bright, smiling face framed by orange curls.
“Why, hello, Merry,” Emma said. “We meet again.”
The little girl’s smile widened, and two round dimples the size of pennies indented her cheeks. She hummed fiercely and spun around on one foot in a circle.
A little alarmed at these strange antics, Emma peered around the jamb to look for Bria just as an older girl came to the door. She had skinny, awkward limbs that seemed all elbows and knees, and her brown hair was twisted into such tight braids they stuck out from the sides of her face like jug handles.
“What do you keep coming around here for?” she said.
“Noreen!” Bria appeared in the doorway, her hands falling on the older girl’s shoulders. “Shame on you, lass,” she scolded, giving her a little shake. “Show Miss Tremayne you’ve been taught proper manners.”
The girl dropped into a stiff curtsey. But then she jerked her pointed chin into the air and scowled at Emma as if challenging her to find anything the least bit likable around her. Emma responded by loving her instantly.
“How do you do, Noreen,” Emma said, giving the girl her brightest smile.
The girl turned to her mother, and Emma caught the sparkle of angry tears held back in her eyes. “Merry
said
the angel would be coming today.”
Bria tucked loose wisps of hair back into one of her daughter’s braids. Both girls were covered with the sooty grime and lint from the cotton mill. “Did she, then?” Bria said. “And I suppose the fairies told her as much?”
Merry hummed loudly, shaking her head so hard her curls bounced.

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