Read The Passions of Emma Online

Authors: Penelope Williamson

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

The Passions of Emma (27 page)

The kitchen fell into a moment of quiet, and then Merry’s hum tinkled brightly, like silver chimes.
Noreen covered her mouth with her hand, catching a giggle. “She says Da’s been boxing shadows.”
Their father leaned over the table to aim a mock blow at Merry’s
face, his knuckles brushing her nose as gently as a kiss, and the little girl squirmed in her chair and hummed in delight. “It’s a thing called shadowboxing, Nory,” he said.
“And who is the better pugilist, Mr. McKenna—yourself or your shadow?” Emma said.
She saw him go still for the briefest of moments, as though he were as surprised as she was that she had spoken up. Then he leaned back in his chair and hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his corduroy britches, and she knew he’d put on the Irish even before he opened his mouth.
“The better pugilist, do you ask, Miss Tremayne? Why, ’tis meself, of course, and it’s mortally offended I am that you would be suspecting otherwise. For sure if I didn’t give that shadow of mine such a proper belting, it’s hard set he was to go slinking out the door ahead of me.”
“Hunh,” Bria sniffed. “It’s surprised I am you made it out the door at all, Shay McKenna, what with the head on you being another of the great wonders of the world, so big is it.”
Shay clutched at his heart as if he’d been mortally wounded, and his wife and daughters all laughed. Even Emma had to smile. Although she was just now getting her breath back, she’d been that shocked by her own boldness. Her remark had been the sort of “smart talk” she always imagined making while out in company but rarely dared to.
But then it had been a long time since she’d felt the pains of shyness in Bria’s kitchen. This was a familiar place to her, a safe place. In the same way that the birch woods near home and the glass walls of the old orangery and the bay waters all held her safely.
She looked around the kitchen with its faded wallpaper and worn linoleum. With its touches peculiar to Bria: the tomato can always full of wildflowers, the hooked-rag rug and rush-seat rocking chair, the font of holy water next to the door. Emma realized with a small sense of wonder that she had been happy in this place, and the thought made her smile.
“Don’t. Don’t do that, Miss Tremayne.”
Her name, spoken so harshly in that shattered voice, skated along her flesh, and stung. She swung her head around, back to him, and slammed into the blazing anger in his eyes.
“Wh-what?” she said. “Don’t do what?”
“Be looking around my Bria’s kitchen with your nose in the air, sneering. You’re spoiled and you’re bored and you think playing peasant is an amusing way to pass a free afternoon. It gives you a chance to display your superiority, surely, and practice all your fine manners, splendid little miss that you are, but—”
“Shay!”
Bria’s cry cut across his words, stopping them, but his eyes stayed hard on Emma.
You are wrong about me
, she wanted to say to him. But the words got caught up somewhere in her throat, because for all that it was untrue now, there had been an element of truth there in the beginning, at the heart of it. And he was looking at her as if he knew it.
“Oh, Shay,” Bria cried again, his name tearing out of her on a ragged cough. “How could you say such a thing, and Miss Tremayne a guest in our house?”
“Our house, aye.” He laid his hands flat on the table, as if he would push himself to his feet, although he stayed seated, and his gaze remained fastened on Emma’s face. “You could be saying that, since we pay the rent on it. Or you could be saying she’s a guest in Mr. Geoffrey Alcott’s house, as he owns the title on it. And as she’s soon to be Mr. Alcott’s wife, that almost makes us a guest of hers, does it not?”
Emma hadn’t known that Geoffrey owned this house, although she realized she should have. Alcott Textiles probably held title to almost all the property around the mill. Just as the Tremaynes owned most of the shacks and tenements in Goree.
“And you,” Bria was saying to her man, her voice roughened from her coughing and her anger, “are behaving as though Miss
Tremayne was someone we ought to despise just for being who she is. God save us, we’re not in Ireland anymore.”
“Landlords are the same the world over, is that not so, Miss Tremayne? Only here in America you’ve added a new twist on how you go about bleeding your tenants: grading a family’s rent on the number of its wee ones that’re sent to slave in the mills for your profits. The more children, the less the rent. Isn’t that how it is, Miss Tremayne?”
She shook her head, her gaze falling away from his. She hadn’t known that, either.
“It’s a cruel practice, would you not say so, Miss Tremayne? To force a man to choose between putting his daughters into the spinning room or watching them starve in the gutter.”
His eyes were hard on her, judging her. She felt as she had every other time she’d been near him, that he was testing her with rules from a world she didn’t know.
Bria pressed a waded-up handkerchief to her mouth, stifling another cough. She gripped her man’s arm, her fingers digging into the flesh bared by his rolled-up sleeve. “Do you mean to be teaching your daughters tinkers’ manners by your own bad example, Seamus McKenna? No matter who has the owning of this house, Miss Tremayne is a guest at our table, and you will tell her now that you’re sorry.”
He let a long, edgy moment pass before he said, “If the truth offends you, Miss Tremayne, then I do humbly beg your pardon.”
Emma lifted her head, her gaze locking now head-on with his. “You’ve a rare knack, Mr. McKenna, for inserting insults into your apologies.”
She saw his eyes tighten a little at the corners, and then his mouth opened into something that was not quite a smile. She thought he was going to say something more, when Merry erupted into a shrill, excited humming.
Noreen had been watching her father the whole time, with a worried frown pinching her face. But now she fastened her
attention on to her sister, and her mouth twisted as if pulled between smiling and weeping.
“Merry says there’s no need to be making such a fuss.” She pointed at Emma, her cheeks flushing brightly. “’Cause
she’s
going to be buying us all a brand-new house someday. Merry says she’s got lots and lots of money.” Her gaze went from Emma to her father and then back to Emma again, and her eyes turned wary. “Just how much money have you got anyways?”
Emma was taken aback. It wasn’t the sort of question anyone of her set would have dared to ask. Yet the girls, Mr. McKenna, and even Bria were all looking at her as if they expected an answer.
She lifted her chin. They expected pride—well, then, she would show them pride. “There is the Tremayne family fortune, of course, which will come to Maddie and me upon my father’s death. It’s mostly in interest-and dividend-bearing securities, although I’ve no earthly idea how much it amounts to. And then I’ve a trust fund that comes to me upon my marriage, or when I turn twenty-five. It’s only a million.”
“Mother Mary,” Shay McKenna exclaimed, rolling his eyes in exaggerated wonder. “‘Only a million,’ she says.” He waved his arm in a wide sweep around the room. “And how many flowers are papered on our kitchen walls—only a thousand, would you say?” He picked up the small blue shaker of Morton’s salt that always sat in the middle of the table, next to the can of wildflowers. “And how many grains of salt in this here—only a hundred thousand? Yet our dear Miss Tremayne has this thing called a trust fund and only a million dollars are in it, and she speaks of it as if it were such an inconsequential thing.”
“Oh, Shay . . .” Bria said on a long sigh.
Emma carefully folded her napkin and laid it out beside the teacup and saucer. “Please forgive me,” she said in her genteelest of voices, “but I’m afraid I must be leaving now.” She came gracefully to her feet with the barest rustle of silken petticoats. If he was
going to accuse her of coming here to practice her fine manners, then she would practice them.
“Thank you for your generous hospitality.” She gave him a small but gracious nod. “Good day, Mr. McKenna. Noreen, Merry . . .” She nearly faltered at the stricken look that darkened Bria’s eyes. “Mrs. McKenna,” she said, her voice breaking a little.
She walked through the door and down the steep steps and out to Thames Street, to where her little carriage waited for her at the hitching post next to the boardwalk. She had just unlooped the reins from around the iron ring when she heard the door bang behind her.
“Miss Tremayne, I’d like a further word with you.”
Slowly, she turned and waited for him. He walked down the dirt path toward her, the path lined with the blue and yellow violets she had helped to plant.
He brought himself right up to her. Close enough for her to watch a bead of sweat form below his ear and run down the pulsing vein in his neck. He unnerved her, the way he was looking at her, the intensity of his stare.
Her throat had grown so tight, she could barely speak. “Do you wish to berate me more, Mr. McKenna? Or perhaps you want to forbid my spoiled self from setting foot inside your house again.”
He shook his head slowly. “No, I’ll not be doing that. Only I’ll be asking you . . .” For the flash of an instant she saw a vulnerability in his eyes, as if a brittle shell had cracked to reveal a part of his soul. “Don’t hurt them,” he said.
Her breath gusted out in a small gasp. “I would never!”
He searched her face, as though weighing the truth of her words. His eyes had turned brittle again, hard, his mouth unrelenting.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “Bria is my friend.”
“Your friend, is she? And what’s going to happen, then, when your other ‘friends’ learn about your visits here? When that man whose ring you’re wearing, and whose life you’re going to be sharing, comes to know of it? I can give you a Yankee guarantee they
won’t like it, and before long they won’t like you for doing it. And you can’t tell me that won’t matter to you.”
“That won’t matter to me,” she said, although even she could hear the lie in her words. She didn’t
want
it to matter, but she had never before braved the censure of the whole of society. And she knew it could be brutal.
“You could as easily pull a fish out of the bay and ask it to take up living on the land,” he said, echoing her unwanted thoughts, “than to build a bridge between our two worlds.”
“I only . . .” She stopped, unable to go on. She didn’t want to build any bridges. She only wanted to be Bria McKenna’s friend.
He drew in a deep breath, easing it out again slowly. She thought his mouth might have softened a little, although his eyes remained hard. “It’s such a grand life you’ve had up until now, Emma Tremayne. You’ve never had to look ahead to the end of things, to their cost.”
She tried to force a smile but her lips were too stiff. “Surely you’re exaggerating. It might be unusual, but it’s hardly a crime against either God or man for a Yankee blue blood and an Irish immigrant woman to share a bit of friendship.”
“Oh, so it’s down to a ‘bit’ of friendship now, is it?” He leaned in to her, his voice growing even rougher. “My Bria doesn’t give of her heart easily, and so it’s a fragile thing. Whereas you . . .
Dhia
, your sort breaks hearts as easily as most folk break bread.”
His words hurt, surprisingly so. Her throat thickened, and hot tears pricked at the back of her eyes. She was going to start crying in front of him at any moment now, and she didn’t think she could bear that. “You really do despise me, don’t you?”
His laugh was low and ragged. “Now, there’s the Great Folk for you, always looking at the world from how it touches upon yourselves. It’s nearly down on my knees I am, begging you to spare my wife the pain I know you’re going to bring her, and all you’re caring about is that I might not be holding you in the grand esteem that you think is your due.”
She tightened the whole of her face against the tears. She lifted her head and turned away from him to climb into her carriage with all the dignity she could muster from two hundred years’ worth of Great Folk breeding.
But then she heard his frayed voice follow her as she drove away. “I don’t despise you,” he said.
He didn’t despise her.
He watched her drive down the road, her carriage wheels rattling on the packed, oiled dirt. The wide straw brim of her hat shadowed her face, and the lace jabot at her throat fluttered in the bay breeze. She looked haughty and unapproachable, and expensive, and he had thought her to be all of those things the first time he’d seen her, that day of the fox hunt. Later, he had thought her a brave-hearted child, hungering for adventure. An innocent being pulled apart by her own painful shyness and a wild daring.

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