The Passions of Emma (29 page)
Emma gave her hand a squeeze of understanding, and Bria fell into a silence, then swallowed as if she were choking back a rock. “I’ll be telling you what happened,” she said. “In a wee moment.”
“There’s no need, Bria. No need, no need.”
“There is, surely. Like yourself, I’ve been feeling the urge to tell someone for a long time now.”
The face Bria turned to her was suffused with both a haunting strength and a tender innocence. “I told you before how Shay’s mam came to die, and how the faith died in his heart that day he buried her. But I didn’t tell you how, when the faith passed on, there came such a hate to take its place . . .
“He had joined the Fenians after that. And the Land Leaguers, a group of violent rebels that harassed and terrorized the landowners and their agents, even killing them when the opportunity presented itself.
“He waited eight years for a chance to do for the land agent who’d driven his mam into the sea. Leastways I think it was Shay who did that cold-blooded killing. He’s never admitted so to me,
and that’s one thing I’ll never be asking him. But the resident magistrate had a warrant that said he’d done it, all the same.”
and that’s one thing I’ll never be asking him. But the resident magistrate had a warrant that said he’d done it, all the same.”
She was gripping so tightly to Emma’s hand now that she was crushing flesh to bone, but Emma didn’t make a sound. She could barely breathe, for the sick bucking of her heart.
Shay was out in his curragh when the resident magistrate came for him. Sir Michael Barnes had come riding into Gortadoo on his blood bay horse, wearing the scarlet coat of the master of the hunt, as if he’d only had to take a pause in doing that more important thing to round up a common Irish criminal. He’d been accompanied by a full complement of the Royal Irish Constabulary, though, in their smart green uniforms.
Bria had had some warning, enough to hide the girls. She put them in the pigsty and covered them with the wet, stinking slop. She made them swear to keep out of sight and silent, no matter what happened.
“The magistrate said Shay was to turn himself in, and to make certain he got the message, the magistrate, he . . . he raped me. He bent me over a stone wall and took me like a dog, outside, where all the neighbors could see . . . where my girls could see. And Shay would be sure to hear of it.”
“Dear God, no,” Emma whispered.
“Only Shay didn’t have to hear of it,” Bria went on. She was crying now, big, silent tears that coursed in streams down her cheeks. “Because he came home in time to see it, to see the last of it. He tried to kill the man who . . . the magistrate, with his fists, and he would have if the constables hadn’t been there to pull him off. They were supposed to take him to Kilmainham Jail for trial, but they set out to hang him right there in Gortadoo, for attempting to murder an officer of the Crown, they said. It was the only tree to be had for twenty miles. A yew tree.”
“Oh, Bria . . .” Emma could feel the wetness of tears on her own face. She came up onto her knees and wrapped her free arm around
Bria’s back while still holding on to her hand. For she wasn’t going to let Bria go; never would she let her go.
Bria’s back while still holding on to her hand. For she wasn’t going to let Bria go; never would she let her go.
“They made me watch it,” Bria said. “And the girls—they made them watch it, too.”
Emma moaned and held her tighter.
“He took a long time at dying, Shay did, strangling at the end of that rope. When my brother, Donagh, cut him down his face was all black, and there was the hangman’s bloody rope burn around his neck. There was a trickle of breath still in him, too, though, only I didn’t know it was so at the time.”
Emma tried to stop the sounds of her crying by pressing her mouth into Bria’s shoulder, but she couldn’t, and it didn’t matter. They cried together for a while, and then slowly grew quiet.
“I don’t know how you bore it,” Emma said into the kitchen’s soft silence.
Bria shrugged and swiped at her cheeks with the back of her free hand. Her other hand still held on tightly to Emma’s. She was breathing hard and shallow, almost panting.
“I bore it in the only way I could. I held a wake for him and buried him, and it wasn’t until he was already on a ship bound for America that my brother told me I’d put a coffin full of stones into the ground instead of my man. Donagh said they were afraid I’d let on, that I wouldn’t seem sorrowful enough.” A ragged laugh tore hard from Bria’s chest. “I suffered through three days of thinking he was dead, and weeping enough rivers of sorrow to drown the world, and sure I’ll never forgive either one of them for that.”
She took such a breath now, as if there were no air left in all the world. “When I thought he was dead . . . Oh, Miss Tremayne, when I thought he was dead, when I put him in the ground—I didn’t know heart and soul could hurt like that, and now I’m doing it to him. Now he’ll be burying me.”
Emma stayed with Bria until the shadows grew long and lavender across the open door, and the girls came home from the mill. And then she went with them to the back end of town to pick raspberries from the bushes that grew wild along Ferry Road.
The sun began to sink into the bay, turning it to melted gold. The breeze had a floating lightness to it, like feathers. Bria sang beneath her breath while she picked, stopping from time to time to pop a berry into her mouth. “‘If maidens could sing like blackbirds and thrushes . . . How many young men would hide in the bushes . . .’”
Her song trailed off and she looked around her. “Where did those girls disappear to, did you see?”
Emma didn’t answer, for she was lost herself in looking at Bria’s face. At the sharp curve of a cheekbone, the high ridge of her brow, the proud thrust of her chin. She had made many sketches of that face. She wanted desperately, hungrily, to try molding that face in clay, but she was also afraid to. As if the instant she tried to create it, she would lose it.
“Are we friends, Bria?” she said, as they kneeled together at the side of the dusty road, among fringes of goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace, holding baskets in the shallows of their laps, and with the tangy kiss of raspberries lingering on their lips.
Bria turned to face her. Her mouth, Emma saw, was stained red with juice. “If we aren’t friends after all that has passed between us, then what would you call us?”
“I want,” Emma said, “to invent another name for what we are.” She looked away, down the road that led through the woods to The Ferry, where she knew from experience that snipes pecked through the mudflats and occasionally died. “There are many people I call friends, but I know they’re not. I’m beginning to think that nothing in my life is real.”
“That’s a
real
nice dress you have on, surely.
Real
expensive too, I shouldn’t wonder.”
real
nice dress you have on, surely.
Real
expensive too, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Emma’s sigh was colored with laughter. “Am I behaving foolishly?”
“Aye. And a little pridefully, too.”
“There, you see, that’s why I need you in my life. To keep me humble and wise.”
They shared a smile. Bria plucked a raspberry off the bush and put it to Emma’s lips. Emma opened her mouth and sucked it in, and the fruit exploded on her tongue, warm and sweet.
“I am your friend, Emma,” Bria said, using her given name for the first time in all their moments and hours together. The color was high in her cheeks, giving them life. Her smile was real. “I’ve come to love you dearly.”
Emma knew her own face revealed the force of all she was feeling. “I always thought that when I found a friend, a
real
friend, it would be like discovering the missing half of myself. But I was wrong. A real friend isn’t your other half, she’s the whole of you, of your soul. She’s the reflection you see in the mirror.”
real
friend, it would be like discovering the missing half of myself. But I was wrong. A real friend isn’t your other half, she’s the whole of you, of your soul. She’s the reflection you see in the mirror.”
Emma lifted her hand, palm out, and then Bria did the same. They touched fingertips, the way they would touch their images in a sheet of silvered glass. Then they both blinked and looked away, as if they had suddenly become blinded by the mirror’s reflection.
And they both realized that the girls were running toward them down the road, running hard as if they were being chased. Merry was humming so wildly they could hear her from all that way, humming as loudly as the whir of a hummingbird’s wing. Then Noreen began to shout.
“Da’s fighting!”
The swinging doors of the Crow’s Nest Saloon slapped together behind their backs. It was like a cave inside, dim and dank, thick with the yeasty smell of beer and the tang of whiskey. A haze of tobacco smoke floated through the air, stinging Emma’s eyes.
She had never been inside a place that sold the devil’s brew. A couple of years ago some daughters of the Great Folk had joined the Women’s Temperance. They had knelt in the rain and the mud outside the Crow’s Nest, praying loudly for God to bring the drunkards to the light and handing out white ribbons as pledges of purity against alcoholic drink. Emma, of course, hadn’t been allowed to take part. Mama frowned on public displays of any sort, even righteous ones.
Emma wasn’t sure what she was expecting now, but what she first saw was disappointing in its very ordinariness. A crude plank bar rested atop stacks of barrels; sawdust lay damp and greasy on the floor. In the middle of the bar stood a wash boiler full of chowder, but the saloon had no tables and chairs, only boxes and stools and a few wobbly benches leaning up against the rough, knotholed walls. None of it looked as if it had been cleaned in the memory of man.
A few men stood around, drinking from tin pails and tomato cans. On the wall in back of the bar hung a sign offering beer for three cents—all you could drink without breathing.
Emma read the sign twice and still couldn’t imagine what it meant. Until she noticed a man lying on the floor beneath one of the barrels, with a rubber hose running from it into his mouth. His chest heaved and his throat worked furiously, while another man in a long leather apron stood over him, his hand on the barrel’s tap. Ready to shut it off, no doubt, as soon as his customer took a breath.
As for Bria, she had barely given the bar or its offerings a glance. She was heading for a back room. Shouts and whistles spilled out from behind the glass-beaded curtain that covered the doorway. And smacking noises that sounded like a cleaver hitting meat.
Blocking the way, with his long legs and broad shoulders, was a man wearing a priest’s robe and collar. Emma didn’t have to be told who he was. The proud bones that gave Bria’s face its strength made of her brother an extraordinarily handsome man.
His gaze went from Bria to Emma, and his eyes widened. “Bria, what in heaven’s holy name—”
“Are you doing here, Father O’Reilly?” Bria shot back. She gave a long, angry look up and down the length of him. “Sweet saints. And why am I not surprised? Don’t tell me you’ve come to the Crow’s Nest to give the
poitín
your blessing and turn it into holy water.”
poitín
your blessing and turn it into holy water.”
“Aw, Bria.” He reached up to brush away the curls that were always clinging to her cheek. “It’s only a wee bit of a sparring he’s doing. The sandbag is all well and good, but it doesn’t hit back. The lad needs to get his feet wet.”
She knocked his hand away. “The lad needs a great clout on his ear, and so do you.” She pushed past him, aiming for the beaded curtain. “You’ll be stepping out of our way, Donagh, if you know what’s good for you.”
Within the back room, two circus lamps cast arcs of ghostly, flickering light through a blue fog of tobacco smoke. A rude and boisterous crowd of men and a few women pushed and jostled elbows for space in front of an area that had been roped off to form a ring around two brawling, panting men: Shay McKenna, and a man with lumpy ears and thick, dark eyebrows that bristled across his forehead like a hedge.
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