“Emma? What is the matter?”
Her mother’s face wavered before her. Emma closed her eyes and put the back of her hand against her cheek. “I feel faint,” she said, trying to sound weak and trembly. Ladies were supposed to feel faint on occasion; it showed a certain delicacy on their part and encouraged men to feel protective. Mama was always fainting. “I . . . I think I ought to go lie down for a while.”
“Oh, very well, if you must. We can’t have you making a scene,” Bethel said. She sounded peevish, but not, to Emma’s relief, disbelieving. “I’ll make your excuses.”
“Thank you, Mama,” Emma said, letting her voice trail off into a sigh.
She turned and made herself walk slowly through the velvet-swagged doorway. But she wanted to run.
She was halfway up the oak stairs when the knocking began. She spun around again, nearly falling. She grabbed the banister tightly
with a silk-gloved hand. She had no reason to believe it was he, yet she knew, she knew.
She went back down the stairs, but slowly, for her legs felt as stiff as old leather, and her heart thumped unevenly. She stared at the big coffered ebony doors a long time before she jerked them open, and then she was looking at his face, into his eyes, looking at him.
At first he said nothing, then his ruined voice came in a whisper. “My wife . . .” The words were so much an echo of that other night, she was almost shocked to see a clear, star-filled sky at his back. “Bria’s having the baby and she’s asking for you.”
Such a freight of feeling came over Emma that she couldn’t move or speak. Bria was having the baby. Bria had asked for her, for
her.
It didn’t matter that for honor’s sake she had decided to stay away. If Bria needed her, then she would come. For tonight she would come.
Emma heard voices coming from the direction of the drawing room. She took a step nearer to him, pulling the door shut behind her. A balmy sea breeze caressed her bared skin. She heard the bay lapping at the rocks on the shore. His chest was heaving; the sweat was rank on him.
“Oh, God, is it happening now? Did you run all this way?”
“Sure and what was I thinking, awearin’ out my poor shoes, when I could’ve ridden here in my coach with its team of four matching bays to pull it and the gilded crest painted on its doors.” He snatched off his hat and thrust his fingers through his hair. “The worst pains’ve only just started, but she’s not known for taking her sweet time at it, so are you coming, or no?”
“But shouldn’t we . . . My uncle’s here tonight. He’s a doctor and—”
He gripped her arm just above the pearl-beaded cuff of her evening glove. As if he would keep her from turning around and going back inside, although she hadn’t moved. His hand was rough with calluses.
“No, no doctor,” he said. “Bria has such a mortal fear of them, and she doesn’t need any more upset. You don’t think I’d be here to fetch you otherwise, do you? Except to make her happy?” He let her go and took a step back. “But if you can’t be bothered to come, then just be saying so, and I’ll be taking myself off.”
“Do you expect me to run the three miles back with you, or may we take my carriage? It hasn’t got a crest, though, so you’ll have to slum it.”
She thought he almost smiled at her then, that he thought about smiling. “Ah,
Dhia
, what a strange little miss you are. Just when I think you—” He stopped, shook his head. “I didn’t run here, I borrowed Paddy O’Donahue’s milk wagon. It awaits beyond your castle gates, Miss Tremayne,” he said, and he held out his hand to her.
She put her hand into his, and they walked together down the piazza steps. She hadn’t known it could be such an intimate thing, going hand in hand. How it could make you tremble and your heart beat fast and your breath go away entirely.
At the bottom of the steps, he said, “Can you manage a wee bit of a run after all?” And then they were running hand in hand along the quahog-shell drive and through the scrolled iron gates, to where indeed a milk wagon waited.
The wagon smelled of soured milk and was full of empty bottles that rattled in their metal cages as they bounced over the road. He drove recklessly, wildly.
In the wagon’s close darkness, she breathed him in, although she was careful not to brush against him or touch him in any way. She thought he must be able to hear her heart beating for him, but she could hide everything else. Her life had made her a master at hiding things.
The wagon swayed as he took the corner onto Hope Street too fast. Emma clutched at the seat, and the frothy chiffon skirts of her evening dress rustled like dry grass in the wind. She wondered what one normally wore to attend a birthing.
She smoothed down her skirts, making them rustle some more. She hugged herself, gripping her elbows, suddenly feeling cold.
He turned to look at her, his face flashing white in the glare of a passing street lamp. “You’ll not be having to do anything, you know. The midwife’ll be there.”
She breathed, swallowed, nodded.
The wagon swayed, the milk bottles rattled, and Bria’s husband said, “For two weeks you’re there to see her near every day, regular as a cuckoo out of a clock, you are. And then you disappear. Do you think she hasn’t noticed?”
Emma swallowed again, breathed again. “I’ve been busy.”
“Have you, then? Bria’s been busy herself. Busy dying.”
Tears clawed, hot and salty, at Emma’s eyes. She turned her head away from him, toward the dark of the passing night.
But when he pulled up to the house on Thames Street, beneath the listing lamppost, he reached across and gripped her chin, turning her face to the white light spilling out from beneath the lamp’s cracked globe. She could feel the tears wet on her cheeks; she hadn’t been able to stop them.
He said nothing, though, only looked at her, and then he let her go and jumped out of the wagon. He helped her down with a hand under her elbow, turned, and walked away from her up the path, not waiting to see if she followed.
Noreen was sitting on the front stoop, with her arms wrapped around her legs and her shoulders hunched. At the sight of her father, she jumped up and ran into the house ahead of him, through the open door.
Emma stood where she was, among the violets she and Bria had planted. She felt disjointed all over, like a marionette dangling loose on its strings.
She heard a loud humming from behind the milk wagon and she turned. Merry crawled out from between the wagon’s large rear wheels. She stood beneath the street lamp, within the circle of its stark light, and stared at Emma with wide, solemn eyes.
“Mam needs you,” she said, and it took a moment for Emma to understand that she’d actually spoken real words.
Emma gathered up the chiffon silk skirt of her evening dress and knelt, sitting back on her heels, so that they were eye to eye. Her tongue felt so thick and uncertain. She’d just spent the last hours engaged in endless small talk. Now, when it mattered so much, she seemed to have no words to say, or even breath to speak them with. All her life she’d always had such trouble with words: finding them and losing them, hoarding them and wasting them.
“And so I’m here,” she finally said. “Though I’m not sure what good I’ll be. You could put what I know about birthing babies into a thimble and still have room left over for a thumb.”
Merry’s laugh rang pure and bright. She skipped up to Emma and grabbed her hand. “We should go in the house now, ’cause the baby’s coming. Noreen says the fairies are going to bring him, but that’s silly. He’ll be coming out of Mam’s tummy, from between her legs.”
She tugged on Emma’s hand, helping her up, and once Emma was standing, she wrapped both of her hands around Emma’s and began swinging their arms back and forth. Her hands were sweaty and sticky, in need of a good washing.
I can do that. I can wash a little girl’s hands.
At the thought, a warm, elusive feeling swelled inside Emma—an unfamiliar thing, it was. A feeling of belonging, of being needed.
Merry stopped swinging their arms and looked up at her. “You musn’t leave us ever again.”
Emma didn’t know she was crying until she felt the seep of tears on her eyelids. “No, I . . . I won’t.”
Merry let go of her hand and ran up the path. She hopped onto the stoop with both feet like a rabbit, then looked back at Emma, waiting.
“Merry?” Emma said, her voice pitched low and breaking. “You can talk.”
The child rocked once, from one foot to the other. She hummed
a long, flat note that could have meant anything, then she disappeared inside the house.
It was bright inside the kitchen with the kerosene lamps all lit. But it was empty. Emma walked slowly into the bedroom as she had walked into so many rooms in her life, feeling shy and self-conscious and unsure.
Bria lay in a white iron bed, with her knees up and bent and spread wide beneath a sheet, and her hands stretched high over her head, gripping the pipe railings. Her back was arched into a taut bow, and she was so drenched with sweat that her thin cotton night rail clung, soaking, to her wasted flesh. Her breathing blew hard in and out her open mouth, sucking and rasping in her chest.
Shay stood at the washstand. He had his coat off and his shirtsleeves rolled up and he was scrubbing his hands in a speckled blue enamel basin. Emma had stopped just inside the door, and he turned to look at her. Taut, white lines bracketed his mouth, and a muscle ticked in his cheek, alongside the scar.
“The midwife hasn’t come,” he said.
“She’s afraid Mam’s going to give her the wasting sickness,” Noreen said. “No one ever comes to see Mam anymore because they’re all afraid she’ll give them the sickness.” She stood next to the door, her back and hands flat against the wall like a soldier at attention. Merry stood next to her, mute and still.
But Bria had turned her head at the sound of their voices. It seemed there was no flesh left on her face, only pale, thin skin pulled tight over the beautiful, strong bones of her skull.
“Emma,
mo bhanacharaid
. . .” She drew in another shallow, rattling breath. “I was so afraid you . . . wouldn’t come.”
“What, not come and miss
the
premier blessed event of the season?” A strange sound came out of Emma’s tight throat, that was both a laugh and a sob. It hurt so sweetly, the love she felt for this woman, her friend.
One of the kitchen’s ladderback chairs had been pulled up next to the bed. Emma went to it and sat, her chiffon skirts rustling. “I
must make mention, Mrs. McKenna,” she drawled in an exaggerated Great Folk drawing-room voice, “that you’ve chosen a nice night for it, for there’s not a cloud in the sky. However, the wind is coming from the southwest, and that always brings wet weather by morning.”
Bria’s ravaged mouth parted into a smile, and then her whole body lurched in a jolting cramp and her mouth pulled wider into a silent scream. The cramping pain seemed to last forever, and when it ended it left Bria exhausted and trembling. Her blue-tinged lips were marked white where her teeth had bitten. But her dark eyes burned with fierce, brave life as she looked at Emma.
“Will you . . . hold my hand,” she said.
Emma took off her evening gloves and let them fall to the floor. She picked up Bria’s hand from where it lay limply on the sheet. She had never felt anything so cold as Bria’s hand. It was as if all the life had left her body, to live only in her extraordinary eyes.
“You’ve been . . . dancing,” Bria said.
Emma smiled. “And a sad, dull affair it was, too. The violinist forgot his bow and had to pluck at the strings with his nose, the cello was forever missing his cue, and I kept trodding on poor Mr. Alcott’s toes.”
Bria breathed a laugh, and then another shuddering, racking contraction seized her, and she was lost to the long, dark pain of it. When it was over she said, between hard gasps for breath, “I might be . . . having to hang on a wee bit too tightly . . . from time to time.”
Emma pushed the wet hair off Bria’s forehead with her other hand. “Never you mind that. That’s what a friend is for, after all—to lend one a hand when it is needed.”
Shay appeared on the other side of the bed with a basin full of water and rags in his hands, and Emma felt a shudder of fear as she suddenly realized the full import of the words:
The midwife hasn’t come.
“I’ve had me some practice at this,” he said to Emma, as if
reading her thoughts. “Last time our Merry came so fast there wasn’t a moment for taking a breath, let alone sending for anyone.”
He bent over and said something to his wife in Gaelic, and though the words were spoken in his harsh, shattered voice, Emma knew they were tender, for their love was, as always, like a living thing in the room.
With amazing gentleness for having such big hands, he lifted the sheet off his wife’s spread thighs. Bria’s night rail was rucked up around her waist, and runnels of sweat coursed down her legs. Her distended belly quivered and jumped, then suddenly contracted and squeezed like an enormous fist.
As Shay washed between his wife’s legs, Emma looked around the bedroom, noticing its clean shabbiness. There was little furniture: only the bed, with a crucifix hanging on the wall above it, the washstand, and a small bureau with chipped varnish. And something that looked to be an altar set up beneath a postcard of the Virgin Mary. Then she realized that at some point Shay must have sent the girls back into the kitchen, and she wondered if that meant that whatever was to happen would happen soon.