The Passions of Emma (57 page)
“Are you one of the crazy ones, or just Yankee stubborn?”
Emma started at the voice in her ear, although it was a nice voice, sweet and chirping like a chickadee’s song. The woman who owned it had a face that was both sad and lovely, with bright violet eyes.
But Emma thought of that wood-paneled room and her uncle and the doctor exchanging those knowing looks while she protested her sanity, and she didn’t trust either the woman or her words.
Although it shook a little, Emma still managed a haughty lift of her chin. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“Are you sane, or insane?” The woman brought her face up close
to Emma’s to peer into her eyes. “You look sane to me. Still, it’s hard to tell sometimes. And the things they do to us in here would soon have the Christ Jesus himself shrieking and drooling and talking gibberish.”
to Emma’s to peer into her eyes. “You look sane to me. Still, it’s hard to tell sometimes. And the things they do to us in here would soon have the Christ Jesus himself shrieking and drooling and talking gibberish.”
Emma almost smiled, and then she thought of herself shrieking and pulling at the chains in her cell, and she shuddered instead.
“So, what are you in for?”
“What?” Emma said, starting again.
“What affliction do they say you suffer from—melancholia, dementia, hysteria, nervous prostration?”
“I have an excitable nature.”
The woman looked Emma up and down, her eyes dancing with an inner smile. “Yes, I can see that. And what did your excitable nature lead you to do?”
“I took a lover,” Emma said, surprising herself with the pride and wonder she still heard in those words, after all that had happened. “But he . . . he was unsuitable, and I was supposed to be marrying someone else.”
“You suffer from an excess of passion then, an affliction more peculiar to the female than the male. Thus, being female is obviously the root of your trouble. Indeed, being female is often found to be a cause of great nervous distress in women.”
Incredibly, Emma found herself wanting to laugh. The woman had a nice smile, although her teeth had gone rotten.
“I’m being incarcerated for the opposite crime as you,” the woman said. “It was my husband who took a lover. He wanted to live with her and I refused to divorce him. At the time, I believed divorce was an unbearable disgrace—I would not even allow it mentioned in my presence.”
She became lost for a moment in her thoughts, then she shrugged. “Oh, the errors of judgment one can make when one is young . . . So he had me put away in here. I don’t know if he’s still with her. She could be dead—they could both be dead—and during my occasional lapses of sanity, I pray that they are. I say
lapses
of sanity because since he had me committed, only he can get me let out. Which he can’t very well do if he’s dead now, can he?”
lapses
of sanity because since he had me committed, only he can get me let out. Which he can’t very well do if he’s dead now, can he?”
She huffed a small sigh and said quite matter-of-factly, “I’ve been incarcerated in this place for over thirty-five years.”
Thirty-five years. God, oh, God . . .
Emma sat on her hands again so that no one could see them tremble.
Emma sat on her hands again so that no one could see them tremble.
The woman’s name was Annabel Kane. During the coming days she would sit with Emma on the bench, or sometimes they would stand to look out the window, when the matron was not about to see them. There was a fence and a locked gate, Emma came to learn, on the other side of the birch grove.
They filled their hours with talk. Or rather, it was mostly Emma who talked, and she mostly about her childhood at The Birches, about sailing and riding and, oddly, about Geoffrey, who dwelled in her thoughts more and more now, although she didn’t know why.
“I fear I’ve grown rather dull in here myself,” Annabel said. “Every day is much the same as the last.”
One day she joined Emma at their place on the bench, her face vivid with excitement. “I’m going home tomorrow!” she exclaimed.
Emma seized her hands. “That’s wonderful,” she said, the tears starting bright in her eyes. “Is it your husband—has he asked them to let you out? Or have the doctors decided you are cured?”
But Annabel didn’t answer, she was that excited. Instead, they talked all afternoon about the things Annabel would do the first afternoon she was free. “I’m going to go for a long walk,” Annabel said. “A long, long walk, and I will look up at the wide, open sky and breathe it in, just breathe it all in.”
And when Annabel was leaving her, she leaned over and wiped a tear off Emma’s cheek. “You take care of that excitable nature of yours, Miss Emma Tremayne. Preserve it well.”
But later the next day, walking past the dormitories on her way to the dining hall, Emma saw Annabel Kane lying down with her feet strapped to her bed, her hands muffed, and a broad leather
band stretched tightly across her chest. She’d been drugged, for she was snoring loudly, and she was naked.
band stretched tightly across her chest. She’d been drugged, for she was snoring loudly, and she was naked.
“Annabel!” Emma cried, trying to go to her. But the matron came lumbering after her, grabbing her arm, and jerking her to such a hard, wrenching stop that she nearly pulled the bone from its socket.
“Oh, God . . . Please, matron. Can’t you at least cover her up?”
“She ripped up her sheets last night,” the matron said, “and so she’s being punished for it. And you’ll find yourself getting the same if you don’t shut your mouth.”
Two days later, Annabel was waiting for Emma back at their place on the bench. She was standing, looking out the window.
“I’m not well sometimes,” she said. “I’ve been in here so long, Emma, so long. All of my life. I was only twenty when I came here. Twenty! I am now fifty-five, an old woman. I shall die in here.” She touched the barred glass with the very tips of her fingers. “Sometimes I despair that I shall die here.”
That night, Annabel Kane ripped up her sheets into strips and tied them together in a good, strong rope. And then she tied the rope to the copper light fixture and hanged herself.
After that, Emma stood on the bench alone.
She shut her ears to the shrieks and moans and snarls of the other women, the madwomen. She closed her nose to the raw smells of their sweat and urine. She pressed her face to the cold, barred glass and watched the birches outside the window lose their leaves, one by one. One day, she looked out and saw the lawn was dusted with a sprinkling of snow.
She didn’t think of Shay because that was unbearable.
She imagined herself walking with Bria along a gray shingle beach, through air that was as silver as the bay.
I
t was a cold and damp, sniveling day, on the edge of tears.
t was a cold and damp, sniveling day, on the edge of tears.
Maddie, sitting in her chair on the terrace that overlooked the bay, worried that she was about to get wet. But it had been one gray, sloppy, and lonely day after the other for so long—first snow and now this slushy rain—and she had so needed to get out of the house.
She heard footsteps on the flagstones and twisted around, expecting to see Tildy or one of the footmen. Her heart began to thud fast and unevenly with both fear and relief to see Stuart Alcott coming down the path with his long-legged stride. He was dressed for casual riding, in leather breeches, knee-high boots, and a Norfolk jacket.
“What, here again so soon, Mr. Alcott?” she said as he came up to her. She had written him countless letters during the past two months, begging him to come and getting no reply. “Ought I to be flattered, or have you run out of money again?”
He leaned over to kiss the air next to her cheek. “And a good afternoon to you too, Maddie girl. Actually, I’ve had a phenomenal run of luck at the tracks lately. No, this time I’ve come to sniff out scandal.”
“Scandal?” She had tried to say it lightly, but it came out brittle. So he knew, then. Probably not the whole, but he knew something.
“Sniffing out scandal amuses me on occasion,” he was saying. “When all my carousing and drinking and gambling begin to pall.”
He faced the bay. He put a hand in his jacket pocket and braced a foot on one of the ornamental iron vases that stood at intervals along the front of the terrace. He thrust out one hip and squared his shoulders. It was a masculine pose.
“Do you know, Maddie, it doesn’t take a lot of effort to lie to our narrow little world here in Bristol and get away with it. For all our money and our hoity-toity Great Folk ways, we are such provincials. But in the nasty, shark-infested circles I sometimes swim in in New York, there are people whose sole reason for drawing breath is to sniff out the lie and the pretense in others and then bring them down.”
He dropped his foot off the urn and turned to face her again. Studying her hard, so that she had to look away. She’d been begging him to come so she could tell him the truth, some of the truth, and ask him to right the terrible wrong she had done. But now he was here, and she was afraid. When he learned of her part in the “scandal,” he would see her for what she was, and he would despise her.
“Sometimes,” he went on, “it amuses my friends to exercise their man-eating talents in uncharted waters, to discover dirty little secrets about us New England pretenders out here in the hinterlands. Especially if we have a tendency to put on airs. And if they do happen to find out any dirty little secrets . . .” He lifted his hands, spreading them. “Well, my, how they do love to talk.”
Her heart was pounding now. He knew, he knew . . . What did he know? “Stu Alcott, are you by any chance trying to work up the nerve to impart to me a particularly juicy bit of gossip?”
“In a way . . . You see, I, in my innocence, just happened to mention to someone one day how my brother’s beautiful fiancée has been spending the last two months visiting with cousins of her mama in their fine and elegant plantation home in Georgia—when lo! I am told there aren’t any cousins in Georgia. Or, more to the
predatory interests of my shark-toothed friend, there are no cousins with a fine and elegant plantation house.”
predatory interests of my shark-toothed friend, there are no cousins with a fine and elegant plantation house.”
He stepped up to her, menacingly close, until his thighs brushed her knees. “And if there are no cousins in Georgia,” he said, “then where oh where is our dear Emma?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Of course there’s a plantation house. Mama’s often spoken of her cousins at High Grove.” But Maddie was afraid, so afraid, Emma wasn’t there.
He leaned over her chair, bracing his hands on the armrests, leaning so close to her now she could see the flaring of his thin nostrils as he breathed, the creases at the corners of his mouth. The black specks floating like dust motes in his gray eyes. And she could smell him. Stale champagne and a faint odor of something like burnt peanuts, sweet and cloying.
“’Fess up, Maddie girl. What has Emma done, and what have you and your mama done with her?”
A sob burst out along with her words. “I had to tell. For her own good, I had to tell.” But that was a lie. She hadn’t been going to tell, until she had watched Emma come running back to the house from the gate after telling her lover goodbye. Her sister had had her skirts lifted high, all the way to her knees, and she was running flat out and laughing . . . She had looked so happy.
Stu’s eyes were staring at her, judging her, and Maddie couldn’t bear it. She averted her face, pressing hard into the chair’s cane back.
“Where is she, Maddie?”
Maddie pressed her fist hard into her mouth to stifle another cry. She hunched down deep in her chair, as if she could press all the way through its cane seat, all the way through the cold winter’s earth to the other side of the world, where he couldn’t look at her, and she didn’t have to face him.
“Mama . . . She said Emma was an embarrassment to the family, and she ought to go away for a while. To—to the p-plantation house.” Except there was no plantation. Mama had lied—Mama
had always been so good at lying—and . . . Oh, God, what had she done?
had always been so good at lying—and . . . Oh, God, what had she done?
Maddie looked up at him in spite of herself, but he had turned away and was staring out at the bay again. The gray, soggy clouds had sunk lower, their bellies sagging into the water.
“I wrote you,” she said. “I wrote and wrote you, begging you to come, but you never did.”
His mouth twisted a little. “Your letters were a bit vague as to the why of it. But you’re right—I should have come anyway.” He swung back around to her. She’d never seen his face the way it was now, so bleached of color, almost fleshless. “That fool woman has sent your sister up to the asylum in Warren, hasn’t she?”
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