The Passions of Emma (37 page)
She watched them after that; she couldn’t help herself.
She sat on the blanket, holding little Jacko in her arms while he slept, and watched them while they raked clams out of the sand and dropped them into buckets.
She could see Emma trying so hard, pretending so hard, but then Shay would laugh, or say some silly, teasing thing to one of the girls, and she would look. Only for a moment would she look, but Bria would catch that sudden burst of longing on her face, like a flash of light under the skin.
She watched to see if Shay did any looking back.
When Emma sat down on a rock to take off her shoes and stockings, he said to her, “You’ve Yankee feet. Long and skinny.”
“And you’ve Irish feet,” she said, right back at him. “Big and always in your mouth.”
Even Bria had to smile at that. But she thought also of how Emma’s voice sounded different when she spoke to him, as if there wasn’t enough breath to push the words out.
Once, the wind caught the brim of Emma’s straw hat, knocking it askew. It was a simple thing what she did, very much a woman thing—she raised her arms to take the hat off and put it on again. The wide lace at her sleeves fell away to reveal her bare white arms, and her breasts lifted with a rustle of silk. And then she cocked her head just a little, as she stabbed the hat pins back through the straw. It was a simple thing, but Shay’s face changed as he looked at her. Only a little, the barest echo of an echo, but it had changed.
And Bria felt as if a hole opened up inside her heart.
She went on sitting, still as a stone, unable to think, unable to breathe. The wind plucked at her hair and at the pine boughs and
maple leaves. The sky was blue, and the bay was bluer, and the sun shone warm on the white sand. And Bria saw none of it, felt none of it.
maple leaves. The sky was blue, and the bay was bluer, and the sun shone warm on the white sand. And Bria saw none of it, felt none of it.
She jumped when something heavy landed in her lap. She looked up into Noreen’s face, she saw Noreen’s mouth moving, but it was as if all life had been washed out of the world.
Then Noreen’s words came rushing at her in a swell of sound, as if blown to her on the wind. “Mam, look at what I found buried in the sand.”
Bria picked up the thing in her lap. “Why, it’s some sort of a pipe, I believe.”
“It’s an Indian soapstone pipe,” Emma said. Her dear friend Emma, who had looked at Shay McKenna with such a hunger in her eyes. Bria knew what it was like, though, to have the wildness inside your heart for him, the burning up. She knew what it was to feel your will dissolve when you looked at him.
“That pipe could have belonged to the great King Philip himself,” Emma was saying. “Philip was the grand sachem of the Wampanoag, and they owned all this land before the settlers came and took it away from them.”
“And isn’t that always the way of it,” Shay said.
This time Emma looked at him squarely and smiled. “It so happens that King Philip was ambushed and killed by a member of his own race. It’s a tale you would appreciate, Mr. McKenna, as it involves blood and politics.”
Emma told a story, then, about how this King Philip was killed by an Indian whose brother he had tomahawked, and as a reward that man got Philip’s hand, which he carried around in a bucket of rum. Noreen, always the strange one for liking to have herself scared silly with gruesome tales, listened with wide eyes and excited little shivers. While Merry hummed questions faster than Noreen could ask them.
Bria looked at her girls and she saw how young they were and how little they knew. And she thought of how alone they were
going to be, her soon-to-be-motherless girls, and she wanted to weep.
going to be, her soon-to-be-motherless girls, and she wanted to weep.
She laid her face against the baby’s head, his hair so soft against her cheek. He wasn’t born so long ago that she couldn’t remember the fierce pain of his birthing, that price a woman paid for giving life, and that terrible, glorious moment when he had been torn from her body and he was no longer hers alone.
He was going to be so lost without her, this brand-new son of hers, without even a memory of her and her mother’s love to comfort him during the bad and empty times.
She looked at Shay, her man, and love and pain twisted inside her, from her throat to the pit of her stomach. Surely it had only been a moment of manly appreciation that she had seen in his eyes, nothing more. Emma was beautiful beyond a man’s dreams, and Shay was every bit of a man. But what if, what if . . .
Not, What if it had been something more?
But, What if it could
become
something more?
become
something more?
She waited until the clams were all gathered, and the fire had burned down to hot embers, and the stones were swept off with a fir limb, and the buckets of clams were dumped on top of the stones and covered with rockweed to hold in the steam.
She waited until all that was done and then she said, “It’s a grand day, it is, to be out on the water, what with the way the wind is blowing so. Would you be willing, Emma, to take Shay out for a wee little sail while the clams’re steaming? For all the boats he’s been on, I doubt one’s ever been as fine as your racing sloop.”
Her words seemed to echo in the small silence that followed. A flush blossomed over Emma’s cheeks, as pink as cabbage roses, and Bria saw her swallow hard. But of course she wouldn’t refuse a request put to her like that, from her dearest friend. Emma Tremayne had impeccable manners.
Bria’s gaze went from Emma to Shay. A look of raw hunger and yearning had come over his face, but he was looking at the sloop.
Bria watched them walk together down to the little weathered
dock where the sloop was moored. They walked close enough that the wind was able to snatch at Emma’s skirt and slap it against Shay’s legs. But they both looked straight ahead, as if all the world’s answers could be found in that sharp white line where blue salt water met bluer sky.
dock where the sloop was moored. They walked close enough that the wind was able to snatch at Emma’s skirt and slap it against Shay’s legs. But they both looked straight ahead, as if all the world’s answers could be found in that sharp white line where blue salt water met bluer sky.
If they spoke at all while they hoisted the sails and cast off, Bria couldn’t tell. She buried her face in the bundle of baby in her arms, smelled his warm breath, and brushed her nose against his cheek.
When next she looked up, all she could see of the sloop was its white sails flitting sharply like a butterfly’s wings over the blue bay water.
Shay hauled hard on the jibsheet as the sloop came about, cleating the line fast with expert hitches. The wind blew strong and steady, and they sailed up into her, close hauled and nicely trimmed.
The
Icarus
made music to his ears, like the finely tuned instrument that she was. The creak of her hull, the tap of her shrouds on the mast, the flutter of the mainsail’s leech when she turned up too close to the wind.
Icarus
made music to his ears, like the finely tuned instrument that she was. The creak of her hull, the tap of her shrouds on the mast, the flutter of the mainsail’s leech when she turned up too close to the wind.
He let his head fall back and closed his eyes, felt the sun burn deep into his eyelids, deep inside him. He felt the tilt and pitch of the deck beneath his feet, heard the suck and splash of the water over the bow, and he knew a moment of pure, unadulterated happiness.
He opened his eyes and turned his head and saw Emma’s eyes look quickly away, as if she didn’t want to be caught looking at him. She sat in the cockpit with her hand on the tiller. The sinews and bones of her wrist flexed starkly against the skin. It took strength, he knew, to hold the rudder steady in such a wind.
“She’s a saucy little craft, Miss Tremayne,” he said. And that she was. There would never be any salt pocks on her brass or stains on
the glossy teak deck. She also cost more money to buy than he could even dream of. “And you’re a deft hand at sailing her.”
the glossy teak deck. She also cost more money to buy than he could even dream of. “And you’re a deft hand at sailing her.”
A smile stole over her face, although she carefully kept that face turned away from him. She’d had to take her hat off because of the wind, and most of her hair had come loose to blow about her, wild and free.
“We Tremaynes like to claim we have salt water in our veins,” she said. “My father taught me how to sail. He had me out on the water as soon as I could walk, and by the time I was six I’d already capsized my first boat, a little ten-foot dagger board. I own the distinction of being the youngest Tremayne ever to have manufactured and survived her own shipwreck.”
He couldn’t help laughing. She surprised him sometimes, the things she said. “I have you beat there, Miss Tremayne. It so happens my mam set out to sea one day, looking for pilchards, and brought me back instead.”
She had a way about her, he’d discovered. Her mouth would dimple just at one corner when she was about to say or do something she thought rather daring. “I suppose you’re going to tell me the fairies delivered you to your parents in a reed boat, rather like an Irish Moses.”
“Not so miraculous as that,” he said, shaking his head, smiling. “My mother had taken the curragh out herself that day, my old man having drunk himself under the table the night before. I came early and sudden, or so I was told. She was too far out to turn about, and so there was only herself to take care of herself, and then me.”
She looked at him then. He hadn’t quite been able to decide what color her eyes were, whether gray or blue or green. They changed the way the sea did on an unsettled day. “She must have been a very brave woman.”
“I don’t remember her being brave so much as . . .” He shrugged. “As desperate,” he finished, and then wondered where that
revelation had come from. He didn’t often admit such thoughts, even to himself.
revelation had come from. He didn’t often admit such thoughts, even to himself.
He pulled his gaze away from her, from those eyes, and it was almost a physical wrenching, although he couldn’t have said why. He studied the sails, in hope that they needed trimming, but they didn’t. Suddenly he didn’t know what to do with his hands.
“I imagine those clams are about done,” he heard her say. “Would you take over the helm and sail her back to shore, Mr. McKenna?”
He gave her a mock salute. “Aye-aye, Captain.”
He reached for the tiller just as the wind gusted hard and the boat heeled smartly into it. Emma, in the act of shifting out of his way, grabbed the tiller again herself, to steady her balance, and her hand came down on top of his.
He allowed his hand to feel her hand, just for a moment. And then he slipped his hand out from underneath hers, and that was the end of it.
It wasn’t lust, he told himself. Because he couldn’t imagine laying her down and taking her the way a man took a woman he wanted, hard and rough and hungry. And it wasn’t love—he was sure of that. Love was what he felt for Bria. It was laughing and dancing and working and worrying and fighting and making up and making babies. It wasn’t this . . . whatever this was.
W
e’ve a wee bit of time left,” Bria said, “before the parade. Why don’t we stop off at the gymnasium and see if Shay wants to come along with us?”
e’ve a wee bit of time left,” Bria said, “before the parade. Why don’t we stop off at the gymnasium and see if Shay wants to come along with us?”
She pretended not to notice the dismay that flashed across Emma’s face. Instead, she bent over little Jacko’s pram and fussed some with the blankets. The shellacked reed pram was upholstered in blue silk plush and lined with woven cane webbing. It was topped with a silk-fringed, satin-lined parasol and rode splendidly along on nickel springs and steel wheels. It had been a christening gift from Emma, and surely no Gortadoo baby had ever been paraded through the world in such style.
“It’s not proper,” Emma said, after a moment of silence had passed between them, “for a lady to be seen entering such a place.”
Bria slanted a teasing smile up at her. “And I suppose it’s afraid, the world is, that the sight of a few sweaty, winded, flab-bellied men will be turning us into a pair of wild-eyed, drooling, lust-crazed jezebels.”
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