An Embarrassment of Riches

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘Well, you know I’m not a married woman, Liam Fitzgerald,’ she said caustically as he waited uncomfortably in the doorway. ‘And to what do I owe this unheard of pleasure?’

  She spoke in English, as she always did when speaking to Maura, and Liam Fitzgerald’s discomfort increased. Although many other Clanmar tenants could speak a little English, and understand more than they spoke, they did not do so with Mary Sullivan’s cultivated accent.

  He had been Lord Clanmar’s land-agent for twelve years and he knew her history, how she had left Killaree as a young girl to live with an English-speaking aunt in Dublin, how she had then gained herself an education of sorts, learning to speak English, and had then obtained a post for herself at Dublin Castle. It had been an extraordinary feat for a Killaree peasant, but looking at her he understood how it had been achieved. There was fierce intelligence in her eyes and stubborn determination in the set of her chin. If she had been born into a different class she would have been acclaimed a beauty. Even now, after so many years of hardship, traces of her pale-skinned, dark-haired, blue-eyed Celtic beauty remained. He remembered how she had looked when she had been a downstairs maid at Ballacharmish and seeing her now, in the earth-floored hovel she had been reduced to, he was deeply embarrassed.

  ‘His lordship would like a word with you,’ he said tersely. He had had to duck his head low to step inside the doorway to speak to her and now he ducked abruptly out again, blinking as his eyes readjusted themselves to the bright sunlight.

  Maura looked across at her mother expectantly. A mouse ran across the floor. An unseen creature rustled in the thatch above their heads. ‘Holy Mary,’ her mother said devoutly, ‘give me strength,’ and taking hold of Maura’s hand she stepped outside.

  Lord Clanmar was a much bigger man than Maura had judged him to be from seeing him in his carriage. He was easily as tall as Kieron and though his hair was snowy white he held himself ramrod straight. Mr Fitzgerald was at his side, studying his boots with intense concentration and Kieron was standing a few yards away from them, an amused quirk to his eyebrows as he waited to see what Lord Clanmar would have to say to his kinswomen.

  Maura flashed him a smile. She still hadn’t told him of the wave she had exchanged with Lord Clanmar’s granddaughter. She wished Lord Clanmar had his granddaughter with him now. Her mother’s hand was holding hers painfully tight and, faced with the reality of Lord Clanmar’s intimidating presence, she was beginning to share her mother’s discomfiture.

  ‘Mr Fitzgerald tells me that you had a good crop of oats and potatoes last year, Mrs Sullivan.’

  ‘Yes thank you, my lord.’

  Her mother’s voice was perfectly steady but Maura noted that she didn’t correct his lordship for addressing her as a married woman as she had corrected Mr Fitzgerald.

  There was an awkward pause. Suddenly Lord Clanmar’s piercing eyes were focused on herself.

  ‘And what is your name, young lady?’

  He had been speaking to her mother in Irish, as he had to Ned Murphy and the rest of their neighbours, and he was still speaking in Irish. She grasped her mother’s hand a fraction tighter.

  ‘My name is Maura,’ she replied. In English.

  Someone, she didn’t know who, her mother or Lord Clanmar or Mr Fitzgerald or even Kieron, sucked in their breath between their teeth. Maura was unrepentant. She and her mother spoke English all the time together and she didn’t see any reason why she shouldn’t speak English to his lordship.

  Lord Clanmar stroked his luxuriantly heavy moustache with his thumb and forefinger. ‘My apologies,’ he said graciously and without the least trace of irony, abandoning Irish much to the chagrin of those of Killaree’s inhabitants who were standing near enough to overhear and could now no longer follow the conversation with ease. ‘I had forgotten that your mother spoke English and no doubt would have taught you to speak English as well.’

  ‘Ma has taught me lots of things,’ Maura said eagerly, ignoring her mother’s frantic squeeze of her hand. ‘I know fairy-stories and can write my letters and can sew and …’

  ‘That’s enough, Maura! I’m sorry, my lord. I—’

  ‘There’s no need to apologize, Mrs Sullivan. If the child can indeed write her letters and sew then she has every right to be proud of her accomplishments.’

  He looked again at Maura and Maura staunchly returned his gaze. Mr Fitzgerald looked from his boots to the distant horizon. Kieron’s eyebrows quirked even steeper.

  ‘I would like to speak further with you, Mrs Sullivan,’ Lord Clanmar said. He glanced around at the scores of listening ears. ‘Inside, I think, if you please.’

  Her mother was rigid, her voice strangled as she forced the words, ‘Of course, my lord. If you say so, my lord.’

  She led the way into the single room that served them for all their needs, the only light and ventilation being that from the open doorway.

  In the bohereen the Sullivans’neighbours gazed after them in dumb stupefaction. Kieron’s amusement turned to mystification. Liam Fitzgerald began studiously to examine his fingernails.

  Maura stood close to her mother, hardly able to believe what was happening. Lord Clamnar was only inches away from her, and in her own home!

  ‘My granddaughter is a year younger than your daughter,’ Lord Clanmar was saying, careful not to let his eyes drift towards the straw pallets that served as their bed, the bare earth floor, the mean array of cooking utensils hanging by the side of the open hearth. ‘Under the circumstances, I wonder if I could ask a favour of you? It is a favour that will entail a great sacrifice on your part, but I think you will agree with me that it is one that will be immediately beneficial to Maura.’

  Maura could hardly breathe. Lord Clanmar asking a favour of her mother! And one that concerned her! What would Kieron say? What would their neighbours say when she told them?

  Her mother’s face had gone very still and Maura was overcome by the strange sensation that there was much more being said between her mother and Lord Clanmar than was being verbally spoken.

  ‘If it is within my power, my lord,’ her mother said, her eyes holding Lord Clanmar’s steadily.

  ‘I think that it is.’ He looked again at Maura and then said, ‘My granddaughter will be in need of a companion and it would please me if you would allow your daughter to fulfil that function.’

  Whenever Maura thought back to that incredible, unbelievable, miraculous moment, the thing that remained totally incomprehensible to her was the way that her mother accepted it. It was as if she had always anticipated that one day a member of the aristocracy would come to her with such a request. As if in some weird and wonderful way, she had been expecting it.

  ‘You are asking a very great deal of me, my lord,’ she said slowly. ‘Maura is all I have and—’

  ‘And you want her to have an education,’ Lord Clanmar interrupted with unexpected gentleness. ‘You want her to have all the things that you yourself wanted and worked so hard to achieve, when you were younger. Is that not so?’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’ Her mother’s voice was still touched with doubt. ‘But Maura has never been away from me and Ballacharmish will seem very strange to her …’

  ‘She will have a companion of her own age and she will adapt with the ease all children have to a change of circumstance.’

  There was another long pause during which Maura nearly died of suspense. Then she felt her mother’s hand lovingly touching her hair.

  ‘If Maura herself has no objection, then I have none, my lord.’

  Maura felt as if the world were shifting beneath her feet. Something momentous was happening but she still didn’t understand exactly what. What did Lord Clanmar mean by ‘a companion’? Was she being asked to be a maid to his granddaughter? Was she to live at Ballacharmish all the time?

  He was looking gravely down at her.

  ‘Do you understand what it is I am proposing?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes. No.’ Maura was in an agony of
bewilderment. ‘I understand that I’m to be a companion, my lord. And at Ballacharmish. But I don’t truly know what a companion is. Am I to work in the kitchens, or am I to work as my mother worked, in the grand saloon?’

  An expression of something very close to pain flashed through Lord Clanmar’s eyes and then he was saying in the gentle manner she found so reassuring,

  ‘The only work you are to do at Ballacharmish will be school-work, Maura. You tell me you can already write your letters and in the months and years ahead you are going to learn much, much more. Ballacharmish isn’t going to be a place of employment for you. It’s going to be your home.’

  And he bowed his head to both of them and walked out into the bohereen.

  Chapter Two

  The heat in New York in the summer of 1856 was intense. It burned down from the azure-blue bowl of the sky as if from a furnace. In the smoking-room of the Karolyis Fifth Avenue mansion fourteen-year-old Alexander Karolyis wiped the perspiration away from the back of his neck with an Irish linen handkerchief and waited impatiently for his father to terminate his conversation with his attorney and to turn his attention towards himself.

  ‘I’m well aware what general opinion is as to the worth of land in the so-called Annexed District, but I’m as sure that land one day will be part of the city of New York as my father was sure the farms he bought in ’25 would be,’ his father was saying crushingly.

  Lyall Kingston nodded, abandoning his deferential warning as to the wisdom of purchasing land in the wilds north of the city. The land Sandor Karolyis had bought in 1825 was now a major part of Broadway and the Karolyis-owned buildings that had been erected from Forty-second to Forty-sixth Streets brought in a staggering revenue. And it wasn’t his own money that was at stake. It was Victor’s. Even if Victor were wrong this time in his judgement, the financial loss would be a mere drop in the ocean to him.

  ‘So you’ll see to that, Lyall?’ Victor queried, aware of his son’s growing impatience. ‘Carry on with the purchase. Farms, woods, hills. I want that land lock, stock and barrel. Is that understood?’

  Lyall nodded. ‘Yes, sir. I’ll see to the transaction immediately.’

  He collected up the papers he had brought with him for Victor’s signature and left the room. Victor turned towards his only child. ‘What is it now? If you’re about to ask if young Schermerhorn can come with us to the Hudson Valley for the summer the answer is yes.’

  Alexander had been about to ask no such thing. His friend and second-cousin was being whisked off to Paris by his mother in two weeks’time and would not be returning until the fall. Until then, with the doors of Columbia College mercifully closed until the next semester, with his father already out of the city for the summer sailing his yacht somewhere off the Florida coast and with his mother’s attention taken up with arrangements for her European trip, Charlie Schermerhorn was enjoying a rare period of freedom. He intended to enjoy it to the full and Alexander intended helping him to do so.

  ‘Charlie is going to Paris with his mother,’ he reminded his father.

  His father gave a derisory snort. His wife’s cousin invariably fled to Europe whenever her husband’s neglect became too much for her to bear. As far as Victor was concerned, the only pity was that she didn’t stay there permanently. He kept his thoughts to himself and said a trifle irritably, ‘Then what is it? We leave early tomorrow for Tarna and I have a lot of people to see before we go.’

  ‘I wondered if it were possible for me to not go with you tomorrow, but to follow on in two weeks’time?’ Alexander asked, trying to make his voice casual and matter-of-fact as if such a request was nothing at all out of the usual.

  In all other circumstances he would have been as eager to leave for their family home in the Hudson Valley as his father was. Situated high on a hill overlooking the River Tarna had been built by his Hungarian grandfather and named after the river that had run past the village in which he had been born. With a Hungarian’s inborn love of horses Sandor Karolyis had built up a stud farm on the Tarna estate that had become the envy of horse-breeders worldwide. Although his father had no interest in horseflesh and only continued to run the stud for prestige and revenue, Alexander lived for the precious weeks he could spend at Tarna, riding the surrounding countryside and the banks of the Hudson for hour after blissful hour.

  Ordinarily nothing would have persuaded him to forgo two of his allotted weeks there, but the prospect of two weeks unsupervised with Charlie was too good to miss. With Charlie’s father off in Florida, and with his own widowed father at Tarna, they could visit the most notorious haunts without anyone being any the wiser. Already they had made plans to visit Long Island where high-speed trotters were raced at hot speeds with phenomenal amounts betted on the outcome. There were other pleasures, too, that they were desperate to try and unless their nerve failed them they intended paying a call on Madame Josie Woods. Josie ran the most discreet and exclusive brothel in the city, and she did so in a house only a stone’s throw away from the Karolyis mansion.

  ‘For what reason?’

  His father fixed him with a piercing eye and Alexander strove to remain outwardly relaxed and at ease knowing that if his father once suspected his true reason for wishing to remain behind in New York he would never smell freedom again until he was twenty-one.

  ‘Because Charlie’s marks are so low that Columbia won’t take him back next semester unless he can show real improvement. His mother has arranged that a tutor accompanies them to Paris and she wants Charlie to begin studying with him even before they leave. Poor Charlie is pretty sick about it. I thought if I kept him company it would help cheer him.’

  Nothing he had said was a lie. Charlie’s marks were deplorable and his mother had engaged yet another tutor. But the tutor was barely in his twenties and had more than a soft spot for Charlie. According to Charlie, escaping lessons was going to be no problem at all.

  Victor Karolyis gave another grunt. It didn’t surprise him that Charlie Schermerhorn was putting up a poor showing at Columbia. The Schermerhorns might have ruled New York society since 1636, but, as far as he was concerned, intelligence was not their strong point. Nevertheless, Charlie was family, and as Victor had gone to the trouble of marrying a Schermerhorn it was only sense to capitalize on the alliance in every way.

  ‘I’ll speak to his mother,’ he said tersely. ‘But don’t let her keep you here a day over two weeks. This year’s cholera outbreak is bound to be worse than last year’s and I don’t want you in the city when it occurs.’

  Alexander nodded. There were always cholera outbreaks in the summer but the infection usually spread no further than the Five Points and the Bowery, places he had never visited in his life and never intended visiting.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said as coolly as his inner elation would allow. ‘May I go and tell Charlie now?’

  His father grunted again, this time in assent, and Alexander strolled with apparent nonchalance from the room, resisting the urge to punch the air with glee.

  Charles Edward William Jacob Schermerhorn IV whooped in elation. ‘The world is going to be our oyster for the next two weeks!’ he said buoyantly, fisting Alexander on the shoulder.

  Alexander fisted him back in the same spirit and within minutes they were on the floor of the Schermerhorn Yellow drawing-room, wrestling exuberantly.

  A terrified maid rushed into the room and, seeing that the son of the house was the cause of the commotion, speedily retreated. Seconds later a butler entered and stood his ground, coughing discreetly. ‘Your mother would like a word with you, sir,’ he said with commendable calm as Ming vases and Sevres porcelain trembled on a half-dozen, delicate, French Empire side tables.

  Alexander and Charlie rolled to a halt at his feet. Charlie looked up at him. ‘Tell her I’ll be with her in five minutes, Larson,’ he panted.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Satisfied that the rumpus had come to a conclusion Larson inclined his head and withdrew.

  Charlie sat u
p and looked across at Alexander. He ran his hand through his dishevelled blond hair. ‘Do you think we dare?’

  ‘Dare what? I’m not coming with you to see your mother,’ Alexander said, wilfully misunderstanding him.

  ‘Dare go to Josie Woods’s establishment?’

  Alexander remained prone on the floor. ‘It’s either that or the women of Greene Street.’

  Charlie shuddered. ‘No, thank you. No telling what we might catch if we go there.’

  Alexander sat up slowly. Although he and Charlie were second cousins there was nothing similar in their physical appearance. Where Charlie was blond and deceptively cherubic, Alexander was as dark and Slavic in his looks as his grandfather had been. ‘Then it’s Madame Woods,’ he said, pushing a tumbled lock of night-black hair away from his brow. ‘If we catch anything there we will at least have the comfort of knowing that everyone who is anyone is also suffering with it.’

  The grin was back on Charlie’s face. ‘Including your father and mine.’

  Alexander cupped his ear for him in mock reprovement. ‘If what I’ve heard about your father is true, Josie should receive us with open arms. Didn’t he help establish her in the first place?’

  ‘So the rumour goes,’ Charlie said without taking offence. ‘I’d better go and see what my parent wants to see me about. Are you going to wait for me?’

  ‘No. Two weeks with you will be quite long enough without spending the rest of today with you as well.’ They stepped out of the drawing-room and into an immense, circular, marble-floored hall. ‘Give my respects to your ma,’ he said as they passed a life-size statue of Niobe weeping for her children.

  ‘I will. She always irritatingly refers to you as a “poor, motherless child”.’

  The footman opened the double-fronted outer doors and it was Alexander’s turn to grin. ‘Motherless certainly, but poor is a bit steep.’

  ‘Ah well, it isn’t a term Ma has any understanding of,’ Charlie said, blissfully uncaring that he had no understanding of it either. He turned to the footman. ‘Why hasn’t Mr Karolyis’s carriage been brought round?’