An Embarrassment of Riches

by Margaret Pemberton

  Lord Powerscourt burst into the room clad only in his night-clothes and a silk dressing-gown. ‘What’s the matter, my boy?’ he asked, striding towards him in concern. ‘Are you ill? My footman said you were choking.’

  Alexander turned away from the outspread paper and stared at him. ‘She’s dead,’ he said thickly, ashen-faced. ‘Ginnie is dead.’

  ‘Oh, my dear boy …’ Lord Powerscourt took a step towards the table and read the short obituary, then he turned, motioning for the servants to leave the room. ‘My dear boy,’ he said again, resting a hand comfortingly on Alexander’s shoulder. ‘I’m so sorry. So very, very sorry.’

  Alexander turned towards him and then, as if Powerscourt was his father and he a small child, he laid his head on the older man’s shoulder and wept.

  That evening, at dusk, he sat alone in the vast garden looking eastwards to where he could see the faint glimmer of the sea. The enormity of what had happened was such that he could still scarcely comprehend it. She had been dead for five days. When he had sat in the hot June sunshine with Powerscourt, and Powerscourt had invited him to stay on in Ireland and recuperate, Genevre had been dead. When he had been exercising, physically strengthening his back and legs, buoyant and dizzy at the thought of being with her so soon, she had been dead. She had died without him even knowing that she was ill. His hands tightened on the arms of his cane chair, the knuckles white. She had died believing that he had abandoned her.

  The dusk deepened into night and the breeze from the Irish Sea grew chill. He continued to sit, staring into the darkness, knowing that he would never be the same person again. If Genevre had died as his wife or as his fiancée, his grief would have devastated him, but it would not have changed him from the person he had always been – the person Genevre had loved. But she had not died as his wife or his fiancée. Because of his father she had died believing that he no longer loved her and the thought of her anguish was more than he could bear.

  Hatred for his father suffused him. Whatever the nature of Genevre’s fever had been, he knew that his father was the true cause of her death. She had died broken-hearted and he was going to have to survive the rest of his life broken-hearted. All because his father had not thought her worthy enough to be his daughter-in-law and had lied and deceived in order to ensure that she never would be.

  As the first pale streaks of dawn lightened the night sky he rose stiffly to his feet. He would avenge Genevre’s death. Somehow, in some way, he would make his father pay for the destruction he had wrought. And he would honour Genevre’s memory by never falling in love again. Not ever.

  He left the house en route for the docks and America on the same day Lord Powerscourt had intended leaving for England. Powerscourt had insisted that one of his own valets accompany him on the voyage and, as the young man in question checked for the last time that all Alexander’s luggage was present and correct, he said to Alexander with a worried frown: ‘Are you sure you are strong enough for the sea crossing, my boy? Why not defer your return to America and accompany me back to London? There will be plenty going on to amuse you and you could perhaps sightsee. Visit Salisbury and Stratford.’

  Alexander shook his head. Touched as he was by Powerscourt’s avuncular kindness he could not presume on his hospitality any longer. Nor did he want to. He wanted to confront his father with the news of Genevre’s death. He wanted to see his father’s face when he told him he was never going to forgive him; when he told him he was going to destroy him, just as he and Genevre had been destroyed; when he told him he was going to make him pay for the heartbreak he had caused.

  ‘No, sir. Thank you all the same, but my mind is made up.’

  Lord Powerscourt accepted defeat. Alexander had been his enforced guest for six months and for a young man of twenty-one they must have been long and wearying months. It was no wonder that he was anxious to return home and be reunited with his family and friends again.

  As the coachman cracked his whip he stepped back from the open carriage, saying with sincere affection, ‘Bon voyage, my boy. And give my respects to your father.’

  His father.

  There were thin white lines around Alexander’s mouth and at the corner of his jaw a nerve began to throb. Out of respect for Powerscourt, when he and his father met he would do as Powerscourt asked. And then he would unleash on his father all of his contempt, all of his bitterness, all of his hatred.

  It was forty miles to Queenstown and the docks and from Waterford he travelled by train. Grim-faced, he stared out at grass, grass and yet more grass. To relieve the tedium there were occasional clusters of mud cabins with half-naked children rooting among the rubbish at the doors. Queenstown was even worse. He hired a carriage for the short journey from the railway station to the docks, appalled at the thought of having to pick his way through the filthy, befouled streets.

  Powerscourt had made his reservation aboard the Cunard line’s Scotia for him and he knew, of course, that he would be travelling first-class with his own stateroom. What he hadn’t known was that emigrants were also going to be passengers, albeit in the bowels of the ship and at a far remove from himself and his peers.

  ‘Jesus!’ he ejaculated as a woman so poorly dressed as to be half-naked squeezed past him, the mewling child in her arms leaving a trail of snot on his Savile Row reefer jacket.

  Teal, his new valet, leapt to his aid, efficiently removing the nauseous excrescence with a handkerchief. ‘Sorry about that, sir. They shouldn’t allow emigrants on this part of the dock. Trouble is, not many gentlemen board here and there aren’t any proper facilities.’

  Alexander could see that. There was only one smartly equipped carriage on the dockside and it was occupied by an elderly lady looking as appalled by the nearby crush and the stench as he felt. Ahead of them a lone gentleman attended by a valet was stepping aboard the first-class gangplank. All the other embarkees were impoverished Irish, pushing a way towards the gangplank at the ship’s stern.

  ‘They’re the scum of the earth, sir,’ the English Teal said disparagingly as he shifted Alexander’s pig-skin travelling bag into a more comfortable position on his shoulder, ‘but you won’t be troubled by them when you’re aboard. You’ll have neither sight nor sound of them then.’

  Alexander was pleased to hear it. As they crossed the cobbles towards the foot of the gangplank a fair-haired girl pushed her way free of the mass of emigrants. Her black silk crinoline was startlingly incongruous against the homespun shawls and ragged dresses that had surrounded her and, as she drew nearer, hurrying towards the waiting carriage, Alexander saw that her face was tear-stained. He wondered whether her distress was for her obvious recent bereavement or had been occasioned by her finding herself caught up in the midst of the poverty-stricken embarkees.

  ‘The landlords often pay for their passage, sir,’ Teal said, attempting to read his mind. ‘It’s the easiest way of clearing them off the land.’

  Alexander nodded. Powerscourt had told him all about the difficulty of removing tenants in order that land could be profitably turned over to sheep-farming. The girl in the black silk dress had now stepped up into the waiting carriage. Though he could no longer see her face it was obvious that her elderly companion was trying to comfort her and that she was still crying.

  ‘Here we are, sir,’ Teal said with relief as they reached the gangplank. ‘I’ll settle you in your stateroom and supervise the bringing aboard of the rest of your luggage.’

  Alexander leaned with relief against the gangplank rail. Sir Ralph Fiennes-Bourton had recommended that he use a walking-stick until he had regained his usual health and strength and because of vanity he had not done so. Now he was regretting it.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’ Teal asked solicitously.

  Alexander nodded and pushed himself away from the rail, walking aboard with a slight limp. It was a sign of physical weakness that he was determined to eradicate. He would be at sea for ten days and in those ten days he intended exercising stren
uously. When he confronted his father he did not want to do so displaying any visible signs of disability. His father. His hands clenched into fists as he wondered for the hundredth time what he would say to him; how he would most suitably and sweetly take his revenge.

  Days passed and still he was unable to think of how he could exact retribution. The enormity of his father’s crime was such that nothing he could think of seemed even slightly commensurate with it. Genevre had died believing that he no longer loved her, that he had never truly loved her. For hour after hour he stood at the deck-rail, gazing out at the heaving grey-green ocean, tears streaming down his face. What had he been doing the moment she had died? Had he been talking with Powerscourt? Playing chess with him? Had he been eating, drinking, maybe even laughing? Even worse than the agony of not knowing was the agony of sometimes waking and forgetting that she was dead, and then remembering.

  He avoided all companionship on the voyage, eating alone in his stateroom, sitting alone on deck, walking off with his hands deep in his pockets if anyone should sit near him.

  The first-class deck was spacious and he walked obsessively, strengthening his leg muscles, determinedly trying to erase his limp. The stern end of the first-class deck was little used by his fellow passengers being uncomfortably near to the emigrants’quarters. Alexander was uncaring of the emigrants and it was here, where he was least likely to be disturbed, that he spent most time, gazing either broodingly out to sea or down at the minuscule area of the lower deck allocated to steerage.

  The men and the women were separated, the men clustering morosely in tightly packed, idle groups while on the other side of the rails dividing them the women tried to carry on with a semblance of normal life, nursing their babies, making meals out of the meagre rations they had brought aboard with them, washing soiled clothes in buckets of seawater and hanging them to dry wherever they could. They sat and stood so closely together that Alexander was amazed they could find the room to do anything. Teal had reliably informed him that the British government allowed the steamship companies to carry only six hundred emigrants per voyage, but that there were nearer to a thousand on the Scotia. Alexander could well believe it. The black mouth of a companion-hatch led to the depths where those unable to squeeze on to the steerage deck existed, in what kind of squalor he couldn’t even begin to imagine.

  As he stood at the first-class deck-rails the women cast curious, surreptitious glances in his direction while the men regarded him with open sullenness. Their hostility was lost on Alexander. He was so sunk in his own misery that he was unaware of their antipathy and if he had been aware, he would have been supremely uncaring. They were dirt-poor Irish, just like the Irish of New York whose ranks they were so soon to swell, and as such they were a species of humanity so far removed from his own kind that they might as well have been cattle.

  The sea grew rougher and as spray swamped the deck the more craven-hearted retreated to their stiflingly cramped communal sleeping and living quarters.

  Alexander didn’t move. He turned up the collar of his reefer against the spray and continued to ponder the question that vexed him night and day. How, in God’s name, was he to make his father suffer for his evil, megalomaniacal meddling?

  There was no obvious answer. His father could not be hurt financially. To hurt him physically would be too transient a punishment. Unless he murdered him. He knew he would only have to think of Genevre and of what she must have suffered in order to be able to murder his father with the utmost equanimity. But once dead, his father would cease to suffer. He, Alexander, was going to suffer from the result of his father’s machinations for the rest of his life. Murder was too unimaginative a solution, too merciful.

  The Scotia had begun to roll alarmingly and he braced himself, remaining upright only with difficulty. The first-class deck behind him was now completely empty and only a few stragglers remained on the saturated steerage deck. One of them, a girl, seemed as oblivious of the high, white-topped waves as he was. She stood staring out at the turbulent ocean, uncaring of the stinging seaspray, her arms wrapped around a narrow funnel in order to retain her balance.

  Alexander continued to ponder his problem. In eight days’time he would be in New York. In eight days’time he had to have a solution. His father’s crime was one that deserved not just any punishment, but apt punishment. His father had thought Genevre, with all her education and beauty and charm and wealth, not good enough to be his daughter-in-law and he had wickedly done his best to ensure that she never became his daughter-in-law. What did he expect now, as he sat in his Fifth Avenue mansion, waiting for the coming confrontation? Did he expect a God-almighty row, followed by a temporary estrangement, followed by a reconciliation and attendance at a wedding where he would acquire the titled daughter-in-law he had set his heart on?

  Alexander’s mouth hardened. If that was the scenario his father was envisioning then he was going to be bitterly disappointed. There would be no reconciliation, not ever. And there would never be a prestigious, titled daughter-in-law to cement his social position among New York’s Old Guard society. Instead there would be …

  A wave hit the ship broadside on and he was sent slithering across the deck. He grabbed hold of the rails that looked down over the steerage deck, gasping for breath as seaspray saturated him. The girl turned her head swiftly in his direction.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she shouted up at him as he staggered unsteadily to his feet.

  He nodded, knowing that he might quite easily have been swept overboard and that it was insanity for either of them to remain exposed any longer.

  ‘Can you make it to the companion-hatch?’ he shouted back at her.

  She nodded and he was aware of glossy smoke-black hair and vivid blue eyes, wide-spaced and thick-lashed.

  As the ship steadied for a moment, preparatory to its next stomach-sickening roll, she pushed herself away from her anchorage, running with difficulty across the water-soaked deck.

  He didn’t wait to see her disappear into the black hole of the companion-hatch. The ship was pitching perilously again and he turned, about to make his own treacherous way to safety.

  ‘Just wait there a moment, sir!’ a ship’s officer shouted, approaching him crabwise.

  With enormous relief Alexander obeyed him.

  ‘This is no weather to be above deck, sir,’ his rescuer said chastisingly when he reached him. ‘Now just hold tightly on to me and I’ll soon have you under cover.’

  It was no moment for pride and Alexander grabbed hold of him, wondering belatedly what the Cunard line’s safety record was.

  Back in the relative comfort of his stateroom, as the ship continued to dive and roll, he tried to remember what it was that he had been on the point of realizing before he had found himself slithering across the deck on his back.

  He had been thinking about his father and his obsessive insistence that the pedigree of his daughter-in-law be such that it would obliterate for ever the memory of his own father’s humble ancestry. And he had been staring down into the deck space allotted to the steerage passengers.

  He gasped for breath, overcome by a moment of blinding revelation. Of course! It was so simple! So devastatingly obvious! The solution to his problem was staring him straight in the face. His father had intended that by severing his relationship with Genevre, his future daughter-in-law would be someone far more suitable, someone far more prestigious. And so he would bestow on him a daughter-in-law the exact opposite of everything he had schemed for.

  He leapt from his bunk and fisted the air with glee. He would pay his father back with his own coin. He would marry a girl so unsuitable that Genevre would seem to have been an English princess in comparison. He would marry a girl so objectionable that his father would never be able to hold his head high in society ever again, no matter how many his millions.

  He began to chuckle and then to roar with laughter. He would marry a girl who was everything that the New York haut ton abhorred. First of all
he would ensure that his bride was a Roman Catholic. That alone would be sufficient to guarantee his future ostracism from New York’s Dutch Protestant-descended high society. He would marry a girl without any education or social graces, a girl with a nationality synonymous with poverty and peasantry. He would marry one of the girls his valet had described as being ‘the scum of the earth’. He would marry one of the emigrating Irish.

  By evening the wind had dropped and the ocean was relatively calm. Still euphoric at having found so satisfying a method of revenge he accepted an invitation that he had hitherto spurned and dined with the captain at high table.

  ‘Do you perform many marriages at sea?’ he asked his host as a wine waiter uncorked the best bottle of claret that the Scotia carried.

  ‘One or two a year,’ Captain Neills replied incuriously. ‘The ladies regard it as romantic.’

  ‘And have you married Roman Catholics as well as Protestants?’

  The captain chuckled. ‘No. When Catholics marry they like to do so with a priest officiating.’

  Alexander took a mouthful of wine and then asked, ‘Is there a priest aboard the Scotia?’

  For the first time Neills was aware that there was more to Alexander’s questions than general curiosity. ‘Not in first-class. There might be in steerage. Why do you ask, Mr Karolyis?’

  Alexander, heir to the richest man in New York and one of the most eligible bachelors in America, smiled blandly at him. ‘Because I intend marrying a Roman Catholic while at sea, Captain. If you would ask your purser to check as to whether there is a priest

  aboard I would much appreciate it.’

  The next morning he strolled along the first-class deck to the point where it ceased, overlooking the steerage deck. Some louse-ridden Irish girl was going to have the shock of her life. He was going to transform her entire future, for even after she had served her purpose and rendered his father catatonic with shock, and after he and she parted for ever, she would be known as Mrs Alexander Karolyis and however modest the income he settled on her, it would be wealth beyond her wildest imaginings.