An Embarrassment of Riches

by Margaret Pemberton

  Maura didn’t demur. Nothing she knew about Alexander’s father had endeared her to him, but she could understand Alexander wanting his father’s Christian name to be perpetuated. If she had known her own father’s name she would have wanted to include it among Felix’s Christian names.

  She felt a pang of sudden sadness. It was very rare that she ever thought about her unknown father. Her mother had never spoken of him and she had died without seeing fit to disclose his name to her. For all she knew he might still be alive. A footman at Dublin Castle perhaps. Or a clerk or a stable-boy.

  Deciding that when they had a daughter, she would ask Alexander if she could be named after her mother, she banished the subject from her mind, not wanting anything to cloud the perfection of the present moment.

  ‘Why don’t you pick the baby up?’ she asked, leaning contentedly back against her silk, monogrammed pillows. ‘Nurse won’t mind.’

  Alexander didn’t give a hang whether the nurse minded or not. Very gently he reached down into the crib, lifting the baby in his hands.

  Felix gurgled appreciatively.

  ‘He knows who you are,’ Maura said, her smile deepening. ‘He’s a very bright baby.’

  Alexander was sure he was. At that moment he didn’t give a damn about his position in society. The Rhinelanders, the Brevoorts, the Roosevelts and the De Peysters could all go to hell as far as he was concerned. The birthday ball and Ariadne Brevoort were all forgotten. He had no thoughts for anything or anyone other than Maura and his son.

  With the baby in his arms he looked across at her. ‘I love you, you know,’ he said huskily, as if he were discovering the fact for the first time.

  ‘I know,’ she said, tears of happiness sparkling in her eyes.

  The idyll lasted until Charlie visited to pay his respects to Felix.

  ‘I wish I’d been in town when he was born,’ he said, a silver commemorative mug with the baby’s name engraved on it, in his hands. ‘I’ve been in Virginia. A duty visit to an aunt who is dying.’

  He gave the commemorative mug to Maura and sat down beside her on the sofa. ‘How is the little fella?’

  ‘He’s a month old,’ Maura said scoldingly. ‘Not only did we have to have a godmother by proxy at the christening, we also had to have one of the godfathers by proxy!’

  Charlie looked suitably sheepish. ‘I’m sorry, Maura, really I am. I’ve been getting roasted right and left. Ariadne Brevoort made me feel as guilty as hell for cutting her birthday ball.’ He turned towards Alexander who was studying form for a race to be held at Harlem Lane. ‘She tells me you turned up though. She seemed very pleased about it.’

  He turned back towards Maura, oblivious of the warning flash in Alexander’s near-black eyes.

  ‘Rather nice that Ariadne is extending the hand of friendship and all that. She’s rather full of her own importance but now that she’s put you and Alexander on her list, the rest of the wives will follow.’

  ‘I don’t think she has put me on her list,’ Maura said, puzzled. ‘She hasn’t left her card and I know nothing about an invitation to her birthday ball.’

  ‘It wasn’t worth telling you about,’ Alexander said crisply, tossing the form card on to a nearby side-table. ‘You couldn’t have gone. The baby was due any minute.’

  ‘The ball was on the twenty-sixth,’ Charlie offered guilelessly.

  ‘The twenty-sixth of February?’ Maura’s puzzlement deepened.

  Charlie nodded, happily unaware of Alexander’s ferment desire to throttle him.

  She had never asked Alexander where he had gone when he had slammed out of the house after their row in the billiard-room. In the deep joy they had shared at Felix’s birth it had seemed irrelevant. Now, however, she wasn’t so sure.

  ‘Is that where you were the night Felix was born?’ she asked, looking across at him. ‘At the Brevoort birthday ball?’

  Alexander nodded and then said to Charlie: ‘Are you going to Harlem Lane tomorrow, Charlie? There’s some expensive trotters being tried out there.’

  Charlie was dimly aware that things were not quite as they should be. Alexander was being oddly abrupt and Maura seemed to have forgotten that he was in the room. It was obviously about time he made his departure and he rose to his feet.

  ‘I may do,’ he said, tempted. The racing at Harlem Lane was always at hot speeds and with high betting. ‘’ Bye, Maura. Say goodbye to little Felix for me.’

  ‘’Bye Charlie,’ Maura said, wondering why Alexander had not mentioned the Brevoort Ball before; wondering if the invitation had been for Mr and Mrs Alexander Karolyis; wondering why the thought of Alexander going there, hard on the heels of their quarrel, filled her with such dismay.

  It was a subject she longed to pursue but she did not do so. Alexander was obviously unwilling to talk about it and she suspected that he was deeply ashamed of it.

  She linked her arm in his. ‘Shall we go into the nursery and spend some time with Felix?’ she suggested, and no further reference to the birthday ball was made.

  The next day, in his study, she stared in bewilderment at the array of embossed invitation cards littering the desk.

  ‘Can I help you, Mrs Karolyis?’ Stephen asked her a trifle nervously.

  ‘I was looking for my husband. I’ve just received a message from Mr Henry Schermerhorn asking if we will meet him for lunch at Delmonico’s.’

  There were invitations for supper parties, dinners, anniversary balls. The names were those of all the people Alexander had so fumed at being cut by, De Peysters, Roosevelts, Stuyvesants, Van Rensselaers.

  ‘Mr Karolyis is in the Chinese drawing-room with Mr Kingston.’

  A slight frown puckered Maura’s forehead. They were all addressed to Alexander only. Not one card was addressed to Mr and Mrs Alexander Karolyis.

  ‘Shall I inform Mr Karolyis that you wish to see him, madam?’

  Maura dragged her attention back to the harassed Stephen. ‘No,’ she said, knowing very well that if Alexander was with Lyall Kingston he would not want to be disturbed. ‘If he should want to know my whereabouts tell him that I am lunching with Mr Henry Schermerhorn at Delmonico’s.’

  It was a sign of how totally unaccepted she was socially, that she was able to dine out with Henry at a public restaurant. She knew very well that no high society matron would have dreamed of doing such a thing.

  She was just about to tell Henry that there were advantages to her bizarre social standing when he said suddenly: ‘There’s an awful lot of garbage being talked at the moment, Maura. Can’t Alexander put a stop to it?’

  ‘What kind of garbage, Henry?’ she asked, spearing a mushroom with her fork.

  Henry looked unhappy. More unhappy than she had ever seen him.

  ‘Garbage about your marriage. Astor buttonholed me at the Knickerbocker yesterday and asked me if I knew that the marriage aboard ship had been only a sham. I told him he was talking out of the back of his head, of course. If it was only Astor getting hold of the wrong end of the stick I wouldn’t bother Alexander with it, but it isn’t. The rumour that Alexander merely pulled a tasteless prank is all around town. It needs stopping, Maura. It needs stopping fast.’

  Maura put her fork down, the mushroom uneaten. Her throat was dry and there was a sickly sensation in the pit of her stomach.

  ‘Why would anyone spread such a rumour? What could possibly be gained from it?’

  Henry sighed and leaned back in his chair, toying with his glass of claret. ‘New York high society can ill afford to ostracize a man who owns half the city. And it wants to present a united front to the war-profiteering nouveaux riches trying to storm its ranks. It can’t bring itself to accept yourself and so this is a neat way of not having to do so. If the marriage was a sham and a prank it doesn’t have to extend social invitations to yourself, only to Alexander.’

  He gave a mirthless laugh. ‘It’s ridiculous of course, because Alexander would never accept any invitation that excluded you. All he h
as to do to put an end to it is to scotch the rumour that you’re not legally married.’

  Maura’s face was very pale. She thought of the shoal of invitation cards on Alexander’s desk; his acceptance of Ariadne Brevoort’s invitation to her birthday ball; his shame-faced nervous tension when Charlie had carelessly revealed that he had attended it.

  ‘You’ll tell Alexander what I’ve said, won’t you, Maura?’ Henry was asking concernedly.

  She forced a smile. ‘Yes, Henry. Of course I will.’

  But she didn’t want to. She was too terrified of what she might hear.

  ‘What the hell does it matter what people think?’ Alexander demanded explosively. ‘All that matters is that life is bearable again!’

  She stood very still. She could hear her heart beating, the blood pounding in her ears. ‘Bearable again?’ she asked, forcing the words through dry lips. ‘Do you mean that life with me has been unbearable?’

  The whipcord muscles under the linen of his shirt tensed until they bulged in knots. He didn’t mean that at all and she damn well knew it. What had been unbearable had been the slights he had received; the boredom of never being invited anywhere.

  ‘I’m twenty-two, for Christ’s sake!’ he flared. ‘Not in my dotage! It isn’t exactly unreasonable of me to want to go to balls and parties, is it?’

  ‘No.’ Her face was like an ivory mask. He had told her all she needed to know. If Astor and others like him had been led into believing that their marriage was a sham, then the person responsible for that belief was Alexander. He had wanted to be accepted into society again and now, at terrible cost, he had been.

  She said unsteadily, ‘You have to tell Astor and everyone else who believes we are not married, that we are married. You have to tell them so for Felix’s sake.’

  He breathed in sharply, his nostrils white. It couldn’t be done. Not yet. In another year or two, when the war was over and society was turned on its heels, coming clean about his marriage wouldn’t matter. But at the moment he couldn’t do it. And at the moment it made not the slightest difference to Felix. He was too young for it to affect him. And he hated being pushed into corners. He hated the whole damned business of feeling in the wrong; guilty; ashamed.

  ‘No,’ he said savagely, pushing his hair away from his forehead. ‘If you don’t like it, go back to Tarna.’

  His selfishness and his obtuseness were too much for her to bear. She wanted to scream at him that going to Tarna would make no difference, that he would still be publicly calling their son a bastard. Overcome by the magnitude of the harm he was causing Felix she raised her hand, striking him full across the face.

  Shock flared through his eyes and then he spun on his heels, striding from the room.

  This time she didn’t run after him, nor did she call his name.

  She made her way to the nursery and abruptly dismissed the surprised nurse. Then she lifted Felix out of his bassinet and held him tight, tears scalding her face. She loved Alexander enough to forgive him nearly anything. But not this. It was too wicked, too irresponsible.

  That night she slept alone in their vast, high bed.

  Alexander sent no message as to his whereabouts. It would have been impossible for him to do so. He was at the Brevoort mansion, making furious, passionate love to a hungrily receptive Ariadne.

  Chapter Nineteen

  She knew about the affair almost from the very beginning, and the hurt of it was crucifying. She couldn’t talk about it with anyone, not Charlie nor Henry, not even Kieron.

  ‘And what is himself going to do about things?’ Kieron asked her as they strolled among the crowds on Broadway.

  It was a lovely warm day in early May and spring bonnets were out in abundance, ornamenting the street with flashes of pink and violet and sizzling yellow.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, striving to keep the bitterness and shame she felt out of her voice. ‘I’ve spoken to Alexander about the tenements time and time again, Kieron. He doesn’t see them as being any of his responsibility. He won’t do anything to improve the conditions in them and he won’t join the Citizens’ Association.’

  ‘Not even for you, élainn?’

  ‘Especially not for me.’

  They had been walking along side by side and he now swung his head towards her, regarding her near-perfect profile with sharply assessing eyes.

  She had changed since the baby’s birth. Instead of being even more happy and radiant she had lost all of the inner zest and joy that was so much a part of her sunny personality. Her beautifully etched face was pale and there were shadows beneath her eyes.

  He said abruptly. ‘It’s not working, is it? You’re not happy with him.’

  She didn’t turn her head towards him. She couldn’t. If she looked into Kieron’s concerned, gold-flecked eyes she knew that the tears would come and that she would be lost.

  She said instead: ‘I love him. Even though he’s being such an eejit about the tenements, I still love him.’

  He took her arm as they crossed an intersection, saying grimly, ‘I don’t know how you can. The man’s a thousand times worse than Lord Bicester for he’s landlord to thousands more than Bicester is or ever will be. He doesn’t deserve to live, let alone to have your loyalty.’

  She stopped walking. She knew how Kieron felt about the Anglo-Irish who had robbed their fellow countrymen of their homes and land, and she shared his contempt for them. And she also knew the lengths that some Irishmen were prepared to go in their efforts to overthrow British rule.

  ‘Are you a Fenian, Kieron?’

  He had stopped walking also and was looking down at her, his cap perched jauntily on his thickly curling hair, his faded blue working-shirt open at the throat.

  ‘And if I am, sweetheart?’

  Her stomach began to tighten in knots. The Fenian Brotherhood was sworn to the overthrow of British rule by force. And to the murder of individuals if that murder was deemed to be warranted.

  She said tautly, ‘Alexander isn’t Anglo-Irish, Kieron. There’s no reason for him to be on any Fenian death-list. Promise me that he isn’t? Promise me?’

  His strong-boned face was inscrutable and for a moment she was overcome with almost overwhelming fear, and then he said, ‘I’ve become a Fenian because I want to see a revolution in Ireland, not because I want to settle scores with Alexander and his like.’

  She let out an unsteady sigh of relief. It was bad enough that instead of being friends, Alexander and Kieron felt only contempt for one another without that contempt degenerating, on Kieron’s part, into anything worse.

  ‘I took bed-sheets and diapers to the O’Farrells last week,’ she said, turning the conversation away from the dark, dangerous subject of the Fenian Brotherhood.

  ‘I know. Katy told me.’ She wondered how often he saw Katy O’Farrell and if he was a little in love with her.

  They had begun walking again and she said apologetically, ‘I’d do more if only I could, but I don’t have access to any money of my own and even though I am Mrs Karolyis, it would feel like thieving to take from Karolyis linen-cupboards.’

  ‘So where did the linen come from that you took to the Bowery?’

  ‘I sold a trinket Charlie Schermerhorn bought me when he returned from his stay in Virginia.’

  His eyes darkened. The situation was ridiculous. She was married to the richest man in the state and if she wanted to make a charitable gift of bed-linen and diapers she was reduced to selling a gift in order to have the money to be able to buy them.

  ‘I know what you are thinking,’ she said, guessing wrongly. ‘You’re thinking that I would raise far more money if sold a dress or a piece of jewellery.’

  ‘No, I’m not. I know damn well why you don’t. It’s the same reason you don’t take from Karolyis cupboards. Am I right or am I not?’

  A slight smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. ‘You’re right.’

  A young girl walked past them, eyeing Kieron appreciatively as she di
d so.

  Kieron was oblivious. ‘When I first heard the name of the man you’d married, élainn, I thought you were going to be able to bring pressure to bear on him and transform the lives of thousands. What went wrong?’

  She remained silent. She wanted to tell him that her marriage had gone wrong but she couldn’t bring herself to find the words.

  She said instead, ‘It’s going to take time, Kieron. Alexander is a very complex personality.’

  It wasn’t true. Alexander was as transparent as glass. She knew exactly why he had embarked on an affair with Ariadne Brevoort. The lies he had told in order to become once more socially acceptable had filled him with guilt and shame, and in order to rid himself of that shame he had had to convince himself that it was she who was at fault, not him.

  That was why he had hurled the ridiculous accusation that she had married him because she had known the kind of wealth his name stood for. And that was why he was now seeking sexual comfort elsewhere. He couldn’t continue coming to her bed when they both knew how grievously he had wronged her, and of how grievously he was wronging Felix.

  It was Kieron, now, who fell silent. He walked at her side, a slight frown knitting his brows. Two emotions were tearing through him and he didn’t know which was uppermost.

  For a while, when he first realized the kind of power and wealth that Alexander Karolyis possessed, he had been fiercely optimistic that Maura would be able to sway him and that he would embark on a great improvement programme where his properties were concerned; that he might even pull the lot down and begin building afresh; begin building model housing for those of little means.

  That hope was now crushed. It was obvious that Maura had absolutely no influence on Alexander and, although she hadn’t said so, it was also obvious that her bizarre marriage was rapidly falling apart at the seams. And that was the reason for the second emotion coursing through his veins. Coupled with the savage disappointment over her failure to change the living conditions for those in Karolyis slums was heady euphoria at the thought of Maura free of her marriage vows.