An Embarrassment of Riches (37 page)

‘Land's sake! You can't invite him here!' Alexander had disposed with the services of his manservant and was struggling to undo his collar-stud himself.

‘Why ever not?' Maura put down her hairbrush and stared at him uncomprehendingly.

With an exasperated blasphemy Alexander wrenched his stiff waxed collar free and flung it down on the bed. ‘He's a
Paddy
, for Christ's sake! Do you want us to be the joke of the city? He wouldn't know how to behave …' He pulled his shirt over his head. ‘He wouldn't know what to say …'

He tossed the crumpled shirt to the floor and began to unbuckle his belt. He had been looking forward to this moment all day. The only reason he was struggling out of his clothes without Teal's assistance, and in the bedroom not his dressing-room, was because he was beginning to begrudge every moment Maura was out of his sight. He loved watching her prepare for bed and at his request she now often did so without Miriam attending her. He loved the grace and suppleness of her body as she stepped out of her clothes; brushed her hair; climbed into the high, vast bed. And now she had shattered his mood of happy carnal anticipation by crassly suggesting that a lay-about Irishman pay them a house call!

She didn't move from the dressing-table stool. ‘Kieron knows exactly how to behave, and what to say …' Her voice was very quiet. Too quiet.

He was carelessly oblivious. ‘He may know how to behave and what to say in a bog in Ireland, but he certainly won't know how to comport himself in a New York mansion!'

‘You don't mean that.'

For the first time he realized that her voice was unsteady.

‘You're tired and you don't mean that. We'll talk about it again tomorrow.'

He
was
tired. The funeral had been emotionally exhausting. It would be a long time before he would forget the snubs that he had suffered, if ever. Those snubs had been merely on Maura's behalf. God alone knew what would happen if he began to hold open house for all her Paddy and Mick friends.

‘Like hell we'll talk about it tomorrow!' he said savagely, sitting down on the bed with his back towards her, yanking off his boots, wishing to God he'd had the sense to have undressed in a proper manner, with his valet's help. ‘I'm a Karolyis! I
own
this city! And I'm not having any truck with Irish scum!'

The words were out before he could stop them. He groaned, swivelling to face her, intending to make right his wrong and for the first time he became aware that the shake in her voice had not been occasioned by distress but by fury.

‘What you say about Kieron, you also say about me!' In the lamp-lit room her eyes were blazing violet-dark. ‘We're kin. Just as you and Charlie are kin. We were born in the same kind of mud-walled, thatched-roof hovel and we escaped a life-time of living in those hovels through the actions of the same benefactor. Kieron entered Ballacharmish on many an occasion and he knows how to behave in society just as well as I know how to behave …'

‘I doubt it.' Alexander had had enough. Tears he could have coped with. Outraged fury, on a day when he had suffered humiliation at the hands of a Van Rensselaer, was just too much. ‘Kieran or Keenan or whatever his name is, wasn't brought up by Lord Clanmar as you were. He wasn't educated as you were …'

‘We're
cousins!
We have the same history, the same …'

‘Then it's a history you're going to have to damn well forget!' Van Rensselaer's sneering face burned in his memory. ‘It must be obvious to you after what happened this morning that we can't continue with this fiction of you being illegitimate Irish …'

She sucked in her breath, her face draining of colour. ‘It isn't a fiction! Like it or not, it's the truth! You know it's the truth …'

He was on his feet now, facing her across the bed, his tensed chest muscles golden in the lamplight. ‘Have some sense! Do you want our child to be a social outcast? I shall speak to James Gorden Bennett tomorrow. I'll get him to run a piece in the
Herald
to the effect that my previous statement about your family and nationality was nothing but an irresponsible joke. From now on you're English, Anglican and I'll have Bennett come up with an appropriate family background for you.'

‘Never!
' Her breasts were heaving, her eyes flashing. ‘I'm Irish and Catholic and I'm not one little bit ashamed of my family background!'

He strode around the bed towards her. ‘Then you ought to be!' he blazed. ‘As long as you cling to it, in this city you'll never be known as anything other than scum Irish and nor will your child!'

She slapped him across the face with all the force that she could muster.

There was a terrible moment of silence. In horror she saw the imprint of her fingers rising in ugly weals on his cheek.

‘God damn!
' he hissed, and then his arms were round her like a vice and his mouth was on hers, hard and insistent.

She couldn't have resisted even if she had wanted to, and she didn't want to. She knew why he had said such hurtful things. She knew how he had smarted under the social cuts he had received at the funeral. She knew that she had been a fool to expect him to welcome Kieron into their home with open arms. And she knew that he didn't want to fight with her. He wanted to love her; to make love to her; and she wanted him to do so more than anything else in the world.

He didn't say sorry the next morning and nor did she expect him to. He had shown his contrition in his physical need of her. All he said in reference to Kieron was: ‘If your friend has any trouble finding employment let me know and I'll find a place for him somewhere.'

‘Yes.'

She was still safely ensconced behind her breakfast-tray, surrounded by a myriad of lace-edged pillows. He was fully dressed, standing looking down at her with a glass of fresh orange juice in his hand, about to leave for his meeting with Lyall Kingston.

She smiled up at him, knowing how much the offer to help Kieron had cost him. It was as far as he would be able to go and she had no intention of reopening their quarrel by once again suggesting that he and Kieron meet. She would meet Kieron by herself. They could rendezvous in one of the city's many eating-houses, or in Union Place or the corner of East 50th Street where the new Catholic cathedral was being built.

He put his glass on her breakfast tray and pulled the tray a little away from her. ‘Bye,' he said, and as he lowered his head to kiss her his hand slid down over her still unrounded stomach.

Her own hand covered his. The baby. She wondered if it would have Alexander's jet-black hair or if its hair would have a touch of Celtic red. A smile curved her lips as she wondered if the baby would inherit not only Alexander's impulsive hot-headedness but her own Irish temper as well.

When Alexander finally tore himself away from her she re-read Kieron's letter and wrote an answer to it. He was staying in a lodging-house in a street she had never heard of and she didn't suggest that she visit him there in case lady visitors were not approved of. Instead she wrote:

If you can meet me this afternoon be on the corner of Fifth and East 50th Street at two o'clock, and if you can't make it today I'll be there every day at the same time until you
can
make it. Simply can't wait to see you again! Much, much love, Maura.

She sent the letter to his address by hand and an hour later the messenger returned bearing an answering note. It read merely:
Sure, and while I'm waiting I'll lay a stone for St Patrick.

She laughed out loud. He hadn't been in the city five minutes and he already knew of the Cathedral being built and why she had thought the corner of East 50th Street a suitable meeting-place for two Irish expatriates.

She asked her coachman to set her down at East 48th Street, knowing that Kieron would crack with laughter if he saw the tastelessly ostentatious Karolyis carriage, complete with hypothetical coat of arms and liveried postilions.

‘Don't wait for me,' she said crisply to the startled coachman. ‘I'll make my own way back.'

As she turned away from him and began to walk along the side-walk she was filled with a sudden, heady sense of freedom. For the first time since setting foot in America, she was unaccompanied. She turned her face up to the sun, revelling in its heat. Suddenly she didn't even mind the city street smells; the traffic plunging chaotically up and down the avenue; the sweat prickling her neck, the dust tickling her nose. This crowded, rutted side-walk was the
real
New York.

The people teeming around her looked as if they had been drawn from every country on earth. There were black faces; Caucasian faces; Oriental faces. In the space of half a dozen yards she passed a woman possessing Nordic white-blond hair and another with the red hair and freckles of a Scot.

There was no sign of the hideous riots that had so recently taken place and she felt not the slightest nervousness at being unaccompanied. The city was hers to enjoy and she was filled with curiosity about it. How big was the park she had glimpsed on her first carriage ride through the city with Alexander? It had seemed vast. She wondered if it had a lake, if it would remind her, just a very little, of Lough Suir.

She crossed East 50th Street and looked up at the rearing, far-from-finished walls of the new cathedral. Already the style was evident. Neo-Gothic. A smile touched the corners of her mouth. Lord Clanmar had been much set against the fashion for Gothic revival in architecture, but perhaps even he would have found it permissible in a cathedral. There were dozens of workmen on the site and among the cacophony of voices the brogue of her fellow-Irish was unmistakable.

Her smile deepened. It was only right that it should be so. They were making the city their own, just as the Dutch had once done and as wave after wave of other immigrants, from other countries, had also done.

‘A penny for them, or are they not worth my trouble, sweetheart?' an amused, dearly familiar voice asked.

She spun around to face him her eyes shining. ‘Kieron! Oh,
Kieron!'

He was laughing down at her, a cap perched jauntily on his thick, springy hair, his faded, blue linen shirt open at the throat, his jacket slung nonchalantly over his shoulder and held by his thumb, just as it had been when they had said goodbye to each other.

‘Oh, Kieron, how I've missed you!' and ridiculously there were tears in her eyes and she wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. She threw her arms around him, hugging him as though she would never, ever, let him go.

Although there was still laughter in his voice, his voice was oddly thick as he held her close, saying: ‘Sure, and I've missed you too,
élainn.'

When at last she could bear to release him she wiped the tears from her cheeks, saying laughingly, ‘I can't believe it's only four months since we said goodbye at Ballacharmish. So much has happened that it seems a lifetime ago.'

‘More for you than for me,' he said lightly, lifting up her hand with the shining wedding ring on her fourth finger. ‘You can hardly have known the gentleman when you stood before the priest with him.'

She had the grace to blush. ‘I didn't, not in the way that you mean, Kieron. But in the way that truly matters I knew everything I needed to know about him even before he ever spoke to me.'

Kieron's strong-boned face remained bland, but his hazel eyes were unconvinced. ‘Then let's go somewhere quieter than this street corner and you can persuade me of it,' he said, tucking her arm in his in easy intimacy. ‘Where shall it be? Are only Delmonico's and Sherry's grand enough for you now?'

‘I've never been to Delmonico's and I've never even heard of Sherry's,' she said, so euphorically happy that she felt as if she were walking on air. ‘How is it you know so much more about the city than I do? I've been here for four months and you've only been in New York for a handful of days.'

He grinned, white teeth flashing in a face bronzed and weathered by a lifetime of work in the open air. ‘You may have been in America for four months, but you haven't been in New York for four months. Tell me now about the farm.'

‘The farm?' For a minute she stared at him blankly, and then realization dawned. She giggled. ‘It's hard to think of Tarna as being a farm. It's very like Ballacharmish. Lovely and elegant and set in the most beautiful countryside …'

‘But not Irish countryside,' Kieron said, suddenly sombre.

Her giggles died. ‘No.' Her hand tightened momentarily on his arm. ‘Not Irish countryside.'

They were both silent for a little while, thinking of Ballacharmish; of the incomparable majesty of Mount Keadeen and Mount Lùgnaquillia; of the matchless beauty of Lough Suir.

He steered her across the crowded sidewalk and into a noisy, cheerful eating-house. ‘And is it true Karolyis horses are among the finest in the world?'

‘You know of them?' She was sure she hadn't written to him of the horses. She had been too busy writing to him of Alexander.

They sat on a bench at a long wooden table, its surface bleached pale by years of scrubbing.

‘Anyone who knows anything of horse-flesh knows the name Karolyis. I'm surprised that you didn't yourself.'

She edged a little nearer to him on the bench, out of the way of a beefy New Yorker, who was sitting on her other side, tucking into a bowl of clam chowder with elbows determinedly akimbo.

‘I didn't connect the name Karolyis with anything, not horses, not New York …'

‘Not an embarrassment of riches?'

There was such amusement in his voice that she found herself laughing again.

‘No. You can't accuse me of gold-digging.'

A waitress was at their side, waiting to take their order.

‘A beer, a tea and two chicken-pot pies,' Kieron said succinctly.