An Embarrassment of Riches (40 page)

He wanted her so much it was a physical pain. He wanted to feel the softness of her breasts against his chest; he wanted to feel her legs sliding sensuously against and around his.

Her breathing was becoming increasingly unsteady. Exercizing every ounce of self-control that she possessed she pressed her hands restrainingly against his chest and moved her face away from his mouth, saying urgently, ‘Alexander, please listen to me! The man Belzell leased from was your father. He now leases from you.
You
are the landlord with ultimate responsibility for the tenement I visited today. You are the person who can change everything for the people living there!'

His mouth had been on the erotic curve of her throat. He lifted his head, checking his raging desire with difficulty.

‘How in God's name can you know that
I'm
the landowner?' he asked in genuine bewilderment. ‘I've never even heard the name Belzell before, I …'

One of the tenants told me. His name is Patrick O'Farrell and …'

Alexander had been patient for long enough. He had endured a tediously long morning listening to Lyall Kingston enumerating the finer details of his father's will and he had spent an equally tedious afternoon cooped up with half a dozen of his father's financial advisers. He had come home eager to be with his wife and he was horny as hell.

‘For Christ's sake, what does it matter?' he exploded exasperatedly. ‘I must own hundreds of properties in the Bowery. For all I know I probably own all of them. What's so special about this one? If your friends don't like where they're living tell them to move out.'

She stepped away from him trying to curb her rising nausea and failing. ‘You sound like one of Ireland's English landlords! They don't care about their properties either. They let factors collect the rents for them, and they let factors turn those who cannot pay out into the wind and rain. When decent men tell them they must take more responsibility for those dependent upon them, they, too, say that if their tenants do not like the conditions they live under then they are at liberty to live elsewhere. Only they cannot do so. The poor cannot move away from the very little they have. The O'Farrells and those that live with them cannot move out, because there is nowhere for them to move to that they can afford!'

‘Then they should find work as other people have had to find work,' he said with answering temper. ‘My grandfather was just as poor as any O'Farrell or Shaughnessy, only he didn't sit on his backside whining about it. He went out and he worked and he made a fortune. Just as your Irish friends could do if only they'd stop feeling sorry for themselves and stay off the bottle!'

This time she didn't slap his face. It would have been too trivial a reaction. She said, white-lipped, ‘You have no understanding whatsoever. You don't know the first thing about being poor. If you were in the O'Farrells'or Shaughnessys'situation you wouldn't find it so easy to go out and earn yourself a fortune. I doubt if any of the people I visited today are drinkers, but if they are, who are you to criticize? You wouldn't find it so easy to stay off the bottle if it was the only comfort in life that you had.'

He spun away from her, abandoning all thoughts of love-making. Furious he stabbed the button that summoned Teal saying savagely, ‘Don't
ever
lecture me again! The slums that you visited today are only slums because they've been fouled by the dissolute Irish savages who inhabit them! Any improvements would be an absolute waste of time and money!'

He stormed into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. She made no attempt to follow him. He was wrong and he was incapable of seeing that he was wrong. He was as ignorant and bigoted and uncharitable as Kieron said Lord Bicester was. She sat down on the edge of the high bed wondering what to do next. Presumably they would go down to dinner in a little while, in which case she should ring for Miriam and bathe and change. But she didn't want to ring for Miriam. She didn't want to see anyone. She wanted to make Alexander understand about poverty; she wanted them to be in agreement about what must be done; she wanted them to be friends again.

From beyond the closed bathroom door she could hear him speaking tersely to Teal. Perhaps he wouldn't want to dine at home after the quarrel they had just had. Perhaps he would go out leaving her to cope with the vast array of servants alone.

She thought back to the words he had used about the Irish. He called them dissolute savages. It was a term coined in ignorance for she was sure that he had never met anyone Irish, other than herself. Her white-hot anger began to ebb. She understood very well the way he had been brought up, cocooned by vast wealth against any of the realities of life. Although he hadn't said so, she knew very well that he had never once stepped into any of the city's slum areas. If he did so, and saw for himself the appalling conditions that existed there, then he would begin to think differently.

There was a hesitant knock at the door and she crossed the room and opened it.

Miriam gave a deferential bob. ‘Do you need me, madam? You hadn't rung and …'

‘No, I'll ring when I do so, Miriam.'

Her mind was made up. Despite all the terrible things that Alexander had said, she was going to make friends with him. Unless she did so, the chasm that had so suddenly sprung up between them would grow wider and deeper and might, in the end, prove to be unbridgeable. The prospect of such a divide between them filled her with sick horror. It would be the end of all the love and laughter between them. The end of the carelessly happy camaraderie that had so united them during their months at Tarna. No matter what the cost, she wouldn't allow that to happen. Alexander wasn't by nature conscienceless and uncaring. He had been conditioned from childhood to disregard the poor and to regard the thousands living in misery on Karolyis-owned land as being none of his responsibility. She would use the passion that existed between them to bring them as close mentally as they had become physically.

The jade doorknob on the door leading to the bathroom began to turn. Feverishly she began to unbutton her dress.

He stepped into the room, his hair sleeked gleamingly with bath-water, a towel around his waist.

Her eyes held his. Silently she stepped out of her dress.

He stopped short, his pupils widening fractionally in stunned surprise, and then darkening with sudden heat.

As she began to undo the buttons on her chemise he said loudly, so that his voice carried into the bathroom and adjacent dressing-room, ‘I shan't be needing you any further, Teal.'

Seconds later there came the sound of the servants'door opening and then closing.

Her breasts spilled free of her chemise, the nipples rose-pink and silky.

He unloosened his towel, letting it drop to the floor, closing the space between them in swift, urgent strides.

Later that evening both Charlie and Henry came to visit them: Charlie in order to discuss with Alexander the bare-faced cheek of an invitation he had just received and that he assumed Alexander had also received, from the
nouveaux riches
Vanderbilts; Henry, because he was mildly concerned as to what Alexander's reactions might be to the social slights proferred him at the funeral.

‘An invitation to a Vanderbilt birthday party, for land's sake!' Charlie exclaimed indignantly, not sprawling on the sofa quite as much as he usually did out of respect for Maura. ‘How does the old devil have the cheek? He's been trying to get his name on a Schermerhorn guest list for years without succeeding and now he's behaving as if it
is
on our guest list and is issuing his own invitations accordingly!'

‘Times are changing,' Henry said, not sounding at all happy about it. ‘By the time this confounded war is over it's going to be impossible to keep families like the Vanderbilts in their place. Too many Old Guard families are being reduced to penury while families without acceptable backgrounds are coming into fortunes. Society is going to have to begin bending its rules in order to accommodate them.'

Coming from Henry this was heresy of the highest order. Charlie stared at him, hardly able to believe his ears. ‘You can't mean it. Men like the Commodore in Schermerhorn and Roosevelt drawing-rooms?'

Henry nodded, aware that the conversation was veering towards dangerous ground. Charlie was a bonehead and he wouldn't put it past him to begin recalling that Cornelius Vanderbilt was the son of a common farmer. Once down that road, the spectre of Victor Karolyis's peasant origins would loom large and the evening would be ruined.

‘Needless to say, neither you nor Alexander will be attending so we can talk about more interesting matters,' he said, wondering what subject would be within Maura's scope. She was obviously fiercely intelligent, but a girl of her nationality couldn't possibly be expected to know anything about the war or American politics, and so the burning questions of the day would just have to remain undiscussed.

‘The finest hunter I ever possessed came from Ireland,' he said, certain that anyone with Irish blood in their veins must be at least passingly knowledgeable about horse-flesh. ‘I told Alexander that he should make a visit to the Irish stud-farms …'

Alexander wasn't listening to him. He was staring at Charlie, appalled. Vanderbilt was issuing invitations for a birthday ball and he hadn't received one. It beggared belief. If all the
haut ton
had been hopefully invited, and from Charlie's account they had been, then it could only mean that he hadn't been invited because Vanderbilt considered him to be no longer a member of the city's social élite.
Vanderbilt
, for God's sake! A man who once worked his father's farm for the cash wage of a hundred dollars a year. A man who, as a youth, had even been snubbed by John Jacob Astor.

He was seized with the fierce desire to vomit. His father's passionate concern about Karolyis social standing no longer seemed pathetic and irrelevant. The Commodore was easily in his seventies and had been a self-made millionaire ever since he had been a young man. Yet still people like Charlie and Henry remembered his origins and socially cut him Even the Astors, now third generation, were plagued by anecdotes of how old John Jacob had eaten peas with his knife and if it hadn't been for a couple of astute marriages, they, too, would have found entry into any sort of decent society impossible. That Karolyis had done so had been because of a similarly astute marriage. It had been a marriage that silenced any gossip about Victor Karolyis's peasant origins and now, because of Alexander's own marriage, these origins were beginning to be remembered.

He looked across at Maura and it was as if he had been thrown a life-line. After their urgent, abandoned love-making she was so radiant with happiness that she seemed to fizz. She was wearing a dress of pale lemon silk, cut fashionably low and in the light of the many chandeliers her glossy dark hair shimmered and shone. He grinned across at her, remembering how she had cried out in pleasure beneath him, how she had answered kiss for kiss, intimate caress for intimate caress. She was everything that he could possibly want in a woman. She was daring, exciting unpredictable, intensely passionate. He dismissed the Commodore from his mind and not once, all evening, did he think of Genevre.

‘I don't want hand-outs from your husband's fine friends,' Kieron said harshly.

They were standing at their usual meeting-place on the corner of East 50th Street.

Even though it was now the end of September it was still unbearably hot. The baby was beginning to make its presence felt and Maura felt queasy and unusually tired. She turned her back on the labourers toiling on the site of the cathedral and said with as much patience as she could muster: ‘It
isn't
a hand-out. Henry Schermerhorn needs someone to oversee his New York stables and you're the very best man he could possibly have.'

Kieron wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He was sweaty and his boots were filmed with dust. The only employment he had managed to get for himself had been labouring on a building site similar to the one they were standing by and he was due back there in fifteen minutes.

‘A glorified head stableboy is a bit of a come-down for a man who's been a factor,' he said tautly.

‘I know.'

She didn't mind his seeming ingratitude, the last thing she wanted was for Kieron to be grateful to her for anything. And she could understand his bitterness. In Ireland he had been used to responsibility. The tenants on the estates he had factored had looked on him with respect. In their eyes he had been a man of consequence. In New York, no-one looked on him with respect. He was a Paddy. He wasn't expected to be capable of anything other than the most menial of jobs.

‘You won't be Henry's stable-overseer for long,' she said encouragingly.

He looked across at her, an eyebrow rising.

‘Henry has always wanted to breed his own horses. He has money enough and I've told him that it's about time he realized his dream. When he does so and I think he's going to do so very soon, then he'll need someone to manage it for him.'

‘And what makes you think he's going to light on me?' Kieron asked, his good humour returning under the onslaught of her fierce optimism.

‘He's going to know immediately you begin working for him that you're a man who is magic with horses. He already knows that you've factored for two of Ireland's greatest landlords. And he knows that he can trust you, for I've told him that he can.'

He pushed his cap even further backwards on his thick hair, not knowing whether to be grateful to her, or annoyed. The last thing he wanted was to have anyone doing him favours. He wanted to make his own way in America and not be beholden to anyone, not even Maura. Yet he also desperately wanted to be free of the ceaseless noise and choking dust of the building site. If Henry Schermerhorn employed him as an overseer for his New York stables then at least life would be tolerable again. If he became manager of a stud-farm, then life would be very heaven.