An Embarrassment of Riches (42 page)

Maura enjoyed such afternoons just as much as Henry did. They reminded her of the lovely, long-ago afternoons at Ballacharmish when she had sat in the rose-garden with Isabel and Lord Clanmar, discussing anything and everything from Darwin's theory of evolution to the reason for the Russian defeat at Borodino.

On 19 November President Lincoln dedicated the military cemetery at Gettysburg and when Maura read a report of the speech that he made there, she wished fervently that Lord Clanmar had still been alive in order that he could have appreciated it. In urging the North to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work which the Gettysburg dead had so nobly advanced Lincoln urged his listeners to ensure that ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth'.

‘It's a definition of democracy itself,' she had said to Henry admiringly.

By Christmas, instead of being over, the war was entering a new phase. The North was busy turning Chatanooga into a massive supply base from which it could advance towards Atlanta. The South was once again tenaciously digging in.

‘We'll spend Christmas at Tarna,' Alexander said to her as they ate dinner in the cavernous, marble-floored dining-room.

Only the presence of the footmen behind their high-backed tapestry-covered chairs prevented Maura from running down the length of the twenty-foot table and throwing her arms around him in delight.

At Tarna the rooms, although spacious and splendid, were also inviting. At Tarna the servants treated her with pleasant courtesy, not cool hostility. At Tarna there were meadows and woods to walk in, horses to feast her eyes on. At Tarna she and Alexander had been happy.

At the sight of her glowing eyes he felt his heart twist in his breast. Why couldn't it always be like this? Why was she so obsessed with the goddamned poor?

‘Have I to ask Charlie and Henry if they'd like to Christmas at Tarna?' he asked, putting his napkin down by the side of his plate and rising to his feet.

His footman eased his chair away from the table. Another two prepared to open the double doors leading into the adjacent drawing room.

‘Oh, that would be wonderful! We could have a tree and decorate the rooms with holly and ivy and make paper-chains …'

He began to laugh. ‘I can imagine a lot of things, but not Charlie and Henry making paper-chains.'

He moved towards her, taking her hand as she rose from her chair. Her fingers interlocked with his. Their eyes met, violet-dark answering the heat of burning grey.

He was gentle with her, mindful of the baby. As they lay in their vast bed, their bodies satisfied, their minds temporarily in tune, one with the other, he ran his hand lovingly over her bulging stomach.

‘Have I told you that I've asked Henry to be the baby's godfather?' he asked musingly, feeling deeply at peace, both with himself and with her.

She laid her hand over the top of his, tenderly stilling it, smiling with pleasure as she felt the throb of the baby's movements through his palm.

‘And have you asked Charlie as well?' she asked, turning her head towards him.

There was a bead of sweat on his olive-toned neck and she kissed his flesh lingeringly, licking it away with her tongue.

His sex began to stir again and he shifted slightly, raising himself on one elbow so that he could look down at her.

‘Yes,' he said in amusement, ‘although what sort of a godfather Charlie will make I can't imagine. Godfathers are supposed to keep godchildren on the straight and narrow and any godchild of Charlie's will find themselves at the races before they are old enough to walk.'

Her hands slid over his well-muscled chest. ‘As will any godchild of Henry's,' she said, her voice thickening as she saw the intention in his eyes.

He lowered his head to hers, kissing her hairline, her temples, the corners of her eyes. ‘Then I'll break the news of his forthcoming responsibility gently to him,' he said softly, his mouth moving towards her lips, silencing any response that she might have made.

He had been wrong to have laughed at the very idea of Charlie and Henry setting to and making paper-chains at Tarna. On their first evening there they applied themselves to the task with such gusto that even he condescended to make the occasional contribution himself.

‘The turquoise and silver chains are for the hall and the dining-room and the lemon and green chains are for the drawing-room,' Maura said, cutting up coloured paper and distributing it to her willing workers.

‘I like the glue,' Charlie said disarmingly. ‘It smells of cloves.'

‘Then we'll all be smelling of cloves, unless you stop waving that glue brush around,' Henry said in mock querulousness. He picked up a cut piece of turquoise paper and laid it against a lemon piece, studying it with the kind of care he usually reserved only for fine horse-flesh. ‘Couldn't we have turquoise and lemon too, Maura? Looks damned fine, doesn't it? Perhaps I should change my racing colours to turquoise and lemon.'

They were all sitting around a large, low table in front of a roaring log fire in the drawing-room. Alexander reached for the bourbon bottle at the side of his chair and refilled his glass. ‘Perhaps we could put smaller turquoise and lemon chains on the tree,' he suggested agreeably, wondering why such a childish, menial task was proving to be so enjoyable.

‘And my bedroom,' Charlie said, chains garlanded around his neck and reaching almost down to his feet. ‘Do you know that Willie Rhinelander has a life-sized peacock picked out in turquoises and emeralds on his bedhead?'

‘I hear his sister is putting mourning behind her with a vengeance,' Henry offered, his brow furrowed in concentration as he linked a yellow chain with a green one. ‘Birthday balls for widows are in poor taste in my opinion and the forthcoming Rhinelander Ball sounds as if it's going to be the most lavish social event to take place since Marie-Antoinette presided over Versailles.'

‘Brevoort,' Charlie corrected, laying into the glue pot with relish. ‘Ariadne Rhinelander married a Brevoort.'

Henry surveyed his completed yellow and green chain with pride. It had been the first thing he had ever made with his own hands and he had found the simple task amazingly satisfying.

Raising his head he realized for the first time that neither Alexander nor Maura were taking part in the conversation and he inwardly cursed himself for being a tactless fool. Any mention of the social life from which Alexander now found himself excluded always met with his stony silence. In order to remedy matters he laid his chain on top of the other chains piling the table, saying with genuine interest: ‘Both Charlie and myself are highly flattered at having been asked to stand as godfathers for the coming baby, but who are you going to ask to stand as godmother?'

Alexander shrugged. ‘We probably won't bother with one as there isn't anyone glaringly obvious to ask.'

‘But there is.'

Maura's interruption was serenely confident.

Alexander stared at her. ‘Who, for God's sake? There isn't a woman in New York who has even deigned to pay us a visit!'

‘The baby's godmother doesn't have to live in New York, does she?' Maura asked, busily disentangling Charlie from his reams of not very carefully colour-matched chains.

Alexander ran a hand through his hair, suddenly fearful that he was about to be confronted with a bog-Irish female from Maura's dim and distant past. ‘No, but she'd have to be here for the christening,' he said unencouragingly.

‘Not necessarily,' Henry interposed. ‘Someone could stand proxy for her. It's been done before.'

‘I don't think …' Alexander began in rising consternation.

Charlie cut across him. ‘Who are you thinking of, Maura? Someone in Ireland?'

She shook her head. ‘No. The friend I was brought up with lives in London.'

She looked across at Alexander. ‘Isabel would love to be godmother to the baby. Do you think there is some way of arranging it?'

Alexander sagged with relief. As far as he was concerned
anyone
would be suitable as long as their surname wasn't Irish.

‘It won't be a problem,' he said truthfully, remembering that Isabel was Lady Isabel.

A log crackled and fell on the fire. Maura began to happily scoop up the mass of finished paper-chains, saying apologetically, ‘I'm tired. You don't mind if I leave you to the bourbon and go to bed early, do you?'

They shook their heads, understanding that in her now advanced pregnancy she had need for rest, but regretful at losing her company. To Henry, Maura was the daughter he had never had. To Charlie, she had become a sister. Both of them loved her. Both of them found life more pleasurable when she was present.

Alexander's dark eyes followed her to the door. From behind she looked as slim and supple as she had the day he had first set eyes on her. He thought back to that moment aboard the
Scotia
, trying to remember if he had had any intimation then of how passionately he was going to desire her.

Incredibly, there had been none. He had seen only an impoverished Irish girl, little different from those around her, apart from her shining hair and pin-neat clothes. He had thought only that she would serve his purpose; that she would enable him to revenge himself upon his father. All his other thoughts had been for Genevre. With a stab of guilt he realized that he couldn't remember the last time he had allowed his thoughts to dwell on Genevre. He was just about to do so when Henry's voice penetrated his consciousness, saying impatiently: ‘For the third time, Alexander, do you want to play a hand of poker or not?'

In the pretty chintz-curtained bedroom in which she and Alexander had first made love, Maura was also thinking about the past. This time a year ago she had been at Ballacharmish with Lord Clanmar and Isabel. Her mother was still alive. Kieron had still been Ballacharmish's land-agent. It had been Kieron who had felled the Christmas fir tree and brought it into the drawing-room. It had been Isabel who had helped her to decorate it. Everything had been as it had always been at Christmas time, ever since she had been eight years old. There had been no intimations that her life was about to be drastically changed. No intimations of the grief that lay ahead, or of the incredible happiness that had followed hard on its heels.

She sat up in bed, reaching out to her bedside table for pen and paper.
Dearest, darling Isabel
, she began in her large, generous handwriting.
How would you like to be godmother by proxy to the new baby
…?

It was the quietest Christmas any of them had ever experienced, and for Alexander and Charlie and Henry, by far the most enjoyable. There were no parties, no other guests. During the day there were toboggan and skating jaunts at which Maura was a well-wrapped and happy spectator. In the evenings there were card games and quizzes and charades in which even Dawes, to his stupefied amazement, was invited to take part.

Henry had originally planned to stay only until the first week in January. By the last week in January he was still there, as was Charlie.

‘Couldn't we stay here for ever?' he said ruminatively to Alexander when Alexander intimated that it was time all four of them returned to New York. ‘We could become hermits and forget all about New York and society and the boring old war.'

At Charlie's flippant reference to the war, Alexander frowned. Like Charlie, he had paid three hundred dollars substitution money to avoid being drafted, but unlike Charlie it was an act about which he had occasional pricks of conscience. There had been a time when he had wanted, very much, to take part in the fighting. The fierce pleasure that he had derived in his marital bed had changed all that. He hadn't wanted to forgo it for the less obvious pleasure of risking his neck on Lincoln's behalf, and he was ashamed by the knowledge that he still didn't want to.

‘You might have no business affairs to attend to, but I do,' he said curtly. ‘We'll leave tomorrow morning.'

Charlie raised his eyebrows slightly. There were times when he didn't understand Alexander. There was no such thing as business affairs that couldn't be handled by someone else and Alexander had business managers and financial advisers by the score.

‘I'm serious,' he said, adjusting the cushion behind his thatch of blond hair and stretching his legs out on one of the long, deeply comfortable drawing-room sofas. ‘I can't imagine why I used to think Henry a dried-up old prune. He plays a mean game of poker and he knows nearly as much about horse-flesh as you do. I'd much rather stay here with Henry and Maura and yourself than go high-tailing it back to New York and Ariadne Brevoort's boring old birthday ball.'

Alexander's frown of irritation deepened. He crossed the room, throwing another log on the fire. Henry and Maura were making their daily visit to the stables and if he were going to pursue the subject of the Brevoort Ball with Charlie, now was as good a time as any. He settled the log with his booted foot and as sparks flew upwards he said with apparent indifference: ‘Have invitations already gone out?'

Charlie blew a curl of fragrant cigar-smoke into the air. The ability to do so without being banished into a study or a smoking-room was one of the things he enjoyed about Tarna. Maura never complained about a whiff of cigar-smoke. Maura never complained about anything trivial.

‘Mine came with the Brevoort Christmas greetings. It's to be fancy dress. A little bird told me that Ariadne intends presiding over the proceedings as Marie-Antoinette, so Henry was rather spot on with his remark about lavishness and Versailles.'

‘He probably knew,' Alexander said, one foot on the fender as he stared broodingly down into the flames.

In all the time that he and Charlie had been buddies, he had always been top dog. It had always been Charlie who had been envious of him. Now, for the first time, he was feeling envious of Charlie.