An Embarrassment of Riches (5 page)

Alexander remained prone on the floor. ‘It's either that or the women of Greene Street.'

Charlie shuddered. ‘No, thank you. No telling what we might catch if we go there.'

Alexander sat up slowly. Although he and Charlie were second cousins there was nothing similar in their physical appearance. Where Charlie was blond and deceptively cherubic, Alexander was as dark and Slavic in his looks as his grandfather had been. ‘Then it's Madame Woods,' he said, pushing a tumbled lock of night-black hair away from his brow. ‘If we catch anything there we will at least have the comfort of knowing that everyone who is anyone is also suffering with it.'

The grin was back on Charlie's face. ‘Including your father and mine.'

Alexander cupped his ear for him in mock reprovement. ‘If what I've heard about your father is true, Josie should receive us with open arms. Didn't he help establish her in the first place?'

‘So the rumour goes,' Charlie said without taking offence. ‘I'd better go and see what my parent wants to see me about. Are you going to wait for me?'

‘No. Two weeks with you will be quite long enough without spending the rest of today with you as well.' They stepped out of the drawing-room and into an immense, circular, marble-floored hall. ‘Give my respects to your ma,' he said as they passed a life-size statue of Niobe weeping for her children.

‘I will. She always irritatingly refers to you as a “poor, motherless child”.'

The footman opened the double-fronted outer doors and it was Alexander's turn to grin. ‘Motherless certainly, but poor is a bit steep.'

‘Ah well, it isn't a term Ma has any understanding of,' Charlie said, blissfully uncaring that he had no understanding of it either. He turned to the footman. ‘Why hasn't Mr Karolyis's carriage been brought round?'

‘Because I didn't come in one and no, I don't want to return in one of yours,' Alexander said before the footman could reply. ‘I like to walk. It's fun.'

Charlie raised his eyes to heaven. ‘Don't let your father find out. He'll say it's the peasant in you and cut you off without a dollar.'

‘Who cares?' Alexander said easily, but as he strolled down the steps and across the cobbled courtyard fronting the Schermerhorn mansion he was furiously angry. Charlie could be an absolute idiot at times. No-one in the Schermerhorn/Karolyis family ever referred to the Karolyis family's beginnings. Not even in fun. They were too recent. Too likely to be also remembered outside the family.

A minion hurried forward to open the giant wrought-iron gates for him and he stepped outside into the hurly-burly of Fifth Avenue.

Charlie, of course, had no such skeletons in
his
family closet. Schermerhorns had been one of the first Dutch families to settle in New Amsterdam. They had quickly forged a large estate for themselves and within two or three generations had amassed a fortune. The fortune was not quite as large now as it had once been, but Schermerhorns were still the
crème de la crème
of New York society. Over the years they might have indulged, behind closed doors, in wife-beating and adultery and even lapsed into madness, but the accusation of ill-breeding could never be laid at their door. They were Schermerhorns. They were not only the
crème de la crème
of society, they
were
society. No wonder Charlie had no realization of how unnerving his last witticism had been.

He began to walk south, towards Washington Square. Karolyises were also, now, the
crème de la crème
of high society, but, even though this accolade had been granted long before his own birth, Alexander knew that the achievement had not been an easy one. It had taken his father's marriage to a Schermerhorn to ensure that the richest family in New York was also a family acceptable in the drawing-rooms of the
haut ton.

A horse-cart clattered past, an elegant four-in-hand hard on its heels. Alexander coughed as he was enveloped in a cloud of dust. His father never allowed his own father's origins to be mentioned, not even between themselves. He was Victor Karolyis, heir to a man who had had the foresight to buy up vast tracts of what was now New York when those tracts were no more than run-down farms and marshland. A man who never sold what he had once bought. A man who, in his real-estate ventures and his shipping interests, was a financial genius. That he was also the son of a man born in a thatched-roofed hovel, in an unremarked village deep in the Hungarian Plains, was too shaming a fact for him to acknowledge even to himself. Almost the first thing he had done on attaining his majority, was to have a genealogical tree drawn up linking the Karolyis name to that of ancient Hungarian nobility. And then he had married a Schermerhorn.

Alexander strolled past the gilded gates leading to the De Peysters' red-brick mansion. The De Peysters were nearly as old a family as the Schermerhorns. Once, when he had been very small and his mother had still been alive, he had overheard her saying to his father that the youngest De Peyster girl would one day make a very suitable daughter-in-law. He grinned to himself, remembering his father's reaction.

‘A
De Peyster?'
the grandson of an Hungarian farrier had queried scornfully. ‘Alexander will one day be the richest young man in the state. Possibly in the entire country. When it comes to marriage he won't have to settle for the descendant of a Dutch patroon!'

His father wanted the blood of European aristocracy to flow in his grandchildren's veins and Alexander knew that when he was despatched at twenty-one on the obligatory Grand Tour of Europe, he was not expected to return empty-handed.

‘Not a daughter of Spanish or Italian nobility,' his father had warned. ‘They're all Roman.' He had shuddered at the thought. Not even a princess would be acceptable to the upper echelons of New York, Dutch-descended Protestant society if she was a Roman. His own father had been born a Catholic and, in the utmost secrecy, had died a Catholic, but no-one knew that. Not even Alexander. ‘The daughter of an English aristocrat would be best,' he had continued forcefully. ‘But don't settle for anything less than the daughter of an earl.'

Alexander had dutifully promised that, when the time came, he would ensure that his bride fulfilled all his father's requirements. He kicked a stone with the toe of a hand-stitched calf-skin boot. At the moment marriage was the last thing he had on his mind. It was the wherefore of losing his irksome virginity that was his present pressing problem.

He agilely avoided an omnibus as he crossed from Nineteenth Street to Eighteenth, side-stepping the droppings that the horse had left in its wake. The house on the corner of Eighteenth and Fifth belonged to August Belmont. He looked up at its excessively ornamented gilded gargoyles and gutters and grinned to himself. Belmont's sexual proclivities were rumoured to be so excessive as to border on satyriasis. Belmont wouldn't have had any trouble losing his virginity. He kicked another stone out of his way and into the busy thorough-fare. He was a Karolyis and he didn't intend having any either.

As he approached his family home he saw that visitors were expected. Red carpet had been rolled out over the porch steps of his home and across the courtyard into the street.

‘Mr William Hudson and Miss Genevre Hudson are expected, sir,' Haines, the butler, told him when he enquired who was about to arrive.

Alexander lost interest. William Hudson was an English railway king newly arrived in the city, whom his father had not yet met. His interest in him was more commercial than social and Alexander was surprised that a red carpet had been unrolled in his honour. He walked along it beneath a constellation of pear-shaped chandeliers and into the grand drawing-room.

‘Good,' his father said peremptorily as he entered. ‘I want you to stay and meet Hudson.'

Alexander suppressed a groan. He should have gone straight to his own wing of the house if he had wanted to avoid boredom. He thought of the two weeks'freedom stretching out in front of him and had the good grace to say dutifully, ‘Yes, Pa.'

Hudson, when he arrived, proved to be a heavily built Yorkshireman with luxuriant mutton-chop whiskers. His daughter was thirteen, a quiet, mousy girl who sat demurely with her hands folded in her lap as tea was brought in.

Within a very few minutes it became apparent that William Hudson had no time for the usual niceties of polite conversation and that the visit was not going to be as tedious as Alexander had imagined.

‘Politicians in London are watching events here very closely,' Mr Hudson said without preamble to a startled Victor. ‘The Kansas-Nebraska act could be the beginning of the end for America. Every state to decide for itself whether it be a free state or a slave state, eh? Unless President Buchanan takes swift action America will be permanently divided and he will be the last President to preside over a united country.'

‘The finer nuances of our internal politics are difficult for outsiders to understand,' Victor said stiffly, politeness disguising his annoyance. ‘No state has a constitutional right to secede from the Union and rumours that the slave states will take such action are just that. Rumours. Nothing will come of it.'

‘And when Buchanan's term of office is at an end, what then?' their Yorkshire visitor persisted, blithely unaware of the offence being aroused by his line of questioning. ‘What if the new Republican Party gains office? Their young leader was deeply opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska act, was he not?'

‘Their young leader stands no chance of ever being elected to the office of President,' Victor riposted drily.

William Hudson smiled. ‘I wouldn't bank on that, Mr Karolyis. Any man who coins the phrase “a house divided against itself cannot stand” is a young man to watch.'

Victor snorted. Alexander suppressed a smile of amusement at his father's annoyance, and the subject changed from young Abraham Lincoln to the possibility as to whether or not specially designed sleeping compartments would be economically viable if attached to long-distance, night-running trains. Not until the ending of the visit did the conversation again take an interesting turn.

‘The benefit of railway construction here, of course, is the great numbers of Irish immigrants available for labour,' William Hudson said as he rose to take his leave. ‘From what I've been told of the conditions they live in, the poor devils must be deeply grateful for such work.'

Victor smiled thinly. He had endured the misplaced remarks as to his country's political stability. He had no intention of lowering himself by entering into a discussion on the Irish.

‘I really can't understand why your City Fathers allow the extortion to continue,' William Hudson was saying, still blithely unaware that he was committing a social
faux pas
of the greatest magnitude. ‘The sub-landlords who rent out the tenements and the land-holders who own the land on which they are built, should be brought to book. Incidents of cholera and yellow fever would then, soon fall. We have similar areas to the Five Points in London of course, Seven Dials and St Giles's, but somehow diseased slums in a new, go-ahead country, such as America, seem far more reprehensible than they do in an old country which has been burdened with them from time immemorial.'

Alexander's gaze had accidentally fallen on Genevre Hudson. She gave him a small, embarrassed smile and he realized with a shock that she was well aware of her father's many conversational gaffes. It was the first time she had impinged on his consciousness as being anything more than a boringly plain accessory to her father. He still thought her sadly plain and typical of the insipid English girls he had previously met socially, but there was intelligence as well as mortification in her eyes and he thought her possibly quite likeable.

His father hadn't replied to William Hudson's last statement, but had merely begun to escort him from the drawing-room and towards the red-carpeted corridor beyond.

Alexander perfectly understood his father's inner fury. His Hungarian grandfather had bought up vast acres of land in the area now known as Five Points when he had still been a young man. His son had often declared that it had been one of his most judicious moves. What sub-landlords chose to do with the land was not a Karolyis problem, despite the attempts made by interfering do-gooders to make it their problem. Of all unfortunate subjects to raise in a Karolyis drawing-room, William Hudson had lit on the most unfortunate.

As liveried footmen bowed the happily oblivious William and his agonized daughter out of the porticoed hall and into their waiting carriage, Victor spun apoplectically on his heel.

‘I want whoever ordered that carpet unrolled, dismissed!' he yelled at the long-suffering Haines.

Alexander grinned to himself as his father stormed off in the direction of his study. If Mr William Hudson had been hoping that afternoon tea with Victor Karolyis would be his entrée into New York high society, he was going to be a very disappointed man.

Two days later, strolling through the crush that had gathered on the Long Island track, Charlie said a trifle nervously, ‘I'm not sure we're going to get away with this, Alex. I thought no-one respectable ever came here, but I've already spotted old Henry Jay and Commodore Vanderbilt.'

‘Vanderbilt isn't respectable,' Alexander said dismissively.

When his own grandfather had been busily buying up land, the even younger Cornelius Vanderbilt had been busy buying up ferries and steamships. Both men had made a fortune but, whereas the Karolyises were now regarded as Old Guard through their linking with the Schermerhorns, Vanderbilt was still regarded as being offensively
nouveau riche
– especially by the descendants of his old rival.

‘He knows a thing or two about horse-flesh though,' Charlie said with grudging admiration. ‘It might be an idea to see what he's putting his money on and to do the same.'