An Embarrassment of Riches

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• Margaret Pemberton
  
• Dedication
  
• Prologue
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  
• Chapter Nineteen
  
• Chapter Twenty
  
• Chapter Twenty-one
  
• Chapter Twenty-two
  
• Chapter Twenty-three
  
• Chapter Twenty-four
  
• Chapter Twenty-five
  
• Chapter Twenty-six
  
• Chapter Twenty-seven
  
• Chapter Twenty-eight
  
• Chapter Twenty-nine
  
• Chapter Thirty
  

Margaret Pemberton is the bestselling author of over thirty novels in many different genres, some of which are contemporary in setting and some historical.

She has served as Chairman of the Romantic Novelists' Association and has three times served as a committee member of the Crime Writers'Association. Born in Bradford, she is married to a Londoner, has five children and two dogs and lives in Whitstable, Kent. Apart from writing, her passions are tango, travel, English history and the English countryside.

To my daughter, Amanda.
With love.

The highly polished landau with the Clanmar coat of arms emblazoned on the doors creaked away from the railway station at Rathdrum and headed towards the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains. Matthew Clanmar looked out at the lush green countryside and a scattering of neatly walled potato patches and gave a deep sigh of relief. It was 1854 and he had not been home for eight years. The Ireland he had left behind him with such anguish had been a country ravished and putrefying, a country held in the grip of famine. The land he had returned to, though abysmally poor, was a land where potatoes were once again growing, free from blight.

His arthritic arm tightened fractionally around the shoulders of the child at his side. However deep his homesickness for Ballacharmish, he could not have returned there with Isabel if Ireland had still been suffering in the throes of hunger. The sights he had endured before leaving for St Petersburg had been too horrific for him to have exposed to a seven year old. Even now, after her sheltered upbringing in England, the poverty of the Irish would come as a shock to her.

In a grim way he was glad that it would. It had certainly never shocked her father. As he thought of his recently deceased son Matthew Clanmar's lips tightened into a thin line. When he had accepted the posting to St Petersburg he had done so with great reluctance and only because the Prime Minister had insisted that he was just the man for the job. No man other than Peel could have persuaded him to leave Ballacharmish when he was so needed there and he had only done so on the understanding that his newly married son would deputize for him in his absence, continuing his self-imposed task of protecting the Ballacharmish tenants from the worst of the famine.

With the benefit of hindsight it was obvious that he should never have trusted Sebastian in such a way. As he knew to his cost, Sebastian's attitude towards the local peasantry was one of high-handed contempt and now it turned into one of criminal negligence. Within days of his own departure, Sebastian and his pregnant wife decamped to his wife's family home in Oxfordshire. In their absence, with no-one to turn to for succour, scores of Clanmar tenants died hideous, lingering deaths from starvation.

Sebastian's flight to England at the first whiff of famine fever was behaviour no different to that of many another English Protestant landlord, but it was behaviour that Matthew Clanmar was unable to forgive. From St Petersburg he had instructed his Dublin solicitor to confer power of attorney upon Liam Fitzgerald, his land-agent. Within weeks, imported oats and potatoes were arriving at Ballacharmish and for Clanmar tenants there were no more deaths from hunger.

He had never seen his son or daughter-in-law again. When he was recalled to the Court of St James's, his long illustrious diplomatic career at an end, he did not travel on to Ireland. Instead he accepted an invitation from the Tsar to return to Russia as his personal adviser.

It had been Sebastian's death which had brought him back to England. The carriage he and his wife had been travelling in had been overturned by a runaway horse. Sebastian had suffered a blow to the head which had killed him instantly. His wife, severely trampled by one of their own terrified horses, had died five days later.

Matthew hadn't hesitated. Although he had never set eyes on his granddaughter he immediately decided that he would make a far more suitable guardian than her widowed and infirm maternal grandmother. He arrived in Oxfordshire in time for his daughter-in-law's funeral, afforded his granddaughter the kindness she was sorely in need of and a week later, her hand tucked trustingly in his, he had taken the fast train from London to Holyhead. From there they had travelled by steamer to Dundalk and then they had travelled by train, via Dublin, to Rathdrum.

‘Do the farmers keep their animals in the little cabins, Grandfather?' a curious voice asked, breaking in on his thoughts of his dead son.

They were approaching the straggling clachan of Killaree and were passing the first of its one-roomed, mud-walled, thatched-roofed hovels.

‘There are no farmers in this part of Ireland,' Matthew said to her gently. ‘At least, not the kind of farmers you are referring to, the kind you find in Oxfordshire.'

From the open door of the hovel a large, begrimed sow ambled out. His eyes darkened. Before he had gone to St Petersburg a fellow ambassador had warned him that he would find the bestial conditions in which the peasantry lived, beyond belief. He had not done so. Dire and terrible as the poverty in the Russian countryside had been, it had not been worse than that suffered by the peasants of his own adopted country. He looked down at his golden-haired granddaughter. If she was to live in Ireland then she had to understand the realities of Ireland and not be indifferent to them, as her father had been.

‘The cabins are houses,' he said as their carriage bowled past a handful of peasant women who were staring at them with round-eyed wonder, shawls clutched beneath their chins, half-naked children clinging to their skirts. ‘But you are right in thinking that animals also live there.'

‘Animals like pigs and cows?' Isabel asked, staring up at him in stunned surprise. ‘Not just dogs and cats?'

‘Some of the cabins have byres but in a great many, the family pig, cow or goat lives with the family in the cabin.'

There was a horrified concern in her eyes and he felt a stab of relief. Sebastian, even at seven years old, would merely have shrugged uncaringly. Isabel, it seemed, had inherited his own compassionate nature, a nature that had often resulted in his being dubbed hopelessly eccentric.

He began to feel happier than he had done for years. Out of the tragedy of his son's and daughter-in-law's deaths had come an unexpected blessing. Instead of enduring a retirement in which he would have had nothing to do but rattle around his London club or walk and fish alone at Ballacharmish, he now faced a retirement full of purpose. He would educate his granddaughter himself. She would need a companion and he knew exactly how he would go about obtaining one. For a long time he had toyed with the idea of taking one of his tenant's lice-ridden urchins as a protégé, intrigued as to what the outcome of such a venture would be. Now, at last, because of Isabel, he would put his long contemplated intention into action.

As the countryside through which they were travelling grew wilder, and as the Wicklow Mountains loomed ever more distinct, he felt his heart almost bursting within him. Because of the guilt he had felt at having abandoned Ballacharmish to Sebastian's negligent care, he had delayed returning for five foolish years. Now at last his self-imposed exile was over and he knew, with utter certainty, that the best years of his life lay ahead of him. He and Isabel were going to get along famously together. Despite his advancing years he was still a good horseman and he would teach Isabel and her companion to ride and to fish and together they would walk the foothills of Mount Keadeen and Mount Lùgnaquillia. As the long reach of Lough Suir slipped into view he saw no reason to delay embarking on his great educational project. He withdrew a paperbag from his greatcoat pocket and proffered it to Isabel.

‘Have a peppermint,' he said companionably, ‘and let me tell you about the glorious Battle of Clontarf in 1014, when the great Irish chieftain Brian Boru saved his country from invasion by the terrible Vikings.'

Maura Sullivan scrambled up through the larchwoods to where gorse and heather clothed the hillside. From here she had a grand view not only of the dirt-road from Killaree, but also of the big house. The short, spiky, upland grass was sharp on her feet after the soft earth of the woods and, after ensuring that she had chosen the best possible viewpoint, she sat down with relief, brushing her feet free of debris.

Kieron had told her that she might have a long wait, that Lord Clanmar and his granddaughter might very well stay in Dublin for a few days before continuing on to Ballacharmish.

‘But he's been away so long, now that he's so near, how can he bear to stay away any longer?' she had asked perplexedly. Kieron had grinned down at her. ‘You're not thinking Ballacharmish is his only home, are you? Sure, but he'll be having grand homes in England and maybe even a home in Russia.'

Maura did not know where Russia was but Kieron's tone of voice told her that it was even further away than England and a place of great wonder.

‘Is that where himself has been this whileen?' she asked, knowing that whatever Kieron told her would be the truth, and not a made-up fairy-tale to keep her quiet.