An Embarrassment of Riches (68 page)

‘And society?' Henry asked faintly.

Alexander's grin deepened. ‘Stuff society. Society can take us or leave us, neither Maura nor myself care.'

‘Then, if you truly don't care, society will most likely take you,' Henry said wryly. ‘Have Stasha and Felix been told of their true relationship to each other yet?'

‘Maura told them. They are both too young to realize the enormity of what she told them, but Stasha understands that he can now call me Papa and that Maura is to be his mama, and Felix understands that he now has a companion. Both of them are highly delighted.'

‘So they should be,' Henry said, well satisfied. He brought up the next subject with a slightly raised silvered eyebrow. ‘And the tenements?' he queried. ‘Are you really going to raze thousands of properties to the ground and build afresh?'

‘It's going to be the biggest rebuilding programme on record,' Alexander said, reaching out for the preliminary architectural plans on the nearby table and spreading them open for Henry's perusal. ‘The main problem is going to be arranging temporary housing while the programme is being carried out.'

‘You'll have to raze and rebuild block by block,' Henry said, grateful that he had long ago sold all his real estate and invested in far less controversial money-making ventures. ‘If it will be any help, I can double up on the number of tenement children vacationing on my stud-farm. It will be a drop in the ocean I know, but …'

‘Hasn't Maura told you?' Alexander was looking at him in surprise. ‘I've arranged for special accommodation to be provided for tenement children at Tarna. You won't have to be inconvenienced any longer.'

Henry stared at him for a moment and then said, ‘I must confess I only agreed to the arrangement out of affection for Maura, but it hasn't been an inconvenience. None of the horses have suffered by having children in close proximity. And two stud-farms serving as vacation centres for needy children would be far more useful than one. If it's all right with you, I think I'll keep on with the arrangement.'

‘You're not on the look-out for aspiring jockeys, are you?' Alexander asked, suddenly suspicious.

‘Not at all!' Henry retorted, affronted. He paused for a moment and then said, ‘Although before Kieron Sullivan left for Kansas he did tell me that he'd come across one tenement child who showed exceptional talent as a rider. An Irish boy, aged ten, from County Wicklow …'

‘Kieron is marrying Katy O'Farrell, ma'am,' Caitlin said to her three weeks later, her eyes shining. ‘Ma and Pa are so thrilled. They won't be honeymooning because there's so much work to do on the ranch, but Katy says that maybe next year they'll be able to manage a trip back to New York.'

The news had not been a shock to Maura for Kieron had been writing to her regularly. At first his letters had contained nothing but repeated requests that she rethink the decision that she had made not to join him and then, as he realized he was powerless to persuade her, his letters began to change tone. He wrote to her of the ranch, of the horses he had bought, of the progress he was making. And in September he began to mention Katy O'Farrell in his letters.

His last letter had arrived two days previously.

…
I'm reading the newspapers daily in the hope there's news of your kidnappers being apprehended. Thank heaven the scum spoke with English accents. If they'd been Irish I would have died with the shame of it. Patrick O'Farrell tells me there's talk of nothing else in New York but the Karolyis new housing programme. So you managed to influence him at last. I'm glad to the bottom of my boots, and I'm glad for your sake that you and he are happy together, sweetheart. When I read of the ransom he paid I could hardly believe my eyes. Yet I can't help regretting and thinking of what might have been. Kansas is a fine state, a man can breathe out here. Life would have been good for the two of us but there, I had my chance long ago and I didn't take it. I've resolved not to be such an eejit again. Katy's a fine girl and I'm thinking that if I let her slide through my fingers I'll be a very great fool. The wedding itself will be small but as every man I've employed is Irish there'll be a fine party afterwards. Give my love to Isabel and tell her we'll have another fine reunion one day.

Isabel.

Alexander couldn't understand her stubbornness in not making up with her.

‘Nothing that happened was Isabel's fault,' he said to her time and time again. ‘
I
was the one who insisted in taking Felix aboard the
Rosetta.
No matter what you may think, Isabel could hardly have stopped me. I am Felix's father for goodness'sake. As to the photographs, I should have realized that photographers were on the bridge and what capital Ariadne would make out of their presence. Instead of doing so I was too busy collaborating with my captain. Nothing that happened was Isabel's fault. Stasha would have been aboard whether she and Felix had been there or not. No matter what Isabel's actions, Stasha would still have caught smallpox.'

Maura had had to agree with him, yet she still hadn't taken a carriage around to the Schermerhorn mansion in order to tell Isabel that she was sorry for the harsh letter she had sent her. She knew that she was behaving badly and she knew that she was causing herself pain, yet she couldn't rid herself of the conviction that Isabel's behaviour had been occasioned because of illicit feelings for Alexander. Why else would she have followed him to Newport for the summer? Why else would she have arranged to live beneath Bessie's roof, rather than continuing to live with herself and Alexander? Their falling out over the
Rosetta
incident was not a good enough reason. If she had returned home in the normal way, then they would, at least, have been able to talk about the issue face to face. They could have been frank with each other, apologies could have been made on either side. But that hadn't happened and, although their continued estrangement brought her intense

pain, Maura couldn't bring herself to make the first move in putting

things right between them.

The day after Alexander had urged her again to visit Bessie and Isabel he asked her to join him in a meeting he was having with Lyall Kingston.

‘I'm drawing up a new will,' he said to her when she had agreed with slight surprise. ‘I want you to be with me. I want your approval for my proposed legacies to Stasha, Felix and Natalie.'

After provision for herself and huge legacies to the Children's Aid Society and the Housing Improvement Society, he had arranged that Tarna should be bequeathed to Felix and that the remainder of his wealth should be left equally divided between all three children.

They had come out of the meeting to the news that some of the marked ransom money was beginning to surface.

‘We'll have the kidnappers within days,' Allan Pinkerton said to them exuberantly. ‘Just don't let Bennett get hold of the news. I don't want them knowing how close they are to being captured.'

All the marked bills had been put into circulation in the Boston area. Allan Pinkerton deployed every man in his employment in a huge operation to track the bills down to source. On an almost hourly basis he kept Maura and Alexander informed as to how the search was progressing.

‘Lord, it's going to be the most sensational trial ever,' Charlie said, as he waited for news with them. ‘Are you sure they were English, Maura? And well spoken?'

She nodded. Apart from their accents, and apart from her hazy description of the man who had leapt into the carriage, she had been unable to help Allan Pinkerton in any worthwhile manner.

‘Surely they must have addressed each other by name, at least occasionally?' he had said to her.

‘No,' she had said. ‘Not once.'

‘And the man who jumped into the carriage was reasonably dressed? Not roughly dressed?'

‘I can't remember how he was dressed,' she had said, wishing she could be more helpful. ‘I was so taken by surprise and everything happened so quickly, but my impression isn't of a roughly dressed man. And he didn't talk like a rough working-class man.'

She sat silent now as Charlie and Alexander discussed the likely length of the kidnappers'trial, and their likely sentence when it was over.

‘They'll be executed,' Charlie said without a shred of doubt in his voice. ‘Kidnapping is a capital offence.'

‘But I wasn't harmed,' Maura was shocked into interjecting.

‘Makes no difference,' Charlie said, thinking execution a damned sight too good for them. ‘Just think if they had been successful in their original intentions and it had been Felix they had kidnapped?'

Maura thought, and shuddered. And shuddered still more when she thought of her kidnappers paying for their crime with their lives.

‘We're moving in on them!' Allan Pinkerton informed them the following day. ‘Rent on a house in Beacon Hill has been paid for in marked dollar bills.'

Alexander spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon pacing the Chinese drawing-room like a caged lion. Maura visited the nurseries, cuddling and nursing Natalie, playing with Stasha and Felix and the train-set that covered half the floor.

She didn't want to think of what her kidnappers'capture would entail. The trial proceedings would be emblazoned all over the front of the country's newspapers. She would have to give evidence; she would have to face them across a courtroom.

She didn't want to know what her two unseen kidnappers looked like. It would make the whole affair harder to forget. And if they were sentenced to death she would never be able to forget.

She knew the minute she heard the sound of running feet that the hunt was over.

Alexander burst into the nursery, white-faced and glittering-eyed. ‘The bastards have got away! Pinkerton's retrieved the bulk of the money, but the kidnappers apparently beat a hasty retreat minutes before his men descended on the house …'

Stasha and Felix had stopped what they were doing and were looking at him with interest.

‘What's a bastard, Papa?' Stasha asked curiously.

Alexander flushed scarlet. He had been so furious with the news that he had forgotten all about the listening children.

‘It's someone who … someone who …' he floundered.

‘It's a word for someone whose mama and papa are not married,' Maura said gently. ‘And because no-one can help it if their mama and papa are not married it's a not very nice word and not one that should be used.'

‘But Papa just used it,' Stasha pointed out reasonably.

Alexander ruffled Stasha's thick shock of hair tenderly.

‘I did, and it wasn't the right word.' He looked across at Maura smiling wryly. ‘The right word would have been one far, far worse.'

‘So that's it,' he said a week later after Allan Pinkerton had visited them. ‘All the ransom money, bar a few hundred dollars, returned. No sign of the kidnappers and not much hope now of their ever being tracked down. I'm sorry, Maura. Truly I am.'

‘I'm not,' she said, and, as shock flared through his eyes, she realized with stunned surprise that he had never realized how much she had dreaded the prospect of a trial.

A smile dimpled the corners of her mouth.

‘I can forget about it all so much easier now, Alexander. Let's not talk about it again. Not ever.'

In a gesture that had caused even more of a sensation than a trial would have caused, Alexander donated the entire amount of the returned ransom to charities of Maura's choosing. Hard on the heels of the furore that his action caused, came news that Isabel was returning to Ireland.

‘It was in the society column in yesterday's
Post
,' Henry said to her one afternoon when Alexander and Charlie had taken Stasha and Felix tobogganing in Central Park.

They were playing chess and Maura's hand faltered as she moved a bishop, taking Henry's queen.

‘She told Charlie some time ago that she had written to Lord Clanmar asking if she could open up the family house in County Wicklow. He's quite obviously given his permission as it said in the
Post
that she was returning to Ireland, not to England.'

Ballacharmish. Maura clasped her hands tightly in her lap as memories engulfed her. The riotous colour and heavy fragrance of the rose-garden; the sunlight gleaming on the still shining surface of Lough Suir; the early morning rides to Mount Keadeen and Glendalough.

Henry pushed the chess-board to one side, saying gently, ‘It really is time the two of you made up, Maura. Isabel is looking desperately unhappy and not at all well and I know that the estrangement between the two of you is making you deeply unhappy as well.'

‘When is she to leave?' Maura asked bleakly, her eyes suspiciously over-bright.

‘At the end of the month, aboard a Cunarder.' Beneath his silvered eyebrows his eyes were dark with concern. ‘I know that you feel Isabel betrayed your trust in her, Maura, but if she did so it was a very slight betrayal. You have forgiven and forgotten far worse betrayals from other sources. Can't you find it in your heart to forgive Isabel for whatever hurt she may have caused you?'

She had been so close to tears that she had been unable to answer him. Rising from her chair she had walked across to the windows that looked out over the avenue and had stood staring in the direction of the Schermerhorn mansion.

‘It isn't often I give advice,' Henry said gravely, ‘but I'm going to offer some now. Make up with Isabel. Life is too short to remain unreconciled with people you love.'

He left the room and she remained where she was, staring with unseeing eyes at the turrets and pinnacles of Fifth Avenue's skyline.

She was still there when Alexander entered the room. ‘Where's Henry?' he said in surprise. ‘I thought the two of you were playing chess.'