An Embarrassment of Riches (20 page)

‘Are you all right, sir?' Teal asked solicitously.

Alexander nodded and pushed himself away from the rail, walking aboard with a slight limp. It was a sign of physical weakness that he was determined to eradicate. He would be at sea for ten days and in those ten days he intended exercising strenuously. When he confronted his father he did not want to do so displaying any visible signs of disability. His father. His hands clenched into fists as he wondered for the hundredth time what he would say to him; how he would most suitably and sweetly take his revenge.

Days passed and still he was unable to think of how he could exact retribution. The enormity of his father's crime was such that nothing he could think of seemed even slightly commensurate with it. Genevre had died believing that he no longer loved her, that he had never truly loved her. For hour after hour he stood at the deck-rail, gazing out at the heaving grey-green ocean, tears streaming down his face. What had he been doing the moment she had died? Had he been talking with Powerscourt? Playing chess with him? Had he been eating, drinking, maybe even laughing? Even worse than the agony of not knowing was the agony of sometimes waking and forgetting that she was dead, and then remembering.

He avoided all companionship on the voyage, eating alone in his stateroom, sitting alone on deck, walking off with his hands deep in his pockets if anyone should sit near him.

The first-class deck was spacious and he walked obsessively, strengthening his leg muscles, determinedly trying to erase his limp. The stern end of the first-class deck was little used by his fellow passengers being uncomfortably near to the emigrants'quarters. Alexander was uncaring of the emigrants and it was here, where he was least likely to be disturbed, that he spent most time, gazing either broodingly out to sea or down at the minuscule area of the lower deck allocated to steerage.

The men and the women were separated, the men clustering morosely in tightly packed, idle groups while on the other side of the rails dividing them the women tried to carry on with a semblance of normal life, nursing their babies, making meals out of the meagre rations they had brought aboard with them, washing soiled clothes in buckets of seawater and hanging them to dry wherever they could. They sat and stood so closely together that Alexander was amazed they could find the room to do anything. Teal had reliably informed him that the British government allowed the steamship companies to carry only six hundred emigrants per voyage, but that there were nearer to a thousand on the
Scotia.
Alexander could well believe it. The black mouth of a companion-hatch led to the depths where those unable to squeeze on to the steerage deck existed, in what kind of squalor he couldn't even begin to imagine.

As he stood at the first-class deck-rails the women cast curious, surreptitious glances in his direction while the men regarded him with open sullenness. Their hostility was lost on Alexander. He was so sunk in his own misery that he was unaware of their antipathy and if he had been aware, he would have been supremely uncaring. They were dirt-poor Irish, just like the Irish of New York whose ranks they were so soon to swell, and as such they were a species of humanity so far removed from his own kind that they might as well have been cattle.

The sea grew rougher and as spray swamped the deck the more craven-hearted retreated to their stiflingly cramped communal sleeping and living quarters.

Alexander didn't move. He turned up the collar of his reefer against the spray and continued to ponder the question that vexed him night and day. How, in God's name, was he to make his father suffer for his evil, megalomaniacal meddling?

There was no obvious answer. His father could not be hurt financially. To hurt him physically would be too transient a punishment. Unless he murdered him. He knew he would only have to think of Genevre and of what she must have suffered in order to be able to murder his father with the utmost equanimity. But once dead, his father would cease to suffer. He, Alexander, was going to suffer from the result of his father's machinations for the rest of his life. Murder was too unimaginative a solution, too merciful.

The
Scotia
had begun to roll alarmingly and he braced himself, remaining upright only with difficulty. The first-class deck behind him was now completely empty and only a few stragglers remained on the saturated steerage deck. One of them, a girl, seemed as oblivious of the high, white-topped waves as he was. She stood staring out at the turbulent ocean, uncaring of the stinging seaspray, her arms wrapped around a narrow funnel in order to retain her balance.

Alexander continued to ponder his problem. In eight days'time he would be in New York. In eight days'time he had to have a solution. His father's crime was one that deserved not just any punishment, but apt punishment. His father had thought Genevre, with all her education and beauty and charm and wealth, not good enough to be his daughter-in-law and he had wickedly done his best to ensure that she never became his daughter-in-law. What did he expect now, as he sat in his Fifth Avenue mansion, waiting for the coming confrontation? Did he expect a God-almighty row, followed by a temporary estrangement, followed by a reconciliation and attendance at a wedding where he would acquire the titled daughter-in-law he had set his heart on?

Alexander's mouth hardened. If that was the scenario his father was envisioning then he was going to be bitterly disappointed. There would be no reconciliation, not ever. And there would never be a prestigious, titled daughter-in-law to cement his social position among New York's Old Guard society. Instead there would be …

A wave hit the ship broadside on and he was sent slithering across the deck. He grabbed hold of the rails that looked down over the steerage deck, gasping for breath as seaspray saturated him. The girl turned her head swiftly in his direction.

‘
Are you all right?
' she shouted up at him as he staggered unsteadily to his feet.

He nodded, knowing that he might quite easily have been swept overboard and that it was insanity for either of them to remain exposed any longer.

‘
Can you make it to the companion-hatch?
' he shouted back at her.

She nodded and he was aware of glossy smoke-black hair and vivid blue eyes, wide-spaced and thick-lashed.

As the ship steadied for a moment, preparatory to its next stomach-sickening roll, she pushed herself away from her anchorage, running with difficulty across the water-soaked deck.

He didn't wait to see her disappear into the black hole of the companion-hatch. The ship was pitching perilously again and he turned, about to make his own treacherous way to safety.

‘
Just wait there a moment, sir!
' a ship's officer shouted, approaching him crabwise.

With enormous relief Alexander obeyed him.

‘This is no weather to be above deck, sir,' his rescuer said chastisingly when he reached him. ‘Now just hold tightly on to me and I'll soon have you under cover.'

It was no moment for pride and Alexander grabbed hold of him, wondering belatedly what the Cunard line's safety record was.

Back in the relative comfort of his stateroom, as the ship continued to dive and roll, he tried to remember what it was that he had been on the point of realizing before he had found himself slithering across the deck on his back.

He had been thinking about his father and his obsessive insistence that the pedigree of his daughter-in-law be such that it would obliterate for ever the memory of his own father's humble ancestry. And he had been staring down into the deck space allotted to the steerage passengers.

He gasped for breath, overcome by a moment of blinding revelation. Of course! It was so simple! So devastatingly obvious! The solution to his problem was staring him straight in the face. His father had intended that by severing his relationship with Genevre, his future daughter-in-law would be someone far more suitable, someone far more prestigious. And so he would bestow on him a daughter-in-law the exact opposite of everything he had schemed for.

He leapt from his bunk and fisted the air with glee. He would pay his father back with his own coin. He would marry a girl so unsuitable that Genevre would seem to have been an English princess in comparison. He would marry a girl so objectionable that his father would never be able to hold his head high in society ever again, no matter how many his millions.

He began to chuckle and then to roar with laughter. He would marry a girl who was everything that the New York
haut ton
abhorred. First of all he would ensure that his bride was a Roman Catholic. That alone would be sufficient to guarantee his future ostracism from New York's Dutch Protestant-descended high society. He would marry a girl without any education or social graces, a girl with a nationality synonymous with poverty and peasantry. He would marry one of the girls his valet had described as being ‘the scum of the earth'. He would marry one of the emigrating Irish.

By evening the wind had dropped and the ocean was relatively calm. Still euphoric at having found so satisfying a method of revenge he accepted an invitation that he had hitherto spurned and dined with the captain at high table.

‘Do you perform many marriages at sea?' he asked his host as a wine waiter uncorked the best bottle of claret that the
Scotia
carried.

‘One or two a year,' Captain Neills replied incuriously. ‘The ladies regard it as romantic.'

‘And have you married Roman Catholics as well as Protestants?'

The captain chuckled. ‘No. When Catholics marry they like to do so with a priest officiating.'

Alexander took a mouthful of wine and then asked, ‘Is there a priest aboard the
Scotia?
'

For the first time Neills was aware that there was more to Alexander's questions than general curiosity. ‘Not in first-class. There might be in steerage. Why do you ask, Mr Karolyis?'

Alexander, heir to the richest man in New York and one of the most eligible bachelors in America, smiled blandly at him. ‘Because I intend marrying a Roman Catholic while at sea, Captain. If you would ask your purser to check as to whether there is a priest

aboard I would much appreciate it.'

The next morning he strolled along the first-class deck to the point where it ceased, overlooking the steerage deck. Some louse-ridden Irish girl was going to have the shock of her life. He was going to transform her entire future, for even after she had served her purpose and rendered his father catatonic with shock, and after he and she parted for ever, she would be known as Mrs Alexander Karolyis and however modest the income he settled on her, it would be wealth beyond her wildest imaginings.

With the sea once again calm the mean little area was massed again with emigrants. For the past four days he had spent long lengths of time leaning on the deck-rails looking down unseeingly at them. Now he looked at them with fierce attention.

They were a sorry sight. Despite it being the beginning of July there was a chill breeze blowing in from the ocean and not one of them had a coat. Their only protection against the vagaries of the Atlantic were coarse shawls and not all of them even had one of those. Despite the many pails of seawater where soiled linen was being washed, the women themselves had an air of grubbiness that he found nauseating. He remembered the stench as they had pressed close to him at the docks and shuddered. If his marriage was going to defeat his father, and was not merely going to be a form of marriage that his father could easily have annulled, then it would have to be consummated. The prospect was horrendous.

He gritted his teeth and scanned the weary faces, looking for one that wasn't encumbered with a child; looking for one that wouldn't be too objectionable in his bed. Face after face stared back at him, weather-beaten and worn with fatigue, yellow-toothed, lank-haired.

‘Christ …' he muttered beneath his breath, ‘there must be one …' He remembered the girl who had stayed on deck during the previous day's storm and his spirits soared. Although obviously an emigrant she had been remarkably clean and neat. He remembered her glossy dark hair, its heavy weight coiled into a knot in the nape of her neck; her blue black-lashed eyes; her creamy pale skin. He scanned the crowded deck but there was no sign of her.

After an hour of waiting for her to emerge from the companion-hatch he began to think that he was going to have to retreat below deck and cross the barrier dividing steerage from the rest of the ship. He deferred the evil moment, willing her to appear, knowing that five minutes in steerage would reduce him to a nauseated wreck. Just as he was beginning to think that there was no hope for it but to search below deck and just as he was steeling himself for the ordeal, she emerged from the companion-hatch, a small child in her arms.

His disappointment was colossal. He watched her as she threaded her way between her fellow-passengers searching for a scrap of space. Her dark blue, almost black, dress was without any tears or rents and with rising optimism he saw that the child was clad in an exceedingly tattered and indistinguishable garment. She didn't have the face of a woman who would put her own needs before that of her child. Perhaps the child wasn't hers. With renewed hope he watched as she found a place to sit. The crush around her was so dense that he could now only see the top of her head.

He chewed the corner of his lip, wondering what to do next. She was too far away for him to call out to her, and even if she were nearer he had no name by which to address her and attract her attention. There was nothing for it but to vault down from his own lofty position and confront her face to face. He peered over the rail, looking for a stanchion. The drop was a good twenty feet and he would need something to slide down. Seeing one that would suit his purpose he positioned himself above it, vaulted the rail, keeping hold of it while his legs found the stanchion. Though he had his back to the steerage deck, he knew from the concerted intake of breath and the shouting that had broken out that every eye must be on him.