Redemption - Leon Uris [146]
The book was placed in the hands of Sir Frederick and Caroline Hubble. Swan’s risk was not all that great. After all, if either Caroline or Weed exposed the contents, Swan had a few hundred other pages on his exploits for Sir Frederick.
Trusting thieves will out. Caroline had her little nest egg, the biggest of all Orange cards, to assure that she alone would draw the final boundaries and settle the accounts favorably. Swan rotted away early in his retirement and was set down with stunning military honors but left behind him his little book of horrors, as if to say his pervasive spirit was still rankling around.
The disengagement of the Weed-Hubble combine was not a simple matter. They were welded together all over the province. Roger sat on the Weed Ship & Iron board and the two had numerous joint investments and partnerships, supplied one another and, until Swan’s departure, attended to a lot of covert affairs together.
While Roger’s earldom was a thin ha’ penny alongside Sir Frederick’s worldwide enterprises, Roger’s ancient title had a mystical hold on Weed. Roger was still the master of Londonderry, endemic to a British Ulster. Londonderry had been Roger’s original Orange card. Now, he had two more of them, Christopher and Jeremy.
Jeremy was let go by his mother for his cowardly behavior toward Molly O’Rafferty and his unborn child. Although Freddie adored Jeremy as a harmless playboy, he had become resigned to the fact that Jeremy would not amount to much in the future of Weed Ship & Iron.
Sir Frederick had ceded Jeremy to Londonderry, to Hubble Manor, and to the Earldom of Foyle, where he could acquit himself as a functionary at charities, horse shows, and snoozing in the House of Lords. Jeremy was to be a ceremonial figurehead much as had been his grandfather, poor stuttering Arthur.
For the moment Jeremy was not up to even these most menial duties. After he had caved in and let her go, his joy and raffish behavior fled him.
Roger issued Jeremy orders. Caroline scarcely spoke to him, and then only in a perfunctory manner on public occasions. His grandfather, while still having a soft spot, grew weary of Jeremy’s lack of steel.
Roger tried energetically to push him into a marriage, but so long as Molly’s disappearance remained a mystery, he refused as though he were hanging on to his last shred of manhood and decency. Jeremy drank heavily, attended the races and horse shows, played rugby with Catholic thugs in the lower counties, and haunted the areas of Dublin around Trinity College and the river Liffey.
Now, Christopher Hubble was quite another matter. It seems that his first steps were out of the marching manual of the Coldstream Guards. Roger bemoaned the bloody fate that would deny Christopher the earldom. Denied it by birth but showing exceptional business skills, one would have thought he was heading straight for the top at Weed Ship & Iron. Only problem was that Sir Frederick thought his second grandson was a stiffassed bore.
No doubt, Weed thought, Christopher had the inclination to run the earldom’s croppy labor with a whip hand in Londonderry’s archaic industries. However, and this was a tremendous however, between Christopher and his grandfather, Christopher did not have the gist of the Belfast atmosphere and the latitude and smarts to deal with ten thousand working people.
During his apprenticeships at the yard, Christopher behaved toward the proud shipwrights and steelmakers as an overlord to his serfs. Likewise, department managers and foremen found him frustratingly priggish and overbearing.
See now, the entrepreneurs of Belfast and particularly his grandfather were rough and tumble bully boys, not the fastidiously clipped, moustached, hands-behind-the-back, slapping-the-old-riding-crop-on-the-breeches guardians of the Crown.
So be it. Roger Hubble had both his sons.
As Roger felt the remoteness grow, he put on a few moves of his own. Jeremy was snatched off the racetrack and ordered into the family