Van Alden barges into Nucky's office after being summoned. Nucky's having a drink, Lucy a smoke, which is just a great juxtaposition. Nucky asks Lucy to give them a moment, and she slinks out with the baby, halfheartedly apologizing. Nucky offers Van Alden a drink -- "if there was ever a time..." -- but he refuses. Nucky begins by wondering how Van Alden is pulling off supporting a wife, a mistress, and a baby on a government salary. Van Alden is hostile to Nucky's offer, but he doesn't exactly leave. Nucky says he doesn't judge people, only helps them, and maybe now Van Alden can appreciate that about him. In exchange for helping Van Alden out financially, he wants info on Esther Randolph -- everything that gets discussed, her plans, her actions. "If she renews her subscription to Vogue magazine, I want to know about it." Oh man, I wonder how old Anna Wintour was back in the '20s. Nucky says to think it over -- and to consider what he's already given Lucy as a gift. Van Alden goggles at that revelation.

Back in Brooklyn, Margaret and Eamoinn talk over tea. She kind of ribs him for his very American cigarette-smoking habit, then he tries to rub it in that their mom died back in Ireland. Doesn't seem like such a fair swap. She says she's already heard the news from a cousin who also emigrated, which Eamoinn sniffs at. She doesn't want to fight, but he seems to want to keep poking at her. He tells her their mother asked for her on her death bed. "Will you weep, Peg, now that it doesn't matter?" Margaret finally speaks up for herself, meekly at first. She did what she had to do. "Would you have seen me off to the Magdalene Sisters?" she asks. "And broken in the workhouse?" He says the priest deemed it a fit punishment (which: ye gods, with the implications of that; and also it puts last week's confession into an even more intense light, huh?); what makes it right for others and not her? "What makes it right for anyone?" Margaret returns. Would he have wished that fate upon Nuala, Beth, or Aylesh? He asks who the father was -- just some guy, some barrister's son. He asks her if this guy forced himself upon her, like she claimed. She silently shakes her head; it's the one thing that shames her. She says she miscarried on the crossing to America, which draws at least an "I'm sorry" from her otherwise pitiless brother. Then she pulls out a stack of bills and hands it to him. To return what she stole when she left Ireland, she says. He argues that she stole from their mother, not him. Is that why she came down here, to pay a debt? "To be among those who know me," Margaret says. Aylesh comes in the kitchen, and Eamoinn snatches the cash from the table before she sees it. She asks Margaret if they can have some trifle. Okay, that's twice that a scene has ended with the promise of trifle. By Chekhov, we'd better get it!