The Wedding Veil(72)
She heard the door open and turned to see Jack, tall, handsome Jack, dressed in his riding clothes, striding across the loggia toward her.
“Oh, lovely,” she sighed. “Have you come to whisk me away for a ride? My head is already spinning, and I haven’t even begun to plan the Christmas celebrations.”
“Well, you know I plan to dress as Santa again,” Jack said. “That is for certain.”
Cornelia couldn’t help but laugh. Jack was the best Santa of all Santas. One of the most glorious parts of Biltmore was that the giant fireplaces inside its banquet hall were complete with interior ledges—which, as it turns out, were perfect for standing on. “Darling, when you jumped off that shelf and onto the hearth last year, I thought all the children would die of happiness.”
Jack raised his eyebrow. “When Mr. Noble discovered that he could hoist a tray with a martini up to me while I was inside, I thought I might die of happiness.”
Cornelia laughed and Jack sat down beside her and smiled. But there was something in that smile that Cornelia didn’t quite like. It was a smile that meant bad news.
“Your mother and I have been talking…” he started.
“No good sentence ever began that way,” Cornelia said, more snappily than she meant to. She knew she had been snappier than she should with Jack quite often lately. The stock market crashing certainly wasn’t Jack’s fault. But things had been strained between them all the same.
Jack, as if he hadn’t even heard Cornelia, continued. “Your mother mentioned that the Chamber of Commerce and Judge Adams had an idea…”
Judge Adams was Edith’s most trusted advisor. Cornelia trusted him even if she had never particularly warmed to him. He was cold and abrupt to absolutely everyone—well, to everyone except Edith. Even still, Judge Adams never missed a thing when it came to the estate, and his solutions were generally good even if Cornelia didn’t like them. She had a feeling deep in her gut that this might be one such idea.
“With tourism down since the crash and the town struggling—and well, us struggling right along with it, they thought that Biltmore might be a draw.”
She took a deep breath. “Please tell me you aren’t suggesting what I think you’re suggesting.”
Jack turned to look her in the eye. “Neely, we live in the bachelors’ wing anyway. If we open the house to the public, it will bring considerable revenue into the estate. We would only have to put a few of the main rooms downstairs on display. We’d hardly even notice a few people walking in and out.”
Cornelia felt her jaw drop. “You can’t be serious! What about Biltmore Forest?” The creation of the Biltmore Forest neighborhood out of a parcel of land on the property had been another of Judge Adams’s ideas—and it had been going well the past few years. “I thought that was going to be the solution to all our problems. A grand neighborhood where people could have their own piece of the Vanderbilt lifestyle.”
Jack shrugged. “No one has the funds to invest or build right now.”
Cornelia felt her stomach turn. Increasingly, the bad news, the struggle to maintain Biltmore, felt impossible. She tried one more tactic. “But I thought the dairy was doing so well!”
“It is, Neely, but the taxes on the house alone are fifty thousand a year. It was hard before the crash, and now…”
She wanted to say that she knew damn well what the taxes were because she was the one who paid them. But that seemed overly unkind, so she bit her tongue. “What about the appraisals?” she asked. “What if we sell off the art and furnishings from some of the rooms we never use anyway?”
Jack nodded. “That might buy us a few months, a year. But then this beautiful house will be forever altered. It will be dismantled piecemeal, sold off for parts. You don’t want that, do you?”
The sadness of this moment overwhelming her, Cornelia said, “Jack, this is my home.” She didn’t say that this felt like the final nail in the coffin, the last step toward her childhood oasis not being hers anymore. And she ignored the truth that was impossible to ignore now: the fabrics were tattered, the curtains faded, the carpets worn, the leathers dry and cracking. Everything needed to be updated and refreshed. And updating 250 rooms was staggering, a monumental feat. In their current financial state, it was impossible. It was such a tremendous responsibility that Cornelia could feel herself shrinking under the weight of it.
“It will always be your home, Connie. I’m trying to keep it your home for a long, long time.”
Cornelia thought of her family lunching at the small table set up in front of the fireplaces in the banquet hall, the grand Christmas tree lording over them. She remembered laughing with her parents when she was young, so happy and carefree as they fished in the bass pond and the river. This home was theirs, was hers. How could she possibly give it away? The thought of people traipsing through her sanctuary tore at her soul. She could practically feel her father, the father whose memory she had tried so desperately to hold on to, rolling over in his grave.
She shook her head, feeling her dangling earrings hit her neck. “There has to be another way.” Jack took her hand so gently it made the tears she was holding back spring to her eyes. She didn’t want any of this. “Jack, Biltmore is a place for dignitaries, for nobility, for family, for friends. It isn’t a place for strangers, anyone with a dollar bill in his or her back pocket to gape and gawk. It’s such a violation of our privacy.”