Under a Gilded Moon(100)

Just this very evening, as a cello sang back in the tapestry gallery and sterling tapped against sterling, she’d let herself think that life at Biltmore had become almost steady. It was still foreign to her, too walled in with marble and glass, but with its own rhythms now—the swishing of silk, the clinking of crystal, the scuffling of maids in the back halls.

“Blimey,” Mrs. Smythe said when Kerry bumped again into a wall. “Don’t tell me you’re bevvied up, now.”

“Not drunk,” Kerry assured her. “Just clumsy.” Kerry could not tell her the truth: that her mind was with the Italians in the dairy barn. And her not even able to warn them for fear Leblanc, watching everyone’s moves, would only follow her there.

Just after serving the cognac and coffee, Kerry slipped out the porte cochere doors just to breathe, the night air full of the scent of melting snow and thawing earth.

Like everyone else at the estate—everyone else in these mountains—she’d been haunted by questions since autumn, the wondering whose laugh could be trusted, whose smile was only a cover, a rattler in its old skin.

Maybe Leblanc coming onto the estate had been nothing but hearsay.

Maybe, just like the Pellegrini, completed at last on the library’s ceiling, they were finally free of the dark and moving toward light—toward the truth of what happened last fall.

She’d felt it this morning, that brighter tone: the chuckling from the men at one end of the hall, the crackle of the hearth logs, the low babble of voices like a brook over rocks.

She felt it on the staircase earlier, that brighter mood: the women’s heels tapping out time on the steps, the cantilevered stone seeming to float four stories up.

“Kerry,” John Cabot whispered as she’d swept past, “we need to talk. It’s . . . urgent.”

His voice—tight as a singing bow’s thread—backed this up.

Pausing, she’d let her head shift just a notch. And given the hint of a nod. Enough that he would have seen it.

Enough that others might have, as well. That was a risk she might regret.

Lilli Barthélemy had brushed past. Watching pointedly.

Raising her chin, Kerry had met her gaze.

But now, if only for these few stolen moments, Kerry was alone—where she could gather herself and brace for whatever it was John Cabot considered urgent. Just her and her mountains. The earth smelled of unfurling fiddlehead ferns and bloodroot and all manner of mosses.

A mist had settled like a fine silk over the front esplanade, wound up the house’s main turret, and snagged on its spires. In the electric light blazing through Biltmore’s windows, the world shimmered.

Her attention swung to the dark outline of the gazebo high on the hill rising at the far end of the lawn. Had it only been a few months ago when she’d stood up there at its edge on a day much like this—the fog and the riffling blue of the ridge all around?

Just a few months and a lifetime ago.

From inside came more strains of the string quartet brought down this week from New York. The cello led the way through another slow, swirling waltz.

Suddenly, the towering doors behind her swung open. Footsteps across the stone: sharp and loud, because he was tall and the heel taps of his shoes weren’t softened by years moving over wet ground like hers were. A pause punctuated each step, like he was asking permission to join her.

Turning, she met Cabot’s gaze.

He had followed her out, waiting just long enough so it might not be clear to the others what he was doing.

Even so, there would be those who would guess.

He took one more step from behind.

She crossed her arms still tighter over her chest. “I need to know who I can trust.”

“We all do.” His voice came low, barely audible over the string quartet and a chorus of wood frogs, fervent and loud, who’d made their home in the garden pools just below.

“They thaw themselves out from a deep freeze, those wood frogs do,” she said. “And they start sometimes when there’s still snow in the groves and up on the peaks, just calling like that.”

“Calling . . . for what?”

She didn’t answer. Surely even in Boston, creatures called that desperately to each other for only one reason.

“Kerry, there’s some news.” He stepped to where he could see her face. “And before I tell you, I need you to know.” He reached out as if he would touch the line of her jaw, but held back. “I’m on your side.”

She heard the loyalty there in his voice—quiet, but fierce.

But she could not meet his eyes—not yet. Because he would not understand the turmoil in her they raised.

Your side.

Living in two worlds as she did now, she’d become like the rag doll she’d made for Tully, the one left by the hearth. Her father’s two hounds—including Mercutio, who died years ago—had discovered the doll at the same time, one cloth hand in each set of teeth. These days, that’s what she’d become, seams ripping.

My side? she wanted to ask. What side would that be?

Instead, she kept her arms crossed but lifted her face.

Here all around were the mountains, life about to burst out again in a wet, giddy green. And here he was: Part of the throb and the thrum and the new. Part of the questions. Part of the seam-ripping pull.

“Kerry, I need you to know also . . .” He seemed to be waiting for her.