Under a Gilded Moon(108)

Lilli’s back to the door, Emily would not know that Lilli heard her approach.

“Mr. Leblanc, I will confess to you my distress. Have compassion, I beg you, on the Italian, who is even now hiding inside the house. If you’ve ever yourself been madly, disastrously in love, Mr. Leblanc, have mercy on him, my lover.”

Emily’s gasp from the other side of the door said that she’d heard.

The moment of stunned disbelief. Now Emily threw open the door and stalked forward. “Lilli, good God, how could you? And to blather it like this to a stranger!”

First confused, Leblanc reared back. Yanked at his collar as if he were having trouble catching his breath. Then smirked from one young woman to the next as Emily railed.

Sweet and guileless as she was, Lilli mused, Emily would never have caused this sort of scene if she’d known Lilli was acting. Lilli listened with a bowed head—a posture she’d never tried on before. When at last she looked up, it was at Leblanc.

“I beg you, sir, to leave the basements of the house unsearch—” Her hand flew to her open mouth. “Mon Dieu! I should have said nothing!”

Leblanc snorted. “I can promise this much: I won’t report this back to your daddy. But as to slowing me down on trapping Catalfamo again and hauling his ass back to justice . . .” He tipped his hat to her. “It’s my damn job. I do wish you bonjour, Miss Barthélemy.”

Lilli counted out retreating footsteps. She knew that in a moment she would need to turn, face Emily, and insist that she’d lied. And a very convincing choice of a lie it was, too. Because no young woman of their social class would have put her own reputation on the guillotine for something untrue. Which was why Leblanc had not hesitated in stomping to the vast basement to search.

Lilli felt a little lightheaded. She’d used the specter of scandal about herself to save someone else. If she was going to be a whore in some minds, then she might as well be one who had guts enough to stick her neck out.

“Walk with me,” Lilli said to her friend, who’d gone speechless. “While we talk.”

But before they’d crossed the courtyard, the maid, Kerry, burst from the porte cochere door, face horribly flushed. Her skirt ripped.

And, holy mother of God, her maid’s cap at the left side of her head, her apron horribly wrinkled, and her red hair as mussed as if she’d been brawling like some sort of street tramp.

The maid, panting hard, met Lilli’s eyes.

Emily, kind heart that she was, moved toward her first. “Are you quite all right, Kerry?”

The maid’s eyes stayed on Lilli’s. As if Lilli Barthélemy might be trusted to hear what was not spoken.

Lilli muttered a single word and did not make it a question. “Grant.” Then she added two more, because they had to be said. “Le batard.”

But before they had time to move, Mrs. Smythe burst up through the courtyard doors that led to the kitchen’s delivery entrance below. The housekeeper, so concerned with propriety, so distraught over Americans’ loose grip on culture . . . was running. And beside her was that smaller replica of Kerry.

“It’s Daddy!” the girl called. “Kerry, it’s Daddy! Rema and Jursey’s up with him now, but Rema says it’s the death throes, sure enough. And he’s asking for you.”





Chapter 52

Holding the last of the warm honey and whiskey to his lips, Kerry rose. Whiskey had done this man a world of harm most of his life, and her stomach roiled at the memories the thickly sweet smell brought flooding back. But maybe now whiskey could help him leave this life with less pain.

Rema laid a hand on her back. “You give your daddy all you could. And now what he’d be needing, we got no kind of power to give.”

Tentatively, as if afraid of disturbing the silence, Tully reached for her singing bow. Then handed her brother the fiddle. Jursey had gotten better on the instrument than Kerry herself ever was, she thought as she listened. Like their father’s, Jursey’s playing pulled all the shields away from your heart—left it exposed and raw to the sorrow of his notes.

In the corner of the stall near the woodstove, Nico huddled under a quilt. Rema knelt to offer the child a biscuit. Kerry could smell the ham and baked apples Rema must have carried here with her and slathered inside the biscuit.

“Grazie,” the boy whispered. “Grazie mille.”

“Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, we’ll find your big brother, sugar,” Rema told him, stroking his hair. “Don’t you fret none.”

Nico blinked back at her. Then seemed to decide this was meant to be a comfort. Biting down on the biscuit, he gave a weak smile. Then leaned forward to kiss Rema on the cheek. Which made the old woman’s eyes fill.

Softly at first, the twins’ voices rose like they were one, the very same timbre, then split into two, harmonized. Haunting.

Come home, come home,

Ye who are weary, come home . . .

Kerry leaned against the half wall of the stall and closed her eyes to listen. From behind her, footsteps she knew. Approaching slowly. Cautiously. Robert Bratchett. Ella just behind.

Thank you, Kerry mouthed, startled by the tears that welled in her eyes just for the gift of their coming. Just for their standing alongside the raw and ugly.

She waited through several more stanzas of the song. But then she had to ask. She leaned in toward Robert Bratchett. “Please tell me. About the photo.”