Under a Gilded Moon(116)
Far below came shouts for help. Estate workers who’d spied her swaying there, she assumed. She could not look down to see them.
Now Grant, surveying the landscape below, leaned over the railing. “Help!” he cried. “Help! She’s jumped, and I’m not sure I can reach her! I tried to reason with her, to calm her, but she’s jumped!”
Kerry could see Grant bending forward, the look in his eyes not concerned, not panicked, but steely. Assured. His hands reached for hers—not, she knew, to pull her to safety, but to pry loose her grip on the ledge. If she stayed like this, desperately holding on to this stone railing, he would make sure she fell even as he appeared to help her.
Without first formulating anything resembling a plan, she let go with her right hand and grasped at a stone baluster to the right, frantically gripping it as she swung her body so that her left could grip the baluster beside it. Reaching again with her right, hands clawing for a better grip, arms and back aching, she swung herself to the end of the line of balusters.
But Grant followed, still shouting for help. Eyes piercing on her, he bent to reach where her hands had moved.
“Almost got her!” he called to the people below. Even as he made a show of leaning to reach for her hands.
The instant before he touched her, Kerry let go her right hand, her left barely keeping its grip, and strained for the copper gutter at the edge of the slate along the north side of the tower. With her left hand, she did the same, just as Grant’s arm shot toward it.
She hung there, dangling, hearing the groan of the nails that held the copper gutter—nails that might decide not to hold this new burden of weight. Inching her way as fast as she could, she slid her hands, bleeding, down the gutter. She was past where Grant could reach her now, but her fingers were giving out.
She was almost, almost at a different section of roof. If she could just . . .
With a rasping screech, several nails pulled loose, the gutter peeling away from the slate. No time to think now. She swung both legs toward the slope of the front-facing roof and launched herself toward it.
Slamming into the top of a fourth-floor dormer, she clawed at it, seizing the sculptured finial at its peak and holding on with both hands. But almost immediately the finial, only ever meant for ornamentation and never to bear the dead weight of a person, was pulling up from its nails, about to give way.
Shouting came below her, and still from above: Grant calling for help for the poor, grieving kitchen maid who, he’d say, tragically took her own life—though in that so-common last-minute regret, she’d tried to reverse her decision, too late.
He was counting, she knew, on the triumph of gravity and of angles.
The finial pulled free and then slate was sliding under her body with nothing, now, to grip as she slid. Three stories beneath her, she knew, were the limestone slabs of the front terrace.
Then her feet found the next edging of copper gutter. For the moment, it arrested her descent.
From below came voices shouting to her to hang on, to slide down, to hold fast.
Slowly, Kerry found her balance, as she had so many times as a girl on a mountain cliff. Slowly, she stepped her way carefully, so carefully, along the gutter, leaning hard into the still sharply pitched roof.
She was almost to another dormer, this one positioned so that she could hold on a moment and straighten.
Inching along the roofline, she reached the dormer’s edge. And now risked another look down. Still three stories below to the limestone slabs, but now the glass dome of the Winter Garden rose to meet her.
The portion of gutter where she teetered was now giving way. Crouching with the dormer to help her balance, she leaped for the copper edgings of the glass roof, hitting its edges with a painful thud. She let her body slide down the panes of copper and glass to the edge of the domed roof. Her whole body hurt, bruised and scratched and aching. But now she was perched at the lower edge of the dome, the flagstones only a story below. And a crowd of people whose faces she couldn’t make out, her vision swimming, were running toward her. Were reaching out arms to help ease her final climb down.
Just before she swung herself down from the edge of the dome of the Winter Garden, Kerry paused to look up. Madison Grant was leaning out over the stone railing, his eyes narrowed to slits on her.
“Thank heavens!” he called. And he waved a kind of thanks to the crowd.
Kerry knew in that moment how it would be. His version of the story that he would tell: himself as the would-be rescuer of the poor kitchen maid who leaped that fateful day from the very top of Biltmore House in despair, who changed her mind at the last and struggled to save herself. Who, thankfully, did not drop all those scores of yards below to her death, but whose memory, poor thing, of the events became understandably rattled.
It would be his word against hers, and his would be the story most people heard and believed. But she lifted her head, let him see her face, bruised and bleeding as it had to be now. Let him see that she knew. No matter how many people he seduced with his wealth and connections and sheen, no matter how many he convinced to see the world as he did, she knew what he was.
Chapter 58
Lilli turned as George took her hand to help her down the stairs of the front entrance, and for a moment she nearly held on. Nearly tilted back her lovely face and told him it was all a mistake, her arranging to go back to New York.
Biltmore Estate was in full bloom now—dogwoods and tulips and azaleas, George had listed for her, along with who knew what else. Lilli cared little for landscaping, but she did like a bold palette in life. And Biltmore was that in the spring.