Under a Gilded Moon(117)
The house towered above her. Like a call. Reminding her it wasn’t too late. That maybe, after all, she didn’t have to leave . . . that this still could be hers.
The footman with the hideous brogue might have caught her indecision as she slowed and glanced back toward the house. He raised an eyebrow at her.
George—bless him—squeezed her hand. “I am sorry that you can’t stay.”
Leaning into him because, even now, she could not quite give up the chase entirely, she squeezed his back. “I only wish that I could.”
His expression grew softer still. “I do understand family concerns that demand one’s attention.”
“Yes,” she said. Because he did. Bless him. A man loyal to his family.
She looked deep into his brown eyes, poetic and almost sad. And she saw there a man who, with a bit more managing—more long walks with Cedric, more of her earnest questions about his Sargents and Renoirs on the walls, more long rides into his precious mountains—might well have been convinced he was in love.
He’s been swimming about in the net for weeks now, she’d chided herself. All that’s left, the final hauling in. Yet she found, to her horror, that she could not do it. That she liked George Vanderbilt far too well to marry him.
Because for all his worldly travels, George Vanderbilt still had the heart of a boy—one who expected to love and be loved. Expected to trust and be trusted.
Honesty, Lilli found, had become her undoing.
The more she’d grown to like him, the more she’d discovered she couldn’t deceive him about who she was and the lengths to which her drives and instincts as a person of action might take her. Nor, she found, could she deceive George about her own feelings. Which, to her mortification, ran in another direction entirely. One she could never act on.
In fact, he was coming right now. The Italian groom, tailed by his little brother a few yards back, was approaching.
Her heart seized.
But hearts could be ignored.
“Mr. Salvatore Catalfamo,” she said.
He stopped beside his employer. “Miss Bar . . .” He did not finish her name, as if it had caught in his throat. He looked away. And then back. The black of his eyes, as always, intense. And now also sad. So terribly, ineffably sad.
“Mr. Catalfamo,” Lilli said, rescuing him, “I wanted to mention to you and to your employer that I’ve learned Leblanc was hired by my father, and that he will be leaving Asheville altogether. I’ve telegrammed my father to call off the search for the men who”—she would not use the word murdered—“were accused of Chief Hennessy’s death.”
She and Sal exchanged a look, raw and painful on both sides.
Sal Catalfamo might have every right to expose her father as a possible instigator of the riots and lynchings, and as someone who profited from the Italian community’s losing control of the waterfront. And perhaps he would do so. Though for Sal’s sake, she hoped not—desperately so. Her father and his kind had a way of pulverizing all who crossed them.
Lilli’s eyes dropped to the child Nico. She felt an unaccustomed twist of guilt as he hobbled forward to rest his head on his brother’s side. The leg a result of the riots she’d witnessed beneath her window that night in New Orleans—and those riots incited by who knew what forces her father had sparked.
Later—tomorrow or next week or next year—she might think more about this. Might even confront her father about it.
For now, she knew only that she was making a sacrifice in walking away. More than one, and both of them painful. Saying no to position and riches and George, before he could ask her to stay as his wife. And saying no, also, to a passion that would come with a poverty, a social plunge she knew she could not possibly bear.
Suddenly, her hands went to her purse, jerking the silk drawstring open. She drew out a folded stack of pages, crumpled for the wear. Unfolding them, she handed the stack to George. “I should have given these to you long ago.”
He flipped through the drawings, his eyes going wide. Then lifting to her. “These are superb. Surely you didn’t . . .”
She laughed. “I surely did not. These were done by your stablehand here. Perhaps Richard Hunt’s son, if he’s still working with you, would be interested in taking on an apprentice.”
Nodding only once, briskly, to Sal Catalfamo so that no one, particularly not George, would see the bright wet of her eyes, she twisted away.
“I have dearly loved your Biltmore,” she whispered.
George brought her hand to his cheek and held it there for a moment. In a gesture, she thought, of a genuine friend. She wondered for a moment, wistfully, what it might have been like to be good friends with one’s husband.
“Au revoir, George,” she whispered.
With that, the footman, Moncrief, handed her into the carriage.
Because it was good manners, Lilli Barthélemy lifted a gloved hand in a wave to her host and also to the man she’d liked to have let herself love in some far distant world where income and background and rank did not matter.
And because Lilli Barthélemy had never looked back in her life, she turned her face toward the walled garden and the mountains beyond. And tried to breathe through the iron bands cinching in on her heart.
Chapter 59
Kerry twitched Malvolio’s reins, but the mule was already stopping. For so homely a creature, he had a way of pausing in a patch of sunlight, with dogwoods and redbuds framing his bony gray form, then looking over one shoulder as if he sensed a camera waiting. Just now, he’d chosen to stop on the hill sloping down to Biltmore near the statue of Diana, as if he and the goddess were two of a kind.