Under a Gilded Moon(28)

He followed her gaze toward the castle. “You wishing you was one of them folks who’ll come to stay there?”

“’Course not.”

But she could picture it even now: women in glittering gowns and long strands of diamonds and rubies and pearls swooping down a long flight of stairs they would never be asked to mop. Women who’d not boiled turnips all morning, whose skirt hems were trimmed in lace, not bits of hay and manure.

And here came the men, their faces unlined by years in the sun and the frost, their spotless shirtsleeves not stinking of smokehouses and fermented corn mash and malted barley. Men who bowed low to the ladies.

Dearg scowled. “Looking down their damn noses. Like just because some bastard can buy up the land like some manor lord means the rest of us got to be peasants.” Resentment was roiling off him. “You realize what’s happened here, don’t you? You and me, we went from folks with farms nearby the construction of the great Biltmore House to nothing but eyesores needing removing.”

“We’re not,” she said, “eyesores. And we’re not leaving.”

She made herself focus on what had always been here—always been hers: the deep, layered green of the hemlocks, the endless sifting of light through birches that flickered and trembled and rarely hung still. The flame of the sugar maples. The rush and roar of the falls in the distance. The damp of the pine straw. The musky rot of the leaves.

She’d always loved autumn here. And no millionaire outsiders, no construction of castles, no sick father or failing farm or spasms of change could take that away.

Before she’d left for New York, she’d rarely stood still like this, not when there was creek water to haul and dough only half-kneaded and corkscrews of apple peel to boil over the fire. Even now she was seeing the faces of Tully and Jursey with round, hungry eyes and her father in bed. Kerry was all that stood in the path between her family and the ravenous stalking of winter ahead.

For only an instant, the last stretch of daylight reached its fingers across the tops of the mountains and turned Biltmore’s limestone walls to a pale, almost translucent blue. The blue of ice on the falls near the cabin. Its towers cast long shadows across its sprawling lawn. Which meant it was time to go.

With sudden gentleness, Dearg plucked rotted wood from her hair. “Farm okay?”

“Roof needs new trusses.” She forced a chuckle. “But then, everything on the place needs propping up, including me.”

“All you got to do is ask.” He fixed his eyes on hers, and looked as if he might like to say more.

“I know. Thank you.”

He reached to touch her jaw. “Hell of a bruise.”

“Wasn’t him.” But then, Dearg would have to know her father was too sick anymore to raise bruises. “But his breechloader always did kick worse’n a mule.”

“Shoulda let me shoot it for you. Do a heap more’n that. If you’d let me.”

The old question hung between them.

“I’m not selling the farm. Me and Daddy agreed on that much even back when. But I got to find a way forward.”

“If you weren’t so almighty stubborn . . .” His face was a good one, strong and square, like the rest of him. He smelled of wood chips and pine.

She lifted a palm to his arm. “Dearg. How’ve you been—really been?”

He looked away. But leaned in toward her palm. Like he needed to feel her close.

She studied his face. “There’s something you’re not saying.”

Kerry saw the tightening between his eyes at her trying to force out his words. But you couldn’t make a man speak, not when you’ve left your breechloader back home.

He pressed his hand over hers. “Here we are, you and me, still yet trying to grow food out of rock.”

She glanced once more toward Biltmore, where she could now make out a man on a horse, the horse cantering slowly from the entrance gates across the wide lawn toward the house, like the man was reining in his mount so he could admire its full impact. The man and the horse melted into the fairy tale now. Like the candles were all about to be lit, the music for some royal ball about to commence playing—some kind of new story about to begin.

The man reined to a halt and scanned the blue crescent of the mountains. Turning, he spotted them. Lifted his hand in a wave. Then rode on.

Dearg spat again. “Don’t nothing grow out of rock.”

She would regret her next words before they were out: “Turns out castles do.”

A beat of silence.

Then here it came.

“Two damn years I waited for you to come back from that city.” His voice was thick. “Thought when you got back . . . thought we . . .”

“I know.” She reached to touch his hand, the leathered coarseness of it. She’d cringed at the touch of nearly every man’s hand in New York, how soft they all were at the dinners and balls, all those sons of bankers and lawyers who’d never held anything rougher than a tennis racket or polo mallet. She’d missed Dearg.

And yet, being back here, she missed the wider world she’d found in the city. The things people knew and read and thought.

“I got a right,” Dearg said, his arm circling her waist, “to know what you’re thinking.”

A faraway whistle, low and long, echoed again. For several moments, it undulated toward and then through her, as if it had learned its up-and-down, short-and-long rhythms by following the never-straight line of the blue hills.