Under a Gilded Moon(40)
I’m trapped, Kerry wanted to scream. Trapped taking care of the twins that I love and a father I don’t, trapped in this place with no job and not much left of the farm and no way out—no way at all I can see.
And there you stand, staring.
Chapter 15
Uneasy all afternoon, since the police had stopped their group outside Bon Marché to ask questions about the murdered reporter, Lilli focused now on smiling. She reminded herself there was no going back. What was done was done.
If she could only move forward. Quit dragging the past behind her like an anchor. Quit letting her father’s voice stalk her.
There’s times a man’s got to take things into his own hands, ma chère petite. Otherwise, every damn Geppetto would have me paying a king’s ransom so they can lay about on my wharves.
Lilli shook the voice from her head.
Ever since the death at the station, she’d been plagued with nightmares. The reporter loomed over her bed in these dreams, his finger pointing at her. Sometimes, he was joined by the little Italian boy from New Orleans, that crippled leg as thick as a tree as he tried to pull it behind him. It was outlandish, really, that she would cross paths again here with the very child she’d seen from her balcony in New Orleans—at the moment, no less, that he’d been maimed. And now, as if that weren’t disconcerting enough, she had to see him again in her dreams.
She’d not been sleeping well, despite all Battery Park’s comforts. She’d even, Emily said, taken to pacing in the wee hours—which Lilli waved away each morning over breakfast at Battery Park.
“Sleep,” she told Emily, “is for those with no imagination for what to do with moonlight.”
Forcing a small laugh now, she strolled between Cabot and Grant through Biltmore’s conservatory. “I find it intriguing that you both would be accusing each other of the crime of”—she paused for dramatic effect—“remembering a name.”
She winced at her own use of the word crime.
With his crocodile’s smile, Grant thrust both hands in his trousers. But Cabot only looked out toward the mountains that swaddled the estate.
The visitors followed their host past the last of the conservatory’s orchids up through a walled garden. On his opposite side from Emily lumbered the Saint Bernard, Cedric—at his master’s heels, as the great beast seemed to be always.
“Pauvre petite bête. The mountain woman, I mean. Poor little thing. She may even have overheard the two of you sparring. As if she needed more humiliation in a day.”
Cabot stiffened.
But Grant waved this away. “Cabot fears, I believe, that I might tamper with the young woman’s affections, given the chance. He implies, in fact, that I have rather the reputation of a rake, albeit an aristocratic one. Although I cannot help but ask: Why is this young mountain woman a particular concern of his?”
Lilli tried on the role of magnanimity. “It was broad-minded of you both to take an interest, however peculiar, in simple mountain folk. Imagine setting up a kind of roadside stand right outside Bon Marché with those two smudge-faced younger versions of her—those hideous roots they actually thought someone might buy? I suppose it captures your eye, Mr. Cabot, for the tragic.”
He looked at her. But said nothing.
Lilli’s gaze followed George’s. She was thinking of him now in more familiar terms, by his given name—at least in her own thoughts. His eyes ranged over the gardens. Even here at the end of autumn, various shades of greens and browns and maroons swirled among the walkways.
She lengthened her strides under the blasted skirt. “What an artist your Mr. Olmsted is. To think of building a formal walled garden here in the midst of these mountains. And what a lovely view from down here of the house.”
“We were hoping for just this effect, transitioning from the French Renaissance style of the house down to a formal garden, and from there, pathways through the woods that shift one still farther—to the forests of the New World. By spring, the roses should be well established. And well before that, the tulip bulbs we’ve imported from Holland and the azaleas just there up the bank should be well in bloom.”
Lilli let her arm brush his. “Roses. And tulips! How I’d like to see that in spring.” She looked up, the very picture of guilelessness, into George’s face.
“Then indeed you shall see it, Miss Barthélemy. I very much want to share these mountains with those who appreciate their beauty.”
She slowed her pace and he turned, brushing against her. “I hope,” she said, “you count me in that number.”
The fear that flickered over his face was probably a good sign, mixed as it was with pleasure. She stirred something in him that was not boredom.
“I wonder, Mr. Vanderbilt, if I might have your permission to explore the inside of your stables before dinner?”
His features relaxed into a genuine smile. “As the house isn’t yet officially open, I suspect dinner will be rather a test. We’ve hired not only a chef whom Hunt recommended from Paris but also several locals from the mountains here. I expect a few shots to be fired.”
She laughed with him. “Might we be safer, then, staying in the stables and missing this first battlefield dinner altogether?”
Nearing the front entrance of the house, he paused. “It is ridiculous I should have thirty-five bedrooms for my guests alone and currently be able to offer you only enough space to change for dinner. But with the construction . . .”