Under a Gilded Moon(41)
“I say.” Grant was approaching. “Are you really living above the stables? We’re all quite comfortable at Battery Park—lovely views from the verandas—but wasn’t it rather preemptive for you to move out of the Brick Farm House and over here where the work is—if you don’t mind my saying—far from complete?”
“The question is, now that I’m settled over the stables, whether or not I’ll be convinced ever to move into my chambers once they’re complete.”
Lilli exchanged a glance with George that said she knew just how he felt. A nice moment of connection—that could be built upon.
The footman, Moncrief, burst from the front doors, balancing, just barely, a platter of flutes. “Champagne?” he asked in a low, dignified voice. But a grin cracked through his attempt at aloofness and calm. “It’s Delbeck, the best that’s grown, they say. Take you right off your head, that it will.”
One side of Vanderbilt’s neatly trimmed mustache twitched. He lifted a flute in a toast. “To good champagne, then, yes? And to enthusiasm.”
They toasted with him, lifting their glasses high in the cool mountain air.
“And to your remarkable Biltmore,” Lilli offered. “A place like none other.”
To Biltmore!
Glasses clinked. Moncrief proffered more flutes. More tinkling glass. More toasting. And behind where they stood, the crunch of footsteps on the macadam drive. Murmured words, too. Lilli stepped away from the group to take in the house from near its front door, her head resting nearly on her back as she gazed up.
Near one of the stone lions, an older woman whose face was a homely web of wrinkles and whose hair was a striking, unlovely red striped with gray stood talking with the young mountain woman they’d encountered earlier.
Lilli Barthélemy wasn’t the type of woman who intentionally overheard conversations—eavesdropping would’ve been far beneath her. If, however, others chose to bare their lives in her hearing, she refused to trouble herself and step discreetly away.
Kerry—was that the name Grant and Cabot had been squabbling over?—leaned in toward the old woman, who didn’t appear to realize anyone else might overhear.
“Gone and changed up your mind then, have you, hon? Bless your sweet heart, you’ve had a time of it. You look rode hard and put up wet.”
Her back to Lilli, this Kerry person was shaking her head. “Daddy won’t be leaving the bed, ever. We’re out of money. I’m out of choices.”
“I know, hon. I’m sorry.”
“I won’t sell the farm. Ever. But the stable area here’s bigger than every cabin left on our ridge, every farmhouse in the village, and the dry goods store, put together.” She sighed. “Which tells me Vanderbilt and his people can wait until our hundred acres of overworked soil gives out not even one wagon of sheaves and a handful of twig-skinny carrots.”
Lilli was startled to feel a frisson of compassion for the mountain girl.
The red-haired old woman patted the girl’s hand with her wrinkled paw. “Hon, you’ll be needing some in-betwixt care for your daddy. You’re already purt nigh wore out, that’d be clear. You count on me to fill in some gaps, hear? Bet they’ll let me slip off now and then for kin who’s toeing up to the pearly gates.”
“Since I need the twins to lay out of school to take care of him till I take back over at night, I asked if Miss Hopson could round up some books for us. I think they can be disciplined enough to . . .”
She trailed off there. Seemed to realize the Biltmore guests had fallen silent.
Life magazine couldn’t have pictured the contrast better, Lilli thought. The rough and ragged—but not wholly unattractive—mountain people standing outside the shimmering sprawl that was Biltmore. Surrounded by the mountains where these people had lived—isolated, no doubt—for so many scores of years.
It made for a quaint image. And also, perhaps, a disturbing one.
The footman, Moncrief, having traded his platter of champagne for a small sterling tray, was approaching at a trot across the gravel, his already-red cheeks going brighter as he ran. Mrs. Smythe would not have approved.
Even as Lilli glanced at that too-eager face and the square of paper he held out to her, she felt her insides twist: some unforeseen crook in her plans to secure George’s trust—and catapult herself beyond the threat of scandal and a tainted family name.
Resting on a sterling saucer, the soiled handmade envelope told her this was from no one she knew—nor was it from someone with whom she’d choose to correspond. Even as the footman stood there with his beagle’s face waiting for her to thank him, she plucked up the letter. And felt the steps of Biltmore shift.
No return address. A postmark from Asheville. Her name, then Care of George Vanderbilt—no Esquire—Biltmore Estate, North Carolina, was scratched there. Its lines only crude, uneven attempts at the English alphabet.
Of course she should have waited to open the letter, especially given that curling of her insides. But curiosity and revulsion had seized her at the same moment—and neither sat well with patience for long. Ripping the envelope open, she found only a card, soiled, with only a handful of words scrawled in the same stiff, jerking hand:
We got to talk. Soon.
Lilli let out a gasp before she could stifle it.
That he would risk communicating with her like this. Linking her name . . . Merde. The reckless fool.