Under a Gilded Moon(44)

“Si. This is true.”

“And I recall that they were beautifully tended.”

Sal knew pride was a failing, but so was pretending not to know his own expertise. “Yes. The finest of the care.”

Vanderbilt tapped his crop. “Your name, as you know, has been included among the suspects for the death at the train station. Many would advise me not to bring a man still under a cloud of suspicion closer in to my home.”

A cloud of suspicion. As if this were new.

Sal could picture himself back in the darkened room near the Café du Monde, a few blocks from the wharves. The points of cigarette light and the hissed whisperings as he and Cernoia and the other dock workers argued.

Hennessy needs to be taught a lesson . . .

Insanity, all of this! The last thing Italians here need is to be suspected of murder . . .

“I will bring you no trouble,” Sal said. The pronouncement was weak—even he could hear that. No protestations of innocence. No proof. No alibi.

Gathering the reins of his mare, Vanderbilt motioned with his head. “Mr. Schenck, I assume you can spare this man while I decide if he might not be better suited elsewhere on the estate?” Biltmore’s owner waited for a nod—reluctant, but a drop of the head all the same—from his forester, then turned back to Sal. “Mr. Bergamini, if you’d please come with me.”

Sal could feel the eyes of the two young women on him, but he knew better than to look either one full in the face. Especially not the one he’d met in the woods. The dangerous one.

“So,” that one said softly as Sal passed, “le bandit a trouvé une cachette.”

It was not difficult French to translate, even for a Sicilian whose language lessons came from hauling Parisians’ luggage and laying out their Florentine picnics.

The bandit has a hideout.

Without thinking, he turned. To find her eyes on him.

From what he’d overhead on the train, one of these women must be the daughter of Maurice Barthélemy. And he knew now in a shattering flash, it must be this one.

Whipping back around, Sal jogged to catch up with George Vanderbilt and the limping mare.

God help him.

The daughter of Maurice Barthélemy.





Chapter 17

Kerry rose before dawn and groped through the hay in the henhouse for eggs, Goneril and Regan pecking at her hand. King Lear strutted about, unwilling to ruffle his feathers by engaging. Cordelia hunched in the corner, her little head low.

“You, Cordy,” Kerry told her. “You cannot be sick. I got three people in there to feed. The math of your being sick won’t work.”

A scuffling by the door. “What don’t work, Ker?”

Yawning, Jursey stood there with red hair poking straight up from his head.

“Doesn’t.” Eggs cupped in her left hand, Kerry turned from the shelves of nests to run her right hand over the ends of the strands. “I’d smooth it down, but you look so much like King Lear this morning, I think I’ll let you two rooster about for a while.”

“Daddy’s moaning in there. Tully’s got the water to boil and the feverwort you picked soaking. But he’s saying he won’t down a sip, not even to ease off the pain. Says he don’t deserve it.”

Because he doesn’t.

But Kerry allowed her first thought, bitter as ginger root, to go where most first thoughts should go: unsaid. Skimmed off to leave something kinder beneath.

“I’ll come see. And if you’ve still got any root stalks on those cattails . . .”

Jursey beamed. “Griddle cakes?”

Kerry kissed him on top of his rooster comb. “Not the season for eating the cattail pollen you like, but you and Tuls get the coals stirred up good, and I’ll have the root stalks ground up in the batter and ready before I go.”

Slipping back through the cabin door and stepping over the box that arrived from New York yesterday, Kerry glanced down. A note from Miss Hopson. She’d gathered a small library’s worth of schoolbooks for the twins.

Tully had nearly fainted with excitement. She plunked down on the cabin floor with a McGuffey’s Reader.

Jursey had only mumbled under his breath, “That much smarts in one place, it’s like to make a man feel just real put out.”

Kerry fried up two eggs for her father and four for the twins to share, which used up the entire haul from the henhouse, yesterday and today. Kerry added to their plates the dandelion leaves Tully had picked. They’d cook the roots later.

Keeping her eyes on the fork, she fed her father his breakfast. From under the bed, Romeo let out a moan, as if filling in for his master. Pulling two of yesterday’s biscuits from her skirt pocket, she tossed them under the bed for the hound.

“Kerry,” her father rasped.

But she pressed a steaming cup to his lips. “This one’s mayapple root, snakeroot, and ratsbane.”

He tried to form more words but couldn’t.

“Good for the liver,” she said, still not meeting his eye. For people that drank other people into their graves, she wanted to add, and now are working on their own.

Some days, and this was one, she felt as if bitterness were turning her insides to something like pine knots and sparks, just seconds away from exploding. She rose.

“Thank you.” The words seemed to take all the strength he possessed.