Under a Gilded Moon(64)

John Cabot knelt to gather the larger shards of glass into a tin pail. For a moment, that was the only sound in the shop, the plink, plink, plink of the ruined window.

Crossing the floor, Kerry reached for a broom. Homemade, she noticed, as her people made brooms, a birch limb for its handle and a wide skirt of stiff straw and cornhusks tied off at a tight waist of twine. Kerry began sweeping.

The twins stood gawking at the ransacked shop. But when they met Kerry’s eyes, her look sent them scurrying to find little pails and straw baskets to begin picking up trash and more of the larger chunks of broken glass.

Clomping her way again through the rubble, Zhen joined the twins in their work: a mashed pastry here with a footprint in its moon face, the cracked head of a doll there, her soft, velvet-clad body slashed open. Tully’s eyes on the doll, she was biting her lip as she swept, Kerry saw. Biting it harder and sweeping more violently to keep back the tears.

Kerry lifted the pastry with the footprint and studied the indentation. Soft edges with the slightest suggestion of stitching. And a toe with a perfectly rounded symmetry, no right or left shoe. So a handmade boot. A local man. Or, at the very least, someone wearing a mountain man’s shoes.

Kerry bent for a sheet of soiled, blank paper. Turned it over. But the other side was not blank.

Here was the flyer again, the one with the four caricatures and the warning. As Ling approached, she let go as suddenly as if Mr. Edison’s electrical currents jolted through it.

With maddening slowness, the paper wafted to the floor.

And landed printed side up.

Ling gestured toward it with his head. “I’ve seen this already. Around town.”

“LNA,” Kerry murmured, not meaning to say it aloud.

Drops of blood appeared on the flyer at her feet. Cabot was crouching over it, reading its message.

His lips moved, forming the letters LNA. “I wonder . . . Ligue Nationale . . .” He hadn’t seemed to have noticed that several fingers of his right hand were sliced open.

Reaching for the doll with the smashed porcelain face, Kerry whipped out the knife she kept in her boot and separated the doll’s skirt from its lacerated body. Running the knife down the skirt’s muslin, she knelt with the fabric next to Cabot.

Taking his right hand, she pressed the bleeding fingers so that they bled more.

After giving the muslin another shake to rid it of any slivers of porcelain or wood, she bandaged the hand. “It still needs a good cleaning when you get back, but this’ll keep it from bleeding onto your shirt.”

Cabot lifted his eyes to hers. “Thank you. You bandage well.”

“Milkmaids,” she returned, “have many gifts.”

Cabot blinked, startled.

But before he could respond, Kerry pointed to the flyer. “You recognized the letters LNA?”

Cabot reached with his bandaged hand for the paper. “When I was in Paris several years ago, back before . . .” That expression flashed again over his face, the one Kerry had read as anger and arrogance—but maybe was closer to pain he was trying to cover. “Some friends and I were briefly the guests of the Rothschild family, who lived there.”

Kerry had heard the name in New York. Something to do with banking. Or with social glamour. Or both.

“The Rothschilds—and the larger Jewish community in Paris—were being harassed in a number of ways by what I gathered was a fairly newly formed group. It was led by a nationalist named édouard Drumont, who organized riots, pogroms, propaganda of all sorts. They called themselves the Ligue Nationale Antisémitique de France.”

Kerry touched one finger to the flyer. “LNA.”

“Yes. Although why we’d see this here . . .”

She hesitated, weighing how much she could trust him. “Perhaps you should know: a member of your own party at Biltmore received a telegram with those initials, LNA, on it.”

“Grant.”

She nodded, not missing how quickly he’d known which Biltmore guest it must be. “It mentioned gaining strength among the educated.”

“That fits with the LNA. It’s taken root in certain corners of the upper crust.”

“But why would Grant be connected to a group in France?”

“Views like the LNA promotes have been showing up in similar ways here—at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, in private clubs. People push back at what they see changing. You must’ve seen it for yourself in New York: walking down the streets of our cities these days is like taking a trip around the world.”

Kerry picked through glass for anything that could be saved. “The languages, the smells, the foods—the sounds of the prayers, even.”

“And that frightens some people. Some people react like this.” With his head he gestured toward the shattered window. Now he held up the flyer. “Or by trying to make others scared.”

Kerry rose and began sweeping again with big, angry stabs.

Ling came to stand in front of her. Placed a hand on her broom’s end to stop its movement. But gently. Like a man who disliked force of any kind, even just the stilling of a broom handle.

Kerry looked up.

Ling turned from her to Cabot to the twins, both picking up shards. “Zhen and I, we thank you.”

Jursey straightened, puffing his chest. “We don’t take kindly to bullies.”

“Most especially,” Tully added, tossing her head toward the ochre paint, “ones who can’t spell.”