Under a Gilded Moon(65)

One corner of John Cabot’s mouth turned up in a sad smile. His eyes swung to meet Kerry’s, and stayed there.

A shiver ran the length of her spine.





Chapter 26

Lilli Barthélemy’s hands never trembled. But they shook now as she grasped the envelope.

Ducking into Biltmore’s empty breakfast room and closing its doors, she drew a breath, long and deep, to steady her nerves. A platter of cheeses—Brie, Gorgonzola, Gruyère, and Roquefort, in a lovely crescent—had been set out with fruit on the sideboard alongside Madeira.

Her stomach knotted. Absurdly, she pictured her insides in the half hitches the stablehand, Bergamini, had used to secure the mare she’d been riding this morning. She’d stayed in the stables for a while again after her ride to chat with him as he’d worked. He’d talked with her, too—longer this time even than the last—but made a point of not standing still. And rarely meeting her eye. Except for one moment, one telling moment when she’d reached for his sketch, propped next to a finishing brush, at the same moment he did. He’d turned fully to face her.

She’d frightened herself at that moment. Because she’d meant only to flirt just enough to blur his thinking—take the sharp edge off whatever anger he might feel toward her because she came from New Orleans and her father was rich and the Italians from there might resent her sort of family.

But she was supposed to be in control of how all this went. Standing there facing him this morning and holding his sketch of a house, she did not feel in control.

Mon Dieu, she berated herself. A Sicilian, for God’s sake. Threatening to turn the tables on her. The black curly hair and the dark eyes and the sweat that dampened the span of his chest. His sweet tenderness with his brother one moment, his gentleness with the horses, and then, moments later, something wild and unshackled as he looked at her. Her breath coming ragged and her plans blurred.

Merde. Stay focused, Lilli.

Nothing good could come from her thinking like this about the Sicilian. Hadn’t she already taken too much of a risk by talking with him several times now in the stables? By standing too close.

Bon Dieu, Lilli. Stop it. The man was not part of her world. Could never be.

If the newspapers had had their way, her father’s name would have been linked with the riots and lynchings, though he’d never left his offices on the wharves. Still, reporters had been waiting for him outside their home.

“Though clearly, mon père,” she’d said to him the next morning, the streets of New Orleans still wet with blood, “you’re not to blame.”

He’d patted her on the head as if she’d been a child, though she’d been fourteen at the time. “A strong man never lets the press push him around,” he’d said.

Which hadn’t exactly answered the question she’d never quite asked.

Nothing about the Barthélemy family in connection with the lynchings ever surfaced in print. Which her fourteen-year-old self had taken as proof her father could not be guilty.

And she’d kept believing that in the years since, even in the wake of the occasional nightmare when she relived that horrible night. She’d still believed it when he cabled to suggest she meet him a week early in Asheville—believed that he was traveling there just to see his daughter and breathe the fresh air. Until the telegram arrived at Battery Park from one of his underlings, apparently, letting him know the New York Times had dispatched a reporter not only to New Orleans but also, having learned where he was, to Asheville. Even then, when she’d learned he’d fled without saying goodbye, even when she’d made arrangements to defend their family name, she’d still believed in the innocence of her father—a man unfairly maligned.

She scowled at herself in the looking glass—and was startled to see how quickly her lovely features could look almost homely, contorted like that. Reason enough not to scowl.

Running a finger over the waving lines of the inked flag that cancelled the postage and the envelope’s edge, Lilli squinted at where, in her hurry, she’d mutilated the paper in ripping it open.

Back home in New Orleans, her father would have reprimanded her for being so common, not using the sterling letter opener the butler would have brought her.

Brinkley, her father called their New Orleans butler. Though his name was Tom Brown, the son of enslaved people. But Lilli’s father believed in the power of image and the power of name—and the power of power itself.

Their banker had advised that economizing, including releasing the butler, might be prudent in the wake of the crash of ’93. And, he’d added delicately, also after the unpleasantness—the banker avoided the words inquest or investigation or Barthélemy Shipping—following all that foreign unrest in New Orleans in ’91.

Lilli had heard her father fume: Barthélemys always have butlers. Regardless of financial teeterings and regardless of Lilli and her mother departing for New York, Brinkley, the butler, remained with Lilli’s father at the New Orleans mansion. Probably not even a cook left by now.

Lilli eased out the paper folded inside the ragged envelope. She forced herself to read the barely legible hand again:

We got to talk. Soon.

Once more, with only that handful of words, Lilli could hardly breathe.

What if she’d made the thing worse by refusing even to acknowledge his note? She’d seen the rage building in him. Ready to blow.