Under a Gilded Moon(69)
She scanned down the lines, gathering quickly that the Louisburg Square townhouse on Beacon Hill had been owned by the Cabot family, a branch of John Quincy Adams’s descendants. The article detailed the crown molding, brilliantly polished floors fixed with wooden pegs, the inlaid marble and mahogany paneling. One of the photographs showed a sterling tea set handcrafted by the silversmith Paul Revere, who’d become better known for a midnight ride through Lexington and Concord. Another showed a parlor, which had been painted, the caption gushed, a bright yellow-gold, the exact color chosen for them by family friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose clapboard home in Cambridge was the same shade.
John Quincy Cabot might as well have been from another planet entirely than the one where Kerry had begun life. A man like that must be accustomed to letting no one get in his way.
In love with the same woman as Berkowitz, Madison Grant had said.
Blue-blooded. Perhaps cold-blooded, too. Though Cabot’s efforts in Ling Yong’s ruined shop made that more complicated to believe now.
Kerry skimmed the pages again: a catalogue of riches and privilege. She slammed the volume with more vigor than she meant to and was just popping it back into place when a door shut on the library’s upper floor. Spinning around, she found Vanderbilt, dressed in white tie for dinner, appearing from behind the chimney on the second-floor balcony.
“I . . . ,” she began. Shouldn’t have been reading your books, was the only way that sentence could end. And had no idea there was a door behind the chimney.
As if reading her mind, he gestured back with his head. “One of my favorite features of Hunt’s. I can slip from my future bedroom and be in my favorite room in seconds without running into the staff.” Blushing, he added, “That is, there are times I’d rather not discuss the evening’s menu with the excellent Mrs. Smythe until I’ve read for a bit in the morning.”
“I understand.”
What an unimaginable luxury, she’d like to have added. To read first thing in the morning—no bell ringing for you, no children hungry, no fires to lay.
Hurrying down the staircase that spiraled from the balcony down to the first floor, he approached. “You were reading the article I mentioned. About Cabot’s home.”
Nothing to do but nod.
“I’m glad you did. But that article doesn’t address what happened later, the compassion we should feel for him.”
“Compassion?” It wasn’t a word that came to mind after seeing the American Architect pictures.
“I actually met him in Maine that very summer—that this article appeared. He was working a good deal with Jacob Riis.”
He must have seen no spark of recognition from her.
“He wrote the book How the Other Half Lives. Widely discussed.”
“I’m afraid it’s not so widely discussed in my world.”
To his credit, he flushed. “It focuses on poverty in the tenements of New York.”
“And now,” Kerry offered, “Mr. Cabot is researching poverty in the Southern Appalachians. For his own book, perhaps.”
George Vanderbilt gave her a slow smile. “You may not be surprised that I was drawn to Mr. Cabot, a man like myself: raised in wealth but pulled”—he glanced to the fire and back to her—“to see how we might address the problems of the poor.”
The poor.
Kerry felt the slap of the label. Her people. Her world. But there it was.
Vanderbilt’s face was pinched with concentration. However awkwardly, he was trying to speak from his heart—from across the chasm between them.
“So John Cabot and I had already connected over our mutual interests in philanthropy. Addressing poverty with action.” He gestured toward the American Architect volume. “One can’t help but admire the dignity with which Cabot conducts himself. Given . . . everything.”
From what she’d seen in those pages, Kerry was having trouble imagining why John Quincy Cabot would have trouble conducting himself with dignity. He’d grown up a prince of Beacon Hill, Boston. Vacationed with Vanderbilts. Probably never lost so much as a game of jacks in his life.
With a sudden glance at a clock above the mantel, Vanderbilt turned. “But I’m forgetting the time. I should rejoin my guests. A conversation for another time, then?” He disappeared out the doors to the bowling green, Cedric at his heels.
Alone in the library now, Kerry tipped her head back to stare at the ceiling. The Pellegrini painting had been mounted at its outer sections and several of the inner, the rest still to be affixed.
Maybe her initial impressions of John Cabot as cold and arrogant had been wrong. She could be impulsive that way with her judgments. Maybe she’d positioned the pieces she’d seen of him into something that perhaps wasn’t the full picture.
Still, though, he was a man who knew nothing of life as she lived it: struggle and loss and long, grueling hours of work, all while looking for reasons to laugh with her siblings and not show the worry that gnawed every day at her insides.
Mrs. Smythe poked her head into the library. “Ah, Kerry, there you are—still unpacking the books, I see. We’ll be at that for some time. Nip up to the observatory and over to the billiard room to collect the bevvies the guests have left about. It’s been enough brandy flowing today to float an ark, it would. Then report to the butler’s pantry.”