Under a Gilded Moon(70)
Kerry wound her way up the grand staircase and then, farther, up a small spiral staircase to Vanderbilt’s observatory at the very top of the house, where the owner of the house or a random guest could often be found alone. Thinking. Reading. Far above the hustle and hurry of the rest of the mansion still under construction.
The observatory was empty just now, only a cold mountain wind howling through a window someone had left open. Stepping to it, Kerry leaned out to peer down. And felt the ground four stories down spin.
Hauling it closed, Kerry staggered back away from her own vertigo. Such a long fall. She’d not be coming up here again if she could help it.
Without looking out at the view, Kerry spun through the room collecting glasses on a tray. Her footsteps shushing on the staircase as she ran, Kerry dropped back down to the main hall, across the Winter Garden to the billiard room. Glancing quickly around, she found it quiet and in good order except for two more glasses, which she added to the tray. Sumptuously paneled, the room was viciously cold despite a fire in the fireplace.
Just as footsteps approached from the hallway, Kerry spotted something glowing orange in the grate. Stepping quickly to the hearth, she plucked with her bare hand at the part of the cloth not already consumed. White cotton. A sleeve. Like a man’s shirt.
As the whole shirt shifted toward her, the other sleeve fully on fire now, Kerry spotted a stripe of something down the sleeve. Something like paint—paint that was ochre in color.
The color of those words, sickly and still dripping, on the remains of Ling’s shop windows.
Which meant that this was either John Cabot’s shirt, or it belonged to someone else who’d been at the scene before. Someone, perhaps, like Madison Grant.
And now the doorknob was turning.
Chapter 28
Kerry might have tossed the flaming shirt back into the fire before Madison Grant had fully swung the door open, but she surely didn’t smooth her expression in time.
His gaze flicked to the fireplace, then stayed on her. “Well. I’m a fortunate man to find you alone.” He ambled toward her. Extended a hand as she stepped back.
With a jangle of the key ring at her waist, Mrs. Smythe bustled to the doorway. “Kerry, dear—” She stopped when she spotted Grant. Her voice tightened. “Excuse me, sir, but we’re needing the staff downstairs.”
The rebuke in her tone might have made another gentleman blush. But Grant only smiled cloyingly at the housekeeper. “Naturally.”
Hurrying past him, Kerry did not meet his eye.
All throughout dinner, as the sterling clattered and the string quartet played, Grant squinted toward the doors of the butler’s pantry at the far end of the banquet hall—watching for Kerry, it appeared. Unloading platters from the dumbwaiters to give the footmen, Kerry could see him repeatedly turning to stare each time the servants’ entrance swung open, but she could mostly dodge out of his line of sight.
For once, she was grateful for her place at the bottom of the social hierarchy of Biltmore: it kept her walled off tonight, quite literally, from the advances and demands of these people who made as many outfit changes over a single day as they had courses at dinner. It kept her cordoned off, too, tonight from her own swirl of emotions, all the questions she’d not yet managed to answer about who could be trusted. And who couldn’t.
As the pantry door swung open and closed, she caught glimpses of the diamonds winking, the starch of the men’s winged collars, the women’s long strands of pearls. The conversation rolled through the door’s crack in snatches. Snippets of travel observations. Bits of flirtation. Shreds of questions about Biltmore’s forest.
“It’s the acoustics of our banquet hall at Biltmore,” Mrs. Smythe had said while they’d set the table, as proudly as if she’d designed the house herself. “They allow for a person to whisper at one end of the table and be heard at the opposite end. Remarkable, that.”
Which would explain all the diners stopping at several points through the long dinner to listen to Madison Grant.
“The pronghorn,” he said at one point, “is actually an artiodactyl mammal, not an antelope, although it is often referred to as one colloquially. We at the Boone and Crockett Club have determined the pronghorn is facing annihilation. It falls to us to protect them and their habitat. Without intervention, they’ll not only cease to thrive, they will cease to be.”
Later, it was Grant’s voice again audible over the others: “Their sort flooding in from Eastern Europe, from Russia. So restricting their immigration is key. The diseases alone they bring threaten the . . .”
The electric and manual dumbwaiters hummed and rattled as Kerry loaded the dishes of Rema’s muscadine cobbler topped with Pierre’s cream onto silver platters. But all evening she kept hearing Grant’s words from that night at the station and that day on the loggia.
Another newspaper man who is a Jew. Extraordinary. Wouldn’t you say?
Annihilation . . . Breeding . . .
The words from those moments and this provided the rhythm of her night as she scrubbed pots after dinner and walked home through the dark.
Extraordinary. Wouldn’t you say? Invasion . . . Disease . . . Annihilation. Extraordinary.
As if by extraordinary Grant meant disturbing. As if Grant himself would have liked to see Berkowitz put in his place.
Or, perhaps, put out of the way entirely. Where Madison Grant’s reputation would be safe from whatever the reporter might have known about him.