Under a Gilded Moon(71)
The next morning, Mrs. Smythe gestured for Kerry to join the other servants outdoors. “It’s a poor show is the flimsy goodbye a guest is given in America, even from a great house. Back home, every servant of rank lines up proper. As it should be.”
Kerry took her place outside the front doors facing the esplanade.
Dusting off his top hat, Madison Grant was walking backward. “One last view of your magnificent hall, Vanderbilt. I shall look forward”—bumping into Kerry, he turned and gave a slight bow—“to returning quite soon.” He looked meaningfully into her eyes.
Emily Sloane smiled at Kerry as she and her friend passed, both elegant in dresses whose waists pulled in tight and plunged to a sharp V. The feathers of their hats brushed together as Emily tipped her head to say something, her eyes shooting toward where a stablehand was holding the team.
But Marco Bergamini’s gaze had fixed upon Lilli Barthélemy. Even in this frigid November air, his shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, his arms muscled and hairy—and strangely tensed. Like he was concentrating on not moving.
Lilli Barthélemy, though, appeared not to notice the stare focused on her. Kerry would not let herself look around for John Cabot.
Grant, his trunks from Battery Park already loaded, stood chatting with his host. “I do hope, George, there’s more progress forthcoming on the attack.”
Together, they walked to the carriage’s far side.
“It’s sad, this,” Mrs. Smythe sighed, “all the guests leaving. The only excitement now will be keeping the footmen smoking outside rather than in.”
All the guests, she’d said.
Inside the carriage, the ladies adjusted their satins and silks. No one else burst from the house as a last-minute addition.
So John Cabot was evidently leaving, too, without so much as a word of goodbye. Not that he owed Kerry a thing. They’d only shared a few hours of cleaning up a vandalized shop. That hardly made them intimate friends. And hardly answered all her questions about him.
Kerry kept her hands clasped in front of her waist. She would work her fingers to the bone in cleaning whatever Mrs. Smythe suggested. She would go home and be up much of the night taking back over for the twins in caring for her father.
By dawn, she would be done with all thoughts of John Cabot.
Marco Bergamini, his jaw set square, climbed onto the driver’s box and snapped the reins to the team. A matched set of bays, they pulled out in perfectly synchronized steps. Coats gleaming in the early morning sun, they looked not even remotely kin to the horses that roamed free through the hollows and hills.
The carriage rolled away on the right side of the esplanade. Oddly, Vanderbilt was no longer standing at the far side of the carriage.
From behind Kerry came the scent of pine.
“George mentioned it’s nearly time to cut wreaths for the doors. And to hang around the necks of the two marble lions here.”
Kerry turned to find John Cabot standing there, a fir wreath slung over one arm.
“He insisted when he returns from seeing his guests off at the station, he and I will try our hands at the task.”
Kerry made her eyes leave his and fix on the mountains. “I’d have thought you’d have left with the others.”
“That had been my plan, yes. But I had nowhere to go for the holidays, and George was gracious enough to offer my staying on.”
In love with the same woman as the reporter, a voice in her head warned her.
Maybe just words from an unreliable source. Still, there were too many things unanswered about John Cabot. And too great a divide between them. Every reason to keep her impulsive nature in check.
“I’m glad. For you, I mean. To stay on.” Kerry turned quickly away and slipped through the front doors.
From the back stairs that led down to the kitchens, someone was shouting her name. At the top of his lungs. With a thick Scottish brogue.
Stumbling and crashing over the lumber stacked in the service stairwell, Moncrief burst up from it. “Kerry, lass. It’s news. I’m so sorry, it’s—”
“My father.” Her head swam.
“No, I’m sorry, not that. I dinnae ken what I was thinking to scare you. It’s your house, I’m meaning. Your brother’s come with the news. Nobody’s hurt, but the roof, it’s fallen in.”
Chapter 29
Kerry and the twins worked all the rest of the day and most of the night. The roof had collapsed between the woodstove and the one bed where their father lay. Unconscious, at least, through it all.
“Please,” Kerry had asked Moncrief and Mrs. Smythe before she’d left, “don’t mention to anyone about the roof.” Because if John Cabot—or, for that matter, George Vanderbilt or the others—knew and wanted to help, she’d be mortified for them to see it, the collapsed roof and the cabin itself. Or if they knew and did nothing, she’d rather not know that, either.
And to the twins, she said, “None of us will tell the Bratchetts about this while we’re still fixing it, hear? We’re already so beholden to them.”
The roof was far beyond patching or buttressing now, the weight of the snow and ice on its rotted shingles and beams too much at last. Snow lay in bright mounds on the churn, on the rocking chair her father had made for her mother before the twins’ birth, on the foot of their father’s bed.