Under a Gilded Moon(74)

Dearg scowled. “Reckon I can judge my ownself what’ll hold good,” he barked from the ladder.

The children’s singing faltered.

“A little higher.” Bratchett pointed. “Good. Now at least three more. But not so many they show up from below. That’s right. Tie the ends near the organ up there. That should hold.”

“Buono.” Marco Bergamini stepped back to survey their work. “Sembra buono.”

Dearg dropped from a fourth of the way down the ladder to land beside him. “How ’bout you speak English, Geppetto.”

Silence rippled over the room now until all was quiet. Dearg stood braced, head lowered slightly, like a bull ready to charge. “Had just about enough of your kind.” Spittle spewed from his lips, and he wiped his mouth with his shirtsleeve.

Raising an eyebrow, the Italian said nothing.

“You people come here, getting paid more to cut stone than I do to break my back digging dirt.”

“I have only just come,” Bergamini put in. But Dearg wasn’t listening.

It was as if, Kerry thought, some invisible hand were moving Dearg’s mouth like a puppet’s. Some other force slowing his movements, slurring his words.

“You come here with all your disease, and you sneak around scaring good law-abiding citizens. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re after.”

McNamee cleared his throat. “Mr. Tate, is it? Perhaps a short break . . .”

Kerry slipped forward to place a hand on Dearg’s shoulder. “Hey. What’s gotten into you?”

As if her hand were tongs just out of one of the fires at the opposite end of the room, he jerked away. “Don’t be thinking people can’t see what the hell’s going on.”

George Vanderbilt stepped into his path. “Mr. Tate, I believe it’s time you left. Now.”

Scowling, Dearg stomped toward the main hall.

“Out through the kitchen courtyard with you, meff!” Mrs. Smythe called after him. “I won’t be having the servants tracking more mud out where Mr. Vanderbilt’s guests come and go.”

Dearg whirled, fists clenched as the crowd huddled closer to the tree. A child whimpered, edging closer to his dairyman father.

Dearg’s steps reverberated through the banquet hall as he stormed out through the back corner door toward the kitchens below. For several beats after the echoes of his footsteps faded, nobody spoke.

Tilting his head back to see to the tree’s very top, Vanderbilt spoke pointedly in Italian. “Buono. Sembra buono. Not just good but excellent. And now, Mrs. Smythe, if you could bring some of that mulled cider for everyone as we decorate Biltmore’s first tree.”

Mrs. Smythe reappeared from the breakfast room, an enormous sterling tray in her arms, the air of the banquet hall filling with cinnamon and cloves, brown sugar and apple, on top of the scents of glowing maple wood in the three fireplaces and the Fraser fir.

From below came a crash, as if a whole line of copper pans had been knocked to the floor.

Dearg, Kerry knew. Making his way out through the kitchen courtyard.

With something vicious and raging inside him.





Chapter 30

Christmas Eve 1895

Sliding from the long-legged chestnut Mrs. Smythe had insisted that Kerry use for this errand in town, Kerry led the horse by the reins toward the train station. She wasn’t much of a horsewoman. Their mule, Malvolio, was fully as stubborn as the cliché about his sort would suggest, requiring maximum effort just to make him walk. But this gelding seemed willing enough to comply with whatever she asked, and glad just to be out in the winter air—as she was. She tied him to a white pine in a pool of full sun.

Being here at the station again made it all replay in her head. Like one of Mr. Edison’s sprocketed movies, the pictures rolled in jerks and flashes, but she could see it all: the crushed boneset plant where the rail dog had landed, the reporter’s too-still body, his phylacteries—small black boxes to aid with prayer—there in the mud . . . And before that, his turning around in his seat on the train to speak with her. His face, so alive with purpose and courage, when he spoke of newspapers and democracy.

Kicking snow in front of her, Kerry slowed as she approached the Western Union window. The telegrapher, Farnsworth, was probably more likely than anyone to know who was where in Best—Biltmore Junction—sitting as he did in the busiest part of the village and listening more than he talked. Today, in the few minutes she had before Mrs. Smythe’s order was ready, Kerry needed to find Dearg. Word on the ridge was he and his brother had moved off their farm now for good.

As she kicked at the snow, she thought again of what she’d spotted that night on the ground. The phylacteries. Symbols of the reporter’s faith and background. Little black boxes that had gone . . . where? Did the police have them now?

Kerry reached the window. “Mr. Farnsworth.”

The metal arm of the machine on his desk was tapping out a message. Round glasses sliding low on his nose, he glanced up without raising his head, as if to remind her how busy he was.

“I wonder if you might know where I could find Dearg Tate.”

Farnsworth kept his eyes on the metal arm. “Do I look like I’m paid enough to answer inane questions?”

“As part of your job, probably not. But I was asking you as a part of this village.”