Under a Gilded Moon(86)

“I erect walls in my life. Not so much to keep others away, but to keep myself standing up. But then, you’ve no doubt already perceived that.”

Cedric, who must have found his way here whenever Cabot came in, rose from the hearth to position himself directly under Kerry’s left hand. Moving her fingers across the silky ears, Kerry did not raise her eyes from the coals. “I sometimes notice bits and pieces that others don’t. But it would appear I also sometimes puzzle the pieces together all wrong.”

She met his gaze and held it, the grief on his face so raw she could hardly keep from looking away. “To lose your entire family at once . . .”

He stepped to the hearth and reached for a poker to stir the embers. “You strike me as a person of great compassion. I suspect you’ve seen your own share of loss. All people of real compassion have, I believe.”

He turned. They looked at each other across the flickering dark. “Losses change us. I’ve become a much less jovial man. Less . . . fun, I’m afraid, to be around.” One end of his mouth attempted a smile. “But I hope I’ve become a kinder, more compassionate man without fortune than I was with.”

She waited a moment before speaking again. “I wonder if I could ask: that sign you make . . .” She placed two fingers of her right hand to the left side of her chest.

“My mother. Like an unspoken I love you in settings where we couldn’t speak. Or when words weren’t enough. She tucked us into bed with it when we were little. Sent us off to school with it.” He met her eye. “We made the sign to each other before anyone left on a trip. Including that one, to Nantucket. When she boarded the ferry from Cape Cod.”

Kerry’s eyes filled at the image: a mother smiling on the deck of a ferry, two fingers of her right hand over her heart as she waved goodbye with the left to her son, headed back to his college. Her disappearing days later, along with her husband and daughter, into the sea.

When he spoke again, it was quietly. “And you? Your life can’t have been easy, I suspect.”

She gazed longer into the fire. “Every day up until two years ago, my whole life was wondering how the next meal could be trapped or baited or skinned or pulled from the ground. I’d no idea a person could go day after day through winter and never feel the cold right down to the bone, never lie awake feeling the wind cut through the walls, the damp deep in the quilts and the straw.”

She raised her eyes to his. “I spent the past two years at Barnard—on scholarship—at the arrangement of a former schoolteacher who once taught here. I only returned this fall when my father became ill and my aunt, who’d cared for my brother and sister, came to work here at Biltmore.” At least, she thought wryly, I can say the word without choking now.

She shook her head. “Honestly, I don’t think I knew until coming back how desperately poor we were. I wish I could say, like you, that I’m the better for it.”

“Surely the additional education you received . . .” He spoke gently, nodding at the two novels she still clutched to her chest.

“Was a great gift. And also a curse. It taught me envy like I’d never known before. Knowing about what’s out there in this big world. What I might have become. It haunts me. Not all the time. But envy pokes its ugly head into my days.”

“To have to return under your circumstances . . . I don’t doubt that was hard.” His eyes swept toward the tall windows, where a bright winter moon lit the outlines of hemlocks. “And yet . . . forgive me if I’m romanticizing these mountains, but there’s something here that draws one in—and surely must draw one back. Almost whether or not you want to be drawn.”

“That’s right,” she said softly. “That’s it exactly.”

His eyes swung back to hers. “If I may be incredibly intrusive . . .”

In the charged silence between them, he waited. She looked back warily.

“I wonder if I might ask you about your . . . friendship . . . with Madison Grant.”

Kerry would’ve been less astounded if he’d asked her the recipe for lye soap. “My friendship with Madison Grant?”

“His . . . interest in you.”

Kerry saw again Grant’s face as he offered his help at the train station and Battery Park, as he stepped close to her on the loggia, ran his hand down her arm. But Kerry had assumed no one noticed but her. And Mrs. Smythe.

Cabot looked away and then back. “It has worried me.”

Kerry recalled what she’d perceived as John Cabot’s rudeness: his curtness at the station, his scolding Grant for flirting with the village milkmaid, for remembering her name.

“That he’d targeted you as an innocent young thing he could . . .”

“Seduce?”

“Well. Forgive me. Yes.”

“Mountain women, you may have noticed, are ferociously stubborn.” She studied Cabot’s face. “There is something Mr. Grant suggested, though. That Aaron Berkowitz and his attacker were both in love with the same woman: Miss Barthélemy, I think. Who might somehow have known them both prior to coming here.”

“But the attacker . . . ? Good God. You mean me.” He looked away. “There are a number of reasons I should be a suspect. But my being in love with Lillian Barthélemy is not one of them.”

The strains of the quartet, now playing Strauss in the gallery, rose and swirled, the crackle of the embers underneath. Gently, John Cabot lifted the books from her hands and placed them on the chess table that sat near the fire.