Under a Gilded Moon(90)
Kerry felt strangely warm as she walked, despite having left her father’s coat for the twins. It was as if those moments shared with John Cabot on Christmas night were still sending the blood coursing through her.
Which was why, she told herself sternly here in the clear light of day, she had to be wary.
Despite the deep, swirling pull of that night, and despite what she’d learned of his story, there were still reasons for caution. Like the cliché of the servant girl falling for the handsome gentleman on the grand estate, convinced that he loved her only to find she’d been just an amusement. John Cabot seemed nothing if not authentic, but wasn’t that what every abandoned young woman said, looking back? And he’d somehow known Aaron Berkowitz before that night on the train platform, yet he’d volunteered nothing to Wolfe that evening. For a man who claimed to value transparency of the heart so highly, there was something unsettling about his not divulging that he’d known the murder victim before.
She didn’t have to let his rumpled good looks or her sympathy for him pull her feet out from under her like the French Broad in a flood. She’d have to exercise caution.
Kerry veered into the woods, the snow thick. The beeswax she’d rubbed into her shoes helped only so much with moisture, her stockings wet through now.
At the barn, Tully and Jursey were up and dressed, Tully’s hair neatly braided, Jursey’s in its rooster comb. The three of them changed their father’s bedclothes, the air once they were done smelling of the pine needle tick.
Kerry kissed each twin on the top of the head. “So. Has he said anything?”
The twins exchanged glances.
“Okay, you two. What’s that about?”
Jursey frowned at Tully, then at their father, just beginning to stir. “He said not to tell.”
“I don’t care, Jurs. I’m not keeping secrets from Kerry.”
Kerry’s hands went to her hips. “Whatever it is, I’m guessing I need to know.”
Jursey sighed but said nothing, crossing his arms.
Kerry focused in on her sister, who strapped on every responsibility like a soldier with his pack. Tully had no capacity for shrugging off duty.
“Spoke just enough yesterday to ask Jursey to take a message,” she blurted.
“A message?”
“Jurs took a kind of letter thing. Delivered to Biltmore.”
“To Biltmore.” Kerry stared at her brother. “And you didn’t tell me?”
Jursey sulked. “Said I’s to deliver it straight to Mr. George Vanderbilt. Said I most of all wasn’t to tell you.”
Kerry took a breath to steady her anger. “And what exactly did the letter say?”
“No idea. Had it folded up tight. Said I wasn’t to open it.”
“Where’d he even get the paper or pen?”
“No idea about that, either. Looked to me like it was maybe some kind of fancy paper somebody must’ve give him somehow. All’s I know was he told me I was to take it down there.”
Kerry turned back to her father, his eyes open now, his breathing shallow, uneven. “Well, then. Would you like to tell me about that letter you had Jursey deliver?”
If he heard, nothing in his face moved.
“Or maybe you want to tell me about that photograph with you and Robert Bratchett? What it’s got to do with your looking riled up when he comes around?”
Still no movement at all. His eyes closed again.
Tully tugged on Kerry’s sleeve. “He’s slipped on off back to sleep. Aunt Rema’s coming to take a watch-over so the three of us can slip off to the chapel.”
Uneasy, Kerry kissed Rema’s cheek when she arrived and let the twins pull her away. Carrying two cane fishing poles and a spear, they slipped unseen around the edge of the clearing and into the back of the chapel, their Methodist church down by the branch that flowed so close to the corner of the square little structure that in spring, when it swelled, it splashed up on the foundation and clapboard. The itinerant preacher would be coming later from Black Mountain, but they stayed only for the hymns, mournful and joyful at once. No instruments today. Just the ragged little congregation standing wet from slogging through snow, the potbellied stove hissing, their singing rising to the hand-hewn rafters. Here were the pained and hopeful voices of people who knew despair was life and life was despair—and grace was there for the taking.
Come thou fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing thy praise,
Streams of mercy, never ceasing . . .
Kerry stopped singing to listen to the babble of the branch instead, barely audible beneath the music. That branch, at least, she’d never seen dry. The mercies of the divine, on the other hand, seemed a whole lot less sure—at least from where she was standing with four hours of sleep from serving a castle of American royalty by day and a dying father by night.
Slipping out the back while the music still throbbed and thrummed from inside, Kerry and the twins walked upstream along the bank. Decades ago, the Cherokees had built weirs throughout the mountains, including here, a V of stones piled in the river with its wide mouth facing upstream to guide the trout toward a narrower, easier catch. Unwinding their lines of twined horsehair slicked with beeswax, Tully and Jursey began digging under the snow in the stream bank’s soft soil for worms. Tully retied the bullet she’d melted and punched a hole in for a sinker.