Under a Gilded Moon(91)

Kerry watched them a moment. Then waded to the tip of the weir.

Jursey grinned, watching. “It’s chancy, if’n you ask me. Water’s ice-cold if you slip in. And you used to could gig a trout in the gills without blinking. But two years layin’ out . . .”

Cocking back her arm, Kerry aimed her spear, a knife blade strapped with squirrel-hide strips to a hoe handle, and let it fly.



Back at the barn, the three of them cleaned and filleted their trout, then rolled the fillets in cornmeal and cracked pepper to cook on the griddle outside.

Tully stomped back from the henhouse with all the outrage of thirteen years old, thwarted. “Only Goneril laid this morning. King Lear, he just struts around like everything’s just fine and it’s all thanks to him.”

Kerry gave her sister’s braid a tug. “So we’ll make cornpone—doesn’t need eggs. All the hens’ll lay tomorrow.”

Tully’s lips pulled to one side. “Your face has got some fret to it—says you’re afeared they won’t.”

Kerry attempted a laugh. “Then how ’bout you don’t look at my face and we’ll both just pretend we believe they’ll lay tomorrow.”



They washed their dirty clothes in the big iron pot outside over a fire—poking and turning with the long paddle, and making several trips each to the branch for more water. Kerry’s hands were raw from the heat and the lye, her hair frizzed from the steam.

Bending over the pot, she mulled over the people of Biltmore.

Lilli Barthélemy’s going pale each time the Italian stablehand had walked near. The letter she’d gotten with Dearg’s handwriting—that made her hands shake.

Madison Grant with all his veneer of wealth and polish—but also his leering. The hateful things he spewed about immigrants and Jews and who knew what else.

Dearg’s resentful reactions to the newcomers, his fit at the Christmas tree raising. His seething under someone’s influence—apparently Grant’s. Or Farnsworth’s. Or both. Someone who stoked his fears.

Sal’s initial attempt to disguise whatever his connection might be with New Orleans, then his fleeing from the Pinkerton man.

Even John Cabot: part of his story making sense now—the tragedy of his family, his anger in the face of Grant’s flirtation with Kerry. But his having withheld the truth—his somehow knowing the murdered reporter.

She was still bending over the steaming lye when rattling bridles and creaking saddles and a low rumble of voices sounded above the trickle of the half-frozen falls. Three men on horseback appeared at the edge of the clearing.

George Vanderbilt rode first, closely followed by his agent, Charles McNamee. Who’d been trying for years—even well before Kerry left for New York—to purchase the MacGregor land. His presence alone was enough to make her want to run and grab the breechloader.

She barely heard McNamee’s words. Because behind him rode John Cabot. Looking ashamed of being there with them.

Yet here he was: part of this unasked-for visit. This intrusion.

“So if we might speak with your father on business,” McNamee was finishing.

Through Kerry’s blur of confusion and rising rage, she could see the agent was smiling, that his easy manner assumed he’d be welcomed. He was already shifting his weight, about to dismount.

She batted curls back from her face. “Our father is unable to accept visitors today. And I cannot imagine any reason he’d have to speak with you about any matters of business.”

Vanderbilt looked confused. McNamee looked unflappably confident.

And Cabot . . . looked pained. “Kerry,” he began.

She ignored him. By being here with these men, he’d made himself their ally.

Charles McNamee drew from his pocket a folded letter. “I do apologize if it’s an inconvenient time. We can certainly come back.”

“I cannot imagine,” Kerry heard herself say, her voice hoarse and unfamiliar to her own ears, “there’d be a reason to do so.”

McNamee held up the paper, a Vanderbilt crest embossed at its top and several lines of neatly flowing script down its page. This design, with its central V and twining leaves, she saw now, was considerably different from the one in the telegrapher’s office with its fleur-de-lis and silhouette of a Gallic rooster, the crest she’d first assumed was Vanderbilt’s doing.

Where McNamee was pointing now, though, was under the flowing script. Where five crudely formed words had been scrawled in what appeared to be charcoal.

Kerry knew before she deciphered the blurred lines what the message would amount to. The twins watching her face, her stomach churned as she read aloud: “Ready to talk selling farm.”





Chapter 41

Late winter 1896

In a daze since leaving New York in a late-winter freezing rain, Lilli did not know the names of the hamlets they passed as the train climbed into the mountains, nor did she care—not with all she had on her mind. She smoothed the brown satin of her traveling dress, tight over the waist and flaring like a bronze bell just past the hips. But how well she looked in the dress wasn’t first on her mind, either.

The only part of this trip she’d dreaded was arriving at Biltmore Junction’s station, where the reporter had died.

She refused to think the word killed. And, certainement, not murder.