The two Americans stared at the sketch, so rudely revised. Then at the upstart Sicilian boy.
“My God,” the older man said at last. “I daresay he’s right.”
“I hesitated to say so and offend you, Richard. But our young friend here has an eye for proportion. And grandeur.”
That next morning in Florence, the man Richard, whose last name turned out to be Hunt, and the younger man Vanderbilt checked out, and Sal helped them load their luggage into a hansom cab on its way to the pier where they would board their steamship for London. But just as the cab pulled away, Sal found in the pensione’s entryway the drawing the two Americans had labored on all night.
Far down the road, he ran after them calling, “Aspetta! Wait!”
He’d run for nearly a mile before Vanderbilt, apparently hearing his cries, finally poked his head out the hansom cab window. Seeing Sal, he shouted to the driver up high and behind them to stop.
“Good Lord!” Hunt said once Sal staggered up to the cab.
Those two words, at least, Sal understood, thanks to Father D’Eridita.
“He ran that entire way?” Vanderbilt asked his older companion, eyes tracing their path.
“It would appear so. I feel a bit winded merely contemplating the thing.”
Catching only individual words—he and ran and thing—Sal tried to hand the two men the paper they’d left. “Is importante? Yes?”
Vanderbilt laughed—but not derisively. A gentle laugh, and quiet. “The truth is, we have far better renderings than this. And be assured we have already mentally included your revisions. You may throw this away.”
He made a tossing away gesture with one hand. But then, perhaps struck—even troubled—by the look on Sal’s face, he paused. “Or you may keep it.” He pointed to Sal, then crossed his arms over his chest as if he were clutching something close. “Lo tieni tu. You keep it.”
“Grazie.”
Vanderbilt inclined his head here. “I am hiring a great many of your people to build my house in America. A great many stonecutters.” He paused, as if to gauge Sal’s understanding. Then repeated himself in Italian.
Sal made himself nod gratefully.
He did not say—in halting English or in Italian—that “his people” were Sicilians, not these Northern Italians who looked down on him and his kind. Nor did he offer that stonecutting was the profession of Northern Italians, especially those close to the Alps, whose fathers instructed their sons in the ancient art. His own people grew lemons and oranges, and also grew sons into strong men who were drafted into the army, or taxed until death or emigration yanked them away.
“Yes,” was what Sal said instead. “I like this. Grazie.”
Because someday—you never could tell—you might want to go to America.
Vanderbilt had drawn a small paper rectangle from his inside coat pocket. “Take my card. I realize the chances are remote, but I like a young man who would try and outrun a horse and cab in order to deliver a sketch that might have been lost. If ever you should come to America, you must come work for me.” He’d smiled a shy, boyish smile. “That is, if you would like.” Once again, he’d repeated himself in Italian.
That was some time ago now.
Back before Sal had realized he could not go home to Palermo to live after Florence as he’d planned, that all of Sicily had become so hungry, the entire weary-soiled island had already eaten up anything short of the thoroughly putrid or soured or stinking. And now was starving slowly to death.
That was back before Sal had realized his own future—and Nico’s, once their mother died—would have to be scratched through and redrawn like the plans of the great house.
It had been six years at least since he’d taken the card from George Washington Vanderbilt II, Esquire, who could hardly be expected to recall the Sicilian who’d served him in Florence, or the boy’s mad dash after the hansom cab.
Sal would have to make him remember, then. Because Salvatore Francis Catalfamo—with Nicholas Peter barnacled to his back—would need some sort of future after tomorrow. After justice. And maybe also revenge.
Sensing he must be approaching the end of the drive now, Sal slowed his pace. The road was giving way to a vast opening up ahead, as if to announce the view of the house itself. High up through the trees was a flicker of something—some dark outline of a steeply pitched roof with a blur of moon backlighting it.
Sal stepped out of the tunnel of trees and into a vast promenade. At the far end of the expanse of a level lawn and circled by deep purple mountains gone nearly black now was a structure utterly unlike anything he had ever seen.
Sal’s jaw dropped, and he took a full step backward. Biltmore’s rooflines, just as Sal had sketched them, were pitched as steeply as the Alps. A reflecting pool in front.
“Mio dio,” he breathed into the silence. “Magnifico.”
But that breath was cut short by the cocking of a gun just behind him. And the cold metal shock of a muzzle finding the back of his neck.
Nico whimpered in terror as they both froze.
The voice, like the gun’s muzzle, was full of cold and of steel.
“Hands up,” it said.
Chapter 9
After walking three miles by the faint glow of a moon shrouded in clouds and by the memory of every curve of the brook, Kerry and the twins and Rema arrived at the cabin long after dark. Smoke, which Kerry could smell more than see, curled from the chimney.
“Who on earth,” she whispered to Rema behind the twins’ heads, “agreed to stay here with him?”
Because it was hard—impossible, really—to imagine a neighbor who’d been willing to keep watch on Johnny MacGregor while Rema and the twins went to New York to fetch Kerry home. They had almost no neighbors left now. And Johnny Mac had long ago severed all barn-raising, crop-sharing community ties.
Until his recent supposed homecoming and repentance, at least. And Kerry had her doubts about that. The approach of death up the front path had a way of making even old knaves gentle up, just in case.
Kerry wanted none of a deathbed, blubbering plea for forgiveness.
Someone had propped the door open, as everyone did here with no windows in a one-room cabin. From the flickering light of the fire inside, Kerry could see a horse tied to the porch railing, the creature’s silhouette badly swaybacked.
As Kerry stepped from the porch through the cabin’s one door, the ladder-back chair by the hearth creaked, Ella Bratchett rising from it. From the shadows at the foot of the cabin’s one bed, Robert Bratchett crossed to them in three strides.
Kerry’s jaw dropped. But before she had the chance to ask even one question, Ella had thrown her arms around Kerry’s neck.
“Welcome back, hon. It’s been an age. Dear God, I miss your momma bad when I see her in you.”
“How kind that you would be here. With him. Ella, I—”
Ella squeezed her hand. “No, don’t try to thank me for staying. I did it for you and Rema and for your momma, rest her soul. Can’t stand the old bastard myself, God help me, Jesus. And Rema, don’t go pushing on me all how he’s changed. Good thing for him the doling out or the not of mercy wouldn’t be up to me.”
Ella patted Kerry’s cheeks. “I told him you were coming, and that got him stirred up. Reckon he’s got things he’d like to be saying to you. Tell you the truth, I got things I’d like to be saying to him, before it’s all over. You rest now.”