She’d pictured nothing like this, not even reading to the twins from the old storybook, a brown tattered thing with only string and a piece of the name Grimm left for binding. These fairy-tale turrets. The glint of copper on gables and towers. The utter unlikelihood of the thing, a castle surrounded by forest and mostly abandoned cabins.
Mostly abandoned. Because they could not make her leave hers.
Yet here the castle stood in the dimming light: spires that seemed to snag at the clouds scudding by. A domed section of glass, reflecting—and becoming—the clouds. As if the laws of gravity or those that dictated where sky ended and castle began did not apply here.
Stopping at the stone railing, she was aware of the footsteps behind her. She knew the hurried snap of the twigs, the quick squinch of damp earth, the thunk at every other stride. And she knew Dearg Tate would not call out for her.
Mountain men were laconic. They answered the good and the bad with the same stoical silence. It was his running that spoke now: something throbbing in him.
She tensed. With the old gladness. The old draw toward the sheer physical force of him. The old friendship, too.
But also with dread pricking its way up her spine.
Climbing on top of the stone balustrade, she looked below, a double ramp zigzagging its way down the hill on both sides, with a brick terrace and fountains a good fifteen feet beneath where she stood, balanced, just barely. But she’d grown up rambling on cliffs, her balance as good as any goat’s. And just now, she needed to feel taller.
She’d seen the castle in its earlier stages—its vast lawn swarming with workers and cluttered with sheds and lean-tos and crude wooden towers for viewing its progress. But today, she saw for the first time more than its grandness and size.
Today, for the first time, she understood what it meant.
The door that it opened to change—but didn’t leave a way back.
Far off in the distance, she thought she could hear the train whistle. And then, swelling behind it, the imagined strains of her father’s fiddle—from the nights back when his pupils were focused, his fingers true on the instrument’s neck.
Now, from behind a bank of rhododendrons, the thunk as the butt of Dearg’s gun landed alongside his foot with each stride. Reaching her, he pulled to a stop. Lifted his face to where she stood balanced up on the stone balustrade.
Without speaking, they both put out their hands, fingertips touching: the old current there. Then her hand pulling back—the current stronger than was safe.
He followed her gaze out toward the house and the blue wave upon wave of mountains that ringed it.
“We all missed you, Kerry. A hell of a lot.”
“I missed all of you.”
She dropped down. Let him wrap her in his arms, thick and heavily muscled. It was one of the things that kept her away, this pull toward him. Like the cords that bound them together might also someday cut off her breath.
“Sorry I couldn’t meet your train,” he said, “me getting stuck in Whitnel—problems at the mill. Saw Farnsworth at the station when I finally rolled in. Said he gave you the message.”
Kerry’s fingers went to the pocket of her skirt: the telegram from Dearg that was still there, a crackle of paper under her hand. With the attack, she’d not thought of it since. “Thank you for that. You heard what happened—before you got back to town?” Spooling images again now: the eager reporter, the kindness of him, facedown in mud.
“Damn shame. Whole station still talking about it when I come in.” Dearg shook his head. “How’s your daddy?”
“Bad. But I knew that before I came.”
From his vest pocket, he pulled a watch, its brass gleaming.
“That’d be new.” She leaned back to see that his hat was new, too: a light-gray felt that would show dirt after the first row of plowing. And his gun, she realized: not the old flintlock but a rifle, a new one. A Winchester. “I thought from your letters . . . ?”
Rather than answer, he propped his Winchester against a stone baluster. “Look at you, Kerry MacGregor. Nothing ever changes with you.” He pointed to what she gripped at her side. “You with a book in one hand.”
She’d forgotten for a moment she’d brought it. Though she’d read passages between job rejections all afternoon.
Books will remind you, Miss Hopson had said, you can make of your life what you want it to be.
Kerry winced now at the memory. Because it just wasn’t true.
Dearg’s mouth tilted. “It’s how I pictured you while you was gone. Even with all them people to ask you to dances and parties and such—you with a book was what I pictured. When I went missing you hard.”
This last admission, she knew, was a risk for him. Turning the we missed you to an I. Like a bobcat rolling onto its back, soft side exposed.
She gave him one of the old smiles—with all the sweet weight of their growing-up past: chalked messages on slates and forget-me-not crowns and bare feet in creeks.
But she wasn’t the same person she’d been when she’d left.
She glanced down to the Wordsworth. Like some sort of shield against her father, so gaunt and so gray, against the collapse of the cabin roof, the coming of winter.
A book. Pitted against all that. Some sorry shield.
“It was one of Miss Hopson’s,” she said. But of course Dearg would know that.
“How is she?”
“She loves teaching at Barnard. Getting to live in New York. Worth it, I think she’d say, the extra years she had to put in to teach there.”
“I recollect how she brung you things to be reading your momma all them times she was laid up. It was when you started talking like her. Thinking like her.”
It was true. Miss Hopson had let Kerry start school at age four—since she’d sat pining every day on the schoolhouse stoop. Then for years after, Miss Hopson had sent her own books home with the little girl to hide from her daddy and read to her mostly bedridden momma. It became Kerry’s—and her momma’s—salvation.
Dearg’s voice had a husky edge to it now. “She was a good one.”
It was the huskiness there in his voice, the reminder again of how they shared a past—and these mountains—that made Kerry turn toward him.
The blue of his eyes above sunburned cheeks. The stiff coarseness of his shirt, homespun, hand-dyed and stiff, in the mountain tradition—things she’d missed the two years she’d been gone. Always the shadow of beard, a shade darker than his hair. Beaded sweat on a broad forehead. He’d have walked several miles to find her—probably starting at the cabin where the twins would’ve pointed him toward town. He’d likely tracked the prints of her store-bought boots.
He followed her gaze toward the castle. “You wishing you was one of them folks who’ll come to stay there?”
“’Course not.”
But she could picture it even now: women in glittering gowns and long strands of diamonds and rubies and pearls swooping down a long flight of stairs they would never be asked to mop. Women who’d not boiled turnips all morning, whose skirt hems were trimmed in lace, not bits of hay and manure.
And here came the men, their faces unlined by years in the sun and the frost, their spotless shirtsleeves not stinking of smokehouses and fermented corn mash and malted barley. Men who bowed low to the ladies.