“You, Cordy,” Kerry told her. “You cannot be sick. I got three people in there to feed. The math of your being sick won’t work.”
A scuffling by the door. “What don’t work, Ker?”
Yawning, Jursey stood there with red hair poking straight up from his head.
“Doesn’t.” Eggs cupped in her left hand, Kerry turned from the shelves of nests to run her right hand over the ends of the strands. “I’d smooth it down, but you look so much like King Lear this morning, I think I’ll let you two rooster about for a while.”
“Daddy’s moaning in there. Tully’s got the water to boil and the feverwort you picked soaking. But he’s saying he won’t down a sip, not even to ease off the pain. Says he don’t deserve it.”
Because he doesn’t.
But Kerry allowed her first thought, bitter as ginger root, to go where most first thoughts should go: unsaid. Skimmed off to leave something kinder beneath.
“I’ll come see. And if you’ve still got any root stalks on those cattails . . .”
Jursey beamed. “Griddle cakes?”
Kerry kissed him on top of his rooster comb. “Not the season for eating the cattail pollen you like, but you and Tuls get the coals stirred up good, and I’ll have the root stalks ground up in the batter and ready before I go.”
Slipping back through the cabin door and stepping over the box that arrived from New York yesterday, Kerry glanced down. A note from Miss Hopson. She’d gathered a small library’s worth of schoolbooks for the twins.
Tully had nearly fainted with excitement. She plunked down on the cabin floor with a McGuffey’s Reader.
Jursey had only mumbled under his breath, “That much smarts in one place, it’s like to make a man feel just real put out.”
Kerry fried up two eggs for her father and four for the twins to share, which used up the entire haul from the henhouse, yesterday and today. Kerry added to their plates the dandelion leaves Tully had picked. They’d cook the roots later.
Keeping her eyes on the fork, she fed her father his breakfast. From under the bed, Romeo let out a moan, as if filling in for his master. Pulling two of yesterday’s biscuits from her skirt pocket, she tossed them under the bed for the hound.
“Kerry,” her father rasped.
But she pressed a steaming cup to his lips. “This one’s mayapple root, snakeroot, and ratsbane.”
He tried to form more words but couldn’t.
“Good for the liver,” she said, still not meeting his eye. For people that drank other people into their graves, she wanted to add, and now are working on their own.
Some days, and this was one, she felt as if bitterness were turning her insides to something like pine knots and sparks, just seconds away from exploding. She rose.
“Thank you.” The words seemed to take all the strength he possessed.
She turned.
His eyes, pleading. He lifted the fingers of his left hand as if to touch hers.
“At the station,” he managed. “The murder. Tell me.”
From Rema’s description of his condition, this was the most he’d managed in days. And there was more than just curiosity there. A kind of desperation, frantic and pained, to know more than whatever Jursey had already told him.
She heard the reporter’s words in her head: The secrets I’m referring to cost a whole bunch of lives and mountains of money . . . But none of that could have anything to do with her broken, bedridden father.
And all Kerry could see was her momma in that very bed, face contorted, struggling for air. This man, years younger, with a glass jar in one hand, his fiddle bow in the other, cursing and kicking the butter churn clear across the cabin.
Kerry shut her eyes. “A reporter for the New York Times was here researching a story.”
“Jew?” he asked, wheezing.
It was the last question she would’ve expected from her father. Except for Sol Lipinsky, who owned Bon Marché, had Johnny Mac ever even met anyone Jewish?
She rearranged his pillow, its batting the stale of sickness and sweat. “The victim was Jewish, yes. Nobody knows yet who did it or why: his being a reporter with stories that could uncover secrets or his just being a traveler with a wallet.”
Her father’s eyes grew suddenly round. “Tate,” he croaked out. After trying to rise, he fell back.
Easing him so that his breathing steadied, Kerry knelt by his head. “What about Dearg?”
“Not him.” He shook his head.
But his eyes closed again, his body worn out. Whatever thought had dropped into his mind like a coin in a phonograph at the fair had vanished.
She waited a moment, shakily, to be sure that was all.
Silence from him.
“The twins are walking down to my work with me. If you need anything, they’ll be back soon enough.”
His next word came as not much more than a groan: “Where?” Or maybe it was only a groan—his or his old hound’s.
Or maybe he was asking where she was working. And she knew she would not say the word Biltmore to him.
How ironic, she thought, that I would be the one in this moment feeling ashamed.
Kerry tried to focus on her work and not where she was—or how the very size of the rooms upstairs dwarfed the people of Biltmore. The basement pantries and laundry and storerooms were a warren of servants’ passageways, where hurrying feet echoed on stone. Just one corridor and a whole world away, the guests lolled, at ease, from the bowling alley to the swimming pool to the dressing rooms.
From the kitchen courtyard, Rema blew into the pastry kitchen along with a small cyclone of leaves and pine needles. “Well, I’ll be pickled in whiskey.”
She stopped to kiss Kerry roughly on one cheek. “Good to see you here, hon.”
“I wish—”
Rema held up her hand. “Don’t go thinking you’re the first person to have to swallow her nevers and near choke. There’s days for wings like eagles, but most of life’s just the walking and trying not to faint facedown in the mud.”
Kerry managed an almost-smile from where she stood at the cutting board. “Fresh peaches. In early November. Lord only knows how they get them here.”
“Pineapples, too. Lord, you won’t never guess who I saw coming in: our friend from the train give the twins that cap, that Mr. Bergamini, out there with the horses, sure’s you’re born.”
From the next kitchen, two heads popped around the doorframe, Tully with her braids askew and Jursey clutching a whimmy diddle, its propeller still spinning, that their father had whittled years ago. “Is little Carlo with him?” Tully wanted to know.
Kerry’s hands went to her hips. “How are you two still here? You said you’d walk with me to see Rema and skedaddle on back. Mrs. Smythe won’t appreciate your being here. More to the point, you’ve got somebody who might be needing your help.”
“We thought,” Jursey explained, “Aunt Rema’s pastry might need some tasting. Just to be sure it come out all right.”
“Oui” came from the next room in a heavily accented male voice. “Just to be sure it isn’t hard as the stone of Montmartre.”
“I’d have thought,” Rema called back, “most highfalutin chefs brung all the way from France would know how to make something simple as rhubarb tarts. Turns out, just because you seen a big ugly tower get built and shook hands with Mr. Eiffel hisself don’t say a durn thing about how actual useful you’re likely to be.”