By Grant, she reminded herself.
Aaron Berkowitz had tried to warn Marco Bergamini about at least one of the gentlemen: Watch out. The murdered reporter must have had information about one or the other or both of them. And that information, perhaps, had been enough to get him killed.
Vanderbilt clapped Cabot on the shoulder. “Let’s take a ramble down to the Bass Pond, shall we?”
Allowing himself to be swept with Vanderbilt toward the door, Cabot glanced back just once. But Kerry turned away toward the bookshelves.
A man whose family home was so grand it was featured in a magazine about princely architecture. No wonder the police and the doctor and the city leaders of Asheville—no one seemed to harbor so much as a fleeting thought that the blue-blooded John Quincy Cabot might have been involved in the attack.
Kerry ripped open the next crate. “You had something you wanted to ask me, Mrs. Smythe? About the loggia.”
“Some men,” the housekeeper said at last, “have got to be taught to keep their kecks on. Their trousers, love.” She leaned heavily against a red leather chair near the hearth. “Well, then, I’m glad we’ve had this talk.”
The smile Kerry suppressed tipped up one side of her mouth. “Me too.”
Mrs. Smythe’s head jerked toward where Cedric had been sprawled by the fire. “Whenever you’re able to clean where the drooling stuffed bear of a beast has been, do see to it.” She lowered her voice. “No wonder Mr. Vanderbilt has not married yet, for all his excellent points. There’s the head-to-toe fur of a Saint Bernard clinging to his clothes even when the beast isn’t at the moment dribbling onto his shoes.” She flung a hand toward a table across the room. “And there aren’t many young women who can be wooed, more’s the pity, over a chessboard.”
She huffed her way back to the door of the library. “Yet even with all the chess and the books and this great sprawl of a house far past nowhere, there seems to be no shortage of women vying for Mr. Vanderbilt. He’s a dear lad, that he is.”
“Mrs. Smythe.” Kerry caught the housekeeper just as she reached the threshold. “About my father. Who is ill.”
Mrs. Smythe’s face lost its detachment a moment. “What is it, love?”
“That’s what Mr. Grant approached me about on the loggia. He offered . . . or wanted to make it seem as if he were offering sympathy. Because of my circumstances, which I believe you may have told him about.”
The housekeeper knotted her lips to one side. “Perhaps it was a bit much I shared with the gentleman.” She sighed. “From long years in service, let me leave you with this, love: a person’s innocent until proven guilty, as they like to say here in the colonies.”
“So then . . .”
Mrs. Smythe pivoted. “Innocent until proven guilty. With just one exception.”
“Which is?”
“If that person’s a man, the opposite should be assumed.”
Chapter 20
Lilli was standing at the threshold of the library when she caught sight of the maid—the one who appeared to see and hear and remember too much, to take in everything around her like some sort of redheaded sponge.
She felt her pulse slow—a sure sign of risk up ahead.
Lilli was not like other young women of her set—catty and deceptively cruel. She was, however, ambitious. And a note like she’d received earlier could be the undoing of her future. As could a little maid who might have recognized the handwriting and assumed some sort of liaison between Lilli and the note’s sender.
Or, far worse, a connection with the reporter’s death.
Here was the maid now in George’s library, which still smelled of new lumber and old books and whatever adhesive they must be using to hang all those cherubs and clouds on the ceiling.
Aurora, Lilli corrected herself. Not random cherubs and clouds, but a masterpiece: The Chariot of Aurora. If she expected to vie for George’s attention—and distract from any stray whiffs of scandal—she’d need to think and sound like a woman who understood art. Assuming she could dredge up the terms she’d not heard since her last trip to Europe.
Chiaroscuro: Wasn’t that one of the words Americans tossed about in the Louvre when they stood awkwardly before Rembrandts?
The juxtaposition of light in the Pellegrini, she might try out saying. Whatever it took to keep George’s attention away from strange notes delivered to Lilli, or rumors of how Maurice Barthélemy had left Asheville in such a rush, or what the Times reporter had come here to ask.
Meanwhile, there was this maid to be dealt with. Lilli squared her shoulders.
She did not trust other women. Men could be managed in any number of ways. But women, who weren’t supposed to be too publicly clever, could be slippery creatures whose intellect often sprang out—ambushed—in unpredictable ways.
This little maid from these mountains was savvy—that much was clear. But perhaps she could be persuaded to keep her mouth shut.
Now, though, the housekeeper, Mrs. Smythe, was charging into the room, pausing only for a “G’day, Miss Barthélemy” as she passed. “Kerry, you’re needed in the kitchens, love. To peel potatoes. And to negotiate peace between Paris and Appalachia.”
The maid stopped her unpacking and turned. Returned Lilli’s look with one of her own. The maid’s eyes never dropping as a maid’s should have, she fell into step beside the housekeeper and hurried for the stairs leading down to the kitchens.
Lilli would have to watch for the next chance to catch her in private. Soon.
Standing beside her in a clearing up a steep, brushy slope at the back of the house, George Vanderbilt was holding out his shotgun for her.
Several days into the visit now, this was their first hunting excursion. Grant and Cabot stood some respectful steps behind the pair with their own weapons over their arms as her lesson commenced. Emily, wearing a cunning little woolen jacket and a smirk, watched the scene from a few steps behind the armed members of the party.
Lilli made sure she reached for the shotgun tentatively. Like a woman who was frightened of firearms. Fumbling it a bit, she lifted the gun’s stock to her cheek. Ran a gloved hand over the barrel.
“So well polished.” An inane comment. But better one that made her look feather-headed than one showing what she felt: suffocated by a corset, the drag of her skirt through the clearing’s tall grass, and this role she had to play.
This was the price of survival: feigning big-eyed incompetence when she was all but quivering with impatience like the panting spaniel holding his position at their feet. She ached to set the dog loose and follow him into the brush, to raise the double-barrel amid the sudden, desperate cacophony of birds driven to the wing and squeeze off two blazing rounds in such quick succession that the birds struck the earth as one.
Control yourself, Lilli.
“So shiny,” she added. And cringed at her own voice.
“Regardless of the abundance or the paucity of a man’s possessions, he should take painstaking care of all that he calls his.”
Lilli turned to meet George’s eye. Had he meant more by this than the proper maintenance of firearms?
“If you’d like me to demonstrate some tips about leading your target, Miss Barthélemy . . .”