Kicking at a hillock of flour, Ling Yong appeared. Then watched the cloud of white snow drift down onto his sparkling floor, little slivers of glass like so much ice. “Ruined. All of it.”
Cabot dropped his gaze from Kerry to turn to the shop’s owner. “I wish I knew what to say.” He glanced back toward the shattered window, the painted smear of words. “To make it less reprehensible.”
Through what was left of the window, Ling spotted the twins and Kerry. His eyes were so deep brown they appeared black—and bottomless. Kerry felt as if she were falling into a pit of despair.
Without speaking, Kerry stepped through the open door and held out her hand. Looking around the ransacked shop with wide eyes, the twins followed.
From behind a barrel, the one item still upright, a little girl of about three emerged. Clomping forward in too-large shoes over the rubble, she stopped beside her father and slipped her hand into his.
Tully stared. One of her hands lifted as if she might touch the black hair that silked down the little girl’s back.
“Our shop,” the girl said with a defiance far bigger than her small frame. “They came to our shop.”
The child’s words hung suspended in air that was still fogged with what must be flour and sugar. Kerry could taste it on her tongue.
“My daughter, Zhen,” Ling Yong said, with a hand on the child’s back. He gestured to hand-drawn pictures tacked to the wall. Several bore the letters of her name she’d apparently scrawled: Z-H-E-N.
Jursey cocked his head doubtfully. “It’s got a Z here, but he pronounces it wrong—like it’d be nothing but J.” Which was so like Jursey, to stand in the very center of chaos and find some kind of anchor in the distraction of how a word ought to be spelled.
Zhen looked from one to the other of them, her dark eyes already guarded, searching the strangers for signs of future betrayal.
Kerry scanned the shop. “How will you . . . ?” Survive was what she wanted to ask. How will you feed your daughter? How will you reopen?
All that hung in the air with the fog of flour and sugar.
“Just lately, I’ve delivered messages for the telegraph office—as you have seen. Only very early. And late. When we were closed. But that work only isn’t enough.”
Kerry followed Ling’s gaze to the window. The word Closed seemed to rebound off the points of glass that no longer kept any boundaries between open or not. “They didn’t even take any of it to use.”
She heard her own words for what they were: partly compassionate. But also, God help her, she was thinking of Tully and Jursey, with little on their stomachs all day, and a floor here full of food. Oats and cinnamon and platters of round, white pastries like full moons—all frosted now with glass slivers and shards. All of it inedible.
John Cabot knelt to gather the larger shards of glass into a tin pail. For a moment, that was the only sound in the shop, the plink, plink, plink of the ruined window.
Crossing the floor, Kerry reached for a broom. Homemade, she noticed, as her people made brooms, a birch limb for its handle and a wide skirt of stiff straw and cornhusks tied off at a tight waist of twine. Kerry began sweeping.
The twins stood gawking at the ransacked shop. But when they met Kerry’s eyes, her look sent them scurrying to find little pails and straw baskets to begin picking up trash and more of the larger chunks of broken glass.
Clomping her way again through the rubble, Zhen joined the twins in their work: a mashed pastry here with a footprint in its moon face, the cracked head of a doll there, her soft, velvet-clad body slashed open. Tully’s eyes on the doll, she was biting her lip as she swept, Kerry saw. Biting it harder and sweeping more violently to keep back the tears.
Kerry lifted the pastry with the footprint and studied the indentation. Soft edges with the slightest suggestion of stitching. And a toe with a perfectly rounded symmetry, no right or left shoe. So a handmade boot. A local man. Or, at the very least, someone wearing a mountain man’s shoes.
Kerry bent for a sheet of soiled, blank paper. Turned it over. But the other side was not blank.
Here was the flyer again, the one with the four caricatures and the warning. As Ling approached, she let go as suddenly as if Mr. Edison’s electrical currents jolted through it.
With maddening slowness, the paper wafted to the floor.
And landed printed side up.
Ling gestured toward it with his head. “I’ve seen this already. Around town.”
“LNA,” Kerry murmured, not meaning to say it aloud.
Drops of blood appeared on the flyer at her feet. Cabot was crouching over it, reading its message.
His lips moved, forming the letters LNA. “I wonder . . . Ligue Nationale . . .” He hadn’t seemed to have noticed that several fingers of his right hand were sliced open.
Reaching for the doll with the smashed porcelain face, Kerry whipped out the knife she kept in her boot and separated the doll’s skirt from its lacerated body. Running the knife down the skirt’s muslin, she knelt with the fabric next to Cabot.
Taking his right hand, she pressed the bleeding fingers so that they bled more.
After giving the muslin another shake to rid it of any slivers of porcelain or wood, she bandaged the hand. “It still needs a good cleaning when you get back, but this’ll keep it from bleeding onto your shirt.”
Cabot lifted his eyes to hers. “Thank you. You bandage well.”
“Milkmaids,” she returned, “have many gifts.”
Cabot blinked, startled.
But before he could respond, Kerry pointed to the flyer. “You recognized the letters LNA?”
Cabot reached with his bandaged hand for the paper. “When I was in Paris several years ago, back before . . .” That expression flashed again over his face, the one Kerry had read as anger and arrogance—but maybe was closer to pain he was trying to cover. “Some friends and I were briefly the guests of the Rothschild family, who lived there.”
Kerry had heard the name in New York. Something to do with banking. Or with social glamour. Or both.
“The Rothschilds—and the larger Jewish community in Paris—were being harassed in a number of ways by what I gathered was a fairly newly formed group. It was led by a nationalist named Édouard Drumont, who organized riots, pogroms, propaganda of all sorts. They called themselves the Ligue Nationale Antisémitique de France.”
Kerry touched one finger to the flyer. “LNA.”
“Yes. Although why we’d see this here . . .”
She hesitated, weighing how much she could trust him. “Perhaps you should know: a member of your own party at Biltmore received a telegram with those initials, LNA, on it.”
“Grant.”
She nodded, not missing how quickly he’d known which Biltmore guest it must be. “It mentioned gaining strength among the educated.”
“That fits with the LNA. It’s taken root in certain corners of the upper crust.”
“But why would Grant be connected to a group in France?”
“Views like the LNA promotes have been showing up in similar ways here—at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, in private clubs. People push back at what they see changing. You must’ve seen it for yourself in New York: walking down the streets of our cities these days is like taking a trip around the world.”