What child is this who lays to rest . . .
Their father’s eyelids fluttered at the words, but he had not otherwise stirred.
Now Tully and Jursey sat among the other children of estate workers, each opening a hand-selected gift. But it was the owner of the estate, eyes shining as he distributed packages, that Kerry watched most closely.
“I don’t think,” said a man’s voice behind her, “I’ve seen George even remotely this happy before.” John Cabot stood there against the doorframe.
Kerry watched the owner of Biltmore presenting the next child with her gift, a doll in green velvet with a green velvet parasol. The child blinked, speechless, in wonder at the porcelain face, then up at the owner of Biltmore, whose eyes glowed.
“Even more,” Kerry agreed, “than he is with his books and his art. And equally as much as he is with his mountains.”
She exchanged a smile with Cabot. And was grateful there was sorrow in his face along with the smile, just as she knew there was in hers.
She’d admired framed Currier & Ives prints at a Barnard friend’s home. Part of her, though, had suspected the people in those lithographed sleighs and those glowing homes were also weighed down with secrets and worry and illness.
Which, perhaps, made the insistently giddy jingle of those sleigh bells hard to bear some days. Other days, maybe, the sleigh bells got to drown everything out.
From the refrigeration rooms where Kerry had just finished her work, she padded up the back stairs. As the string quartet migrated from the banquet hall to the Winter Garden, she could slip through shadows at the back of the house undetected.
Surely no one else would think to come to the library tonight. The last hint of smoke tendrilled from the maple logs in the fireplace.
Pulling Nicholas Nickleby and Middlemarch from one of the unpacked boxes, Kerry dragged an armchair close to the embers. Not even opening the books, she held them close to her nose. Smelled their leather, felt the supple spines. She’d read both during her time in New York, and now it felt like she was gathering their characters around her like friends.
Feet aching, she closed her eyes. From the Winter Garden, the string quartet’s performance of a Handel composition drifted through the house, amplified by limestone walls and marble floors.
A single footstep a few yards away.
Kerry bolted upright in the armchair.
John Cabot stood in the shadows to the right of the fireplace. Might have been there all along, in fact, and her too exhausted to notice.
“Forgive me. I’ve startled you.”
She stood. “I can go.”
“No. That is, please don’t.” He stood at an angle to the fire, his profile toward her. “George mentioned he’d given you full access to his library. For what little spare time you might have.”
“Still, I should go.” She was turning when she realized what he was holding: a volume of the American Architect. With a maroon bookmark.
“Someone left this sitting out.” As if he were suddenly not conscious of her being there, he laid two fingers of his right hand on his left lapel. The same sign she’d seen him make at the depot in New York.
“The article about your family’s home on Beacon Hill.”
“Former home.”
She waited for him to go on.
John Cabot put the book down and thrust his hands into his pockets as he stared into the fire. “I wonder if you’d allow me to tell you the story behind that article—that is, the story that came after it.”
“Of course.” Kerry could see the pain that tightened the corners of his eyes.
“I don’t speak easily of my life to those I don’t know well—those I don’t have ample reason to trust. I hope it’s not too presumptuous if . . . forgive me if I say that you strike me as utterly trustworthy.”
“I think,” she said softly, “I can forgive you for that.”
“It seems somehow deceitful not to tell you.” He paused. Then nodded to the issue of American Architect. “It happened shortly after that article came out. Both my parents and my sister, Adelaide, drowned late that summer in a sailing accident off Nantucket. I’d just gone back to Harvard for my final year.”
“That . . .” She struggled for words, her throat tight. “That must have been horrific.”
His eyes drifted to the fire. “I went on in a bit of a daze, I think, as if I were handling it well. I was not, I’m sorry to say. When the lawyers settled the estate, it also became clear my father had been in debt. For years. I became the sole heir overnight—and the sole debtor. The house was actually sold just a few months”—he nodded toward the volume Kerry held open—“after the article’s publication.”
Kerry’s own gaze dropped to the fire. Suddenly cold, even there near the hearth, she shuddered. “I’m so very sorry.”
“I erect walls in my life. Not so much to keep others away, but to keep myself standing up. But then, you’ve no doubt already perceived that.”
Cedric, who must have found his way here whenever Cabot came in, rose from the hearth to position himself directly under Kerry’s left hand. Moving her fingers across the silky ears, Kerry did not raise her eyes from the coals. “I sometimes notice bits and pieces that others don’t. But it would appear I also sometimes puzzle the pieces together all wrong.”
She met his gaze and held it, the grief on his face so raw she could hardly keep from looking away. “To lose your entire family at once . . .”
He stepped to the hearth and reached for a poker to stir the embers. “You strike me as a person of great compassion. I suspect you’ve seen your own share of loss. All people of real compassion have, I believe.”
He turned. They looked at each other across the flickering dark. “Losses change us. I’ve become a much less jovial man. Less . . . fun, I’m afraid, to be around.” One end of his mouth attempted a smile. “But I hope I’ve become a kinder, more compassionate man without fortune than I was with.”
She waited a moment before speaking again. “I wonder if I could ask: that sign you make . . .” She placed two fingers of her right hand to the left side of her chest.
“My mother. Like an unspoken I love you in settings where we couldn’t speak. Or when words weren’t enough. She tucked us into bed with it when we were little. Sent us off to school with it.” He met her eye. “We made the sign to each other before anyone left on a trip. Including that one, to Nantucket. When she boarded the ferry from Cape Cod.”
Kerry’s eyes filled at the image: a mother smiling on the deck of a ferry, two fingers of her right hand over her heart as she waved goodbye with the left to her son, headed back to his college. Her disappearing days later, along with her husband and daughter, into the sea.
When he spoke again, it was quietly. “And you? Your life can’t have been easy, I suspect.”
She gazed longer into the fire. “Every day up until two years ago, my whole life was wondering how the next meal could be trapped or baited or skinned or pulled from the ground. I’d no idea a person could go day after day through winter and never feel the cold right down to the bone, never lie awake feeling the wind cut through the walls, the damp deep in the quilts and the straw.”