“Spoke just enough yesterday to ask Jursey to take a message,” she blurted.
“A message?”
“Jurs took a kind of letter thing. Delivered to Biltmore.”
“To Biltmore.” Kerry stared at her brother. “And you didn’t tell me?”
Jursey sulked. “Said I’s to deliver it straight to Mr. George Vanderbilt. Said I most of all wasn’t to tell you.”
Kerry took a breath to steady her anger. “And what exactly did the letter say?”
“No idea. Had it folded up tight. Said I wasn’t to open it.”
“Where’d he even get the paper or pen?”
“No idea about that, either. Looked to me like it was maybe some kind of fancy paper somebody must’ve give him somehow. All’s I know was he told me I was to take it down there.”
Kerry turned back to her father, his eyes open now, his breathing shallow, uneven. “Well, then. Would you like to tell me about that letter you had Jursey deliver?”
If he heard, nothing in his face moved.
“Or maybe you want to tell me about that photograph with you and Robert Bratchett? What it’s got to do with your looking riled up when he comes around?”
Still no movement at all. His eyes closed again.
Tully tugged on Kerry’s sleeve. “He’s slipped on off back to sleep. Aunt Rema’s coming to take a watch-over so the three of us can slip off to the chapel.”
Uneasy, Kerry kissed Rema’s cheek when she arrived and let the twins pull her away. Carrying two cane fishing poles and a spear, they slipped unseen around the edge of the clearing and into the back of the chapel, their Methodist church down by the branch that flowed so close to the corner of the square little structure that in spring, when it swelled, it splashed up on the foundation and clapboard. The itinerant preacher would be coming later from Black Mountain, but they stayed only for the hymns, mournful and joyful at once. No instruments today. Just the ragged little congregation standing wet from slogging through snow, the potbellied stove hissing, their singing rising to the hand-hewn rafters. Here were the pained and hopeful voices of people who knew despair was life and life was despair—and grace was there for the taking.
Come thou fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing thy praise,
Streams of mercy, never ceasing . . .
Kerry stopped singing to listen to the babble of the branch instead, barely audible beneath the music. That branch, at least, she’d never seen dry. The mercies of the divine, on the other hand, seemed a whole lot less sure—at least from where she was standing with four hours of sleep from serving a castle of American royalty by day and a dying father by night.
Slipping out the back while the music still throbbed and thrummed from inside, Kerry and the twins walked upstream along the bank. Decades ago, the Cherokees had built weirs throughout the mountains, including here, a V of stones piled in the river with its wide mouth facing upstream to guide the trout toward a narrower, easier catch. Unwinding their lines of twined horsehair slicked with beeswax, Tully and Jursey began digging under the snow in the stream bank’s soft soil for worms. Tully retied the bullet she’d melted and punched a hole in for a sinker.
Kerry watched them a moment. Then waded to the tip of the weir.
Jursey grinned, watching. “It’s chancy, if’n you ask me. Water’s ice-cold if you slip in. And you used to could gig a trout in the gills without blinking. But two years layin’ out . . .”
Cocking back her arm, Kerry aimed her spear, a knife blade strapped with squirrel-hide strips to a hoe handle, and let it fly.
Back at the barn, the three of them cleaned and filleted their trout, then rolled the fillets in cornmeal and cracked pepper to cook on the griddle outside.
Tully stomped back from the henhouse with all the outrage of thirteen years old, thwarted. “Only Goneril laid this morning. King Lear, he just struts around like everything’s just fine and it’s all thanks to him.”
Kerry gave her sister’s braid a tug. “So we’ll make cornpone—doesn’t need eggs. All the hens’ll lay tomorrow.”
Tully’s lips pulled to one side. “Your face has got some fret to it—says you’re afeared they won’t.”
Kerry attempted a laugh. “Then how ’bout you don’t look at my face and we’ll both just pretend we believe they’ll lay tomorrow.”
They washed their dirty clothes in the big iron pot outside over a fire—poking and turning with the long paddle, and making several trips each to the branch for more water. Kerry’s hands were raw from the heat and the lye, her hair frizzed from the steam.
Bending over the pot, she mulled over the people of Biltmore.
Lilli Barthélemy’s going pale each time the Italian stablehand had walked near. The letter she’d gotten with Dearg’s handwriting—that made her hands shake.
Madison Grant with all his veneer of wealth and polish—but also his leering. The hateful things he spewed about immigrants and Jews and who knew what else.
Dearg’s resentful reactions to the newcomers, his fit at the Christmas tree raising. His seething under someone’s influence—apparently Grant’s. Or Farnsworth’s. Or both. Someone who stoked his fears.
Sal’s initial attempt to disguise whatever his connection might be with New Orleans, then his fleeing from the Pinkerton man.
Even John Cabot: part of his story making sense now—the tragedy of his family, his anger in the face of Grant’s flirtation with Kerry. But his having withheld the truth—his somehow knowing the murdered reporter.
She was still bending over the steaming lye when rattling bridles and creaking saddles and a low rumble of voices sounded above the trickle of the half-frozen falls. Three men on horseback appeared at the edge of the clearing.
George Vanderbilt rode first, closely followed by his agent, Charles McNamee. Who’d been trying for years—even well before Kerry left for New York—to purchase the MacGregor land. His presence alone was enough to make her want to run and grab the breechloader.
She barely heard McNamee’s words. Because behind him rode John Cabot. Looking ashamed of being there with them.
Yet here he was: part of this unasked-for visit. This intrusion.
“So if we might speak with your father on business,” McNamee was finishing.
Through Kerry’s blur of confusion and rising rage, she could see the agent was smiling, that his easy manner assumed he’d be welcomed. He was already shifting his weight, about to dismount.
She batted curls back from her face. “Our father is unable to accept visitors today. And I cannot imagine any reason he’d have to speak with you about any matters of business.”
Vanderbilt looked confused. McNamee looked unflappably confident.
And Cabot . . . looked pained. “Kerry,” he began.
She ignored him. By being here with these men, he’d made himself their ally.
Charles McNamee drew from his pocket a folded letter. “I do apologize if it’s an inconvenient time. We can certainly come back.”
“I cannot imagine,” Kerry heard herself say, her voice hoarse and unfamiliar to her own ears, “there’d be a reason to do so.”
McNamee held up the paper, a Vanderbilt crest embossed at its top and several lines of neatly flowing script down its page. This design, with its central V and twining leaves, she saw now, was considerably different from the one in the telegrapher’s office with its fleur-de-lis and silhouette of a Gallic rooster, the crest she’d first assumed was Vanderbilt’s doing.