The moment of stunned disbelief. Now Emily threw open the door and stalked forward. “Lilli, good God, how could you? And to blather it like this to a stranger!”
First confused, Leblanc reared back. Yanked at his collar as if he were having trouble catching his breath. Then smirked from one young woman to the next as Emily railed.
Sweet and guileless as she was, Lilli mused, Emily would never have caused this sort of scene if she’d known Lilli was acting. Lilli listened with a bowed head—a posture she’d never tried on before. When at last she looked up, it was at Leblanc.
“I beg you, sir, to leave the basements of the house unsearch—” Her hand flew to her open mouth. “Mon Dieu! I should have said nothing!”
Leblanc snorted. “I can promise this much: I won’t report this back to your daddy. But as to slowing me down on trapping Catalfamo again and hauling his ass back to justice . . .” He tipped his hat to her. “It’s my damn job. I do wish you bonjour, Miss Barthélemy.”
Lilli counted out retreating footsteps. She knew that in a moment she would need to turn, face Emily, and insist that she’d lied. And a very convincing choice of a lie it was, too. Because no young woman of their social class would have put her own reputation on the guillotine for something untrue. Which was why Leblanc had not hesitated in stomping to the vast basement to search.
Lilli felt a little lightheaded. She’d used the specter of scandal about herself to save someone else. If she was going to be a whore in some minds, then she might as well be one who had guts enough to stick her neck out.
“Walk with me,” Lilli said to her friend, who’d gone speechless. “While we talk.”
But before they’d crossed the courtyard, the maid, Kerry, burst from the porte cochere door, face horribly flushed. Her skirt ripped.
And, holy mother of God, her maid’s cap at the left side of her head, her apron horribly wrinkled, and her red hair as mussed as if she’d been brawling like some sort of street tramp.
The maid, panting hard, met Lilli’s eyes.
Emily, kind heart that she was, moved toward her first. “Are you quite all right, Kerry?”
The maid’s eyes stayed on Lilli’s. As if Lilli Barthélemy might be trusted to hear what was not spoken.
Lilli muttered a single word and did not make it a question. “Grant.” Then she added two more, because they had to be said. “Le bâtard.”
But before they had time to move, Mrs. Smythe burst up through the courtyard doors that led to the kitchen’s delivery entrance below. The housekeeper, so concerned with propriety, so distraught over Americans’ loose grip on culture . . . was running. And beside her was that smaller replica of Kerry.
“It’s Daddy!” the girl called. “Kerry, it’s Daddy! Rema and Jursey’s up with him now, but Rema says it’s the death throes, sure enough. And he’s asking for you.”
Chapter 52
Holding the last of the warm honey and whiskey to his lips, Kerry rose. Whiskey had done this man a world of harm most of his life, and her stomach roiled at the memories the thickly sweet smell brought flooding back. But maybe now whiskey could help him leave this life with less pain.
Rema laid a hand on her back. “You give your daddy all you could. And now what he’d be needing, we got no kind of power to give.”
Tentatively, as if afraid of disturbing the silence, Tully reached for her singing bow. Then handed her brother the fiddle. Jursey had gotten better on the instrument than Kerry herself ever was, she thought as she listened. Like their father’s, Jursey’s playing pulled all the shields away from your heart—left it exposed and raw to the sorrow of his notes.
In the corner of the stall near the woodstove, Nico huddled under a quilt. Rema knelt to offer the child a biscuit. Kerry could smell the ham and baked apples Rema must have carried here with her and slathered inside the biscuit.
“Grazie,” the boy whispered. “Grazie mille.”
“Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, we’ll find your big brother, sugar,” Rema told him, stroking his hair. “Don’t you fret none.”
Nico blinked back at her. Then seemed to decide this was meant to be a comfort. Biting down on the biscuit, he gave a weak smile. Then leaned forward to kiss Rema on the cheek. Which made the old woman’s eyes fill.
Softly at first, the twins’ voices rose like they were one, the very same timbre, then split into two, harmonized. Haunting.
Come home, come home,
Ye who are weary, come home . . .
Kerry leaned against the half wall of the stall and closed her eyes to listen. From behind her, footsteps she knew. Approaching slowly. Cautiously. Robert Bratchett. Ella just behind.
Thank you, Kerry mouthed, startled by the tears that welled in her eyes just for the gift of their coming. Just for their standing alongside the raw and ugly.
She waited through several more stanzas of the song. But then she had to ask. She leaned in toward Robert Bratchett. “Please tell me. About the photo.”
He turned, startled, to her. Several lines of the old song went by.
Oh for the wonderful love he has promised,
Promised for you and for me . . .
He raised an eyebrow.
Stepping toward the barn doors, Bratchett ran the back of his right arm across his forehead. Then dipped his head close to hers. “We both volunteered for the army, the Union army.”
Though we have sinned he has mercy and pardon . . .
“Plenty of mountain boys didn’t—for either side. Didn’t feel much connected to the federal government up North or to a bunch of slaveholders hadn’t ever so much as gotten a fingernail dirty. But your daddy and me, we volunteered. Got assigned to the same unit. Made it through, both of us, to come on back home.”
Kerry braced herself against a barn door for support.
“It was after the War things got stirred up. Packs of men, mostly come back from the Confederate Army, went riding at night. Terrorizing.”
Kerry gripped the door’s rope handle, the music from behind them swelling, Bratchett’s words floating somewhere on top. “And my daddy?”
“Your daddy wasn’t of them that went out night riding, no. Him and me were still friends. Our wives, too.”
Holding her breath, she waited for whatever was coming.
“But one night the riders come to him first, trying to bring him along to my place. He wouldn’t go.”
Bratchett’s good arm passed over his forehead and eyes again. Kerry could see he wanted to stop. Let the old song have the final say. But she would not let him look away.
“Your daddy didn’t ride with them, but he didn’t try and stop them, either. Told me later the bunch was drunk and bored, bruising for somebody to bully. Long and short of it, he was scared. They left your farm, come to my place. I fought them back, best as I could. Just me, maybe seven of them.”
Kerry’s eyes dropped to his arm.
“Only good news was Ella’d stayed overnight with a cousin in Black Mountain. No idea what they’d done to her if she’d been there. I’d have had to kill one or two, and they’d have strung me up, sure. As it was, they set the cabin on fire. Left me for dead.”
“On fire,” Kerry repeated.