Lilli’s eyes dropped to the child Nico. She felt an unaccustomed twist of guilt as he hobbled forward to rest his head on his brother’s side. The leg a result of the riots she’d witnessed beneath her window that night in New Orleans—and those riots incited by who knew what forces her father had sparked.
Later—tomorrow or next week or next year—she might think more about this. Might even confront her father about it.
For now, she knew only that she was making a sacrifice in walking away. More than one, and both of them painful. Saying no to position and riches and George, before he could ask her to stay as his wife. And saying no, also, to a passion that would come with a poverty, a social plunge she knew she could not possibly bear.
Suddenly, her hands went to her purse, jerking the silk drawstring open. She drew out a folded stack of pages, crumpled for the wear. Unfolding them, she handed the stack to George. “I should have given these to you long ago.”
He flipped through the drawings, his eyes going wide. Then lifting to her. “These are superb. Surely you didn’t . . .”
She laughed. “I surely did not. These were done by your stablehand here. Perhaps Richard Hunt’s son, if he’s still working with you, would be interested in taking on an apprentice.”
Nodding only once, briskly, to Sal Catalfamo so that no one, particularly not George, would see the bright wet of her eyes, she twisted away.
“I have dearly loved your Biltmore,” she whispered.
George brought her hand to his cheek and held it there for a moment. In a gesture, she thought, of a genuine friend. She wondered for a moment, wistfully, what it might have been like to be good friends with one’s husband.
“Au revoir, George,” she whispered.
With that, the footman, Moncrief, handed her into the carriage.
Because it was good manners, Lilli Barthélemy lifted a gloved hand in a wave to her host and also to the man she’d liked to have let herself love in some far distant world where income and background and rank did not matter.
And because Lilli Barthélemy had never looked back in her life, she turned her face toward the walled garden and the mountains beyond. And tried to breathe through the iron bands cinching in on her heart.
Chapter 59
Kerry twitched Malvolio’s reins, but the mule was already stopping. For so homely a creature, he had a way of pausing in a patch of sunlight, with dogwoods and redbuds framing his bony gray form, then looking over one shoulder as if he sensed a camera waiting. Just now, he’d chosen to stop on the hill sloping down to Biltmore near the statue of Diana, as if he and the goddess were two of a kind.
Kerry slid from his back. “I still say one of you should be riding him.”
Jursey shook his head. “It’s you got near up to killed.”
“A harrowing,” Rema pronounced, giving Kerry’s shoulders a quick hug. “That’s what you been through.”
“I’m fine. Truly.”
Although, truly, she wasn’t. Her whole body was bruised and sore. But that wasn’t the worst of it. She’d seen death before, but not in this way. And not so close together, going back to Aaron Berkowitz, who’d believed in the goodness of exposing the bad, if it was the truth.
Her father’s death had, in fact, become now an actual loss—the grief for the gentle, laughing fiddler of his sober days in her childhood and also grief for the penitent, physically broken but finally whole man at the end.
She grieved, too, for the man he might have been, the family they might have had, the calm that might have cocooned them instead of the turmoil that cycloned.
Adding to the weight of that grief was the loss of the land her father’s family had farmed for generations.
“It’s like,” Kerry leaned in to say to Rema, “somehow watching them shovel earth onto Daddy’s casket, and his signing that deed there toward the last without consulting a soul, it was like a burial of our whole family. Our pride.”
Rema shook her head. “Can’t nobody bury your pride but you. You just recollect that, hear? I reckon they handled it all respectful enough?”
“Yes. With apologies for the timing.”
“And a price more’n they agreed with your daddy.”
Kerry frowned. True, it was more money than any MacGregors had seen in their lives. But it was also just money. Not the land where for a hundred years her family had hauled the rock and plowed the fields. Made love in the groves. Watched the sun rise over the hemlocks. Birthed babies whose cries rang over the hollows. Then finally been laid to rest back in its soil.
“It was inaudible, selling the farm was,” Jursey offered now, poking his head between them.
“Inevitable,” Kerry corrected. “And you’re right, Jurs. It was. Also, it’s good you can go back to school.”
Miss Hopson, just joining them from her climb up the hill, smiled at Kerry. “How was your contract meeting with Mr. Vanderbilt? Not full of sound and fury, I hope?”
“We finished just now, in the Winter Garden. It was so”—she let the simplicity of her next word, a tiny one, carry the full weight of the day’s cargo—“sad.”
“But with a payment, I hope, that makes all sorts of opportunities possible for you and the twins.”
“And for Rema. I’m insisting she share it with us. Though she says she’ll stay in the kitchens of Biltmore a while longer. I think she likes a good spat over pastry.”
“You’ll not be coming back to New York, then?”
Kerry shook her head. “Not while the twins need me. And maybe not at all. It’s strange, devastated as I was to have to leave. But now I have so many ideas brewing of what I’d like to do here.” She reached a hand to her old teacher. “Thank you for all you’ve done for me. I won’t let all you’ve taught me go to waste, I promise.”
Crossing Biltmore’s lawn and strolling toward them came the Bratchetts, Ling Yong and Zhen, and the Catalfamos, invited here by Kerry—with George Vanderbilt’s welcome—to help give Miss Hopson a send-off before she returned to New York. Tully stood on her tiptoes to wave as the group approached.
Jursey stroked what wasn’t yet even fuzz on his chin. “I’ve been cogitating. We got plenty of cash money to buy something else. Not far from here’s a farm up for sale, Rema says. On Sunset Mountain near in to Asheville. One hell of a view. Or we could build us a small inn.”
Miss Hopson’s gaze swept over the house and the mountains. “Spectacular.”
Tully leaned into Malvolio’s shoulder and crossed her arms. “I was sure enough expecting to hate it leaving the farm. But I’m not feeling so much in the way of that now—even trying.”
Jursey leaned into Kerry. “You reckon all the pack of houseguests left Biltmore by now?”
“I suppose they have.”
Rema tried to meet her eye. “You said that peckerwood Grant snuck off back to New York?”
“He did.”
“Slithered off,” Tully suggested. No one disagreed. She snapped off a twig of redbud and slid it behind Kerry’s ear. “Will he get faced up to justice, you think?”
Kerry sighed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they can’t attach anything criminal to him. It was ideas that he was helping spread. That’s harder to prosecute.”