Tully sniffed. “Aunt Rema said she’d be back around lots to help out caring for Daddy. But for now she’s all moved in here to the castle.”
Kerry stalked to catch up with them. “We do not need any castle!”
Like their heads could swivel on a single neck, Tully and Jursey both looked away.
Kerry reached for a softer tone. “Not when we have each other.”
Biltmore House was going from lilac to a light pearly gray as the sun, sprawling low and golden over the tops of the mountains, began rising higher now in the sky. Encircling it were autumn patches of scarlet and ochre and topaz mixed with green bands of hemlock and balsam.
Kerry shook her head. “I’ll look at the mountains. But I won’t look at that house. Castle. Whatever it is.” She faced sideways.
Tully was the first to speak again. “Looks honest to God like a quilt pattern. One of them Momma did most. Bear’s Paw, maybe. Or Lost Children.”
“Drunkard’s Path, looks to me,” Jursey said. “Or, no . . . Bachelor’s Puzzle.”
Kerry flopped down on the grass, knees and her book hugged to her chest. “Love in a Tangle. That’s what it is.”
Collapsing beside her, the twins gaped at the gray-violet sprawl of the house.
At least, Kerry thought, they know better than to comment on it.
“School,” she said suddenly. “You two are supposed to be in school.”
Jursey shrugged. “You got to find a job that pays during the day. Me and Tully, we got to take care of Daddy and things at the farm till you get back and take up the night caring. If a schoolteacher can learn us, we can learn our ownselves.”
“Teach. We can teach ourselves,” Kerry corrected, sighing. “Between the last couple of schoolteachers who left midyear and . . .” She could not add living with Aunt Rema. “And how plenty of people speak here, you two could use some attention to your education, don’t you think? I’m more to blame than anyone, my being so far away. Maybe I can get some schoolbooks sent down through Miss Hopson. For however long . . .”
When Tully spoke, her voice had gone boggy, wet and unsteady with tears that she rarely let herself cry. “Reckon Daddy won’t ever recover?”
Rather than answer, Kerry leaned over to wipe away a single tear. Which was so like Tully. And mountain women. Controlled. Restrained. In grief and in hope. Because there was always more grief, and more hope, ahead.
Jursey, on the other hand, already had two streams of tears rivering down his cheeks. Just like he’d devoured his biscuits that morning in big desperate bites—with gusto. In case there were no more biscuits—or tears—to be had in this life.
The three of them stared down the long slope of green toward the house.
Dragging a heel that was coming unstitched from its sole across the grass, Jursey pondered. “Maybe you could check that inn where them people from the train station were staying—Battery Park. They might be needing extra help there.”
“I don’t . . . ,” Kerry began. She pictured John Cabot and his stare that bored like a leather punch. Observing everything here like it was on display in a museum.
Primitive people of a primitive land and their pathetic attempts to survive now that their habitat had been threatened.
The village milkmaid.
She wanted to go nowhere near him or Madison Grant or their kind.
“I won’t—” Kerry stopped. Sighed. Pulled the twins to her.
This much was clear: she’d have to march through the grand hotel doors. See the glint of the marble, the glow of the ladies’ gowns, the stares of the gentlemen, pausing, brandy in hand. She’d hold her head high.
She glanced down. Her hands were blistered and stained a deep turnipy purple. Which no amount of holding one’s head high could hide.
Kerry sighed. “For your sakes, I’ll ask for a job at the Battery Park and any place this side of hell. Anywhere except Biltmore.”
Chapter 10
By twilight, Kerry had covered all of the village of Best and much of Asheville. Still no offer of cash-paying work.
Alone, she tromped past the train station. In the telegraph office, Farnsworth sat quietly smoking, feet propped up on his desk where a framed crest sat, the crest’s central shield surrounded by elaborate tendrils. Maybe, Kerry mused, workers all had to frame the Vanderbilt family crest when the village’s name changed to Biltmore Junction—who knew?
He did not look up as she approached, which was just as well. She needed to send a telegram but had no money for payment. Mountain people asked for no favors.
Digging in her skirt pocket for a stamp—her last from her Barnard days, when she’d had a small stipend with her scholarship—Kerry stepped to the trash outside the telegraph office and, head high, sorted through clean, though used, slips of paper. One was a telegram to Madison Grant.
LNA GROWS IN INFLUENCE, PARTICULARLY AMONG ERUDITE.
GALLIC ROOSTER LIKE THE REICHSADLER AND BALD EAGLE GAINING STRENGTH.
CONTINUE TO SPREAD MESSAGE: THE RACE WILL BE LOST IF WE CONTINUE THIS WAY.
An odd message. Maybe about the wildlife preservation efforts Grant alluded to on the train? Kerry crossed out its handful of words and scrawled out what would no doubt sound like a desperate handful of her own, addressed to Miss Hopson:
In need of schoolbooks for the twins, now thirteen years old. Bright but . . .
She hesitated here, then scratched out the last line, torn between the truth and loyalty to her siblings—to her mountains, as well. And to the one-room schoolhouse that educated its students well only with the rare kind of teacher she’d had herself, the twins having had Miss Hopson for just four years before she’d left for New York. After Miss Hopson, there had been a span of almost interchangeable teachers whose reformer’s instincts and good hearts had not even remotely prepared them for so many students at so many levels with so much need. One after the next, they grew thin and sad, and then left.
Very bright, but in need of remedial grammar . . .
She sighed.
Mathematics, science, geography. Anything helpful. Truly.
Warmest regards,
Kerry
She refused to give in to the shame of how the letter would look—no proper stationery, not even a fresh page. Kerry folded the former telegram so that it was blank on its outer two sides, then added Miss Hopson’s address at Barnard and the stamp. For its seal, she stepped to a pine tree that grew near the tracks, wiped a stick over nodules of sap, then knelt at the tracks for a sliver of charcoal spit from an engine’s smokestack. The glue would have been better if she could have heated the sap and the charcoal together, but this would do.
Farnsworth had been watching her, evidently, as she’d scavenged and scrawled. He stroked his beard.
“I’d be grateful, Mr. Farnsworth,” she said, handing the letter to him, “if you’d see this gets out with the next post.” She’d walked on before he could ask questions.
Following the line of hemlocks, she rambled back past the gazebo with its marble goddess. The twins not here to witness her seeing Biltmore—really seeing it, for the first time in two years—Kerry stared down the long slope of grass.
She’d rarely in her life struggled with envy, not even as the scholarship student strolling with her Barnard peers up Fifth Avenue as the cabriolets and four-in-hand carriages of the merchant princes passed. But now, back in her own mountains . . .