She winced at her own use of the word crime.
With his crocodile’s smile, Grant thrust both hands in his trousers. But Cabot only looked out toward the mountains that swaddled the estate.
The visitors followed their host past the last of the conservatory’s orchids up through a walled garden. On his opposite side from Emily lumbered the Saint Bernard, Cedric—at his master’s heels, as the great beast seemed to be always.
“Pauvre petite bête. The mountain woman, I mean. Poor little thing. She may even have overheard the two of you sparring. As if she needed more humiliation in a day.”
Cabot stiffened.
But Grant waved this away. “Cabot fears, I believe, that I might tamper with the young woman’s affections, given the chance. He implies, in fact, that I have rather the reputation of a rake, albeit an aristocratic one. Although I cannot help but ask: Why is this young mountain woman a particular concern of his?”
Lilli tried on the role of magnanimity. “It was broad-minded of you both to take an interest, however peculiar, in simple mountain folk. Imagine setting up a kind of roadside stand right outside Bon Marché with those two smudge-faced younger versions of her—those hideous roots they actually thought someone might buy? I suppose it captures your eye, Mr. Cabot, for the tragic.”
He looked at her. But said nothing.
Lilli’s gaze followed George’s. She was thinking of him now in more familiar terms, by his given name—at least in her own thoughts. His eyes ranged over the gardens. Even here at the end of autumn, various shades of greens and browns and maroons swirled among the walkways.
She lengthened her strides under the blasted skirt. “What an artist your Mr. Olmsted is. To think of building a formal walled garden here in the midst of these mountains. And what a lovely view from down here of the house.”
“We were hoping for just this effect, transitioning from the French Renaissance style of the house down to a formal garden, and from there, pathways through the woods that shift one still farther—to the forests of the New World. By spring, the roses should be well established. And well before that, the tulip bulbs we’ve imported from Holland and the azaleas just there up the bank should be well in bloom.”
Lilli let her arm brush his. “Roses. And tulips! How I’d like to see that in spring.” She looked up, the very picture of guilelessness, into George’s face.
“Then indeed you shall see it, Miss Barthélemy. I very much want to share these mountains with those who appreciate their beauty.”
She slowed her pace and he turned, brushing against her. “I hope,” she said, “you count me in that number.”
The fear that flickered over his face was probably a good sign, mixed as it was with pleasure. She stirred something in him that was not boredom.
“I wonder, Mr. Vanderbilt, if I might have your permission to explore the inside of your stables before dinner?”
His features relaxed into a genuine smile. “As the house isn’t yet officially open, I suspect dinner will be rather a test. We’ve hired not only a chef whom Hunt recommended from Paris but also several locals from the mountains here. I expect a few shots to be fired.”
She laughed with him. “Might we be safer, then, staying in the stables and missing this first battlefield dinner altogether?”
Nearing the front entrance of the house, he paused. “It is ridiculous I should have thirty-five bedrooms for my guests alone and currently be able to offer you only enough space to change for dinner. But with the construction . . .”
“I say.” Grant was approaching. “Are you really living above the stables? We’re all quite comfortable at Battery Park—lovely views from the verandas—but wasn’t it rather preemptive for you to move out of the Brick Farm House and over here where the work is—if you don’t mind my saying—far from complete?”
“The question is, now that I’m settled over the stables, whether or not I’ll be convinced ever to move into my chambers once they’re complete.”
Lilli exchanged a glance with George that said she knew just how he felt. A nice moment of connection—that could be built upon.
The footman, Moncrief, burst from the front doors, balancing, just barely, a platter of flutes. “Champagne?” he asked in a low, dignified voice. But a grin cracked through his attempt at aloofness and calm. “It’s Delbeck, the best that’s grown, they say. Take you right off your head, that it will.”
One side of Vanderbilt’s neatly trimmed mustache twitched. He lifted a flute in a toast. “To good champagne, then, yes? And to enthusiasm.”
They toasted with him, lifting their glasses high in the cool mountain air.
“And to your remarkable Biltmore,” Lilli offered. “A place like none other.”
To Biltmore!
Glasses clinked. Moncrief proffered more flutes. More tinkling glass. More toasting. And behind where they stood, the crunch of footsteps on the macadam drive. Murmured words, too. Lilli stepped away from the group to take in the house from near its front door, her head resting nearly on her back as she gazed up.
Near one of the stone lions, an older woman whose face was a homely web of wrinkles and whose hair was a striking, unlovely red striped with gray stood talking with the young mountain woman they’d encountered earlier.
Lilli Barthélemy wasn’t the type of woman who intentionally overheard conversations—eavesdropping would’ve been far beneath her. If, however, others chose to bare their lives in her hearing, she refused to trouble herself and step discreetly away.
Kerry—was that the name Grant and Cabot had been squabbling over?—leaned in toward the old woman, who didn’t appear to realize anyone else might overhear.
“Gone and changed up your mind then, have you, hon? Bless your sweet heart, you’ve had a time of it. You look rode hard and put up wet.”
Her back to Lilli, this Kerry person was shaking her head. “Daddy won’t be leaving the bed, ever. We’re out of money. I’m out of choices.”
“I know, hon. I’m sorry.”
“I won’t sell the farm. Ever. But the stable area here’s bigger than every cabin left on our ridge, every farmhouse in the village, and the dry goods store, put together.” She sighed. “Which tells me Vanderbilt and his people can wait until our hundred acres of overworked soil gives out not even one wagon of sheaves and a handful of twig-skinny carrots.”
Lilli was startled to feel a frisson of compassion for the mountain girl.
The red-haired old woman patted the girl’s hand with her wrinkled paw. “Hon, you’ll be needing some in-betwixt care for your daddy. You’re already purt nigh wore out, that’d be clear. You count on me to fill in some gaps, hear? Bet they’ll let me slip off now and then for kin who’s toeing up to the pearly gates.”
“Since I need the twins to lay out of school to take care of him till I take back over at night, I asked if Miss Hopson could round up some books for us. I think they can be disciplined enough to . . .”
She trailed off there. Seemed to realize the Biltmore guests had fallen silent.
Life magazine couldn’t have pictured the contrast better, Lilli thought. The rough and ragged—but not wholly unattractive—mountain people standing outside the shimmering sprawl that was Biltmore. Surrounded by the mountains where these people had lived—isolated, no doubt—for so many scores of years.