“I didn’t mean to imply . . .”
“Had a schoolteacher during my growing up who took her job serious.”
“Could you tell me more of her?”
“Miss Annie Lizzie Hopson. Give her a hell of a lot of credit, even being a lady schoolteacher. She could learn an old shoat to read. Give out books.”
“Books that . . . forgive me, but were these books she bought herself and brought here? As a kind of . . . ?”
Tate spit to one side. “If you’re meaning charity . . .”
“No. I didn’t mean that.”
“She’d got people she knew in New York—college up there—took to sending down boxes of books. She took to spreading ’em out. Gave out pulled taffy candy to us kids for memorizing big ole hunks of poems. Plays, too.”
“Like,” Cabot said after several beats, “The Merchant of Venice, perhaps?”
“All that. Stayed a right smart while. Back when folks here still lived on their own land.” He stopped there, voice tight. “Back before there was foreigners here. Back when things was safe.”
As Sal watched, Dearg Tate shifted his gaze to the Grant fellow. Sal thought for a moment they exchanged nods, like men who knew each other. But he dismissed that; they were from two different worlds as much as Sal and Tate were. Maybe it was just the shared detachment in their eyes that joined the two of them for him. Sal knew all too well how full the world was of men who appeared aloof just like this, even as they molded that world to their own liking.
Turning back, Sal was only vaguely aware the conversation behind him had ceased. Gently, he ran a hand down the mare’s left front leg. Leaning his own weight against her body, he lifted the hoof.
“Bergamini!”
Sal jumped, but hung on to the hoof. The last thing this horse needed was for him to drop her foot painfully to the ground.
Slowly, he ran a finger to where a stone had wedged its point between the wall of the hoof and the tender part of the foot’s underside, its frog. After prying the stone out bit by bit so as not to further the damage, he traced the laceration.
“Bergamini, may I ask why you have left your work to play blacksmith?” Schenck’s w’s had gone to harsh v’s again: vork.
But Vanderbilt turned to the forestry manager. “I wonder if I might ask Mr. Bergamini a few questions.”
Schenck appeared to make himself pause before answering. “But of course.”
Vanderbilt knelt next to Sal. “Mr. Grant thought he detected a slight limp up that last hill, I believe, but he was rather deep in conversation.”
The scowl Sal delivered said there was no conversation so deep it warranted ignoring an animal’s pain. Lowering the hoof along with Sal, Vanderbilt patted the mare’s shoulder.
“Forgive me.” Vanderbilt directed this last comment to the horse. He turned to Sal. “I assume we should lead her back and not ride?”
“Si. Yes. No ride. The Arab in her is her strength—but also her weakness. She will not show she is in the pain. Perhaps much in the pain.”
“She does have Arabian in her, you’re right. For endurance.”
Sal ran a hand down the mare’s nose. “And for the looks. The Arab is the most beautiful of the horses.”
“You have experience with the breed, I take it?”
“In Sicily, we had much of the conquering. But it has given to us the architecture that is beautiful, and much varied. And a line of the horse descended from horses of the desert and the horses of the knights. The Middle Ages.”
“You have a preference for the horses of the desert, then?”
“The lungs are strong. The hooves are sound. They drink less of the water. They need less of the food. The intelligence, it is superior. The heads”—he returned a hand to the mare’s nose with its pronounced dip, its wide nostrils, its eyes large and deep set—“the most beautiful of all.”
The others in Vanderbilt’s party had drawn close, including the young woman whose horse had nearly trampled Nico and him in the forest that first night.
Cabot lowered his head toward Vanderbilt. “You may have found a new addition to the staff of your stables.”
Despite the clang and shush of the digging behind them, the lady whose horse had reared in front of Sal appeared to be listening with particular interest.
Vanderbilt addressed Sal. “You are the young man I met in Florence.”
“Si. I am.”
“And yet you grew up far to the south, in Sicily?”
“There was no longer the work in Palermo. But when I was a boy, my father, he cared for the horses of a landlord and also the horses to rent.”
“A livery stable?”
“Yes. For the tourists to Palermo who came off the ships. From him, I learned much.”
“I remember now that you not only took care of the luggage but also cared for the horses at the Pensione DiGiacomo.”
“Si. This is true.”
“And I recall that they were beautifully tended.”
Sal knew pride was a failing, but so was pretending not to know his own expertise. “Yes. The finest of the care.”
Vanderbilt tapped his crop. “Your name, as you know, has been included among the suspects for the death at the train station. Many would advise me not to bring a man still under a cloud of suspicion closer in to my home.”
A cloud of suspicion. As if this were new.
Sal could picture himself back in the darkened room near the Café du Monde, a few blocks from the wharves. The points of cigarette light and the hissed whisperings as he and Cernoia and the other dock workers argued.
Hennessy needs to be taught a lesson . . .
Insanity, all of this! The last thing Italians here need is to be suspected of murder . . .
“I will bring you no trouble,” Sal said. The pronouncement was weak—even he could hear that. No protestations of innocence. No proof. No alibi.
Gathering the reins of his mare, Vanderbilt motioned with his head. “Mr. Schenck, I assume you can spare this man while I decide if he might not be better suited elsewhere on the estate?” Biltmore’s owner waited for a nod—reluctant, but a drop of the head all the same—from his forester, then turned back to Sal. “Mr. Bergamini, if you’d please come with me.”
Sal could feel the eyes of the two young women on him, but he knew better than to look either one full in the face. Especially not the one he’d met in the woods. The dangerous one.
“So,” that one said softly as Sal passed, “le bandit a trouvé une cachette.”
It was not difficult French to translate, even for a Sicilian whose language lessons came from hauling Parisians’ luggage and laying out their Florentine picnics.
The bandit has a hideout.
Without thinking, he turned. To find her eyes on him.
From what he’d overhead on the train, one of these women must be the daughter of Maurice Barthélemy. And he knew now in a shattering flash, it must be this one.
Whipping back around, Sal jogged to catch up with George Vanderbilt and the limping mare.
God help him.
The daughter of Maurice Barthélemy.
Chapter 17
Kerry rose before dawn and groped through the hay in the henhouse for eggs, Goneril and Regan pecking at her hand. King Lear strutted about, unwilling to ruffle his feathers by engaging. Cordelia hunched in the corner, her little head low.