“From in here I can still hear you!” the chef called from the next room.
To the twins, who’d paused at the door to listen, Rema tossed a fried pie apiece, steam slipping from their slits on top where cinnamon gold oozed onto flaky brown. “Go on, now.”
Jursey brightened. “We’re fixing to see to Daddy, then go climbing for possum grapes and muscadines, if there’s any left. Mess of cattails down by the pond here. Reckon folks’d miss a few shoots if’n I broke off a handful to boil?”
Tully wagged her finger at him. “We don’t take a thing off Mr. Vanderbilt’s land. Kerry can’t be losing the last job she’s ever like to get.”
Rema winked at Kerry as the twins turned to leave.
“Don’t stop for talking with Mr. Bergamini,” Kerry called after them. “Go on now, fast.”
Tully held up a hand like a flag to signal she’d heard as they thundered away.
“And also,” Kerry said—mostly to the pastry crust, though partly to Rema—“our friend Mr. Bergamini’s hiding from something. Going by a name that’s not his. Rumors he may be an extortionist, a thief, and a killer. Oh, and an anarchist.” She turned to the sink and began scrubbing baking pans stippled with grease and flakes of crust.
Rema poured a concoction that smelled of butter and thyme and chicken and cream into a pie shell. “I got me plenty of friends with lots of straight in their narrow. Time I had a few with swerve in their wide.”
From the next kitchen, Pierre groused a rumble of sounds that only occasionally formed a sentence. “The pastry in there,” he called at one point. “I can hear from all these yards away will be heavy.”
Rema smiled serenely as she pinched together the upper and lower crusts in a crenellated circle. “Not the way I cut in the lard real good.”
“Lard! Do not speak to me of the lard. I can see already that I will need a hatchet to cut these . . . pies in a pot, however you call them.”
“Is there nary a chef in Paris with more sugarmouth in him? I’d a thought a place like Biltmore wouldn’t settle for mean and liable to char the cheese both.”
Mrs. Smythe bustled in, then blinked in surprise at the silence she found on entering, only the scraping and splash of Kerry’s scrubbing and a soft, tuneless humming from Rema. “Ah. So on the culinary front, no one’s got the cob on—no bad moods?”
Rema beamed up at her. “Nothing but fair weather between me and my friend Pierre.”
“Splendid.” Spotting Kerry, she sighed. “Miss MacGregor, I do appreciate your industriousness. Never sitting off, not even for a bit.”
“I thought since I’ll primarily be working the dumbwaiters once Mr. Vanderbilt has moved fully in, and since there are no diners just now except . . .”
“Indeed. So for now, do see to the loggia at the back of the house. Yesterday’s storm dropped leaves everywhere, and it looks a poor show.”
Kerry hadn’t intended to cross paths with any of Mr. Vanderbilt’s guests again so soon. She’d meant, in fact, to avoid them altogether.
She found the loggia unoccupied—a relief. For all Biltmore’s splendor—its indoor commodes and hot water from faucets, its electric lights and a pool for swimming indoors, regardless of weather—her head ached with the vastness of it. She was beginning to feel like the creature years ago that her father caught in the stick-built trap set for whatever night prowler had broken into the smokehouse. The raccoon’s eyes in their black mask were so mournful, so repentant, Kerry had thrown herself on her father and begged for mercy.
Straightening from the wicker chair she was drying with a towel, she turned to admire the view, the rolling deer park and pond with the mountains rising beyond that. The air still held the muskiness of autumn, but with the sharp tang of balsam and the bitter cold to come. In the distance, she was sure she could hear not just the splash of Biltmore’s fountains, but beyond that the low roar of waterfalls.
The truth was she’d missed these smells, these sounds, these views so much it had hurt. For all she’d admired in New York, for all the ways it expanded her world, some bone-marrow depth of her had come back alive here in her mountains.
The November skies were a dark, menacing pewter. But she’d always loved November, the way the bare limbs of the trees opened up views that couldn’t be seen in the warmer months. Opened up secrets.
“It’s disconcerting, really,” a man’s voice said behind her.
Kerry jumped. Mrs. Smythe wouldn’t have sent a servant to clean the loggia this time of day if she’d suspected a guest would’ve ventured out into the wind.
Kerry glanced both ways for someone else Madison Grant might be addressing. Briskly, she swept at the leaves. “Disconcerting?”
It probably wasn’t the right thing to do, engaging in conversation with a guest. But also a direct address probably shouldn’t be ignored by a servant.
Kerry flinched at that word, servant. The talons of regret it gripped into her.
Grant swept a hand toward the view. “Rather disconcerting that on a day like today, it’s hard to distinguish the clouds from the mountains. Just range after range of the gray, all of it appearing to swell and move.”
This seemed to require no response from her.
“Disconcerting, too, how the panorama is unbroken by any sign of human habitation. Or does that remoteness not bother you, Miss MacGregor?”
“It’s one of the things I love most about our mountains, actually.”
One of his eyebrows crooked upward. “‘Our.’” He formed the word carefully.
She’d not meant to include him in the pronoun. “Those of us,” she clarified, “who’ve always lived here.”
Smiling, he turned back to the view. “I must admit that when I look at these mountains, I have the oddest, most unaccustomed sensation of feeling small. Almost insignificant, even, on some sort of grand metaphysical scale.”
Kerry applied herself to drying the next chair.
“The light like this,” he continued, “the color of sterling silver. Only with cracks of white in it. The immensity of it.”
The new wicker glistened with beads of ice, its fresh black paint still unmarred. If Mrs. Smythe were to peek outside from the tapestry gallery, at least she would see Kerry working, not standing and chatting with a guest.
“The peculiar thing is I’ve a lifetime of looking at the ocean—summers in Newport, mostly. But I’ve never felt quite this way.” He turned from the view. “Perhaps you’ve not seen the ocean?”
Rather than answer, Kerry bent to dry the next chair. Except for the past two years, she’d not left Buncombe County before. Madison Grant probably wouldn’t include in “seen the ocean” having walked past the wharves and acres of tenement housing on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and New York Harbor.
“But the ocean has never made me feel small. Dozens of times I’ve stood on the very precipice of the Cliff Walk in Newport.” He motioned to the drop off the loggia. “Easily as steep as this. And a scene that ought to feel as immense. And yet . . .”
Kerry straightened. “It’s part of the role mountains play in our lives. To make us feel small. Humbled.” She offered this without looking at him.