From the breakfast room, Lilli Barthélemy suddenly appeared, hurrying down into the Winter Garden from its far side. She thrust a scrap of paper into her skirt’s waistband.
“Ah.” George Vanderbilt strode toward Kerry, who’d just picked up her tray from the hall table. “Splendid idea to serve tea in the Winter Garden on a wet November day.”
Stepping down into the glass-domed room, Kerry arranged the sterling pieces on a table near the fountain: the tea and cream and sugar beside mounded pastries on the left and buttermilk biscuits on the right—Pierre and Rema drawing their battle lines even on this platter.
Lilli Barthélemy lifted a chocolate croissant from her plate, its fragrance wafting toward Kerry, who, with effort, did not let her eyes drop ravenously to the platter. “Goodness, how I’ll miss Biltmore.”
Lifting his teacup in a kind of toast, Vanderbilt said, “Then you must return to Biltmore, all of you. In the New Year.”
Lilli Barthélemy placed her hand on her chest. “How lovely.”
She moved to admire an etching that hung at eye level. As Kerry swept past, the woman raised her tea almost to her lips and tipped it, tea splashing down her front. Without Kerry’s having touched her.
“Comme c’est triste,” she said, running a hand across the satin.
Vanderbilt was quick to turn. “I’m so sorry. Was there an accident?”
With an excess of graciousness, she smiled at Kerry. “Don’t blame her, please. It could have happened to anyone—an unintentional jostle was all. We’ll just step through here and repair the damage.”
Before Kerry could protest she’d not touched Mr. Vanderbilt’s guest, she was being pulled into the corridor, the door closing behind them.
Lilli Barthélemy plucked the scrap of paper from her waistband. “I wonder if I might ask you about something.”
Kerry took a breath, but didn’t let it out yet. With the breath might come all sorts of words that could end this job, her way of supporting the twins. Her eyes dropped to the woman’s skirts. “Your dress appears as if it will weather the damage I didn’t do to it.”
Lilli Barthélemy raised an eyebrow. “You’re a cheeky one, aren’t you?”
“If by cheeky you mean straightforward.”
“Then I shall be straightforward in return. Perhaps you’d like to elucidate why you blanched the other day when you saw a letter delivered to me.”
Kerry paused, sifting out what she could say like separating turnips from the weeds they were yanked up with. “It reminded me of the handwriting of an old friend.”
Lilli Barthélemy took her measure. “And?”
“And it startled me.”
“What I mean is, what did you make of it?”
Kerry returned the steadiness of her look. “You might imagine why I’d hesitate to say more.”
Lilli Barthélemy crossed her arms and appeared to consider how to proceed. “If by chance the handwriting you saw was indeed that of an old friend of yours—which would be rather extraordinary, of course—I would ask you this: Can he be trusted?”
“There was a time I’d have said yes without hesitation.”
“And now?”
“Now there are . . . things about him I don’t recognize as the same man.”
“I see. Let us be honest, then—as one woman to another who knows what it is to have men pursue them.”
Kerry said nothing, waiting.
“I’m well aware our stations in life are different. But let me be blunt: your looks are striking. And you are surprisingly well spoken for a mountain . . . sort.”
“Surprisingly?”
Lilli Barthélemy was plowing on. “You no doubt know what it is to receive unasked for—and often unwanted—attentions from men you hardly know. Come now.”
Kerry only tipped her head.
“At any rate, I would ask that you say nothing to anyone of these letters.” The woman stopped there, as if realizing too late she’d used the plural. She stepped closer. “I can assure you, the arrival of these has been loathsome to me.”
“That I can see.”
Lilli Barthélemy looked frustrated with their exchange. She frowned. “You may depart.”
Instead of a curtsy, Kerry managed only a nod and strode down the servants’ passageway.
With the Saint Bernard trotting close by her side, Kerry darted toward the library. She wouldn’t have long before she’d be noticed missing. On top of a half-unpacked crate, she ran her fingers over the first editions—Dickens and Austen and Eliot.
But she had little time.
Before seeing Ling’s shop, she might have convinced herself that Grant’s mention in his telegram of a bald eagle and a certain sort of rooster—and whatever the German word meant—were simply allusions to birds in danger of extinction, or maybe species he meant to secure for his new project, the Bronx Zoo. All the servants who’d served a meal or afternoon tea or even collected coats for George Vanderbilt’s visitors had overheard plenty about Grant’s wildlife preservation. But the flyer covered in glass on the floor of Ling’s ruined shop was related to or produced by the LNA, the group cited in Grant’s cable. So the telegram must have been referencing something far more sinister than avian extinction.
Kerry pulled down a stack of bound Atlantic Monthly collections she’d cleaned and shelved. Miss Hopson had subscribed to the magazine. A photograph in time, she liked to say, of American intellectual culture. The fact that Vanderbilt viewed them as worthy of keeping and binding by year in fine leather underscored this.
Surely, then, if any periodical might hold a clue to the views Madison Grant and his sort were spreading . . .
Heart racing, she flipped through one at a time, scanning for mentions of the Ligue Nationale Antisémitique or anything else that even remotely might fit with the letters LNA. She could have asked John Cabot what he made of the mention of the bald eagle or the rooster in Grant’s telegram, but somehow she wanted to trust herself first to find some sort of clue.
One after another, she scanned commentaries on Grover Cleveland. On the overcrowding of American cities—teeming sewers and filthy streets. On the poverty of tenement housing. On the robber barons and their opulent homes.
The Vanderbilt name came up often. The railroads they owned. The mansions in Newport and New York. A few mentions, even, of Biltmore.
One article addressed a growing distrust in Europe and the United States of Jews and immigrants. Kerry scanned it quickly, her eye caught by images of national pride in England (the Barbary lion, the rose, St. George’s cross), Germany (a coat of arms with a black eagle), and also France (the fleur-de-lis, among others). None of the articles mentioned the Ligue Nationale Antisémitique in particular. Several, however, alluded to a nationalist fervor growing not just in the United States but around the world.
Kerry raced to finish flipping through the recent editions. Still nothing specifically about LNA. And now she could hear voices as several guests passed through the main hall toward the grand staircase. Which would mean they’d be changing for dinner. And that she’d be needed in the butler’s pantry quite soon.