Which meant that this was either John Cabot’s shirt, or it belonged to someone else who’d been at the scene before. Someone, perhaps, like Madison Grant.
And now the doorknob was turning.
Chapter 28
Kerry might have tossed the flaming shirt back into the fire before Madison Grant had fully swung the door open, but she surely didn’t smooth her expression in time.
His gaze flicked to the fireplace, then stayed on her. “Well. I’m a fortunate man to find you alone.” He ambled toward her. Extended a hand as she stepped back.
With a jangle of the key ring at her waist, Mrs. Smythe bustled to the doorway. “Kerry, dear—” She stopped when she spotted Grant. Her voice tightened. “Excuse me, sir, but we’re needing the staff downstairs.”
The rebuke in her tone might have made another gentleman blush. But Grant only smiled cloyingly at the housekeeper. “Naturally.”
Hurrying past him, Kerry did not meet his eye.
All throughout dinner, as the sterling clattered and the string quartet played, Grant squinted toward the doors of the butler’s pantry at the far end of the banquet hall—watching for Kerry, it appeared. Unloading platters from the dumbwaiters to give the footmen, Kerry could see him repeatedly turning to stare each time the servants’ entrance swung open, but she could mostly dodge out of his line of sight.
For once, she was grateful for her place at the bottom of the social hierarchy of Biltmore: it kept her walled off tonight, quite literally, from the advances and demands of these people who made as many outfit changes over a single day as they had courses at dinner. It kept her cordoned off, too, tonight from her own swirl of emotions, all the questions she’d not yet managed to answer about who could be trusted. And who couldn’t.
As the pantry door swung open and closed, she caught glimpses of the diamonds winking, the starch of the men’s winged collars, the women’s long strands of pearls. The conversation rolled through the door’s crack in snatches. Snippets of travel observations. Bits of flirtation. Shreds of questions about Biltmore’s forest.
“It’s the acoustics of our banquet hall at Biltmore,” Mrs. Smythe had said while they’d set the table, as proudly as if she’d designed the house herself. “They allow for a person to whisper at one end of the table and be heard at the opposite end. Remarkable, that.”
Which would explain all the diners stopping at several points through the long dinner to listen to Madison Grant.
“The pronghorn,” he said at one point, “is actually an artiodactyl mammal, not an antelope, although it is often referred to as one colloquially. We at the Boone and Crockett Club have determined the pronghorn is facing annihilation. It falls to us to protect them and their habitat. Without intervention, they’ll not only cease to thrive, they will cease to be.”
Later, it was Grant’s voice again audible over the others: “Their sort flooding in from Eastern Europe, from Russia. So restricting their immigration is key. The diseases alone they bring threaten the . . .”
The electric and manual dumbwaiters hummed and rattled as Kerry loaded the dishes of Rema’s muscadine cobbler topped with Pierre’s cream onto silver platters. But all evening she kept hearing Grant’s words from that night at the station and that day on the loggia.
Another newspaper man who is a Jew. Extraordinary. Wouldn’t you say?
Annihilation . . . Breeding . . .
The words from those moments and this provided the rhythm of her night as she scrubbed pots after dinner and walked home through the dark.
Extraordinary. Wouldn’t you say? Invasion . . . Disease . . . Annihilation. Extraordinary.
As if by extraordinary Grant meant disturbing. As if Grant himself would have liked to see Berkowitz put in his place.
Or, perhaps, put out of the way entirely. Where Madison Grant’s reputation would be safe from whatever the reporter might have known about him.
The next morning, Mrs. Smythe gestured for Kerry to join the other servants outdoors. “It’s a poor show is the flimsy goodbye a guest is given in America, even from a great house. Back home, every servant of rank lines up proper. As it should be.”
Kerry took her place outside the front doors facing the esplanade.
Dusting off his top hat, Madison Grant was walking backward. “One last view of your magnificent hall, Vanderbilt. I shall look forward”—bumping into Kerry, he turned and gave a slight bow—“to returning quite soon.” He looked meaningfully into her eyes.
Emily Sloane smiled at Kerry as she and her friend passed, both elegant in dresses whose waists pulled in tight and plunged to a sharp V. The feathers of their hats brushed together as Emily tipped her head to say something, her eyes shooting toward where a stablehand was holding the team.
But Marco Bergamini’s gaze had fixed upon Lilli Barthélemy. Even in this frigid November air, his shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, his arms muscled and hairy—and strangely tensed. Like he was concentrating on not moving.
Lilli Barthélemy, though, appeared not to notice the stare focused on her. Kerry would not let herself look around for John Cabot.
Grant, his trunks from Battery Park already loaded, stood chatting with his host. “I do hope, George, there’s more progress forthcoming on the attack.”
Together, they walked to the carriage’s far side.
“It’s sad, this,” Mrs. Smythe sighed, “all the guests leaving. The only excitement now will be keeping the footmen smoking outside rather than in.”
All the guests, she’d said.
Inside the carriage, the ladies adjusted their satins and silks. No one else burst from the house as a last-minute addition.
So John Cabot was evidently leaving, too, without so much as a word of goodbye. Not that he owed Kerry a thing. They’d only shared a few hours of cleaning up a vandalized shop. That hardly made them intimate friends. And hardly answered all her questions about him.
Kerry kept her hands clasped in front of her waist. She would work her fingers to the bone in cleaning whatever Mrs. Smythe suggested. She would go home and be up much of the night taking back over for the twins in caring for her father.
By dawn, she would be done with all thoughts of John Cabot.
Marco Bergamini, his jaw set square, climbed onto the driver’s box and snapped the reins to the team. A matched set of bays, they pulled out in perfectly synchronized steps. Coats gleaming in the early morning sun, they looked not even remotely kin to the horses that roamed free through the hollows and hills.
The carriage rolled away on the right side of the esplanade. Oddly, Vanderbilt was no longer standing at the far side of the carriage.
From behind Kerry came the scent of pine.
“George mentioned it’s nearly time to cut wreaths for the doors. And to hang around the necks of the two marble lions here.”
Kerry turned to find John Cabot standing there, a fir wreath slung over one arm.
“He insisted when he returns from seeing his guests off at the station, he and I will try our hands at the task.”
Kerry made her eyes leave his and fix on the mountains. “I’d have thought you’d have left with the others.”
“That had been my plan, yes. But I had nowhere to go for the holidays, and George was gracious enough to offer my staying on.”