In love with the same woman as the reporter, a voice in her head warned her.
Maybe just words from an unreliable source. Still, there were too many things unanswered about John Cabot. And too great a divide between them. Every reason to keep her impulsive nature in check.
“I’m glad. For you, I mean. To stay on.” Kerry turned quickly away and slipped through the front doors.
From the back stairs that led down to the kitchens, someone was shouting her name. At the top of his lungs. With a thick Scottish brogue.
Stumbling and crashing over the lumber stacked in the service stairwell, Moncrief burst up from it. “Kerry, lass. It’s news. I’m so sorry, it’s—”
“My father.” Her head swam.
“No, I’m sorry, not that. I dinnae ken what I was thinking to scare you. It’s your house, I’m meaning. Your brother’s come with the news. Nobody’s hurt, but the roof, it’s fallen in.”
Chapter 29
Kerry and the twins worked all the rest of the day and most of the night. The roof had collapsed between the woodstove and the one bed where their father lay. Unconscious, at least, through it all.
“Please,” Kerry had asked Moncrief and Mrs. Smythe before she’d left, “don’t mention to anyone about the roof.” Because if John Cabot—or, for that matter, George Vanderbilt or the others—knew and wanted to help, she’d be mortified for them to see it, the collapsed roof and the cabin itself. Or if they knew and did nothing, she’d rather not know that, either.
And to the twins, she said, “None of us will tell the Bratchetts about this while we’re still fixing it, hear? We’re already so beholden to them.”
The roof was far beyond patching or buttressing now, the weight of the snow and ice on its rotted shingles and beams too much at last. Snow lay in bright mounds on the churn, on the rocking chair her father had made for her mother before the twins’ birth, on the foot of their father’s bed.
They bundled the sick man in quilts and carried him on a wool blanket serving as stretcher out to the barn. Romeo lumbered beside his master and slid himself into a full-bodied sprawl, again at Johnny Mac’s feet, in the barn. Kerry and Jursey hauled out the woodstove and cut a hole in a wall for its chimney pipe.
Not that all the cracks between boards won’t let out the smoke. And let in all the winter cold.
They restuffed the tick with dry pine needles they dug out from under the ice and settled their father on it.
“The sweetest he’s smelled for a long spell,” Jursey pronounced.
They salvaged what they could: the schoolbooks first—blessedly unharmed in stacks along a far wall—and then the table and the three chairs and the cast-iron griddle. And last but not least, the fiddle, the singing bow, and the two newly crafted banjos from their hooks on the wall.
As they passed where the bed had stood in the cabin, Kerry bent for a square of paper, old and yellowed, one side a sketch of a woman. It must have fallen from somewhere between the bed slats and tick. Kerry’s heart stopped.
She knew the face. With no photographs of her, this would be the one surviving likeness of Missy Murray MacGregor, a sketch her husband, Johnny Mac, must have done years ago. In the drawing she stood smiling, still young and unhurt by the world or her own marriage. She clutched a basket of eggs, wildflowers spilling out one side of it. Behind her on the ground scrabbled a couple of chickens and a rooster that must have predated King Lear.
Without speaking, Kerry waited until they were back in the barn with the stove stoked. Then she handed the sketch to the twins. They did not need to be told who it was.
The drawing between their two heads, the twins fell asleep on a quilt with no mattress or tick underneath.
“We’ll scrape out more pine straw tomor—” Kerry was saying, but might have fallen asleep before completing the word. The twins were already snoring.
Rema arrived at dawn the next morning and insisted she’d be taking more turns with Johnny Mac’s care.
“Mrs. Smythe’s got a whole army of cooks now. They ain’t near as good, so no chance of me losing my place.” She winked. “But with Mr. Vanderbilt’s family all descending on him like the plague from New York, they’ll be eating nothing but highfalutin Frenchified food for the next week. Mr. Vanderbilt, he’d take my biscuits any day over croissants, but it gives me some time to help out around here.”
She surveyed the barn as if it didn’t smell of manure, didn’t crunch with straw underneath. “Well, now. We’ll hang some quilts in the stall here, keep out the worst wind. Be right snug and homey. Woodstove. Table. Chairs. Got all we need.”
“And the fiddle Daddy loved, and the other instruments,” Jursey pointed out.
Rema kissed him on top of his head. “Goes without saying you brung those.”
She and Kerry exchanged glances. The weight Kerry felt—caring for her father, overseeing the twins, needing to work night and day, still missing the life that she’d left—had just gotten heavier still with the collapse of the roof and the move to the barn. She felt now like her own chest might cave in with the weight.
But Rema’s eyes held her steady. Helped her breathe.
Letting the twins accompany her since Rema was there to watch Johnny Mac, Kerry and Jursey and Tully half slid, half slogged back to Biltmore—just in time for Kerry to change into the black dress and white apron she loathed. Still, the whole house smelled of pine and cinnamon and cloves. Every fireplace on the main level blazed.
Sleigh bells echoing from far down the Approach Road, a team of Clydesdales trotted through the front gates in perfect step, a fine spray of snow from each landing hoof. From the steps of Biltmore, Kerry could make out the sleigh’s load: a magnificent Fraser fir.
Tully and Jursey and the children of other estate workers in the house and dairy and forestry crew had been pummeling each other with snowballs at the edge of the esplanade. Now they all stopped to gawk—the twins’ heads, Kerry saw with a smile, pitching left at the same angle.
What a gift to be young, Kerry thought. To not envy the glittering Biltmore and its acres of rooms. To not worry about how you’ll be eating or where you’ll be sleeping tomorrow. To just enjoy the moment, the snow, the beauty, the bells.
Kerry tried to remember if she’d ever felt young.
To her surprise, though, she felt herself smile. Snow did that to her. So did the twins. And the scent of pine. Helped her forget for a few blessed minutes at once.
Charles McNamee gestured to Vanderbilt across a line of staff gathered to watch the tree’s arrival. “From the Douglass farm. One of the larger single tracts purchased early on.”
Standing near Vanderbilt, Kerry hadn’t planned to speak out loud. “My neighbors.”
But then both men were looking at her as she watched the approach of the sleigh and its tree.
This time she faced them. “The Douglasses were my neighbors.”
Hesitating, McNamee edged closer. “She’s right. I don’t recall all the positions of all the farms without checking our records, naturally—not for tens of thousands of acres. But the earliest and the final ones are more vivid. I do recall the MacGregor land abutted the Douglass tract.”