“Abuts,” she corrected—smiling so it might not sound rude. “Forgive me, Mr. McNamee, but it’s still present tense. Still my farm next to the old Douglass place.”
The two men exchanged glances—oddly troubled glances, she thought.
Vanderbilt broke the silence, shifting his attention toward the sleigh gliding toward them down the long drive, the horses tossing their heads, the three men in the driver’s seat all windblown and beaming. “Glad Cabot was able to stay longer.”
“Poor fellow,” McNamee added.
Picturing the palatial home on Louisburg Square in Boston that the American Architect had featured, Kerry’s head lifted. But there was no time to ask why McNamee would call the owner of such a home a poor fellow.
The Clydesdales stomped to a halt in front of the stairs. Everyone talking and laughing, the sleigh bells still ringing as the horses shook their heads, the gathered crowd moved forward to help with untying the tree.
His cheeks flushed with the cold, John Cabot leaped from in between Marco Bergamini and Robert Bratchett on the driver’s seat. In his arms were boughs of evergreen of all sorts—white pine and hemlock and fir. Fumbling, he thrust out a hand to Vanderbilt and then McNamee.
Turning to Kerry, he fastened the ends of a balsam bough into a wreath and held it out to her. “For the neck of a lion, perhaps?” Dropping to his knees in the snow, he circled another bough around the neck of the other marble lion. He leaned back. “What do we think, Mrs. Smythe?”
The housekeeper nodded approvingly. “I think, Mr. Cabot, that you, sir, have a proper good eye.”
With his eyes brighter than Kerry had ever seen on him, he looked up at her. “The ridge up there—close to your farm, isn’t it? Yours and Tully’s and Jursey’s?”
“Yes. And . . .”
“Yes?”
“You remembered their names.”
“They’re your family.” He stood. Seemed about to say something more. But appeared to change his mind, sweeping his arm up toward the ridge. “It’s spectacular in the snow. The views. The hemlocks and hardwoods. Not completely deforested like so many of the acres George bought.”
Her heart squeezed as she pictured it. “Exactly why we could never sell. I’ll work my hands clear to the gristle first.”
She could see his eyes widen and fix on her—almost, she thought, too fixed. As if determined not to exchange glances with anyone else.
“I wonder,” he ventured, “if you’d be willing to show me your farm one day soon. I know it’s nearly the Christmas season and Mrs. Smythe has you working quite late in the evenings. But if you have a few hours off, would you and your brother and sister be willing to show me?”
He knew a surprising amount of her life. She yanked another long strand of twine loose from the Fraser fir where it was bound to the sleigh. Then raised an eyebrow at him. “So you can explore more of the oddities of hillbilly ways, Mr. Cabot?”
“Ah. Fair enough.” The shock of hair flopped onto his forehead as he smiled. “I won’t pretend to understand these mountains as you do. But I will tell you that I find myself drawn here. In ways I can hardly explain. As if I’d come home.”
Kerry turned with the loosed strand of twine in one hand. And the smile she gave back was genuine. “Actually, Mr. Cabot, you did fine just now explaining.”
Every available person on the estate, including several workers from the farm and the forestry crew—and the owner of Biltmore himself—bent a back to help drag the giant fir indoors and across the house to the banquet hall. The children of the estate workers bounced and milled about, snatching up twigs of fir, then sticking them behind each other’s ears and into frayed collars, all of them squealing.
“Proper gutted, far too crowded it is with all these,” Mrs. Smythe groused—but quietly, out of range of the ebullient George Vanderbilt. “Doing my head in, that’s what.”
A man smelling of tobacco and burnt sugar shouldered in beside Kerry to grip part of the trunk.
“Dearg.” She surprised herself at the stir of being both glad—the habit of years—and deeply uneasy. “It’s been a while since we’ve seen each other.”
“I seen you some. From a distance. When you didn’t rightly see me.”
“Actually, I saw you from a distance once, too. When I was walking through Asheville. There was the most awful broadside on a lamppost at the corner.”
Even as they both sidestepped along with the Fraser fir, he gave her a look full of flint and powder.
Then, strangely, his gaze swung to Marco Bergamini. And back.
Had Dearg seen them walking together from Riverside Cemetery and made some sort of assumptions?
At the hall’s end opposite the three fireplaces, Dearg and Robert Bratchett clambered up wooden ladders propped high against the far wall. From below, the Italian tossed them each one end of a long rope whose middle was looped around the top of the fir.
As a group of men below lifted and positioned its trunk into a tin bucket of water, the men on the ladders leveraged the tree’s top until it stood straight. Forming a half circle below, the children clapped, their heads resting on their backs as they gaped up at the giant fir. It was Tully who began to sing, her voice clean and pure as the winter air, the others joining in:
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree . . .
Close to where Kerry stood, Bratchett directed securing the tree. “Grown, spun, and twined it myself, this rope. Soaked that sapling for months before cutting the strips. Tie that one higher.”
Dearg scowled. “Reckon I can judge my ownself what’ll hold good,” he barked from the ladder.
The children’s singing faltered.
“A little higher.” Bratchett pointed. “Good. Now at least three more. But not so many they show up from below. That’s right. Tie the ends near the organ up there. That should hold.”
“Buono.” Marco Bergamini stepped back to survey their work. “Sembra buono.”
Dearg dropped from a fourth of the way down the ladder to land beside him. “How ’bout you speak English, Geppetto.”
Silence rippled over the room now until all was quiet. Dearg stood braced, head lowered slightly, like a bull ready to charge. “Had just about enough of your kind.” Spittle spewed from his lips, and he wiped his mouth with his shirtsleeve.
Raising an eyebrow, the Italian said nothing.
“You people come here, getting paid more to cut stone than I do to break my back digging dirt.”
“I have only just come,” Bergamini put in. But Dearg wasn’t listening.
It was as if, Kerry thought, some invisible hand were moving Dearg’s mouth like a puppet’s. Some other force slowing his movements, slurring his words.
“You come here with all your disease, and you sneak around scaring good law-abiding citizens. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re after.”
McNamee cleared his throat. “Mr. Tate, is it? Perhaps a short break . . .”
Kerry slipped forward to place a hand on Dearg’s shoulder. “Hey. What’s gotten into you?”
As if her hand were tongs just out of one of the fires at the opposite end of the room, he jerked away. “Don’t be thinking people can’t see what the hell’s going on.”