She raised her eyes to his. “I spent the past two years at Barnard—on scholarship—at the arrangement of a former schoolteacher who once taught here. I only returned this fall when my father became ill and my aunt, who’d cared for my brother and sister, came to work here at Biltmore.” At least, she thought wryly, I can say the word without choking now.
She shook her head. “Honestly, I don’t think I knew until coming back how desperately poor we were. I wish I could say, like you, that I’m the better for it.”
“Surely the additional education you received . . .” He spoke gently, nodding at the two novels she still clutched to her chest.
“Was a great gift. And also a curse. It taught me envy like I’d never known before. Knowing about what’s out there in this big world. What I might have become. It haunts me. Not all the time. But envy pokes its ugly head into my days.”
“To have to return under your circumstances . . . I don’t doubt that was hard.” His eyes swept toward the tall windows, where a bright winter moon lit the outlines of hemlocks. “And yet . . . forgive me if I’m romanticizing these mountains, but there’s something here that draws one in—and surely must draw one back. Almost whether or not you want to be drawn.”
“That’s right,” she said softly. “That’s it exactly.”
His eyes swung back to hers. “If I may be incredibly intrusive . . .”
In the charged silence between them, he waited. She looked back warily.
“I wonder if I might ask you about your . . . friendship . . . with Madison Grant.”
Kerry would’ve been less astounded if he’d asked her the recipe for lye soap. “My friendship with Madison Grant?”
“His . . . interest in you.”
Kerry saw again Grant’s face as he offered his help at the train station and Battery Park, as he stepped close to her on the loggia, ran his hand down her arm. But Kerry had assumed no one noticed but her. And Mrs. Smythe.
Cabot looked away and then back. “It has worried me.”
Kerry recalled what she’d perceived as John Cabot’s rudeness: his curtness at the station, his scolding Grant for flirting with the village milkmaid, for remembering her name.
“That he’d targeted you as an innocent young thing he could . . .”
“Seduce?”
“Well. Forgive me. Yes.”
“Mountain women, you may have noticed, are ferociously stubborn.” She studied Cabot’s face. “There is something Mr. Grant suggested, though. That Aaron Berkowitz and his attacker were both in love with the same woman: Miss Barthélemy, I think. Who might somehow have known them both prior to coming here.”
“But the attacker . . . ? Good God. You mean me.” He looked away. “There are a number of reasons I should be a suspect. But my being in love with Lillian Barthélemy is not one of them.”
The strains of the quartet, now playing Strauss in the gallery, rose and swirled, the crackle of the embers underneath. Gently, John Cabot lifted the books from her hands and placed them on the chess table that sat near the fire.
Then he opened his arms. “I wonder . . . might I ask you to dance?”
She saw awkwardness pass into his face as soon as the words were out. “That is . . . the waltz. I’m not sure if you know . . .”
She smiled up at him. “I did learn, yes. In New York. Part of my friends’ educating the backward hillbilly.” Just about to put her hands in his outstretched ones, she hesitated. “But if someone were to come . . .”
“Then they must grab a partner and join us.” He stepped closer, his evening coat smelling of wood smoke and leather book bindings and the outdoors. And a whiff, too, of Cedric.
Holding one of her hands, he opened the windowed doors from the library leading to the terrace outside. The moon lit the snowflakes like glitter sifting to earth.
With the distant strains of the quartet swelling, they stepped outside, faces upturned toward the bright flakes. Waltzing, they twirled through the falling snow.
Lifting her face as they slowly spun to a stop, Kerry stepped in still closer to John Cabot’s tall frame. Let herself sink into the kiss.
Sounds and sensations swirled around her, the deep stir of his kiss, the soft sifting of the snow on the pergola rafters and its withered wisteria vine. The far-off undulations of the violins. And from across the valley, the low bellow of a cow. She felt as if she had jumped from one of the mountain cliffs but found herself able to glide on currents of air. She moved still closer into the kiss, her arms twining tightly around his neck.
Slowly, slowly, she pulled her head back—but only to see his face. To see that his expression was inexpressibly tender, his eyes bright and intense on hers.
Standing there hearing her heart pound, Kerry suddenly went rigid.
“Marco Bergamini,” she whispered. Hardly the time to whisper another man’s name. But there it was, the words already out. “From bergamino.”
Cabot stepped back, his face quizzical—but not angry. He waited for her to speak.
“It’s a long shot. And Leblanc surely . . . But if they stayed in the woods while he searched it . . .”
“I’m afraid I’m not following you.”
“I think I know the place we ought to look for them next.”
Chapter 38
Leblanc glowered up at the night sky. Only moments ago, snowflakes had been fluttering softly down on his horse and him as they trudged through the estate. But now the flakes were landing with an icier, meaner plink, as if adjusting themselves to his mood. At least there was this: Catalfamo and that cripple of a brother of his could not travel far—unless they’d taken the train out of town like that chit of a girl, Vanderbilt’s niece, had said. If they were still here in this cold, they could hardly sleep outside without freezing to death from exposure.
That last possibility, he cheered himself, would at least expedite his mission. If he couldn’t drag Catalfamo back to New Orleans, he could at least deliver a copy of a coroner’s certificate.
Leblanc had no reason to distrust George Vanderbilt, who’d have nothing to gain by involving himself. And yet he did distrust him. Something about the man—a softness, maybe, around the eyes—made the owner of Biltmore look like someone who might just harbor a fugitive with some pathetic story and a cripple for a sidekick.
This estate of Vanderbilt’s was far too vast to ride over—something like a hundred thousand acres, maybe more—looking for a criminal. But the cold and now the sleet cut the scope of Leblanc’s search down immensely. If the two dagos were here on the estate, they’d have to take shelter somewhere indoors. For now, he’d done only a cursory search of the damn house, which was the size of a castle, and the stable, which was the size of a large house, since Catalfamo, like every criminal Leblanc had tracked, would have bolted as far away as he could from the one on his trail.
Only because Vanderbilt’s niece looked so stupidly sweet and innocent did Leblanc bother with checking the train station where she claimed to have seen the Italian on his way out of town. But the stationmaster and the telegrapher had both looked at him blankly, said they’d not seen the pair of guineas come or go lately.