“Clear to the ground. Your daddy felt bad. Bad enough to help me rebuild—a good three arms between us.” He smiled sadly. “Thought he maybe could have stopped them.”
Robert Bratchett looked her in the eye. “He was probably right. They might’ve been worked up enough to throw some punches his way, but they likely would’ve listened to him. People respected your daddy back then.”
Kerry heard the back then and knew it wasn’t a barb. Just simply true. For most of her life, he’d been known all through this hollow as just a drunk. Who could fiddle the stars into falling.
“The crime your daddy laid at his own doorstop was maybe he could’ve said something. Maybe could’ve stopped Tate.”
Kerry’s mouth opened. But she was slow pulling out sound. “Tate?”
“Dearg’s daddy. Their ringleader back then. That pack always looking for who to hate next. Seemed like the poorer they got, the more land or jobs or women they lost, the more they went looking for trouble.”
“Tate,” she repeated, seeing Johnny Mac’s eyes again, round with terror back in the cabin when he’d asked about the attack at the train station. But no Tate could be connected with that—Dearg’s father long dead and Dearg not even in town.
“Kerry, your daddy had his demons, I know—and a temper like hell. But I’ve wondered if part of what made him rage so loud was the guilt—of back when he’d kept too quiet.”
A hemlock shuddered, its limbs slapping the barn, as the wind blew. Side by side, the two of them stood in silence.
Then Bratchett walked back toward the stall and the man lying there, his breaths just a faint rattle now. As Kerry watched, Robert Bratchett reached down and held Johnny Mac’s hand. From under the bed, Romeo moaned.
She followed Bratchett back into the barn, letting the strains from the fiddle and the singing bow and the twins’ voices flow past her like the brook past the corner of the old chapel.
Ye who are weary, come home . . .
It wasn’t that she believed just now the words they were singing. But there was comfort in standing nearby to listen. To feel the music swirl around her and hold her. While the fissures inside her widened and her tears came streaming at last. And the part that had been hardened against her father for years broke fully open now—not in forgiveness, not yet, but in raw, unguarded sorrow.
Chapter 53
Nico was all that mattered now.
Sal tensed, listening to the rhythm of hoof beats on the Approach Road’s macadam. Peering from behind the screen of rhododendrons, he watched a rider approach. But this was a slim man and well dressed, on a horse that held its tail high and its neck arched: Arab blood, Sal could tell even from this distance. Definitely not Leblanc and his rented dun.
George Vanderbilt cantered past. His head shifted right and then left as if searching for something.
Avoiding the shafts of morning sunlight, Sal moved swiftly through the forest. He would come only close enough to Biltmore House to get his bearings for the direction Kerry MacGregor headed when she walked back to her farm. That might at least put Sal in the general vicinity of the Bratchett farm—where Nico would still be staring blankly out at the world.
Sal felt the strength of his chest, his arms. He was ready to stop Leblanc however it had to be done.
He listened for the sounds of Vanderbilt’s horse receding. But now there were more coming. Galloping from just the other side of the bend in the Approach Road, nearest Sal.
As they burst into his line of sight, Sal crouched lower. But the first rider, his hat pulled low on his face, glanced right as if spotting a movement behind the rhododendrons. Leaning forward and right, he’d plunged with his horse off the road and into the woods before Sal could run more than a few strides.
With all the fury of years of running from a crime he’d not committed, all the anguish of knowing he’d been branded a vicious animal in this country he’d adopted, Sal swept a branch from the ground and spun, arm raised, to face the horseman.
As the horse shied violently left, the rider kept his seat, barely.
“Cabot! Mi dispiace. I thought—”
“You thought I was Leblanc. In which case I can only be grateful my head is still fully attached to my shoulders.”
A second horse—the Arab—broke through hemlocks to join them, George Vanderbilt breathing hard, and behind the Arab this time, another horse, riderless, had been tethered. “Thank God, Catalfamo. We were hoping we’d find you trying to make your way to Bratchett’s place. But Leblanc will look for you there at some point, probably soon. So Nico’s not there. We’re here to take you to him.”
Third in line behind Vanderbilt and Cabot on their horses, Sal leaned forward on the horse they’d brought for him as if he could by sheer force of will leap over the others to reach Nico first. But not knowing the way, he could only remain pitched forward, the gelding turning his head as if to ask why his rider’s body gave signals for speed when the rocky, root-webbed trail and the two horses ahead all demanded nothing above a fast walk.
They rose to a break in the trees. Sal’s eyes adjusted to the blaze of sun as they emerged from the thickly forested trail.
In the clearing stood a scattering of wooden structures. The one straight ahead, a small log cabin with no windows and its door left ajar, stood defeated, its roof collapsed.
Behind the cabin stood another, even smaller structure with some of its boards pulled loose, as if they’d been needed for another purpose. A chicken house sat to the left, its hens and rooster flapping and scuffling to announce the presence of the strangers. From the largest structure, a barn, came a deep bray.
At the barn door, two identical heads appeared, the red of the hair flaming in the clearing’s blast of sun.
“It’s all right,” Jursey MacGregor announced. “It’s not who we thought.”
Tully stood squinting at them down the barrel of an old flintlock.
“I can see that for my ownself,” she said. But did not set the gun down, as if, seeing what she’d seen of the world lately, she’d rather greet these visitors with a weapon already leveled.
“Where is—” Sal began. But no need to finish.
A third head appeared at the barn door—lowered, just a dark swath of hair. And a scuffle of hay as one leg dragged across the ground.
Sal slung himself off his horse, not even bothering to tether the gelding. “Nico!”
Clutching hard to the slight little body, convulsing now, Sal felt his own tears falling into his brother’s hair. “Nico. My Nico. You are safe.”
Words were being exchanged behind them. But Sal held his chin over Nico’s head, kept both arms tight around the slight frame. Let his brother feel safety on every side.
“May we speak with your older sister?” Cabot was asking the twins.
Even holding his brother to him, even flooded with relief to find Nico safe, Sal realized now the tension in the air he’d missed before.
The twins exchanged looks.
Tully gestured for them to follow. “She’s back in here. With our daddy. And some neighbors who’ve come to . . . say their . . .” She looked to her brother.
“Goodbyes.” He reached for his sister’s hand, like he could talk better if he felt his other half. “They come to say their goodbyes.”