But Grant followed, still shouting for help. Eyes piercing on her, he bent to reach where her hands had moved.
“Almost got her!” he called to the people below. Even as he made a show of leaning to reach for her hands.
The instant before he touched her, Kerry let go her right hand, her left barely keeping its grip, and strained for the copper gutter at the edge of the slate along the north side of the tower. With her left hand, she did the same, just as Grant’s arm shot toward it.
She hung there, dangling, hearing the groan of the nails that held the copper gutter—nails that might decide not to hold this new burden of weight. Inching her way as fast as she could, she slid her hands, bleeding, down the gutter. She was past where Grant could reach her now, but her fingers were giving out.
She was almost, almost at a different section of roof. If she could just . . .
With a rasping screech, several nails pulled loose, the gutter peeling away from the slate. No time to think now. She swung both legs toward the slope of the front-facing roof and launched herself toward it.
Slamming into the top of a fourth-floor dormer, she clawed at it, seizing the sculptured finial at its peak and holding on with both hands. But almost immediately the finial, only ever meant for ornamentation and never to bear the dead weight of a person, was pulling up from its nails, about to give way.
Shouting came below her, and still from above: Grant calling for help for the poor, grieving kitchen maid who, he’d say, tragically took her own life—though in that so-common last-minute regret, she’d tried to reverse her decision, too late.
He was counting, she knew, on the triumph of gravity and of angles.
The finial pulled free and then slate was sliding under her body with nothing, now, to grip as she slid. Three stories beneath her, she knew, were the limestone slabs of the front terrace.
Then her feet found the next edging of copper gutter. For the moment, it arrested her descent.
From below came voices shouting to her to hang on, to slide down, to hold fast.
Slowly, Kerry found her balance, as she had so many times as a girl on a mountain cliff. Slowly, she stepped her way carefully, so carefully, along the gutter, leaning hard into the still sharply pitched roof.
She was almost to another dormer, this one positioned so that she could hold on a moment and straighten.
Inching along the roofline, she reached the dormer’s edge. And now risked another look down. Still three stories below to the limestone slabs, but now the glass dome of the Winter Garden rose to meet her.
The portion of gutter where she teetered was now giving way. Crouching with the dormer to help her balance, she leaped for the copper edgings of the glass roof, hitting its edges with a painful thud. She let her body slide down the panes of copper and glass to the edge of the domed roof. Her whole body hurt, bruised and scratched and aching. But now she was perched at the lower edge of the dome, the flagstones only a story below. And a crowd of people whose faces she couldn’t make out, her vision swimming, were running toward her. Were reaching out arms to help ease her final climb down.
Just before she swung herself down from the edge of the dome of the Winter Garden, Kerry paused to look up. Madison Grant was leaning out over the stone railing, his eyes narrowed to slits on her.
“Thank heavens!” he called. And he waved a kind of thanks to the crowd.
Kerry knew in that moment how it would be. His version of the story that he would tell: himself as the would-be rescuer of the poor kitchen maid who leaped that fateful day from the very top of Biltmore House in despair, who changed her mind at the last and struggled to save herself. Who, thankfully, did not drop all those scores of yards below to her death, but whose memory, poor thing, of the events became understandably rattled.
It would be his word against hers, and his would be the story most people heard and believed. But she lifted her head, let him see her face, bruised and bleeding as it had to be now. Let him see that she knew. No matter how many people he seduced with his wealth and connections and sheen, no matter how many he convinced to see the world as he did, she knew what he was.
Chapter 58
Lilli turned as George took her hand to help her down the stairs of the front entrance, and for a moment she nearly held on. Nearly tilted back her lovely face and told him it was all a mistake, her arranging to go back to New York.
Biltmore Estate was in full bloom now—dogwoods and tulips and azaleas, George had listed for her, along with who knew what else. Lilli cared little for landscaping, but she did like a bold palette in life. And Biltmore was that in the spring.
The house towered above her. Like a call. Reminding her it wasn’t too late. That maybe, after all, she didn’t have to leave . . . that this still could be hers.
The footman with the hideous brogue might have caught her indecision as she slowed and glanced back toward the house. He raised an eyebrow at her.
George—bless him—squeezed her hand. “I am sorry that you can’t stay.”
Leaning into him because, even now, she could not quite give up the chase entirely, she squeezed his back. “I only wish that I could.”
His expression grew softer still. “I do understand family concerns that demand one’s attention.”
“Yes,” she said. Because he did. Bless him. A man loyal to his family.
She looked deep into his brown eyes, poetic and almost sad. And she saw there a man who, with a bit more managing—more long walks with Cedric, more of her earnest questions about his Sargents and Renoirs on the walls, more long rides into his precious mountains—might well have been convinced he was in love.
He’s been swimming about in the net for weeks now, she’d chided herself. All that’s left, the final hauling in. Yet she found, to her horror, that she could not do it. That she liked George Vanderbilt far too well to marry him.
Because for all his worldly travels, George Vanderbilt still had the heart of a boy—one who expected to love and be loved. Expected to trust and be trusted.
Honesty, Lilli found, had become her undoing.
The more she’d grown to like him, the more she’d discovered she couldn’t deceive him about who she was and the lengths to which her drives and instincts as a person of action might take her. Nor, she found, could she deceive George about her own feelings. Which, to her mortification, ran in another direction entirely. One she could never act on.
In fact, he was coming right now. The Italian groom, tailed by his little brother a few yards back, was approaching.
Her heart seized.
But hearts could be ignored.
“Mr. Salvatore Catalfamo,” she said.
He stopped beside his employer. “Miss Bar . . .” He did not finish her name, as if it had caught in his throat. He looked away. And then back. The black of his eyes, as always, intense. And now also sad. So terribly, ineffably sad.
“Mr. Catalfamo,” Lilli said, rescuing him, “I wanted to mention to you and to your employer that I’ve learned Leblanc was hired by my father, and that he will be leaving Asheville altogether. I’ve telegrammed my father to call off the search for the men who”—she would not use the word murdered—“were accused of Chief Hennessy’s death.”
She and Sal exchanged a look, raw and painful on both sides.
Sal Catalfamo might have every right to expose her father as a possible instigator of the riots and lynchings, and as someone who profited from the Italian community’s losing control of the waterfront. And perhaps he would do so. Though for Sal’s sake, she hoped not—desperately so. Her father and his kind had a way of pulverizing all who crossed them.