Miss Hopson nodded. “When you told me of the cable, I knew you’d feel you should go. So I took the liberty of trying to help—by sending a telegram of my own. A surprise, which I hope will be a welcome one, is waiting for you in the foremost car.”
Kerry looked to the farthest platform and back. “Whatever you’ve done, thank you.”
The train’s whistle sounded again. Another release of steam. Kerry felt her lungs contract.
“All aboard!” the conductor bellowed. “Royal Blue express to Washington!”
Kerry lifted a small leather-bound trunk, borrowed from Miss Hopson, and her own brown bag. Together, not speaking, they moved toward the train. Then suddenly, eyes wide, Miss Hopson gestured toward the end of the train. “My heavens . . . look.”
“They’ve hitched on a private car?”
“Not just anyone’s car. That’s the Swannanoa. George Vanderbilt’s, hooked to your train.”
Kerry tipped her head. “I’d say it’s more his train than mine. Since his family probably owns the tracks.”
A woman in mauve was waddling past, her several chins layered above a lace collar. “They say it’s elegant as a Fifth Avenue parlor, his train car is. But I don’t see Mr. Vanderbilt himself, do you?”
Miss Hopson flushed. “I’m not certain I’d know his face.”
“Oh, but from the society pages, surely! They say he’s built himself a new estate somewhere down . . . there.” She waddled on.
Kerry shot a wink at her old teacher. “‘Somewhere down there.’ Because like every New Yorker, her geography of the South includes some cotton fields, some tobacco farms, and one town that perhaps isn’t quite a city, Atlanta.”
Ladies in tight-waisted tan or gray or dark-blue traveling jackets and matching skirts swept toward Kerry’s train, their sleeves tight on the forearms but puffed so voluminously from the elbows to the shoulders that they walked well apart. The feathers and flowers of their millinery bobbed as they chatted. In the next wave of passengers boarding, two gentlemen in top hats meandered past.
“There,” said the taller of the two, shoving a shock of dark-blond hair back from his eyes—the gentleman from earlier. “That’s George’s car at the end.”
The other dusted a coat sleeve. “He couldn’t have picked a more unlikely spot for this latest venture. I understand the mountain people in the environs are rather a challenge. Ferociously independent, for one thing.”
“So I’ve read.” A stride in front of Kerry, the taller one turned back to check the time on the depot clock. “And tragically illiterate.”
Kerry fisted her right hand on her smaller brown bag, a flour sack she’d dyed with pokeweed and chicory. The effect was supposed to blend in with the rest of the traveling world’s leather, though the taller gentleman glancing down at it now cocked his head at it as if it were a museum piece from a primitive culture.
Heat flooded her face, her neck, her chest. She returned the man’s stare. “Ferocious,” she told him, “would not be the half of it.”
He blinked, startled.
But the train whistled again, and this time the sound spun Kerry back to her old teacher for a hurried hug. Somehow the gentlemen’s words, superior and detached, had launched her past a final gut-wrenching goodbye and straight, square-shouldered into what had to be done.
Miss Hopson placed a gloved hand on her arm. “Godspeed. And one final word.” Her eyes sparkled above her lined cheeks. “Just remember, ‘Have more than thou showest.’”
“‘Speak less than thou knowest.’” Kerry walked backward as she lifted the hand holding her sack.
“‘Lend less than thou owest.’” Miss Hopson ended the volley as she always did, with a blown kiss.
“Wait.” The waddling lady in mauve turned. “I know that quote. Is it the King James?”
But now Kerry was struggling to run with her flour sack luggage and the borrowed trunk toward a porter. She headed not toward the end of the train, where passengers in their feathered hats and satin lapels were boarding the ladies’ cars and the Swannanoa, but toward the first car. Where the smoke and the sparks drifted in—where the immigrants and the less moneyed sat.
She’d made her choice.
Which would likely, she knew even now as she ran, whipsaw her future into something far from what she’d worked for. Far from what she’d dreamed.
But so be it.
She’d heed her old teacher’s warning. She’d keep herself clear of entanglements, whatever power remained of the old currents and pull.
And she’d keep the resentment that burned in her bones toward her father in check. She’d have to—if she didn’t want to explode.
The porter took her trunk with a small bow. The flour sack luggage she pulled back from his reach. “This I’ll keep with me. But thank you. It has my”—she turned her head toward the blond gentleman, who’d paused a few feet away—“valuables.”
His eyebrow arched. Pausing, then touching the brim of his hat, he strode with his companion toward the Swannanoa.
Ferocious, she wanted to shout after him. And stubborn. Beyond anything you and Vanderbilt and your millionaire friends could imagine.
Chapter 2
Trailing behind the lady in mauve, who hauled herself up with the help of a porter, Kerry mounted the steps. As she made her way down the aisle, her eyes were still adjusting to the train’s blazing electric light, its royal-blue ceilings and mahogany walls and two rows of gleaming, front-facing wooden benches, and the cigar smoke that hazed around a man in a brown bowler. She had only an instant to brace for impact as two passengers toward the front of the car rose from their seats and threw themselves at her.
“Tully!” Kerry wrapped first her sister then her brother in a hug. “Jursey! How on earth?”
Squeezing them close, Kerry felt their hearts beating up against hers. Her own thudded louder, like it had only been just keeping time—a weak, grudging beat—these past two years so far away.
Tully flipped back a braid. “It was Miss Hopson did it, paid the tickets for us to come up. Said it’d do us a world of good getting to travel all snug together.”
Jursey said nothing but shyly held on to Kerry’s arm as if she might disappear again into the steam of the station.
Beaming, Rema looked up from her knitting. “Well now, here’s a sight for sore eyes. My Lord, how we’ve missed you, sugar.”
“And I’ve missed all of you.” Kerry surprised herself with how true this felt. How prophetic her old schoolteacher had been in arranging the family’s tickets—a gift of mooring lines to bring Kerry back home.
She lifted her head from the twins but kept an arm over both sets of shoulders even as the three of them huddled their way to the front of the car. “So, Aunt Rema.” Here was a woman who’d shot her share of black bears and mountain lions and the leg of one tomcatting husband, but who appeared to be cowed by New York. “What do you think of the city?”
Rema shrugged, sparing only a glance out the window. “Bunch a buildings that outgrowed the sky.”
Chuckling as she settled herself between Tully and Jursey on a bench toward the front, Kerry listened to both twins talking at once. News of the village schoolhouse—without a teacher again, four of them having left since Miss Hopson, who’d stayed there so long. Romeo, their daddy’s bloodhound, kept everyone awake with his snoring. The air smelled of apples back home, and apples were the only thing still growing strong on the farm.