Tully was studying little Carlo Bergamini, dragging his left leg as he limped beside his brother. “How’d you go getting the gimpy leg?”
The child only turned large black eyes on her.
“A stumble,” his brother said. “Down the stairs.” He turned quickly away.
A lie, Kerry saw.
People only turn that swiftly away from their own words when it’s a lie. As if they can’t bear to face a mangled up truth of their own making.
“The porters,” one passenger sniffed as she swept by, “certainly do take their time unloading here. Why, in Boston . . .”
Those who’d traveled in the ladies’ car and the Swannanoa were overseeing the transfer of their luggage from railroad porters to stocky men calling out “Battery Park Inn!” and “Kenilworth!” Trunks swung up to balance on broad shoulders, then to the tops and backs of waiting carriages and hansom cabs. Horses nickered.
The Italian turned back to Rema. “If you would do the kindness, we ask only which is the way to the Biltmore.”
“The nighway’s what you’d be wanting, hon.”
“Closest road,” Kerry translated.
“Called the Approach Road—the give-out for why it got built. But it’s a good three mile long. Near up to dark now and nobody living there yet, so you’d be making the trek for nary a thing.”
He turned in the direction she’d pointed.
“But, sugar, if you’s bound and determined to set eyes on Biltmore tonight, fog and all, then the big ole stone arch, that there’s the gatehouse. Through it’s the Approach Road, whole heap of showing-off switchbacks and winding around.” She waved her arms in S patterns.
He gave a quick bow. Heaving his sack to one shoulder, he whipped the cap from his head and tossed it toward the twins. “Per voi due.”
Jursey snared it, and the twins squealed in delight. Plucking it from her brother’s grasp, Tully angled it on her head and tossed her braid back over her shoulder. Slumping, Jursey withdrew.
“Jesus,” Rema told them, “would want y’all to share cheerful-like. And me, I’ll snatch you bald-headed if you don’t.”
The not–Marco Bergamini lifted a hand to tip his cap—no longer there. Then he cupped his palm under Carlo’s elbow and the two of them walked on.
Tully and Jursey went leapfrogging over steamer trunks and hatboxes. Kerry, with Rema at her elbow, began searching for the trunk she’d borrowed. Probably buried by now under mounds of luggage being loaded onto carriages bound for the area’s largest inns.
Jostled from behind, Kerry stopped. The two gentlemen from the train were passing, the shorter one with the thick mustache, Grant, having turned to speak. He gave a deep bow, extending his top hat in a broad sweep. “Begging your pardon.”
“It’s quite all right. My siblings over”—she swallowed the yonder—“there. They’ve already stomped on half the crowd.”
From a few yards away, the Times reporter was waving to her. “Hope to see you again while I’m here!”
“Good luck!” she called back. With uncovering all those secrets, she stopped herself from adding aloud.
He might be just the man for the job: the slight, unintimidating frame and the sweet, eager demeanor—and behind that, a hunter’s nose for the story. If the meek could inherit the earth, maybe the kind could capture the truth.
The gentleman with the mustache stepped around in front of her now. “Do allow me to introduce myself. I am Madison Grant, of the New York Grants, and lately of Yale University. And this is John Quincy Cabot. Of Beacon Hill, Boston.”
This was clearly meant to impress, which amused Kerry. Underneath the top hat, Grant’s hair was thinning, but his face was unlined. Early thirties, perhaps.
The taller of the two, this John Cabot, the gentleman she’d seen at Grand Central Depot, lifted his own hat stiffly. He looked to be in his early twenties. Raking back the dark-blond shock of hair from his eyes, he nodded to her. “How do you do.” His jaw squared.
He would’ve been strikingly handsome, Kerry thought, if his face hadn’t been set so hard. Mean, almost. Like he was mountain stone and not a real man.
Cabot was already turning away. “Please excuse us. Grant, that must be Vanderbilt’s man over there, talking with the fellow on the ancient horse.”
Kerry followed his gaze. The fellow on the ancient horse referred to Robert Bratchett, who owned a farm high on a ridge up from the MacGregors. Or had, perhaps. Like everyone else, he might’ve sold out to Vanderbilt by now.
The skin of Bratchett’s hands was nearly as dark as his bay horse. He gripped the reins in his one good arm, his maimed one hanging limp. His horse’s hips jutted from behind the simple woven pad he sat on. The gelding was old, his front hooves pigeon-toed and gray brindling his coat.
Still, Kerry bristled for her neighbor at the word ancient. Especially from this outsider, Cabot, who’d know nothing of having no choice but to ride your one horse until he dropped, or you did—no choice but gratitude for every day you could both still walk to the field.
Kerry studied the rigidness of Cabot’s profile. “So.” She could hear chilliness steal into her tone. “You are guests of George Vanderbilt?”
John Cabot met her eye. “You know the gentleman, then?”
Surprise in his expression. As if she were clearly not the sort of person who would have crossed paths with the great George Washington Vanderbilt II.
She raised her chin. “We have had . . . dealings.”
Rema let out a snort.
But Kerry only raised her chin a notch further. Stiffening, Cabot said nothing.
“In that case,” Madison Grant offered, “I hope we shall see you again, Miss . . .”
“MacGregor.” She dropped the hint of a curtsy and was turning away, but stopped.
John Cabot was scanning the village—what little of the farmhouses and privies and cabins could still be made out through the fog and the dim light. Now he was studying Rema, her back turned, and the twins—their old boots with broken squirrel-hide laces and holes at the toes—thudding over the station platform’s pine boards as they chased each other around towers of trunks.
“On the outside of the station,” Kerry offered pointedly, “you’ll also want to take note of the tools hanging there—the axes, the rail dog, timber wedges, and hammers. For the men here who repair the railroad, not just own it.”
His gaze swept to her. He must have heard the defiance in her tone. One of his eyebrows lifted. But still he said nothing.
Rema’s hand dropped to her arm. “Back in my day,” she murmured to her, “we gave the good looking-est of the roosters some smidginy benefit of the damn doubt.”
But Kerry’s hands had already gone to her hips. “We are not a National Geographic Society feature, you know.”
He stared back at her.
“I’ve seen the magazine.” She’d seen it a total of once was the truth, and that one was Miss Hopson’s. “The photos of poor villagers somewhere in the world. Their quaint, primitive ways. To be gawked at by arrogant outsiders.”
Ignoring her aunt’s pats on her arm, Kerry stood her ground.
Locking eyes with her, John Cabot touched the brim of his top hat.