Under a Gilded Moon(2)

“Nico!” The second man, a tweed cap flopped at an angle on his black hair, held the boy close. “Ero cosi spaventato! You cannot wander away when I turn the back for even the moment.” He held the boy’s face in his hands. “I won’t let them take you from me again.”

Kerry crossed her arms to close up the hole, the ache she felt in the absence of her own brother and sister. Which gave the telegram its pull.

“What on earth,” she murmured to her old teacher, “have those two been through?”

A movement from the gentleman near the clock made her glance back at him. He was bringing two fingers from his right hand to his left lapel—like some sort of reflex or sign. Holding them there.

Turning, he met her gaze. A shock of dark-blond hair dropped across his forehead. Stiffening, he dropped his hand from the lapel.

A contradiction, she thought: the elegance of the top hat, the arrogant set of the shoulders—against the something else in his face she couldn’t quite read.

“So, then,” Miss Hopson was saying, “I gather your father’s illness is serious.”

“The fact that they sent a telegram . . . No one has cash money for that. And Western Union tends to frown on bleached apples as payment.” Kerry held up the rectangular paper.

YOUR DADDY GONE SICK. ME & TWINS WISHING WE COULD CARRY YOU HOME.

“Gone sick means dying, since it’s a cable they can’t afford. The me & twins means my aunt Rema’s counting on my missing my brother and sister something terrible fierce—which I do. Counting on that winning out over the terrible fierce that brought me up here. The carry isn’t just slang for bring but also her saying I might need help going back to what, whether I like it or not, still is home.”

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.’”