Under a Gilded Moon(3)
“‘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.
Nobody mentioned the reason for this whole journey: their daddy himself.
As the train clattered out of the station and began gaining speed, Rema’s needles clacked in time with its crankshafts and wheels. Her dress, made of yellow homespun, hung crookedly from her shoulders, like from a broken clothes hanger. She’d insisted on taking the twins so Kerry could go up to Barnard. But maybe Kerry shouldn’t have let her.
By Pennsylvania, the twins had sprawled over the bench and were sleeping, Tully’s head and Jursey’s feet in Kerry’s lap. They were thirteen this fall and both growing lanky, their bodies often shifting at the same moment, as if nudged by the same dream. But their faces, Kerry noticed, lay serene—unusually so for both of them. As if now that their older sister was back with them, all was bound to be well.
Which Kerry knew could not be true.
Having left well before dawn, the Royal Blue, an express, reached speeds of ninety miles an hour and covered the distance to Washington in an impressive five hours. But after they changed there to the Southern Railway, the stops were slowing their speed. The four of them settled back in for the rolling Virginia farmland. And now, after a longer stop and a train change in Salisbury, North Carolina, where George Vanderbilt’s car was decoupled from their previous train and attached to the new one, the land was buckling still more from hills to low mountains.