Toward the Sunrise (2 page)

In any event, Julia left the dog at the convent, where the sisters agreed to care for it until they could place the dog in a decent home.

Upon returning to the college, Julia found two members of the Philadelphia Police Department waiting for her. When she refused to tell them or Dean Kreutzer what she’d done with the dog, a disciplinary hearing was ordered for the following Wednesday.

So now she sat on this hard wooden bench, awaiting her fate. She had been given an opportunity to address the board, but the charge was an ethical violation for the theft of a dog, and she couldn’t deny that she was guilty as charged. Nor could she state with a clear conscience that she regretted her actions, which was what they needed to hear from her.

Julia had wanted to become a medical missionary ever since she was twelve years old and had pulled down a volume of
The Travels of Marco Polo
. Her world had changed forever. That creaky old leather volume, filled with hand-colored prints and maps of the Far East, sparked a spirit of adventure that lit her soul to this day. She dreamed of caravans traveling the Silk Road, of the austere beauty of the windswept Mongolian plains, of the perfumed gardens of Kublai Khan. She dreamed of someday seeing these lands with her own eyes, and why shouldn’t she? She could combine her love of science with the craving for adventure by becoming a medical missionary.

Medical missionaries weren’t charged with teaching the Bible or converting the natives. Julia would be useless in such a capacity, but by working in faraway places that had never seen a formally trained doctor, her life would be an example of Christian charity and selfless acts of service.

The unlatching of the door broke the silence of the room as Dean Kreutzer emerged. Julia stood, wondering if the others would follow, but the dean was alone, her steel-gray hair upswept into a stiff bouffant, her lips tight.

Dean Kreutzer closed the door. “Miss Broeder, it is the unanimous decision of the board that you lack the maturity and judgment to proceed with your education here. You are asked to leave the college immediately.”

The blood drained from her face. The room tilted. Until this very second she hadn’t truly believed they would expel her. How should a person react when every hope, ambition, and dream was crumbling into ash? For the first time in her life, Julia didn’t know what to do or say. She stood rooted to the floor with her mouth hanging open, mute and helpless.

“The train to New York leaves at six o’clock tomorrow morning,” Dean Kreutzer said. “I will make arrangements for you to be driven to the depot.”

And with that Julia felt the door slamming on her entire world.

2

Julia left the college the next morning with nothing but her two battered old traveling satchels. After riding the train to New York City, she took a steamship forty miles up the Hudson River to New Holland, a village too tiny to be on most maps. She walked down the rural lane toward Dierenpark, the historic estate where she’d been born in the groundskeeper’s cottage.

Tightly laced boots were never intended for walking long distances, and her feet screamed for relief after trudging the two miles from town. The traveling bags pulled on her arms, and she dreaded telling her brother she’d been ousted from medical school only six months shy of graduation. Emil was a good-natured fellow, but he had enough responsibilities on his hands without the ignominious return of his younger sister.

The November breeze was chilly, and her boots rubbed blisters onto the sides of her toes, forcing her to walk gingerly. Why did women feel compelled to buy such ridiculous footwear? She’d searched for practical shoes, but no shop in Philadelphia carried ladies’ boots without at least a two-inch heel, so now she limped home like a victim of a Chinese foot-binding contraption.

She rounded the bend to Dierenpark, one of the grandest homes in America. Rough-hewn granite pillars guarded the entrance of the estate, but its gates were open, as was always the case at Dierenpark. The mansion was still another half mile behind the gates, but the groundskeeper’s cabin was only another hundred yards behind a stand of ancient hawthorn trees. Maintained by generations of Broeders, the cabin had a wide covered porch and a row of windows across the front. She mounted the steps, dropped the two bags with a thud, and knocked on the front door.

It felt odd to knock for permission to enter the home where she’d spent the first eighteen years of her life, but no one had expected Julia to ever live here again. After college she was supposed to become a doctor, venturing out into the world carrying medicine, hope, and a desire to do good things. She wasn’t supposed to limp home with
all her worldly possessions clutched in two sodden traveling bags and fall upon her brother’s mercy.

The door jerked open, and Emil’s broad frame filled the opening. “Julie!” he said with a wide grin. He tugged her into a rough hug, the air gusting from her lungs at the ungainly embrace. Sometimes men as big as Emil didn’t know their strength. He brushed a swath of blond hair that fell into his eyes back from his forehead. “We didn’t expect to see you so soon. Wait until you see the babies; they’re as big as ham shanks.”

She had to admit to being excited to see the twins again. They’d been born while she was home last summer, and they’d been so tiny they fit into the crook of her arm. She stepped inside the cabin, the familiar scent of apple cider and wood smoke in the air. The main room was spacious, with a wall of river rock framing a fireplace so big that when she was a child she could stand inside it without stooping over. Comfortable seating was scattered in clusters, and a battered old table doubled as a work surface and dining space. It was messier than she’d ever seen it, with baby nappies drying on haphazard laundry lines throughout the room.

Emil handed her a towel, and she swiped the damp from her hair and coat, but at the same time, she instinctively walked to the large crib to inspect her nephews. They had dark hair like their mother, but both had the round, innocent faces they’d inherited from Emil. One boy was sound asleep, but the other happily gnawed on a rag doll and gave her a drooly smile.

“Where is Claudia?” Julia asked.

“Oh, she’s in bed. She hasn’t been feeling so well.”

Julia turned in concern. She had already completed her coursework in obstetrics, and four months after the birth, Claudia ought to be fully healed.

“What is the problem?” she asked.

“Morning sickness. I don’t know why they call it morning sickness when she’s got it all day long.”

Julia’s jaw dropped. “What do you mean, morning sickness? Is she with child again?”

“The doctor says she is two months along.”

Julia sighed. It was none of her business how Emil and Claudia conducted their lives, but how on earth were they going to handle another newborn so soon after the twins? Had she been here, she
might have recommended that Emil keep his hands to himself for a few more months. She would have thought Emil could have figured that out on his own, but he’d never been the brightest man in the valley.

“How long are you staying?” Emil asked, lifting a baby from the crib when the child started whimpering. “Things are pretty cramped ever since the twins came along. We still can’t hang the laundry outside because of all the rain, but we can find someplace to stash you for a day or two.”

She turned away, rubbing her thumb along the grainy surface of the fireplace rocks while she parsed her words. “I’m not sure. I am no longer enrolled at the college. One thing led to another, and well . . . I got expelled.”

“Expelled?” Emil asked. “Is that a good thing? Like some kind of spelling contest?”

A lot of people in town laughed at her brother, who was as thick as a bowl of oatmeal about anything other than puttering about in the gardens. They’d both attended school in the village, but Emil dropped out after only a few years.

“No, it’s not a particularly good thing. It means they don’t want me back at college.”

Emil looked confused. “Why wouldn’t they want you back? You’re the smartest girl in all of New York.”

But also perhaps the most reckless. There was no point in trying to think of ways to soften the message. She told Emil everything, including how unlikely it was that any other medical school would accept her after she’d been expelled for moral turpitude.

Emil sat hunched over on a footstool, exchanging uncertain glances with Claudia, who had dragged herself from bed upon hearing Julia’s arrival.

“So I’ve been expelled, and there is no going back,” Julia explained to them as she nursed a cup of tea.

“What if you wrote a nice letter saying how sorry you were? Maybe then they’d take you back?” Emil suggested.

But she wasn’t sorry. Even now, with time to reflect on her actions, she didn’t regret taking that dog to safety in the countryside. If she told Dean Kreutzer where the dog had been taken, the dean would see it turned back over to Ross McKinney and his friends. “I think it’s a little more complicated than that,” she said to Emil.

“What about asking the Vandermarks for help?” Claudia asked. “My daddy says they have more power than the president of the United States. The president has to ask Congress for permission to get things done, but the Vandermarks just unleash their lawyers.”

The Vandermarks had owned Dierenpark ever since two brothers sailed across the sea from Holland in 1635, staking a claim in the raw wilderness. It had been the Vandermark brothers who built this very cabin, and as their wealth expanded over the decades, they began building the grand mansion overlooking the Hudson River. Members of the Broeder family had been their groundskeepers since the early days, and the Vandermarks had always treated the Broeders well.

Not that Julia had ever actually met a Vandermark. The last Vandermark to live at Dierenpark had abandoned the mansion sixty years ago, after Karl Vandermark was found floating dead in the river. Three additional generations of Vandermarks had been born, and none of them ever came near Dierenpark, and Julia doubted they ever would.

But their lawyers came. An attorney for the family visited Dierenpark several times per year to inspect the estate, pay the taxes, and ensure the servants were performing their tasks. When Julia had been a child, that attorney was named Mr. Garfield, an elderly man with tremendous muttonchop whiskers who would pat Julia on the head and express amazement at how much she’d grown. He would pay the servants’ salaries and always asked if they had need of anything, for the Vandermarks were generous people who would be sure to provide for their loyal servants.

But when she was fifteen, there was a change. Old Mr. Garfield retired, and the job was passed to a new attorney, a young man with light brown hair and eyes the color of the summer sky. Ashton Carlyle’s elegantly chiseled face was handsome enough to make any young girl’s heart flutter, but at twenty-three he was far too old and serious for someone like Julia. She was a country bumpkin and he was a Yale-trained attorney who seemed to find her interest in Marco Polo amusing. He lived only forty miles down the river in New York City, but they were from entirely different worlds. He was glamour and excitement and style. Even in the middle of nowhere, he seemed to carry an air of metropolitan sophistication with him. Was it his flawless attire? His neatly clipped hair? He always wore a silk vest, and the buttons on his clothing looked like real ivory. In
the heat of high summer, when he shed his suit jacket, he still wore a starched collar with a vest and tie. For Julia, there was something appealing about a man who seemed so elegant in the middle of this abandoned, isolated estate.

It was Ashton Carlyle who had gotten Julia into college. The Broeder family had always been told that if they needed anything, they had only to ask the Vandermarks. Over the years, the Vandermarks helped with medical bills, repairs to the cabin, even funds for special occasions like holidays and weddings. But college? No one in her family had ever asked for such a substantial gift. And yet the Vandermarks were her only prayer of ever attending college, and when she’d turned eighteen, Julia had screwed up her courage to ask Mr. Carlyle if he could make it happen.