Until the Dawn (19 page)

Sophie closed her eyes, praying she could find the right words to soften the old man’s intransigence about this house. “Your father wasn’t so very different from your Dutch cousins,” she said. “Karl Vandermark oversaw the local timber industry. Sometimes he rolled up his sleeves and helped saw wood at the local mills. People loved him for it. I know the Vandermarks were already fabulously rich from their shipping empire, but your father took personal interest in keeping the New Holland mill operating, even though it probably only represented a pittance compared to the rest of his income. When your father was alive, the pier was used for trading vessels and fishing boats. He employed hundreds of people in New Holland, but it came to an end when your family left the valley.”

The old man’s mouth tightened. “My father wasn’t the heroic saint this town likes to imagine him.”

It was an odd comment, but she didn’t want to gossip about a long-dead man, she wanted to save Dierenpark.

“Then
you
be the heroic man,” she said. “Break the string of bad luck you think haunts your family by some shining act of goodwill. Turn Dierenpark into a hospital or a school. Change the lives of people by doing something astounding. Be a hero.”

The old man’s face was shuttered as he stared into the distance. Had her words found some spot of softness inside him? It was impossible to tell.

“I think it is time for you to go find Pieter and ask him to take the climate readings,” he said. “Whether he agrees to take over the job or not, you need to stay away from Dierenpark. My family needs time alone.”

As Nickolaas had predicted, Pieter was reluctant to take responsibility for monitoring the weather station in her absence. Standing on the roof, he eyed the modest equipment as though it had morphed into a dragon he had been ordered to slay.

“What if I don’t do it right?” he asked. “Those men in Washington will be mad at me.” His face was marred by splotches from the bee stings, but with the vigor of youth, his body was rapidly mending. His spirit, however, had taken another blow, and he was back to the timid boy who feared every move he made was a mistake.

Sophie flipped open the notebook to where Pieter had been recording the numbers for the past few weeks and turned it over to him. “I’m going to sit on this stool and not make a peep while you do the whole thing this morning.”

He fidgeted, his shoulders curling in and a mutinous expression on his face. “I don’t want to do it. I might get it wrong. We can get Mr. Gilroy to do it.”

“But Mr. Gilroy hasn’t been with me each morning over the past weeks. Only
you
can do it, Pieter. You know this system better than anyone else in this house. Now, let me watch you take those measurements, and I’ll be here to help if you make a mistake.”

The boy swallowed hard and stepped up to the hygrometer, scrutinizing the tiny brass dials for a full sixty seconds before writing down a number. After he got moving, he gathered the rest of the data faster. Sophie stood to check his work, pleased to see he’d recorded everything precisely right. She beamed down at him.

“I knew you could do it. You will be so much better at this than Mr. Gilroy. Will you please do this for me while I’m gone?”

“I guess it would be okay,” Pieter mumbled. The anxiety in his voice wrung her heart, and she scrambled for a way to breathe a bit of confidence into a boy who seemed to fear the world.

“It’s going to be more than okay, honey—it’s going to be marvelous. The feeling of purpose you’ll have when you see those weather reports published in the newspaper, based on the data
you
provided—that’s a feeling of being needed you will never forget. Those reports get printed on the first page of the newspaper, right at the very top corner, because everyone wants to know the weather, right?”

Pieter nodded, a hint of a smile finally turning up the corners of his mouth.

On her walk home, she felt tired, dispirited, and the scent of rice pudding still clung to her. She’d made no progress in saving the house from demolition, and because she’d dared stand up to Quentin, she’d been banished for at least a week while the deadline for the demolition drew closer.

But at least she had made Pieter smile this morning. It was a genuine smile, based on the first hint of confidence and pride in his accomplishment, and that was a very good thing.

Quentin glared at the Gainsborough painting of the seascape, the sails of the skiff billowing in the wind. Mr. Gilroy had cleaned up the rice pudding, and now the painting looked pristine against the ivory wall. It had a joyous and exuberant quality. Almost transcendent in the way the light illuminated the majesty of the sea.

He hated it.

There had been a time when he loved nothing more than taking to the sea in precisely that sort of skiff. He and Portia
would rise before dawn and slip their sailboat from its mooring. Bodyguards followed at a respectful distance, but once he and Portia were at sea, they had no need for bodyguards. Their racing skiff was the fastest in the world, and they were both expert sailors.

They had been best friends since childhood. Portia was two years older than he, but they might as well have been twins the way they grew up. They both summered in Newport, and their families traveled Europe together, giving them a chance to explore their passion for sailing along the sun-bleached Mediterranean coasts and the Adriatic Sea. They hungered for adventure, and the sea offered endless realms of pure elation wherever they traveled. Their skiff was so fast it barely skimmed the water as the sails filled with air. They’d spent Quentin’s eighteenth summer in Venice, the magical city tucked along the northern shores of the Adriatic Sea.

As long as he lived, that summer would glimmer like a diamond in his memory. After a day of sailing, they’d tie up the boat, exhausted and sun-chapped but overflowing with life and exuberance. On days they took to the sea, they were not heirs to great fortunes, they were nomads setting sail for the edge of the known universe.

They sailed during the day, and in the evenings a stream of men came to court Portia. She was beautiful and rich beyond imagination. She was also laughingly disinterested in any of the men who came calling. She wanted the sea, and as the afternoon shadows grew long in the harbor, they pulled their boat into its moorings and explored the city. Always within call were bodyguards hired by Nickolaas, but Quentin and Portia were good at ignoring them.

They bought goat cheese from street vendors, listened to gypsies play mandolins in the distance, and there was nothing that wasn’t possible. Portia bought orange blossoms from a
peddler and wore them in her hair like a crown of flowers from a Botticelli portrait. As the moon rose, they dined in street cafés with artists and poets, with professors and merchant princes. He felt as if he were at a crossroad. There was nothing he could not do, and the world was alive with hope.

Portia wanted to learn the craft of boat-making and sail a schooner made with her own hands all the way to Canada. He was her best friend and he vowed he would make it happen for her. After they were married, he wanted to spend their first year sailing a boat of their own making around the known seas.

It hadn’t worked out that way. Their marriage had collapsed quickly, and Portia avoided him until Pieter’s birth finally brought the first hint of softening. They decided to buy a yacht suitable for taking a child and bodyguards with them, and they would try to recapture that lost dream of perfection.

The bodyguards could not save Portia from the tragedy heading her way. Cholera was a horrible disease that crippled some, while others were able to shake it off with little trouble. All the wealth in the world could not save Portia once she’d been exposed to the cholera bacterium.

Portia’s final days still tormented him. It shouldn’t have ended like that for her. How could she have been so fierce and alive on the sea but collapse in fear as she became convinced she was about to fall victim to the Vandermark curse? “All the Vandermark wives die young,” she had said in her delirium. Her restless body twisted on sheets soaked in perspiration, and nothing he could say would convince her she was not destined to fall victim to the same fate. She died three days after falling ill.

The sight of that magnificent Gainsborough painting reminded Quentin that there were days on this earth when it was possible to believe the world would never end, when laughter carried on the breeze and musicians played mandolins in the distance. He closed his eyes, trying to blot out the pain from
his leg and remember the scent of orange blossoms and salty air. Of youth and windblown days and the sloshing of water along Venetian canals.

The door opened suddenly. Quentin refused to open his eyes. Only Nickolaas would dare enter his room without knocking.

With a scrape and a thud, a chair landed at his bedside. “You’ve upset Miss van Riijn.”

Of course he’d upset her. That was the point of hurling his breakfast against the wall. He’d been drowning, and all she’d wanted to do was shove rice pudding down his throat. The girl disapproved of anyone who wasn’t as blindingly cheerful as she, and how could a person like that know about real melancholia?

He glared at Nickolaas. “And?”

“And I don’t like it. Miss van Riijn has insight into this house that I need. Something is going on. My father knew it, I know it, and Miss van Riijn knows it. There is something magical at work here.”

A bitter laugh escaped. “Spare me. I’ve no time for this.”

“How do you explain the water lilies that never die?”

“What do you mean, never die? Everything dies.”

Quentin listened with drop-jawed disbelief as Nickolaas recounted what he knew about the water lilies, gleaned from Sophie and confirmed by Mr. Gilroy, who had been questioning people in the village. The water lilies were vibrant and abundant, even though the tidal pull of the Hudson forced salty water upstream each day, leaving a brackish taint that ought to make a freshwater plant like a water lily impossible. The water lilies did not merely survive, they flourished. Only during the deepest frosts of winter, when the river was covered with ice, did they disappear, but with the first thaw, as water began flowing again, those lilies rose above the surface, as healthy as though they’d merely been hibernating beneath the ice.

Quentin pondered the mystery. “There must be some sort
of thermal activity beneath the river in that spot,” he said. “There are hot springs farther up the river, perhaps there is a similar phenomenon here. Somehow the heat is able to keep the lilies alive.”

“And the salt in the water? How do they survive that?”

He crossed his arms and thought. It did seem odd, but surely there was a rational explanation. He was no scientist, but plenty of plant life thrived in salty environments, and these lilies must have adapted to the area over time. “Maybe some sort of nutrients in the soil or water.”

“Or magic. There is a thriving oyster bed in that same spot. Oysters have vanished from the rest of the Hudson River, but they thrive in Marguerite’s Cove. It is a phenomenon with no scientific explanation.”

Suspicion began prickling across his skin. He wouldn’t put it past Nickolaas to try to pass off a bunch of folklorists and soothsayers as respectable archaeologists. “And you think the archaeologists you are bringing in are going to find evidence of magic?”

“I have no idea what they’ll find, but there’s been something unique about this land since the Vandermarks first set foot on it in 1635. It is why they named it Dierenpark, the Dutch word for paradise.”

There was nothing special about this piece of land. It was normal for people to endow historical curiosities with a mystical aura. It was nothing more than human instinct to indulge in sentimentality and the longing for something divine. There was a logical explanation for everything in the world, and a few decent biologists were likely to discover an explanation for the peculiar health of the water lilies.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” Quentin said. “You hire your archaeologists, but I want a team of biologists to examine the same spot in the river. I guarantee they will find a perfectly
logical explanation for both the water lilies and the oysters.” A rush of competitive spirit surged to life. There
was
something odd about the lush abundance on this estate, but properly trained scientists could provide an explanation.