Until the Dawn (4 page)

“I’
M
SCARED
of the dark.”

Quentin tensed but wouldn’t let frustration leak into his voice. “I know you are, Pieter, but we’ll find the candles soon and light up the entire house. Come sit beside me.”

They were in the kitchen, where the sunset filled the room with an eerie pink glow. Pieter was sullen as he flung himself onto the bench, and Quentin winced when the boy accidentally kicked his bad leg. Pain shot up from his shin, through his knee and thigh, finally hitting his spine. Dizzying pain swamped him, but he let no sign of it show before Pieter.

“Mr. Gilroy has gone on a hunt for some lanterns,” he said as soon as he could deliver the sentence in a normal voice. “We’ll stay here until he finds them.”

Although it would be a good idea for Pieter to learn how to confront the dark sooner rather than later. There were no goblins or ghosts looming in the shadowy corners, but Pieter’s imagination was likely to conjure them up at the least provocation. Pieter had been sleeping with a small light in his room
ever since the incident last summer, and nine-year-old boys shouldn’t need such crutches.

He ran a hand through Pieter’s silky hair, leaning in to kiss the boy’s head. Raising this child was the most important responsibility of his life, and so far he’d been failing. Coddling Pieter’s fears hadn’t worked. Neither had the parade of specialists and physicians hired by his grandfather. The only thing they had yet to try was forcing Pieter to directly confront his fears, and Quentin’s time to pull the boy back onto a solid footing was growing short.

Because frankly, Quentin probably wasn’t going to be alive much longer. His leg was getting worse with each operation, and his last doctor had warned he probably had no more than two years before his body finally failed him. How was he to raise this boy to manhood when the time was so short?

The day had been a catastrophe from beginning to end. For months he’d been preparing Pieter for this day, trying to erase the ominous tales Pieter had heard from his grandfather about the family curse and the haunted mansion that was the cause of it all. Pieter had become convinced he was destined to fall victim to the string of bad luck that plagued their family with each generation. The boy had wept a little this morning when he’d realized today was the day they’d be moving into Dierenpark, the mansion his grandfather had taught him to fear. Quentin had taken the boy onto their hotel balcony that overlooked Central Park and carefully explained there was no curse haunting their family. It all sprang from the jealous ramblings of people who took delight in the misfortunes of rich people. It had taken almost an hour, but Pieter finally relaxed enough to be willing to leave the hotel.

Then there were the problems getting the carriages up the hill. When Quentin went to town to arrange for another carriage, some morbid tour guide filled Pieter’s head with dark tales that
aroused every one of the boy’s old fears. Then Quentin had stupidly fired the servants before he’d learned where the food, the privy, or the candles were.

At least they weren’t hungry. A pot of stew had been simmering on the stove, and it was an explosion of flavorful seasoning, tender vegetables, and succulent beef unlike anything Quentin had ever experienced. Over the years, he had dined at the finest restaurants in Europe, but nothing compared with that stew. Perhaps they were all overtired and starved, but the moment they tasted the stew it was as if they were eating ambrosia from the heavens. And that Dutch sweet cake . . . with eight hungry men, Pieter, and a governess, each of them got only a single slice of cake, but it was sublime. Tensions had eased, people relaxed, and for a few moments it had felt like he’d made the right decision.

Then the sun started setting and Pieter’s fear of the dark made him realize they didn’t know where the lanterns were. The deepening gloom seemed ominous, but Quentin insisted they remain at Dierenpark even if they couldn’t find the lanterns. This journey to the ancestral Vandermark estate was too important to turn away before their mission was complete.

“There is no reason to fear the dark,” Quentin reasoned. “The earth has rotated away from the sun so that the people in China and India can enjoy the light. There is nothing evil in the dark. In a few hours the sun will be back.”

“Grandpa says that at night goblins come out of the swamps to look for children who got caught outside. They dance around in circles on the lawn.”

“And you believe such things?”

Pieter nodded. “That’s why mushrooms spring up in circles overnight. That’s what Grandpa said.”

Quentin sighed. His grandfather had cared for Pieter for most of the past year while Quentin recuperated following his latest
surgery, and Nickolaas Vandermark had planted the seeds of superstition about the family curse into Pieter’s gullible mind. Nickolaas was actually Pieter’s great-grandfather, but it was a mouthful and simply easier for the boy to call him Grandpa. Pieter embraced his grandfather’s endless superstitions far too easily, and now Quentin had to undo the damage.

“Pieter, I want you to repeat after me. If I can’t see it or touch it, it doesn’t exist.”

Pieter did as instructed, his voice heavy with skepticism.

“The world is a predictable and rational place,” Quentin continued. “Science can tell us precisely when the sun will rise and set. There are no goblins lurking in dark corners or hereditary curses that afflict innocent people for no earthly reason.”

“Then why did my mother die?”

Quentin turned away to gather his thoughts. The last thing he wanted to discuss was Portia’s death, sparked in part from her own irrational fears of the family’s curse. He had to wash these poisonous superstitions from Pieter’s mind before they ruined the boy. He had so little time remaining to guide Pieter into manhood, and he’d sit here until sunrise if it helped Pieter conquer his fears.

“Your mother died from cholera, not because of a ridiculous curse,” he said patiently. “Repeat after me again. If I can’t see it or touch it, it doesn’t exist.” The world operated on scientific principles, and he would allow Pieter no crutch of superstition in learning how to survive in it.

It was dark now, and Quentin braced himself for the long night ahead. It seemed that ever since his wife’s death eight years ago, his life had become an endless night of darkness and despair, waiting for a dawn that never came. In a perfect world, he could promise Pieter that their lives would be filled with joy and sunlight. He wished he could teach Pieter that all it would take was integrity and faith to guide them into a
safe and blessed world, but Quentin had long since given up believing in fairy tales.

By morning, Quentin was exhausted. During the night, Pieter had startled awake at every creak made by the old house. Quentin had tried to explain the effect cooling temperatures had on the expansion and contraction of building materials, but Pieter suspected it was ghosts or burglars. And just when they’d finally settled into a restless sleep, a thunderstorm had rolled through the valley, keeping them both awake until sunrise.

Thunder was one of the many things that terrified Pieter. “If you look in a mirror while it’s thundering, you’ll see a ghost,” Pieter had said in a trembling voice. “Grandpa said so.”

Quentin was bleary-eyed and exhausted as he dragged himself from bed. Pieter had finally slipped into a restless sleep, but Quentin was eager to explore Dierenpark.

The house was comfortable despite its imposing size. As an architect, he could immediately spot the places where some daring ancestor had tacked on a room or wing. The seventeenth-century rooms had low, wood-beamed ceilings and a coziness that came with their smaller dimensions. The rooms added in the eighteenth century had a stiff formality, with plaster walls, high ceilings, and an imposing scale. At some point, an orangery had been attached to the house, and the abundant glass panels captured the sun and regulated the heat to permit growing tropical plants and orchids.

As much as Quentin resented the staff who had been profiting off his family’s tragedies, he couldn’t criticize their care of the house, for the interior was in pristine condition. The bookshelves were filled with antique volumes, their leather bindings cleaned and oiled. The china cabinets displayed silver and
crystal, all polished and in gleaming condition. The desk in the library was filled with paperwork that had been untouched for the past sixty years.

After he’d explored most of the ground floor, it was obvious the best place to work was going to be the large parlor adjacent to the kitchen. It was an older room with a low-beamed ceiling and a few settees and tables scattered about. A row of diamond-paned windows overlooked the river. The glass was slightly rippled, as was common of glass from the seventeenth century. The slight distortion made the river below seem to sparkle even more in the early-morning light.

Mr. Gilroy helped him lay out drafting paper on one of the tables close to the window, and he quickly sank into the day’s work. He bid Mr. Gilroy to send Pieter to him as soon as the boy had dressed for the day.

“Are you sure you want Pieter to help with this?” Mr. Gilroy asked, his tone the embodiment of civility. “He seems a little young to learn the art of demolition.”

“It is important for Pieter to see me at work,” he said. Especially since Quentin had spent so much of the past year trapped in a convalescent hospital like a useless cripple. “I won’t allow my son to join the class of the idle rich. He can choose any profession he wishes, except a life of leisure.”

Despite his illness, Quentin had always been capable of gainful employment as an architect. He could no longer get out into the field to supervise construction, but he had been capable of drafting plans from his sickbed. Now that he was walking again, he’d mentor Pieter in the principles of architecture and scientific reasoning for as long as he could.

He took a sip of lousy coffee. None of them knew how to operate the percolating apparatus in the kitchen, and although Mr. Gilroy eventually got the contraption to work, bitter coffee grounds infused every sip. He took another taste, sucking on
the grounds and trying not to laugh. How could two intelligent men be defeated by the simple task of brewing coffee?

A sudden peal of bells shattered the quiet of the morning, making him choke on the coffee. The bells came from a few feet behind him, buried somewhere in the walls. A doorbell? Mr. Gilroy looked equally startled but headed to the front door to check.

“The Vandermarks are not at home,” he heard Mr. Gilroy’s polite voice intone to whoever had the gall to ring their bell at eight o’clock in the morning. With his refined British accent, John Gilroy sounded proper enough to be butler to the queen.

“I don’t need to see the Vandermarks,” a sweet voice said. “I just need to pop up onto the roof for a few minutes.”

It was the voice of the blond woman from yesterday. As much as she irritated him, he couldn’t deny that she was probably the prettiest girl he’d ever seen on either side of the Atlantic. With flaxen blond hair and deep blue eyes, she looked like she ought to be flouncing through an alpine meadow in a flowy white blouse with a lace-up bodice. She had a heart-shaped face and a slim little nose and was the closest thing to an angel he’d ever seen. He’d been an angry brute yesterday, but nothing he’d said seemed to fluster her.

“You’d better talk to Mr. Vandermark about that,” Mr. Gilroy said. “He was quite insistent that the household staff had been severed from employment.”

“But I’m not part of the household staff. I work for the government. And I need to get onto the roof.”

“Gilroy, send her back here!” Quentin hollered from his seat at the table.

A moment later she arrived, sadly minus the charming alpine costume but looking every bit as lovely in a simple gown with her hair in a casual braid worn over one shoulder. It annoyed him to see her looking so pretty first thing in the morning.

“Miss van Riijn, correct?”

“Yes, but everyone calls me Sophie.”

“Fine. You’re fired, Sophie.”

Smiling, she set a covered basket on the table. “I brought some fresh scones. They’re almond.”

“Excellent. Leave the scones, but you’re still fired.” It aggravated him that she found his comment amusing.

“But I’ve never worked for you, so you can’t really fire me, can you?” She drifted closer to the table, gazing through the window with a wistful expression on her face. “I always love this time of day. I like to stand at this exact spot, where I can see the goldfinches playing in the birch trees while I drink a cup of coffee and watch the sun rise. It is a perfect place to gather my thoughts and count my blessings.”

He fought not to roll his eyes. “Miss van Riijn, please be aware that I am violently allergic to your brand of doe-eyed sentimentality. That much sugary optimism spilled into the atmosphere this early in the morning is liable to render us all comatose.”

She cocked her head at a charming angle. “I don’t understand what you just said, but I think it was an insult. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a scone?”

He schooled his face into an impassive mask. It took a barrel of gall to waltz in here after being fired yesterday, and yet she’d slipped past Mr. Gilroy with ease and kept him nattering like a magpie. She was either a master of subversive tactics or was exactly what she appeared to be: a lone, naïve daisy standing in a field, begging to be shot for target practice. He normally did not feel much sympathy for people who exuded bottomless good cheer, but there was something oddly attractive about her. Not that he would let it soften him.