Until the Dawn (2 page)

“Ease up, Marten,” she muttered as she passed him and drew the boy aside. He was a handsome lad, no more than eight or nine years old, with dark hair and enormous gray eyes that remained locked on the house at the top of the cliff. He barely reached her elbow, and she crouched down to be on eye level with him.

“There now,” she soothed. “You know that man is just spinning tales in hopes of getting more tips, don’t you? There’s nothing to be frightened of.”

“It looks like a scary place to live,” the boy said tightly.

Sophie laughed. “But you don’t have to live there, right? Tonight you’ll go home with your parents and sleep safe and sound in your own bed. Everything will feel better once you’re home, don’t you think? What’s your name, lad?”

“Pieter,” he said. “Pieter spelled with an
I
.”

“Pieter with an
I
! What a fine Dutch name, just like the saint. Even when he was afraid, St. Peter was a good man, wasn’t he? There’s no shame in being a little scared now and then.”

The boy’s gaze remained riveted on the mansion. His lower lip wobbled, and tears pooled in his eyes, on the verge of spilling over. This sort of trepidation seemed unnatural. Something was wrong with this boy.

“Come now, what’s got you so upset?” she asked softly. “It can’t all be about that silly old house. I always feel better when I talk to someone about what’s worrying me. You can tell me anything. I promise not to laugh.”

The boy glanced over her shoulder, and she turned to follow his gaze.

Oh dear . . . they were being watched.

The gang of tough men stood only a few yards away, glaring at her with hard eyes. There was only one woman with them, a timid-looking young lady who seemed as anxious as the boy. The half dozen men in the group looked like prizefighters, with massive shoulders and no necks. One of the men wore a fine gentleman’s suit, but he looked no less fierce as he scrutinized her. There was no family resemblance between this boy and the hard strangers. Something was wrong. She turned back to the boy.

“Are you with those people behind me?” she whispered.

He nodded.

“Are they your family?”

He shook his head, and a trickle of ice curled around Sophie’s heart.

“Where are your parents?”

“My mother is dead, and my father went back to the village. My father is really angry.”

A man from the gang of strangers started heading their way.
He was dressed in flawless attire, but dread settled in the pit of her stomach as she eyed the man coming toward them. “This isn’t your father?” she asked as he drew closer.

“That’s Mr. Gilroy. He’s my father’s butler. He always watches me.”

Sophie stood, moving to stand in front of the boy. This boy seemed frightened beyond all reason, and if he was in danger, she wouldn’t stand aside.

Mr. Gilroy seemed taller and more daunting as he stood before her. For all his fine clothing and starched collar, a sense of barely leashed power radiated from the imposing man.

“Thank you for comforting the boy,” Mr. Gilroy said in a gentle voice with a hint of a British accent. “I’m afraid young Pieter doesn’t care for ghost stories, and your kindness is much appreciated.”

Had there ever been a more courteous voice? It had a velvety, calming quality that set her nerves at ease.

“You’re welcome. Most of the tourists enjoy tales about the old Vandermark estate, but some of us are more sensitive. Your group is touring the river, I take it?”

There was a slight pause. “Not precisely.”

She waited for Mr. Gilroy to elaborate, but he said nothing. Tourism had been their village’s salvation ever since the Vandermarks had abandoned the estate and closed down their timber mills, paper mills, and iron mines. The fishing and oyster industry had helped fill the void, but even those had collapsed in the past decade.

When Sophie’s Dutch ancestors had come to America in the seventeenth century, the Hudson River was so bountiful that a basket dipped in the river could scoop up striped bass, perch, and bluefish. But all that was a thing of the past now. As Manhattan filled its riverfront with factories, the fish farther up the river died off and the oyster beds failed. Now the village
needed revenue from the tourists who flocked to the Hudson River Valley to catch a glimpse of the unspoiled wilderness north of the city.

Sophie brushed back a strand of her blond hair that had broken free in the morning breeze. “Well, I hope you have a nice visit to New Holland. It’s a lovely village, and most travelers enjoy the shops and cafés.”

Pieter kicked the ground, scattering a spray of sand. “My father won’t enjoy it. He never enjoys anything.”

“That’s enough,” Mr. Gilroy said firmly but not unkindly. “Your father has been very sick, but he is doing what’s right. He isn’t doing this to punish you.”

To her horror, the boy’s face crumpled, and the tears finally erupted. “I just want to go home,” he sobbed. “I want to go live with Grandpa again. Please, Mr. Gilroy, please, can’t you take me back home?”

She couldn’t help herself. Never had she heard so much misery in a voice, and she gave in to the urge to console him. Hunkering back down, she slid an arm around the boy’s narrow shoulders. “There now, go ahead and have a good cry if it will make you feel better,” she soothed.

There was something terribly wrong with this boy. He was too old to be blubbering in public, and none of the adults who traveled with him seemed interested in extending comfort.

She looked up at Mr. Gilroy. “Will the boy’s father return soon? If you arrived on that steamboat, I don’t know how much longer it will be here.”

“We didn’t come on the steamboat,” Mr. Gilroy said. “The carriage we arrived in can’t scale the hill, so my employer has gone to the village to get a lighter one.”

She blinked in confusion. “Why do you want to scale the hill? There’s not much up there but the Vandermark estate, and it isn’t open for visitors.”

“It will be open for us,” Mr. Gilroy said.

“No, I’m afraid Dierenpark is entirely closed to the public. It has been for the past sixty years.”

“It will be open for us,” Mr. Gilroy repeated, not so gently this time. A note of steel lay beneath the velvet of his voice.

Oh dear, this was going to be awkward. This wouldn’t be the first group of people disappointed they couldn’t tour the mansion, but it was impossible. The narrow, rutted lane leading up the cliff was treacherous, and even though the Vandermarks had supplied funds to maintain the house and keep it safe from troublemakers, it was in no condition for visitors.

“There’s not much to see,” Sophie hedged. “The crows have taken up residence in the east wing and have a nasty habit of attacking strangers. There are some postcards for sale if you are curious about what the Vandermark mansion looks like up close.”

“Thank you, but we will tour the mansion shortly and have no need of postcards.”

Sophie took a step back. The staff hired to maintain the estate had been walking a fine line for decades, and strangers were almost always discouraged. Almost . . . but not always. Any group that traveled with a butler must be people of means, and Sophie sometimes made exceptions for people willing to pay ridiculous sums to take a peek inside the house. The village needed all the revenue it could get.

“On rare occasions, arrangements can be made for a very select type of visitor,” she said. “It takes some time to arrange, for the estate is never open to visitors who arrive unannounced.”

“We’re not visitors,” Mr. Gilroy said in an implacable voice. “We are the Vandermarks. And we’ve come home to stay.”

Sophie scrambled up the steep footpath, heedless of the vines and shrubbery that slapped at her skirts as she raced toward
the top of the cliff. Rutted with centuries of maple roots and corroded by runoff, it was a treacherous path, but she had to hurry. Mr. Gilroy had told her that Quentin Vandermark, the great-grandson of the man found floating dead in the river, intended to take up residence in the house immediately. Today!

Which was a huge problem. No one had expected the family to ever return, and well . . . over the years, certain liberties had been taken with the house. Mostly by her. Some of it could be hidden, but she’d have to hurry. She hiked her skirts in one hand, using the other for balance as she scaled the hillside with careful steps. With each step higher, the air got sweeter and the leaves grew greener.

Despite the blather told to the tourists, Dierenpark wasn’t haunted. Quite the opposite, in fact. Sophie had no explanation for it, but every square inch of the Vandermark estate bloomed with health and abundance. It seemed like the blossoms were more vibrant, the grass softer and greener, and the fruit grown on the estate sweeter than anything harvested in the village.

A screen of weather-beaten juniper trees provided a windbreak at the edge of the property, sheltering Dierenpark and creating an isolated haven of beauty and peace at the top of the cliff. Built of granite block, Dierenpark was a sprawling mansion with gables, turrets, and mullioned windows. The oldest portion of the house had been built in 1635, but over the centuries, it had been expanded to become a rambling mansion, one of the largest private homes in America.

Tearing across the meadow, she burst through the front door and barreled down the center hallway to the sun-filled kitchen at the rear of the house. It was in the newest part of the mansion, with plenty of windows to let in natural light. A fire burned in the brick hearth, and bundles of herbs hung alongside copper pots dangling over the scrubbed wooden work table.

“The Vandermarks are here!” Sophie gasped, doubling over
from her frantic dash up the side of the cliff. “Quick, get the merchandise out of here, and hide everything else.”

Florence Hengeveld pushed herself off the stool where she’d been bagging up Dutch cookies to sell to the tourists. With a face withered like a dried apple and a widow’s hump slowing her walk, Florence had been the estate’s housekeeper for forty years. She was the “hunchback” mentioned by the tour guide. But Florence wasn’t a victim of the Vandermark curse. She was merely old, and old women often had a widow’s hump.

“What do you mean?” Florence asked. “The Vandermarks’ lawyer is here?”

For the past sixty years, the only contact they’d had with the Vandermarks was from a series of attorneys who paid their wages and settled the annual tax bill. So why had the family suddenly returned? Sophie bit her lip, praying they hadn’t heard rumors about the equipment she’d installed on the roof of the mansion.

“They’re here in person,” she said. “Quentin Vandermark and his son. I thought they were living in Europe, but they’re back, and they intend to take up residence today. Their carriage can’t get up the hill, so they’ve gone to get a lighter one and will be here any moment. Quick! Hide anything having to do with the tourists. I’ll find Emil to help.”

“He’s working on the garden fence,” Florence said as she shuffled to a cupboard, dumping the bags of Dutch cookies and shortbread out of sight.

Sophie ran outside, calling for Emil Broeder, a simple-hearted man with a rapidly expanding family, including twin boys and a baby daughter only two months old. He and his family lived in the old groundskeeper’s cabin a few acres away.

She found him repairing the fence that kept deer from plundering Sophie’s herb garden. In short order she dispatched him to the house to hide all evidence of their tourism business.

But the biggest problem was on the roof, and it wasn’t exactly something Sophie could hide. She would just hope the Vandermarks wouldn’t notice until she could smooth the waters. Surely, with so grand an estate, they’d never even notice the paltry structures Emil had helped her erect on the roof, would they?

Because in her long line of failed engagements and thwarted dreams, her tiny weather station on the top of the Vandermark mansion was what gave meaning and purpose to Sophie’s world. In a dying village where economic opportunities dwindled by the year, Sophie was part of a grand, national experiment to create the first system of accurate and reliable weather forecasts for anyone who chose to buy the morning newspaper. She’d never asked permission to install the weather station, but the roof of Dierenpark was now one of three thousand monitoring stations manned by volunteers who gathered climate data in hopes of creating accurate weather predictions that would make the world a safer place for everyone.

And she prayed Quentin Vandermark would not interfere with that.