Until the Dawn (35 page)

“Run along upstairs,” Quentin said. “We can serve ourselves breakfast.”

“Thank you!” she said, dashing to the drawer in the sideboard for her notebook of climate data.

The air was fresh and clean on the widow’s walk. Surrounded by the serene beauty of this beloved spot, it made the calamity of the previous night seem far away. This was just another day. Another lovely, bountiful day filled with promise and hope and a young boy who was going to fully recover. Her tight nerves unraveled and snapped. She tossed the notebook down, ran to the railing, fell to her knees, and wept.

It felt good to sob it all out. Pathetic, but good.

After her momentary crying jag, she took the daily read
ings. Her eyes were swollen, so she squinted at the tiny dials, but recorded the measurements as she had been doing for the past nine years. Her handwriting looked small and tidy beneath Pieter’s larger, clumsier printing, but she ran her fingers along the numbers he’d written over the past few weeks.

How she loved working with that boy, and how fragile their lives were. Any day could be their last. Pieter was a loving boy, so desperate to please, and she was thrilled she had been granted the opportunity to share this humble task with him.

But she hadn’t shared her faith with him. Not really. She’d planted a few seeds and assumed they would have plenty of time to take root and grow. The boy was hungry for meaning in his life, and she had been stingy in sharing her gifts because she was afraid of annoying his father. It wasn’t Pieter’s fault that he had been born into such an odd family, but for whatever reason, God had planned for her path to intersect with the Vandermarks, and she had more to offer Pieter than teaching him to read a thermometer.

Yesterday, Quentin had asked her to marry him. Amazing, and she still couldn’t quite grasp this startling turn of events.

She had been tempted by the house. What woman wouldn’t be? But a marriage between herself and Quentin would surely be a disaster. Over the past few weeks, they had formed a cautious truce, but that could snap quickly, just as it had last night when he’d suspected her of feeding tainted food to his family.

No, she didn’t need to marry Quentin to share her faith with Pieter. It was painfully obvious that Quentin had no true feelings for her beyond what she could do for his son, and she wanted more from a marriage than that. It was time to head back downstairs and brave the whispers and curious stares of the people who weren’t quite sure if she was trustworthy.

She heard the argument before she was even halfway down the hall.

“We’re not touching a morsel out of that woman’s kitchen,” a voice asserted. “If you don’t employ a different cook, I’m going back to the city.”

“I hired you to find an answer to a specific scientific question,” Quentin’s ice-cold voice said, “and you are threatening to abandon that quest over pure superstition?”

“The sight of those men doubled over and heaving up their dinner wasn’t superstition, that was a fact,” another voice said. The speaker was the red-headed man from outside the larder this morning. “If she didn’t poison the food on purpose, maybe it was that Vandermark curse we’ve been hearing so much about. Either way, I want that woman out of here.”

Muffled voices interrupted, and it was clear there was quite a battle among the professors. Could this wonderful research all come crashing to a halt because of what had happened last night? She leaned against the wall to steady herself against a wave of dizziness, the plaster cool on her overheated skin.

“Sophie isn’t leaving,” Quentin asserted, his voice pure steel. “That woman sheds grace and light in every room she enters. Any man with a functional brain would try to catch a fragment of that grace and cherish it, rather than push her aside. I’m not sending her away. Were it in my power, I would cut the moon out of the sky and give it to her on a silver platter.”

Her notebook dropped from her nerveless fingers, splatting open on the tile floor. Quentin whirled around to see her standing in the doorway. If he was embarrassed to have been overheard, he gave no sign of it. On the contrary, his eyes that had been sparking with anger gentled the instant he saw her.

She glanced away, rocked by the protective expression on Quentin’s face. It shot straight to a vulnerable part deep inside and enveloped her with a sense of well-being. No man had ever spoken so passionately on her behalf, and a rush of wild, electrifying emotions stirred inside.

Her food was untouched on the table, a group of professors watching her through solemn eyes. A few were hostile; most were sympathetic.

Quentin held out his hand, his palm turned up, beckoning her.

In a room full of people, he stood proudly and offered her his support. She placed her hand in his, and a current of strength flowed from his hand into hers. He pulled her closer, and she followed. When she stood alongside him, he slid his arm around her waist and turned to face the group.

“Miss van Riijn stays,” he said in a firm voice, daring anyone to deny him. “Anyone who won’t take food from her kitchen may leave immediately. She is an essential part of this household, and I won’t allow her name to be tarnished by small-minded superstition.”

Never had she felt so protected. Standing alongside him made her feel like they belonged together, like they were a team. Even if every one of these scientists pushed away from the table and left the house, it wouldn’t matter because Quentin believed in her.

But she didn’t want the biologists to leave. Not if they could find a scientific explanation for Marguerite’s Cove and save Dierenpark. “Quentin, I’ll go if it’s the only way—”

“You belong here,” he asserted. “More than any of us, you belong at Dierenpark.”

He still held her sheltered against his side, and when she looked up at him, the tender affection in his face was overwhelming. He leaned down, smiling softly, his face mere inches from hers. Every instinct urged her to close the space and kiss him, for she wanted more of this compelling attraction.

A clattering came from the front of the house, and footsteps came running toward the kitchen. It was Professor Winston, the man sent to Harvard to find a translation for the strange piece of paper found nailed into the old box. His hair was
windblown and cheeks flushed as he held a piece of paper high above his head.

“It’s Algonquin!” he shouted.

A bunch of researchers rose, drawing closer as Professor Winston continued rambling in an excited rush of words. “The text is an old form of the Indian language. The librarian at Harvard recognized it immediately.”

There was no more talk of anyone leaving as all gathered around Professor Winston to hear what he had learned.

The first Bible printed in America was not in English or Latin or any other Old World tongue. It was the labor of love from missionary John Eliot, who brought the word of God to the Indians of New England, learned their language, and rendered it phonetically into the Roman alphabet. Eliot printed a thousand copies of the complete Bible in the Natick-Algonquin dialect, and in 1663 he distributed them among the praying Indians. The page found nailed into the box on Vandermark land was compared to one of the original Algonquin Bibles in the Harvard library and found to be identical in size, composition of the paper, and font of the text. There could be no doubt. This page was torn from one of the original 1663 Bibles.

Professor Winston said he had left the original page discovered on Vandermark land at Harvard “for safekeeping.” No one needed a reminder that Nickolaas might well carry out his threat to burn the page if given the chance. Professor Winston carried an exact copy of the strange text written out in his own hand, using the same stanzas, indentations, and underlining.

“But why was the page nailed into a box?” Byron asked. “Who did it? And why?”

“Impossible to say,” Professor Winston answered. “We compared it with an English Bible at the library and translated the underlined passages. It’s from Genesis, the part about God putting the mark on Cain.”

He gave Sophie the page that had the English translation, complete with the same passages that had been underlined in the document they found. It was from the book of Genesis, shortly after Cain killed Abel, as he stood before God to account for his sin. She read the passage aloud to the group.

“‘Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is more than I can bear. You are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”’”

The underlined passages picked up a few lines later. “‘The Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. So Cain went out from the Lord’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.’”

She looked up in bewilderment. “But what does this mean? Who underlined these passages?”

Professor Winston shrugged his shoulders. “The book dates to 1663, but for all we know, it could have been nailed into that box and buried centuries later.”

“The nails looked like they came from a seventeenth-century forge,” one of the archaeologists said. “And the other artifacts found in the same substrata were all from the seventeenth century. That box was buried hundreds of years ago.”

Sophie knew the history of the original Vandermark brothers as well as any local historian. Caleb and Adrien Vandermark had arrived in the country in 1635 and immediately built the humble cabin that eventually became the groundskeeper’s home. Adrien was always on the move, forging ties with European settlers as far north as Massachusetts and with some Indian tribes. It was a tragedy when he’d been killed in an Indian raid a few years later. Caleb continued to prosper, building the pier and establishing their shipping empire, sending furs and timber back to Holland. Caleb lived into his eighties and was one of the richest men in America when he finally died in 1685.

The box could have been buried by Caleb, or it could have been one of his sons that survived him, but the question remained . . . why?

Without warning, Quentin plucked the document from her hands. “I’ll take that,” he said casually, then he pivoted on his one good leg and began limping to the rear of the house.

“You’re leaving me here?” Her voice sounded wounded even to her own ears. The confidence she’d felt when standing beside him drained away, and she stared at his retreating back as he hobbled to the far end of the house.

“Anyone who says a single bad thing about Sophie shall be beheaded,” he called out over his shoulder as he disappeared down the hallway.

She stifled a laugh. That casual defense was all it took to banish the lingering sense of inadequacy. Quentin knew she was innocent, and the opinion of these men simply did not matter. The untouched breakfast was a clear sign that some of the professors either feared the Vandermark curse or the vengefulness of a scorned woman, but that was their shortcoming, not hers.

Quentin’s impulsive surge of protectiveness toward Sophie had surprised even him. It was only a few weeks ago that he was raging at her himself, but that was before he’d discovered the depth of her generosity and good-natured humor. Now he would cheerfully fire anyone who dared breathe an unkind word about her.

Her blunt rejection of his marriage proposal still smarted, for his affections ran deeper than he dared reveal. After the collapse of his marriage to Portia, he’d vowed never again to lay himself open to that sort of unreciprocated emotion, but it was getting harder to repress the turbulent, glorious feelings
he harbored for Sophie. He wanted to love and cherish and protect her—all the things a husband should do for his wife.

Even if she wanted nothing to do with him, he still felt compelled to protect her. That was why he took the document away from her this morning. There was something tainted and bad about it, and he didn’t like seeing it in her slim, gentle hands. Besides, he suspected Nickolaas knew exactly what the document meant, and that it wasn’t good. Nickolaas had once said that in the months before his father’s mysterious death in the river, Karl had been preoccupied by strange foreign documents found in the house. Karl had a specialist translate the documents, and whatever he learned was enough to send the man into a profound depression. Ever since discovering that buried box on the property, Nickolaas and Mr. Gilroy had been turning the house upside down on the hunt for more documents.

He found Nickolaas and Pieter in the library. Pieter, still wearing his nightclothes, sat at the desk chair, flipping through the pages of a book. Gratitude surged through Quentin, for although Pieter still looked pale and tired, there was a spark of curiosity in the boy’s eyes.

“Feeling better?” Quentin asked, holding his breath.

“Grandpa said I could come help search for more of those strange pieces of paper. He thinks there are still some we haven’t found. It’s like a treasure hunt.”

Sure enough, Nickolaas and Mr. Gilroy had removed entire shelves of books, stacking them around the library in towering mounds that filled the floor space. Dust swirled in the air, and it couldn’t be good for Pieter’s lungs. Besides, he didn’t want Pieter exposed to whatever superstitious rubbish Nickolaas believed was rooted in those letters.