Until the Dawn (39 page)

Each morning for the next three days, Quentin awoke with the same burning objective: Prove himself worthy of Sophie’s hand in marriage.

It wasn’t going to be easy. He’d gotten off to a monumentally bad start with her, and she was still cautious around him. She wouldn’t marry him unless he could take the plunge into her world of faith. He didn’t know how to prove that he was a new man, but he would try.

Sophie had warned him they were due for a spell of bad weather, and it was here. A front moving down from Canada had collided with a storm blowing in from the ocean, guaranteeing several days of steady rain. The research teams were closeted indoors, making privacy difficult. In a house this big, it ought to be easy to find some out-of-the-way corner, but it seemed whenever she wasn’t cooking, Pastor Mattisen was nearby, watching over Sophie like a mother hen. And Marten Graaf was a relentless pest.

Blessed are the pure
in heart, for they shall see God.

He needed to stamp out these instinctive resentments and learn the art of patience. Sophie attracted her share of men who wanted to protect her, and he ought to be glad for their vigilance rather than resenting them.

See? His newfound faith was already catching him when cynicism reared its head. While Sophie cooked, he carried the old leather Bible into the privacy of his bedroom. As rivulets of rain trickled down the windows, he soaked in the enduring words of kindness, mercy, and compassion that were the birthright of all people on earth.

It changed the way he related to the world. Having been blessed with a fortune from the moment he arrived in the world, it was time to begin sharing it. Yesterday, he’d wired his attorney to begin the process of donating a bequest to the village of Roosenwyck in Holland to fund some kind of civic charity like a hospital or a school. Perhaps the donation would serve double duty and soothe the guilt plaguing Nickolaas. After all these centuries, it was impossible to know how much of their fortune
had been built on the funds embezzled by Caleb Vandermark, but Quentin could pay it back and then some.

After three days of rain, the tempers of the twenty people trapped within the house began to grow short, made worse by Nickolaas’s overt rudeness to Professor Winston, the man who had taken the page of Algonquin text to Harvard for safekeeping.

When Professor Winston joined them at the breakfast table this morning, Nickolaas had pushed away from the table and left without a word. Sophie, who had just arrived at the table with two baskets of warm blueberry muffins, had looked wounded as Nickolaas stormed from the room.

Quentin had stood. His grandfather was behaving like a child, and Quentin wasn’t going to tolerate rudeness to Sophie or Professor Winston. In the past, Quentin would have let the rift fester, assuming it was a natural consequence of his grandfather’s eccentricities. He would have enjoyed watching the drama unfold, with only mild curiosity for how Nickolaas would move the chess pieces to his advantage.

Not anymore. Following Nickolaas into the relative privacy of the library, he tried his most conciliatory tone. “Why the hostility to Professor Winston? You know a historian was honor-bound to protect that document.”

“He ought to be
bound
to the man who is paying his salary,” Nickolaas replied in a sour tone.

Above all, love one another
. Sophie’s humble Christian precepts had been burned onto Quentin’s mind, and he tried to extend a bit of understanding to his grandfather.

“I don’t know why the Indians sent those strange Bible passages to this house, but it’s causing you to resurrect a battle begun hundreds of years ago over something no one even remembers. Sophie reports this rain is due to continue for the rest of the week, so we’re all stranded here. Can’t we abide together
in peace? We eat the same food, breathe the same air. Maybe we want different things from life, but we are all brothers.”

Nickolaas snorted. “Now you are sounding like Sophie and her Bible-toting pastor.”

The comment was intended as an insult, but Quentin absorbed it without blinking. Nickolaas was not instinctively opposed to religion—indeed, he seemed attracted to all manner of outlandish spiritual beliefs. The more exotic and strange, the more Nickolaas liked it. He believed in everything, which meant he believed in nothing. He latched on with the zeal of a magnet seeking true north, but the fascination never lasted more than a year or two before something else captured his imagination. The only constant had been that none of these spiritual quests ever fundamentally changed the way Nickolaas looked at or interacted with the world.

“Why is it that in all the forms of spirituality in which you’ve dabbled, you never pursued Christianity?”

Nickolaas seemed taken aback by the question, but he considered it carefully, rubbing his chin while staring at the rain pattering against the windowpanes. “I guess because it seems so ordinary,” he finally said. “So pedestrian.”

Quentin gave a reluctant smile at his grandfather’s dismissive assessment. Christianity
was
a pedestrian religion, spread by men wearing sandals who walked across the ancient world driven by nothing more than the awesome power of faith. Sophie was pedestrian, and yet she was the most luminous woman he’d ever met.

If he needed proof of that, it was by the way she blossomed at a simple gift he arranged for her. With enough money and determination, it was possible to find anything in New York City, and three days earlier he’d sent Mr. Gilroy on a very specific quest.

Mr. Gilroy had returned this morning, seeking Quentin
out in the privacy of the library. The butler’s hair was still damp from the rain. “The Cohasset bridge has been washed out,” he reported as he tossed an oddly heavy sack on the desk. “It wouldn’t surprise me if other rivers start flooding their banks.”

Like everyone else in the house, Quentin was becoming heartily sick of the incessant rain, but at least his leg was not complaining. Normally, damp weather caused the bone-deep ache in his leg to scream for relief, but not this time. He scooped up the sack and went to find Sophie.

The wide portico at the front of the house was sheltered from the elements, and he coaxed Sophie outside to sit on the bench overlooking the rain-drenched meadow as water dribbled from the eaves. The bench was compact, and her slender frame was nestled close to his. With her layers of skirts and petticoats, not a centimeter of their flesh was touching, but it still seemed agreeably intimate.

The bag Mr. Gilroy had brought from the city was the size of a loaf of bread and quite heavy. He passed the coarse burlap bag to her without comment.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“A present,” he said, then winced. The presents he’d bought for Portia usually included ropes of pearls or gemstones the size of robin’s eggs. A man of his wealth ought to provide something much nicer than a sack of strange-looking pods.

Sophie peeked inside the bag, her face screwing up in confusion. “What
are
they?” she asked, lifting the odd vegetable from the bag. It was a ruddy orange shade, larger than her hand, and looked like an oblong pumpkin. There were four of them in the bag.

“You once said the cocoa powder in this village was bad, and you wanted to make your own. These are cocoa pods, shipped directly from Brazil. If you split it open, you will find fresh cocoa
beans inside. Then you can begin your culinary adventure of making chocolate from scratch.”

“You remembered!” she exclaimed. Her eyes widened in delight as she held the pod to her nose for a sniff and then ran her fingers along its waxy skin. “It’s fabulous. Thank you!”

A piece of him wanted to shower her with expensive jewels and the titles to faraway castles, but he knew such things wouldn’t make her happy. Sophie delighted in wading into a river to gather oysters, the challenge of baking the perfect pie, a bouquet of wildflowers, or even a peaceful afternoon on a rain-drenched porch.

She slid a little closer to him on the bench, and he slipped his arm around her shoulders, staring over the verdant green of the meadow and savoring her closeness. He wanted this forever. He was content here, with her. He had been born with sixty million dollars to his name, but he’d throw it all in the dust for this. After a lifetime of wandering the earth and struggling against his fate, he had found happiness in the simple splendor of this glade and alongside this extraordinary woman.

He leaned down to kiss her forehead. “Thank you, Sophie,” he whispered. “Thank you for everything.”

He had so much to be profoundly thankful for. He was grateful Sophie had taught him to see the world and his place in it differently. His leg felt better than it had in years, and it seemed that against all odds, the last surgery he’d submitted to in Berlin might actually be working. The muscles around the weakened bone still hurt, but instead of the perpetual pain, it hurt only when he put too much weight on it.

Rather than thinking of the success of the operation as a triumph of science over God, something inside him was shifting. Long after Sophie had dashed inside to begin experimenting with the cocoa pods, he sat in the quiet solitude, listening
to the rainfall and searching for the spiritual presence he felt hovering just out of reach.

Are you out there?
He waited, but no answer came, and he didn’t know exactly what he believed—yet his world was opening, expanding, broadening. He was meant to do something with his life rather than wander from city to city, building bridges and counting his money, though he still didn’t know what.

And rather than feel dissatisfied, he smiled and looked forward to discovering the answer as the world unfolded in its own time.

22

T
HE
RAIN
MADE
IT
HARD
for Sophie to get her daily reports telegraphed to Washington. The bridge at the old Cohasset Road was washed out, requiring one of the bodyguards to flag down a steamship to ride into Tarrytown and transmit the message from there. Her messages were arriving late, but at least they were getting through. The massive storm was pouring rain throughout all of New England, so she was certain that plenty of the Weather Bureau volunteers faced similar problems.

Without regular trips into the village for food, the larder was getting skimpy, and Professor Byron offered to go hunting to restock their provisions. “Can you cook venison?” he asked.

“If you kill it, I’ll cook it,” she said gratefully.

She had already begun the process of turning the cocoa pods into a powder she could use for baking. The first challenge was getting the pods open. None of the kitchen knives was up to the task, and finally Marten smashed them open on the edge of the slate steps behind the kitchen. Inside they found waxy white beans, which the old cookbook instructed her to let ferment in a warm place, turning them several times until the
sugars developed on the outside of the bean. Pieter came by many times a day to stare at the beans as Sophie turned them.

“They don’t look like chocolate to me,” he said.

“Wait until I roast them. I expect the whole house will smell good, and then they will start to look more familiar to you.”

She waited three days before she was satisfied the beans were ready for the next step. They roasted surprisingly fast in the oven, and in less than thirty minutes she had cooling cocoa beans that slipped from their husks with ease. Once cooled, they could be ground into cocoa powder. The cookbook advised that the finer the powder, the higher the quality of the chocolate.

All the professors took turns at the kitchen grinder clamped to the work table, the one she normally used only for coffee. She was grateful for their help, for grinding was a lot of work, and the men seemed tireless as they processed the cocoa into a fine powder. It looked better and smelled more fragrant than anything she had seen for sale in the village.

On the fifth day of rain, Quentin did not appear for lunch, which surprised her. Lately he had been dining with everyone, and in an unusually cheerful mood, but she did not let his absence concern her. It gave her a chance to deliver his meal to the library, where he had secluded himself all morning. Stolen moments of privacy were hard to find, but she was glad they would have one.