There was a cut crystal bell beside his wineglass. He rang it, and almost immediately a young woman appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Bring the brandy,” he told her, “and a pair of the medium-sized bell glasses.”
She withdrew, returning moments later with a squat-bodied ship’s decanter and a pair of glasses. “Very good, Leota,” he said. “You may pour a glass for each of us.”
She served me first, placing the glass on the tablecloth at my right, pouring a generous measure of cognac into it. I watched the procedure out of the corner of my eye. She was of medium height, slender but full-figured, with a rich brown skin and arresting cheekbones. Her scent was heavy and rich in the tropical air. My eyes followed her as she moved around the table and filled my host’s glass. She left the bottle on the table. He said, “Thank you, Leota,” and she crossed to the kitchen door.
My eyes returned to the doctor. He was holding his glass aloft. I raised mine. “Cheers,” he said, and we drank.
The cognac was excellent and I said as much. “It’s decent,” he allowed. “Not the best the French ever managed, but good enough.” His dry lizard eyes twinkled. “Is it the cognac you admired? Or the hand that poured it?”
“Your servant is a beautiful woman,” I said, perhaps a little stiffly.
“She’s a Tamil. They are an attractive race, most especially in the bloom of youth. And Leota is particularly attractive, even for a Tamil.” His eyes considered me carefully. “You recently ended a marriage,” he said.
“A relationship. We weren’t actually married. We lived together.”
“It was painful, I suppose.”
I hesitated, then nodded.
“Then I daresay travel was the right prescription,” the doctor said. “Your appetites are returning. You did justice to your dinner. You’re able to appreciate a good cognac and a beautiful woman.”
“One could hardly do otherwise. All three are quite superb.”
He lifted his glass again, warmed its bowl in his palm, inhaled its bouquet, took a drop of the liquid on his tongue. His eyes closed briefly. For a moment I might have been alone in the high-ceilinged dining room.
His eyes snapped open. “Have you,” he demanded, “ever had a cognac of the comet year?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Eighteen thirty-five. Have you ever tasted an eighteen thirty-five cognac?”
“Not that I recall.”
“Then you very likely have not, because you would recall it. Have you ever made love to a virgin? Let me rephrase that. Have you ever embraced a virgin of mixed ancestry, Tamil and Chinese and Scandinavian? You needn’t answer. A rhetorical question, of course.”
I took a small sip of cognac. It was really quite excellent.
“I could tell you a story,” Dr. Turnquist said. “Of course you’d want to change the names if you ever decided to do anything with it. And you might take care to set it on some other island.”
“I wouldn’t have to name the island at all,” I said.
“No,” he said. “I don’t suppose you would.”
There were, it seemed, two brothers named Einhoorn. One, Piet, was a planter, with large and valuable holdings in the southern portion of the island. The other, Rolf, was a trader with offices in the capital city on the island’s eastern rim. Both were quite prosperous, and each had survived the trauma of the island’s metamorphosis from colony to independent nation.
Both had been married. Piet’s wife had died years ago, while delivering a stillborn child. Rolf’s wife deserted him at about the same time, leaving on a Europe-bound freighter with whose captain Rolf had traded for years. The ship still called at the island from time to time, and Rolf still did business with her captain. The woman was never a subject of conversation between them.
Although he saw them infrequently, Dr. Turnquist got along well enough with both of the Einhoorn brothers. He thought them coarse men. They both had a hearty appetite for the pleasures of the flesh, which he approved, but it seemed to him that they lacked refinement. Neither had the slightest taste for art, for music, for literature. Neither gave any evidence of having a spiritual dimension. Both delighted in making money, in drinking brandy, and embracing young women. Neither cared much for anything else.
One evening, Rolf, the trader, appeared at the doctor’s door. The doctor had already finished his dinner. He was sitting on the enclosed veranda, sipping a postprandial brandy and reading, for the thousandth time, a sonnet of Wordsworth’s, the one comparing the evening to a nun breathless with adoration. A felicitous phrase, he had thought for the thousandth time.
He set the book aside and put his guest in a wicker chair and poured him a brandy. Rolf drank it down, pronounced it acceptable, and demanded to know if the doctor had ever had an 1835 cognac. The doctor said that he had not.
“The comet year,” Rolf said. “Halley’s Comet. It came in eighteen thirty-five. It was important, the coming of the comet. The American writer, Mark Twain. You know him? He was born in that year.”
“I would suppose he was not the only one.”
“He thought it significant,” Rolf Einhoorn said. “He said he was born when the comet came and would die when it reappeared. He believed this, I think. I don’t know if it happened.”
“Twain died in nineteen ten.”
“Then perhaps he was right,” the trader said, “because the comet comes every seventy-five years. I think it is every seventy-five years. It will be due again in a couple of years, and that is when I intended to drink the bottle.”
“The bottle?”
“Of eighteen thirty-five cognac.” Rolf rubbed his fleshy palms together. “I’ve had it for two years. It came off a Chinese ship. The man I bought it from didn’t know what he had but he knew he had something. Cognac of the comet year is legendary, my dear Turnquist. I couldn’t guess at its value. It is not like a wine, changing with the years, perhaps deteriorating beneath the cork. Brandies and whiskeys do not change once they have been bottled. They neither ripen nor decay. A man may spend a thousand pounds buying a rare wine at a London auction house only to find himself the owner of the world’s most costly vinegar. But a cognac — it will no more spoil with age than gold will rust. And a cognac of eighteen thirty-five—”
“A famous cognac.”
“A legend, as I’ve said.” He put down his empty glass, folded his hands on his plump stomach. “And I shall never taste it.”
The silence stretched. A fly buzzed against a lightbulb, then flew off. “Well, why not?” the doctor asked at length. “You haven’t sworn off drinking. I don’t suppose you’ve lost your corkscrew. What’s the problem?”
“My brother is the problem.”
“Piet?”
“Have I another brother? One is sufficient. He wants the cognac, the Comet Year cognac.”
“I daresay he does. Who wouldn’t? But why should you give it to him?”
“Because he has something I want.”
“Oh?”
“You know his ward? She’s called Freya.”
“I’ve heard of her,” the doctor said. “A half-caste, isn’t she?”
“Her mother was half Tamil and half Chinese. Her father was a Norwegian seaman, captain of a freighter that docked here once and has never returned. You haven’t seen Freya?”
“No.”
“She is exquisite. Golden skin that glows as if lighted from within. A heart-shaped face, cheekbones to break your heart, and the most impossible blue eyes. A waist you could span with your hands. Breasts like, like—”
The man was breathless with adoration, Dr. Turnquist thought, though not like a nun. “How old is this goddess?” he asked.