“Fifteen,” Rolf Einhoorn said. “Her mother died five years ago. Piet took her into his household, made a home for her. People credit him with an act of charity. My brother has never performed an act of charity in his life.”
“He makes sexual use of her?”
“Not yet. The bastard’s been saving her.”
“Ah,” said the doctor. “Even as you have been saving your cognac. Waiting, you might say, for the reappearance of the comet.”
“Piet has been waiting for her sixteenth birthday. Then he will make her his mistress. But he wants my cognac.”
“And you want — I’ve forgotten her name.”
“Freya. He has offered a trade. Her virginity for my bottle.”
“And you have accepted?”
“I have accepted.”
The doctor raised his eyebrows.
“It seems unfair,” Rolf said. The doctor noted a crafty light in his eyes. “Piet will have every drop of my precious cognac. He may drink it all in one night or stretch it out over a lifetime, and if he wishes he may shatter the bottle when he has drained it. And what will I have in return? One night with this beauty. Her maidenhead will be mine, but when I return her to him she will be a far cry from an empty bottle. She will be his to enjoy for as long as he wants her, and I will be left with the memory of her flesh and not even the memory of the cognac. Does it seem fair to you?”
“Can’t you get out of the deal?”
“I could,” Rolf said. “And yet there ought to be a better solution, don’t you think? The little angel’s birthday is two months from tomorrow. That is when the exchange will take place.” He lowered his eyes deliberately. “Piet has seen my bottle. He has examined the seal.”
“Ah.”
“You are a clever man. A doctor, good with your hands. Perhaps there is a way to remove the contents from a sealed bottle, eh?”
“You would have to bring me the bottle,” the doctor said, “and I should have to see what I could do.”
Piet turned up later that week. Coincidentally, Dr. Turnquist was reading another sonnet of Wordsworth’s at the moment of his arrival, the one about the world being too much with us. Old Wordsworth, he thought, had a knack.
Piet, not surprisingly, told essentially the same story as his brother. He spoke quite eloquently of the legendary perfection of the 1835 cognac, then spoke at least as eloquently of his ward. “She has spent five years under my roof,” he said. “She is like a daughter to me.”
“I’m sure.”
“And now I’ve traded her to my verdammte brother for a bottle of brandy. Five years, doctor!”
“The brandy’s been around for almost a century and a half. Five years seems a short time in comparison.”
“You know what I mean,” Piet said. “I wonder.”
“What is it that you wonder?”
“I wonder what virginity is,” Piet mused. “A virgin’s embrace is nothing so special, is it? Ordinarily one wants one’s partner to be schooled, able. With a virgin, one delights in her incompetence. What is so special, eh, about a tiny membrane?”
The doctor kept silent.
“You are a doctor,” Piet Einhoorn said. “One hears tales, you know. Exotic bordellos whose madams sell a virginity ten times over, tightening the passage with alum, restoring the maidenhead. One hears these things and wonders what to believe.”
“One cannot believe everything one hears.”
“Oh,” Piet said.
“Still, there is something that can be done. If the girl is a virgin in the first place.”
“I have not had her, if that is what you are implying.”
“I implied nothing. Even if she hasn’t been with a man, she could have lost her hymen in any of a dozen ways. But if it’s intact—”
“Yes?”
“You want to be with her once, is that right? You want to be the first man to have her.”
“That is exactly what I want.”
“If the hymen were surgically detached before the first intercourse, and if it were subsequently reattached after intercourse has taken place—”
“It is possible?”
“Bring the child,” the doctor said. “Let me have a look at her, eh?”
Two days later Rolf returned to the doctor’s house. This time his visit was expected. He carried a small leather satchel, from which he produced a bottle that fairly shouted its age. The doctor took it from him, held it to the light, examined its label and seal, turned it this way and that.
“This will take careful study,” he announced.
“Can you do it?”
“Can I remove the contents without violating the seal? I think not. There is a trick of removing a tablecloth without disturbing the dishes and glasses resting atop it. One gives an abrupt all-out pull. That would not do in this case. But perhaps the seal can be removed and ultimately restored without its appearance being altered in any way.” He set the bottle down. “Leave it with me. There is lead foil here which will not be readily removed, paper labels which might yield if the glue holding them can be softened. It is a Chinese puzzle, Einhoorn. Come back Saturday. If it can be done, it shall be done that day in front of your eyes.”
“If my brother suspects—”
“If it cannot be done safely it will not be done at all. So he will suspect nothing. Oh, bring a bottle of the best cognac you can find, will you? We can’t replace cognac of the comet year with rotgut, can we now?”
The following day it was Piet’s turn. He brought with him not a leather satchel but an altogether more appealing cargo, the girl Freya.
She was, the doctor noted, quite spectacular. Rolf’s cognac had looked like any other cognac, possessed of a good enough color and a perfect clarity but otherwise indistinguishable from any other amber liquid. Freya, her skin a good match for the cognac, looked like no other young woman the doctor had ever seen. Three races had blended themselves to perfection in her lithe person. Her skin was like hot velvet, while her eyes made one wonder why blue had ever been thought a cool color. And, thought Dr. Turnquist, a man could impale himself upon those cheekbones.
“I’ll want to examine her,” he told Piet. “Make yourself comfortable on the veranda.”
In his surgery, Freya shucked off her clothing without a word, and without any trace of embarrassment. He placed her on his table, put her feet in the stirrups, and bent to his task. She was warm to the touch, he noted, and after a moment or two she began to move rhythmically beneath his fingers. He looked up from his work, met her eyes. She was smiling at him.
“Why, you little devil,” he said.
He left her there, found Piet on the veranda. “You’re very fortunate,” he told the planter. “The membrane is intact. It hasn’t yielded to horseback riding or an inquisitive finger.”
“Have you detached it?”
“That will take some time. It’s minor surgery, but I’d as soon sedate her all the same. It would be best if she didn’t know the nature of the procedure, don’t you think? So she can’t say anything that might find its way to your brother’s ear.”
“Good thinking.”
“Come back in the morning,” the doctor told him. “Then you may enjoy her favors tomorrow night and bring her back to me the next morning for repair. Or restoration, if you prefer.”
Piet came in the morning to reclaim his ward. As he led her to his car, the doctor thought not for the first time what a coarse, gross man the planter was.
Not that his brother was any better. Rolf arrived scarcely an hour after Piet had left — there was an element of French farce in the staging of this, the doctor remembered thinking — and the doctor led him into his study and showed him the bottle. Its neck was bare now, the wax and lead foil and paper labels carefully removed.