Follow My Lead (24 page)

They stopped at one door, at the very end of the hall. Frau Heider took a large ring of keys out of her apron pocket and, finding the appropriate one, fitted it into the new brass lock on the door.

“I had to put new locks on this door,” Frau Heider explained.

She opened the door and let them into utter chaos.

Papers stacked in boxes everywhere, paintings and etchings in half-open crates, everything piled floor to ceiling.

“My husband’s life’s work,” Frau Heider said grimly.

“Did drunken school boys do all this?” Jason asked, following Winn as she delicately moved into the space.

“Only partly. I fear my Wilhelm did not get very far in his reorganization this time.”

“This time?” Jason asked.

“He reorganized everything once a year. The move from Berlin made it especially . . . mixed up? Yes, mixed up.”

Jason looked to Winn, who had gone still, her fingers gingerly picking up a piece of aged vellum, its ink almost indecipherable. It was likely a few centuries old—if it came from Durer’s time.

“Winn?” Jason ventured gently. “Are you all right?”

Her head came up, and he saw the resolve in her eyes. “I’m fine,” she stated clearly. “Let’s get to work.”

T
WO days. That’s how long it took for Winn to find what she was looking for. Two days that she spent encased in the small room on the third floor, fully immersed in her quest. Two days that Jason spent below stairs with Frau Heider, wondering what on earth was going on in that tiny, cramped space.

Of course, he had been in there. He had tried to assist Winn as best he could, but four hours of deciphering tight German handwriting in fading ink on aged, browning paper was his limit before he needed some air. Of course, Winn would not let the windows be open in the room, nor would she allow anyone to touch the papers without soft cotton gloves on. Frau Heider, with absolutely no enthusiasm for Dürer and having similar limits to Jason’s, removed herself as well and got out of Miss Crane’s way.

“You think it the best thing?” Jason asked, no longer trying to mask the concern in his voice. “That she is working herself so hard?” They were in the kitchen rooms, cutting up the bread, cheese, and vegetables that Frau Heider had just fetched from the market, leaving Jason to fend off yet another group of eager students (French ones, this time) and their enthusiastic guide. It was decided that a young stern man would be far more adept at dissuading visitors than an older matron. They were correct in this assumption.

“She’s not even sleeping,” he added, removing the hot iron pot from the woodstove and pouring its piping contents into a teapot to steep.

Frau Heider, once assured of their marital status and the work cut out for Winn, had decreed that they would stay in her guest bedroom, which luckily had a bed. Old and not often used, and therefore lumpy and uneven, but a bed nonetheless. Winn and Jason had simply shrugged at each other—strangely, they were becoming accustomed to their imposed sleeping arrangements. Or at least, Jason thought, he was.

That first night, when Frau Heider had gone up to bed, he sat downstairs for some minutes, trying to decide if he should go to bed or go to Winn—but he had already spent several hours with her that day, his eyes straining to decipher unintelligible handwriting, his lids drooping in exhaustion. As such, he decided on sleep, thinking that Winn would join him shortly. After all, after dinner she had said she was only going to spend an hour or so in the little room at the end of the hall.

It was just before dawn when he awoke and saw she wasn’t there, no circular, Winn-sized dent in the mattress beside him. If he had known she wouldn’t be there, he thought peevishly, he would have allowed himself to sleep beneath the sheets.

The next night was similar, Winn going up to the small room after dinner, leaving Jason with Frau Heider. It wasn’t as if he could stop her—the exhaustion sinking into her eyes or no. Winn’s entire body was a tensed wire, her entire focus on pawing through the contents of Herr Heider’s collection. So he went to bed alone again . . . but he didn’t stay there. After midnight, when the house was still, he went to the small room at the end of the hall and knocked gently.

There was no answer. He tipped his head in and found Winn with her head down on the desk, her candle burning precariously low. He went and rocked her shoulder.

She didn’t move.

“Winn,” he whispered.

Still no movement.

“Winnifred,” he tried, louder.

“Stop calling me that,” she complained weakly, keeping her eyes tightly shut.

“Come along, you need to sleep,” he argued, but she pushed his hands away.

“I’m just resting my eyes.”

“And Napoleon just had a mild interest in foreign policy. Come on.” And, brooking no opposition, he took her up into his arms and carried her—she couldn’t weigh more than a bird’s wing—down to their shared bedchamber. She was dead asleep before her head hit the pillow, curling into the Winn-sized ball that he knew well now.

And again, when he woke up before dawn, it was because there was no Winn in the bed, just, this time, her impression.

“This is her passion.” Frau Heider shrugged kindly. “And passionate people, they are blind to everything else. Like my Wilhelm. He would sometimes go days, weeks without emerging from his study. I brought him food, I made him sleep . . . I was the only person who could connect him to the world.” She smiled the sad, wistful smile that painted her face whenever she spoke of her Wilhelm, which was a dominant topic of conversation the past few days.

“I cannot lie—in some ways, she is the answer to my prayers. A talented person, taking care of that mess of paintings and papers and sketches that I cannot,” she mused.

“I know she’s talented, of course. I’ve read her papers, I just didn’t—”

“Didn’t think of the work that went into them?” Frau Heider chuckled. “Trust me, Mr. Cummings,” she said, placing a small plate of stewed turnips on the tray. “My Wilhelm, he would be in his books for days, ruining his eyes on old words. And while he was here, I had use . . .” She paused for a moment, sadly looked at her hands. As if her fingers missed the purpose she sued to put them to.

“People like Wilhelm, and your Winnifred,” she continued after a moment, “they can have all the talent in the world, but they need someone like us to care for them. As you will discover.”

“Winn keeps saying she doesn’t need anyone.” Jason shook his head.

“And you believe her? You do not know your wife very much.” Frau Heider chuckled.

“I know her well enough to know that she doesn’t like turnips,” he replied, and removed the small plate of turnips from the tray, replaced it with the teapot, and hefting it, headed for the stairs.

Two days, Jason thought as he climbed the steps to the third floor, the plate of food in his hands. Two days, and he didn’t even know if Winn had slept four hours total during them. Frau Heider was right; as much as he enjoyed dabbling in the Historical Society’s interests and taking in a lecture here and there, he really had no notion of the work that went into the process of discovery. He could only marvel, and try to help, and make trays of food.

How well did he really know this woman he was escorting all over the Continent? They had met, barely, a decade ago, but unfortunately not to his recollection. And it had been, what, a month ago? that he ran into her outstretched hand in the courtyard of Somerset House. But still, she kept earning his surprise.

He knew she was a fighter, determined and focused to an almost frightening degree of intensity. Demanding her independence and holding fast to that freedom on the basis of her ability to argue. And he knew she was oddly sheltered, her curiosity the reason he saw her as a sparrow, darting about from here to there, her attention fixed on the next, the new, the unknown. Absorbing the world with childlike wonder.

The wonder she still had in the world. He liked that best.

Jason knocked on the door at the end of the hall and quietly let himself into the small room.

Two days, and to Jason’s eye, it looked like she had barely made a dent.

Papers were in new piles, spread out around the room in neat lines, some form of chronological charting going on. The crated paintings had been moved into an adjoining room (Jason had been the one to do the moving, of course), allowing Winn to concentrate solely on the papers. The small desk had been moved in yesterday with a chair, and there, like yesterday, in between two piles of old work orders and supply lists written in Renaissance-era German, lay the head of Winnifred Crane, sound asleep.

She looked so tiny asleep. She was small in any case, but asleep, the bravado that filled her frame was in hiding, and she was as soft and fragile as a doll. Jason put the plate down by her head and gently placed his hand on the back of her neck, that small stretch of exposed skin that he had subconsciously claimed as his own. She didn’t jump, didn’t stir. He leaned down closer, a small part of him wanting to make sure that she was still breathing.

One other thing Jason knew about Winn—the woman could sleep like the dead.

“Winn!” He shook her shoulder gently and then when that did nothing, harder. “Winn, the letters are on fire!”

That
brought her head up. Quickly, forcefully. So quickly and so forcefully that her head connected with his nose, and he stumbled back, his eyes watering like mad.

“Ow!” he cried, the sound muffled by the fact that he was holding his nose.

“Ow, yourself!” she replied, holding the back of her head. “You have the pointiest nose in Christendom!” Before he could vehemently protest, Winn whipped her head around the room. “The papers . . . Fire?”

“No . . . no fire,” Jason answered, adjusting his nose. Finding it without breakage and thankfully not bleeding, he felt well enough to release his hand. “We have to stop meeting like this.”

“Oh, thank goodness.” Winnifred sighed, her gloved hand coming to gently rest on one of the piles of paper on the desk. Then, with a sidelong glance to Jason, she asked, “Are you crying?”

“What? No,” Jason said quickly, blinking up any stray moisture from his eyes. “I . . . we thought you should eat.” He waved his hand to the plate on the desk, next to her elbow. As she inspected the food, he looked around the room. “You should really open up a window, let some air in here. No wonder you fell asleep. Again.”

If she remembered being carried to bed the previous night, her face gave no hint of it. “We cannot open the windows. Do you understand how delicate these papers are? The wrong breeze hits them and tears them . . .” She gave a small shudder.

As she delicately stripped off one of her cotton gloves and picked up a piece of bread and cheese, he peered over the papers on the floor. “Have you found what you’re looking for?” he asked.

“Sadly no.” Winn sighed, frustrated. “But I have managed to sort out which letters are in Master Dürer’s hand and which are not. That pile there”—she indicated where he stood—“are notes and notations on mathematics. Those”—she pointed to another pile—“are markings on human proportion. Nothing conclusive, certainly not drafts of anything that made it into Dürer’s
Four Books
, but these are the types of things that most people would normally think worthless and have burned. And Herr Heider found them in a trunk, in an antiques shop. Amazing, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” Jason agreed, bending to look at the papers. “But where are your letters? The ones about the Adam and Eve painting?”

“That’s another problem,” Winn replied, taking another bite of bread and cheese, closing her eyes and making a small noise of sheer pleasure in sating her hunger. It took Jason a moment to notice she was still talking. “Albrecht Dürer depicted Adam and Eve several times. Including a painting, done in 1507, and an engraving, done in 1504, both undeniably his. So any letters he received mentioning an Adam and Eve could be about them.”

“But you thought our Adam and Eve was done in the 1490s, correct? Can’t we simply go by the dates of the correspondence?” Jason asked as he lifted letter after letter, careful to be delicate.

“We could,” Winn said, smiling, “if only our forefathers had been so kind as to date every letter they sent. Besides, who’s to say Dürer received the letters around the time of the painting? Things aren’t always done in good time. I’ve written theory and criticism on thousand-year-old works.” Then she looked down at the piece of bread in her hand. “Add in that the pages are nearly illegible, and that my Renaissance German skills are not as strong as I’d thought,” she admitted ruefully, “I’m near to going cross-eyed on these.”

“You lasted about thirty hours longer than anyone else—or, at least, I—would,” Jason admitted. “But . . . you have always said that these letters exist, yes?”

“Of course they exist!” Winn cried, frustrated. “I am not going to fail now!”

“No, you misunderstand!” Jason replied quickly. “I meant to point out that you said ‘letters.’ Plural.”

“Yes,” Winn replied, realization dawning. “Herr Heider told me of letters, a correspondence. So there would be more than one letter in the same hand.”

“You need to categorize these differently. You need to find the letters in the same handwriting, not the same subject matter.”

Winn dropped her sandwich, her eyes glued to Jason’s face, her expression complete astonishment. “Oh, Jason, that’s brilliant. Utterly and completely brilliant.” And before he knew it—likely even before she knew it—she had leapt from her chair and taken the two short steps across the room and kissed him.

It was like being hit by a wave. When he had kissed her in the taproom of the Stellzburg Inn, his mind had been tuned to the idea of survival. And her reaction had been one of surprise, and from what he could recall, little else. But this . . . this was pure emotion. Gratitude, joy, desperation . . . all coming from this trim body against his, those arms that wound around his neck, those sweet lips pressed up to his own.