Follow My Lead (41 page)

“Of course I recognized him!” Gruff, gregarious Sir Geoffrey Alton said as he forked another serving of roast onto his plate. “We met once three years ago over a card game at White’s. And because of my work, I know better than to forget a face. Especially one to whom I lost twenty quid.”

Sir Geoffrey Alton, diplomatic envoy of Britain to Austria, chuckled at his own joke. To either side of him, his daughters—the young girls who had played their saviors—either laughed along, or took pity on him and did so.

Sir Geoffrey and his daughters were a happily situated family. Apparently his wife had died some years prior, and unwilling to leave his girls in the upbringing of a relative, instead brought them, and the appropriate number of household servants, with him wherever his services were required. And the girls seemed to benefit from it—they were both able to hold easy polite conversation, on a range of topics. Evangeline—called Evie by her sister—was thirteen, and in the midst of growing into a true English beauty, fair of hair and face and temperament. Her younger and yet taller sister Gail was a curious mix of intelligence, silliness, and vulnerability. If Jason wasn’t mistaken, Sir Geoffrey was going to have his hands full with both of them once they came of age.

But he didn’t really think terribly long on the marriage prospects of the Alton daughters as his attention had naturally and rightly fallen to the food in front of him. Supper was a hearty and yet sumptuous affair. Jason was in his own personal brand of heaven. There was roast, duck, lamb. There were breads, potatoes, vegetables, wine.
English
custard. Say what one will about the lack of culinary graces in English cuisine, but there was no better sight than a pudding when one had been without its gelatinous wobbling for weeks on end.

He had three helpings.

“I couldn’t live without English fare, myself,” Sir Geoffrey declared, patting his own stuffed belly. “I make sure to bring along my own cook when I am assigned to different posts.”

“It’s true,” Evangeline Alton interjected shyly. “We were living in Paris, surrounded by the best chefs in the world, and my father is livid that there are no peas in his stew.”

“Good Lord, Geoffrey, I knew you were a philistine, but I didn’t know how far it extended.” The drawling voice from the other end of the table called out, eliciting giggles from his dinner companion, the younger, taller Gail Alton. “Please tell me that you have not taught your daughters to consider nothing more horrible than a pealess stew,” Mr. Henry Ellis said with a grin.

While Jason had been surprised to be recognized by Sir Geoffrey Alton, the more significant surprise was that Sir Geoffrey’s visiting friend, Mr. Henry Ellis, recognized Winn.

“Of course I recognize you,” he had said when they first met as dinner was being served. “In fact, Lord Forrester asked me to act as escort on your journey once you reached Calais.” A twinkle appeared in the older gentleman’s eye. “But you never made it to Calais, did you?”

“Henry is much in your line, Miss Crane,” Sir Geoffrey supplied. “He is a fellow of the London Society of Antiquaries—your rival learned society, I believe, Your Grace—and is newly named as the curator of the British Museum. I’m surprised your paths have not crossed yet.”

“I’m sure they would have had I been in London during the weeks Miss Crane made such an impression on the Historical Society,” Mr. Ellis replied. “But I was in France. But once I received Lord Forrester’s letter and managed to get my hands on a few English newspapers, I was quite eager to meet you. You cannot imagine my devastation when you were not on your ship! I was told by some excessively large gentleman that you had chosen to take another vessel to a different destination.”

“Ah, yes,” Winn hedged. “It seemed my path veered in a different direction, with different companions.”

Unbeknownst to Winn, that tidbit of information was already known to their host. Earlier in the evening, while Winn was still dressing, Sir Geoffrey had called Jason into his library. Jason had never felt more like a guilty schoolboy in his life.

“I understand from my maids and daughters that you have kept the young lady close in your company . . . Perhaps too close?” Sir Geoffrey had questioned.

What was Jason to have said? Was he to tell Sir Geoffrey that while they had been in each other’s company the whole trip, nothing untoward had happened? It had. Or was he to tell him that Miss Crane was an independently minded female, and watch the man sneer in well-bred criticism?

Apparently, however, Jason’s silence on the subject was the best answer he could have given, as Sir Geoffrey had merely looked at him and said, “It is impossible to know what occurred on the road to here, so I will not question you. London may care, but we are well removed from London, and therefore I have decided to keep my council on the subject. But, while in this house . . .”

He hadn’t needed to finish the sentence. Jason had nodded, relieved that he was no longer a schoolboy in trouble.

“Well, since I intended to drop you in Switzerland on my way to Vienna,” Mr. Ellis was saying, “I decided to simply travel straight here instead. And of all the luck, you end up in my friend’s care, and I get to meet you after all!”

Winn smiled then, as Mr. Ellis’s obvious good humor put everyone at ease.

“Now then, I have read only a little about your journey and its cause, so tell me everything I missed,” Mr. Ellis said.

And Winn obliged. Over supper, she held the entire table rapt in her retelling of her trials in getting to London, her first meeting with Lord Forrester (and incidentally, Jason) that had set the academic world alight, including the small lie she told about the location of the letters. The two girls gasped at that.

“Oh, how exciting!” Gail said. “The start to an adventure.”

“You mean how frightening,” Evangeline countered. “Having to hide your destination as you set off into the world alone?”

“Well, as luck would have it, I was not alone.” Winn shot Jason a look from under her lashes. But before that look could be remarked upon by the audience, she continued with their dramatic trip to Hamburg, then Nuremberg—and what they found there.

This caught Mr. Ellis’s attention.

“May I see these letters?” he asked, and Winn produced them.

“They’ve been in your pocket? For the whole journey?” he asked, aghast.

“I know, I’m horrified,” Winn replied. “I would have killed for some kidskin or vellum to protect them with. But I had no choice—my cousin had caught up to us in Nuremberg, and we had to run. I’ve been extremely careful with them . . . even when we had to sleep on the side of the road or work as stable hands for a meal.”

“As I recall,” Jason had to interject, “I did most of that stable-hand work.”

He could tell that Winn was about to counter teasingly, but the girls spoke before she could.

“This is better than any of Mrs. Rothschild’s books,” Gail squealed to Evangeline’s eager nodding.

“She could take a page from you, Miss Crane. And to think, the whole thing over a painting!”

Sir Geoffrey chuckled heartily at that. “My Evie is mad about her paintings . . . and my Gail about her history. I think you’ve hit upon the one story they both would sit still for.”

And then, the story concluded with their rescue, already well known to all in attendance, attention turned to the neglected food in front of them, and conversation began to be colored by comments on card games at White’s, English pudding, and peas in stew.

But it was after most of the plates had been cleared that attention again returned to Winn’s story of their adventures, and Mr. Ellis—free from the possibility of a splattered pudding—produced the letters from the safety of drawer he had placed them in and began to inspect them.

“They have held up remarkably well, given their age,” Winn commented.

“True . . .” Mr. Ellis commented, his eyes never leaving the page. “But you are right to seek a secondary evidence. These provide doubt but not proof of your painting’s authorship.” Then he looked up and addressed another member of the party. “Gail, would you come and look at this? My German is atrocious.”

“If you need a translation, I think I’ve managed the whole,” Winn said, but a chuckle from Sir Geoffrey deterred her.

“Don’t worry about the letters, Miss Crane,” he said. “My Gaily girl knows how to handle herself with such important things, don’t you?”

“Yes, Papa,” the girl replied, her jaw setting as she became quite serious, stilling her normal, eleven-year-old bounciness.

“Besides, Gail has a bit of a knack for languages. We’ve been here only two months and I’d swear up and down she was a native Austrian if I hadn’t seen her every day of my life.”

Gail sat down next to Mr. Ellis and began to peruse.

“There is no last name to her signature—where do you intend to start looking?”

“I have to surmise that this woman met Master Dürer first and perhaps only in Basel, when he was apprenticing, but they kept up a correspondence, even though these were the only two letters found. The simple fact that it is a literate woman in the year 1500 points to her being well-off. Add to it that she is obviously trained in art, and since they met in Basel, at one time had means to travel, she must have been very wealthy indeed,” Winn explained. “The only location mentioned is St. Stephen’s Cathedral, so perhaps there is a slim chance they still have some records of who the wealthy or aristocratic families were who worshipped there.”

“You won’t find her family at St. Stephen’s,” Gail piped up from her position bent over Mr. Ellis’s shoulder. “At least not her biological one.”

“What do you mean? She mentions her mother in one letter, doesn’t she?” Jason asked, trying to remember the exact phrasing from Winn’s excited retelling in Nuremberg.

“
My mother who is my superior in all things
—when she has been scolded for having too much pride in her work,” Winn added, apparently reading Jason’s thoughts . . . but then, a funny look crossed her face and her hand went to her locket. “Unless . . .”

“Exactly.” Gail smiled at Winn. “You misidentified the article. Understandable, since it’s a bit smudged, but . . . there it is.”

Mr. Ellis beamed at Winn the way an instructor looked on his favorite pupil, and Winn was shaking her head, practically laughing at her own foolishness, but the rest of the table was on the edge of their seats, eager to be clued in.

Unsurprisingly, Jason was the one who couldn’t hold his tongue any longer. “Well then, what does it really say?” he cried impatiently.

“It says
my Mother Superior
,” Winn answered, smiling. “The author of this letter is a nun.”

“Which makes sense,” Mr. Ellis supplied for the edification of all. “In that era, a woman of talent would have had more of a chance in a nunnery to foster it than in a marriage.”

“Excellent,” Jason said. “But is there an abbey associated with St. Stephen’s?” he asked the table.

“Er . . . well, there are dozens of nunneries in Vienna who worship at St. Stephen’s at major ecclesiastical holidays,” Sir Geoffrey supplied. “Let me reach out to some people, see if I cannot get the parish priest to provide you with a list.”

“So, to paraphrase Shakespeare, we shall get ourselves to a nunnery.” Winn smiled.

“Nunneries, it sounds like,” Jason grumbled. But the rest of the table was far too taken with excitement to note his skepticism.

“Oh, Jason, this is wonderful. This might actually work!” Winn cried excitedly. Jason let her voice saying his name, which she had refrained from using over dinner, wash over him, settling into that place in his spine that relaxed at the sound.

“How so?” he asked. “I’m sorry to play devil’s advocate, but we still have to locate half of a three-hundred-year-old correspondence that it is very unlikely to have been kept as important, if at all.”

“True,” Winn agreed, “but when have you ever known a church to throw anything away?”

“I’ll toast to that!” Sir Geoffrey called out. “Richards”—he addressed a servant who had blended effortlessly into a wall—“bring out the Burgundy. A ’93, I should think!”

Jason’s gaze shot to Winn’s. And together, the both of them burst into starry-eyed laughter, leaving the rest of the room out on the joke.

And if they had been alone, he would have taken her into his arms then and held her there. For as long as he could.

Because as they toasted with the long-ago promised Burgundy’93, Jason could not help thinking with a touch of melancholy that tomorrow . . . tomorrow was the beginning of the end of the adventure.

T
OTTY was fairly certain that George’s head was shortly going to explode. Which would be a tragedy, as it would be impossible to get blood and brain matter out of her travel gown, and she only had three with her.

Of course, Frau Heider could lend her one, and the two of them were of a size. But really, she would prefer it if George’s brain stayed in his head altogether.

Yes, Frau Heider had taken up a place as a co-traveler on this journey. Well, it had been so long since Totty had had a friend her own age to chat with, and George was not the best of company on this journey, as he was becoming progressively more surly and erratic as every day ticked on.

The search for Winn had not gone well in Nuremberg. George was unable to locate any trace of her for almost two days—and indeed, had almost assumed they’d headed for England, letters in hand—when his inquiries at the stable yard bore fruit. They had yielded a young boy who had been duped by a woman and her flame-haired companion, and the child was scathingly eager to tell them where they went—or rather, where the coachman had left them on the side of the road.

“And we are off!” Frau Heider had cried. “Oh, how exciting!”

This elicited strange looks from both Totty and George.