"Meeting your younger self."

Jason scoffed for a moment. "I wasn't . . . that is, I was never that bad when I was twenty." Then he hedged, uncertain. "You think I was?"

Winn simply shrugged and smiled sympathetically.

"Well, that's highly disconcerting," Jason answered glumly. But Winn had already moved forward and knocked on the door to the Durer House.

No one came to the door, so she knocked again. And again.

"Herr Heider!" she finally yelled. "Herr Heider, I know you are in there!"

The locks finally rumbled and the half door was cracked open.

"English, yes?" The lady who had been guarding the door from the assault of young marauding English university students only minutes before peeked out through the small opening.

"Yes, I'm here to see-" Winn began with relief but was abruptly cut off by the half door being thrown wide open.

"No more English! No more tourists! This house is closed to the public! Go . . . make migration elsewhere!" The woman's eyes flashed steel again, and she made to slam the top portion of the door shut again, but this time, it was stopped.

By Jason's hand. And rather painfully, too.

"Madam," Jason ground out through his teeth. "Before, you said you own this house. Are you, perhaps, Frau Heider?" he asked with a pointed look to Winn.

"Da," Frau Heider replied, alleviating the pressure on Jason's hand. "Ich bin Frau Heider."

"Frau Heider, I'm here to see your husband," Winn cried, not wasting any more time. "It's Winnifred Crane . . . Alexander Crane's daughter!"

As they were admitted into the house where Albrecht Durer had lived and painted, Jason expected to be awed. To feel the hallowed light of residual genius. Instead, he was fairly certain he entered a regular, albeit messy and disorganized, Nuremberg town house under basic construction.

And under a shroud.

Black drapes covered wall hangings, mirrors, clocks . . . black tablecloths fell in folds over surfaces. Even the relative clutter of stalled construction work could not mask the grief this house existed in.

"I apologize for the mess, Miss Crane, but ever since my husband purchased the house we have been invaded by students and artists from every single country!" Frau Heider explained in her strong English, stopping to rest at one of the two massive pillars that marked the entrance to the home. She dabbed at her brow with the edge of her serviceable apron, weary from a trying morning.

"Herr Heider was originally from Berlin, but is a Durer enthusiast," Winn explained to Jason. "So much so that when he made a pilgrimage to Nuremberg a year or two ago and saw this house, he purchased it."

"Da, my Wilhelm had to save it, he told me. He sold my father's business that I inherited in Berlin, our house there . . ." Frau Heider paused for a moment, her gray eyes lost in thought. Then, she fluttered her hands, smoothed her apron. "But he did do a great deal. You should have seen this place before-falling down around its elbows. It cost so much and took so long to simply get it habitable!"

"The tour money must have helped financed the repairs," Jason surmised, and watched Frau Heider's face blush.

"Wilhelm, he wanted all the travelers-migrators . . . ?" she said, asking tacitly if she had the correct word.

Jason smiled kindly and supplied, "I think you mean 'pilgrims,' ma'am."

"Da-pilgrims. Students, lovers of Master Durer, they come, and my husband cannot in good faith turn them away. People of study are good, nice . . . but school boys drunk add more to the repairs," Frau Heider replied. "We had been asking the city of Nuremberg to purchase the house, as a historical place, but the city, it has no money. So instead we try make repairs, and make lives here, and move my husband's Durer collection in, da?"

"Yes, Frau Heider, the correspondence is why I came to see your husband," Winn began, but the woman was not listening.

"And then, last month, while unloading trunks of letters from Berlin . . . he collapsed . . . and left me." Frau Heider's fluttery hand came up to her eyes, covering them. Jason glanced at Winn. Winn's sympathetic heart-and perhaps her own affections for the man-wore plain on her face.

"Oh, Frau Heider, I am so sorry-if only we had known."

"Left me to deal with that scrounging, not good"-then Frau Heider said a word in German that Jason decided he would not translate for Winn, no matter how much she gave him that inquiring look-"tour guide and his drunken charges!"

"I do hope you don't include us in that group," Jason asked with a smile.

Frau Heider blinked a moment, and her shoulders relaxed. "Of course, good sir, of course. I am sorry, I have been the neglectful host. Please, follow me." She ushered them to a set of chairs by a small fireplace in an adjoining room. "How did you know my husband?" she asked Jason.

Jason managed a, "Well, I . . ." before Winn jumped in.

"You see, Frau Heider, I am the daughter of Alexander Crane, and have been writing your husband for several years now."

Frau Heider's eyebrow went up. "You. Have been writing my husband?"

"Yes," Winn said in a rush. "We have been corresponding on the works of Durer for some time, especially since my father is a scholar-"

"I am sorry, but are you telling me that my husband has been writing with young ladies, for how long?"

"Oh, many years. And, I don't think he wrote other young ladies, just me. I am astonished to hear of his death. He always seemed so vigorous in his correspondence."

"Vigorous?"

"Lively. Impassioned."

"Passioned?" Frau Heider's voice came out as the barest strangle.

"Yes!" Winn cried, oblivious. "Why, I remember one time he wrote to me of a particular nude sketch that he had discovered-"

As Jason saw the farce playing out before him, two things became abundantly clear: First, Herr Heider had kept his correspondence to himself, and second, to keep the already emotional Frau Heider from breaking, he was apparently to lend Winn his name a few days longer.

"Darling!" Jason interrupted, smiling tightly at the look of palest, abject horror on Frau Heider's face. "Perhaps it would be a good time to mention to Frau Heider that we are currently on our wedding trip. And the purpose of it."

Winn looked up at him curiously, her face awash in confusion. He leaned down and kissed her cheek, at the same time whispering in her ear, "After all, you won't get what you want if the lady thinks you've cuckolded her."

"Oh?" Winn asked. Then for the first time, seeing the look of complete horror and confusion on Frau Heider's face, understood. "Oh!" she cried again, this time with understanding. "I assure you, Frau Heider, my correspondence with your husband was purely academic. After all, I've only ever had eyes for . . . my darling Jason, here." She latched her hand onto his and squeezed. The act of which crushed his fingers even as it relieved the pressure on Frau Heider's face, and she relaxed.

"Of course," Frau Heider said, sighing. "How silly of me. My Wilhelm only ever had eyes for Master Durer and, if I could get his attention, for me."

"In fact," Winn said kindly, "we do not wish to impose, but we are on something of a mission."

"A mission?" Frau Heider's eyes lit up. "A mission involving my husband?"

"Precisely."

"A mystery!" Frau Heider cried joyfully. "I love nothing more than a good mystery. Tell me, my dear, how can I help?"

"Your husband told me about some letters," she said, taking her portmanteau from Jason's hands and fishing out the Adam and Eve copy. "Ones he found, written to Master Durer, about this Adam and Eve painting."

Frau Heider took the painting from Winn's hands and peered at it with those keen gray eyes. "I do not recognize it, but I did not involve myself in my husband's work," Frau Heider said.

"Well, you see, the letters he found say . . ."

As Winn laid out the purpose of her visit-leaving out the less than pertinent information regarding George and various wagers-Frau Heider followed the conversation carefully, only occasionally stopping her, asking her to speak slower or for Jason to provide a translation.

"Frau Heider, please, tell me you still have those letters. I would be eternally grateful," Winn concluded.

Frau Heider slid her eyes between Jason and Winn once more, and Jason held his breath. "Yes, my dear, I do. At least, I hope so."

At that pronouncement, she rose and beckoned for Winn and Jason to follow her. And they did, up the stairs to the third floor, where the repairs had not gotten as far as they had on the rooms downstairs, but which at least seemed sturdy and clean. Except for one space.

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."

Twelve.

Wherein letters are found, hope is lost, and unexpected visitors arrive.

TWO 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 Durer 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.