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 Durer'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 Durer'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 Durer 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 Durer 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.

She broke away mere seconds later, her eyes searching out his, confused and more than a little embarrassed. Somehow, his arms had come around her back and he was actively holding her to him. Keeping her there, keeping the cold air from filling that space. Then, he let her go.

She backed herself all the way to the other side of the room. Unfortunately, Jason thought, the room was too small to put any worthwhile distance between them. All he could do was stare at her, and all she could do was look at the space of floor between them.

It must be the air, Jason thought. The heavy air that in the last few seconds had burned up like fire.

"I, ah . . . I need some air," Jason said finally, filling the void that had been previously occupied by only the sounds of their breathing. "So I'm going to . . . go take a walk."

He didn't check to see her reaction. He didn't even spare her a glance as he wrenched open the door and passed through to the other side. And as he stepped downstairs and out onto the street, his mind kept going over and over the last few minutes on a never-ending loop. And one coherent thought managed to make it through his wreckage of a brain: What the hell had just happened?

She could have kissed Jason. Again. If he'd been in the room.

It was barely an hour later that Winn located the letters she was looking for. There they were, having been moved into different piles because one spoke mainly about Durer's engraving education in Basel, Switzerland, and the other has the barest mention of an Adam and Eve painting. Her eyes were burning, and her mind beyond tasked, but it was there. She knew it.

Since Jason was not in attendance, instead she contented herself with running downstairs, the two letters in hand, and accosting Frau Heider with her delightful find.

"Frau Heider!" she called out, finding her in the kitchen, taking a trowel and plaster to a crumbling corner of the room. "I found them! I found them!" she cried, entering the room.

"Ah, wunderbar," Frau Heider replied. "May I see?" She held out a hand, covered in plaster, and Winn's eyes went wide with horror. "Ah, no-you are right. Best not touch."

"Where is Jason?" Winn asked, her heart beating in her throat. "I must show him!"

"He went out, child," Frau Heider replied, waving her trowel in the direction of the door. "Said he needed air."

Winn blushed and then ran for the door, the letter, her precious careful letters, still in her hands.

"He went in the direction of the Hauptmarkt, my dear!" Frau Heider called out and then, as the girl burst through the door, could only chuckle to herself. Discovery, whether a letter or a feeling, was ever an inspiration.

Winn had never had much luck at finding people in crowds. Being on the shorter side of the human spectrum, she could only hop on her toes and pray for a glimpse of red hair and beard. It was just past noon, and the market was bustling with women purchasing meat for that night's supper, men bartering and trading for feed and seed for the farms just outside the city walls. Others strolled the craft stalls, small dolls and clockwork toys, carved wooden buttons and small treasure chests that had no purpose other than to look pretty and remind people that they had once been to the market on a warm summer day.

And in the middle of it all was Jason.

She found him after some minutes, exiting a small shop on the northeast side of the square. He had a package wrapped in paper in his hand, that Winn could only assume was a sandwich of some kind. She ran up to him, into him, with such force that it set Jason back on his heels.

"Oof!" The air came rushing out of his chest as he backed away from the door frame that had caught his weight. "For such a small person you really pack an enormous wallop," Jason grumbled as he discreetly hid the package behind his back. "Is it in your plans to cause me as much bodily injury as possible?"

"I'm sorry!" Winn cried, giggling. "Well, not really. I found them!"

"You found them," Jason repeated dumbly. Then, understanding, "You found them? The letters?"

She nodded, and produced the letters from her skirt pocket. "It's very small, the section that I need, but it's right here." She indicated the lines she sought on the page, her hands still gloved in plain white cotton. Jason came to stand behind her and peered over her shoulder.

"It's nearly illegible," he said finally, his breath in her ear. "Can you make it out at all?" At her nod, he responded, "Read the passage to me."

And as she met his eye, his face alarmingly close to hers, Winn forgot for a moment that they were in the crowded Hauptmarkt. "I think . . . at least, I am sure I am right, but I think it says this." She cleared her throat and read. "I wish to honor the master and my friend for his sympathies. Once you said you admired my work, so I send to you my last work, a First of Man and Woman. My mother, who is my superior in all things, has proclaimed pride my sin, and that I must rid myself of the paints, that I honor myself more than God. When we met in Basel, you suggested I study-" Winn paused here and squinted. "I think this next word means 'horticulture,' but I honestly have no idea." Then she cleared her throat and continued. "And my practicing I hope has met with your agreement."

Winn looked up then, carefully refolding and pocketing the letter as she did so. "And then they discuss Lutheranism in veiled terms for a while, and that's it."

"That's it?" Jason asked, a little too skeptical for Winn's liking. "There are no other letters in this handwriting?"

"Yes, there is one," she replied, carefully fishing it out of her pocket, "but it mainly discussed etching techniques Durer studied in Switzerland and some other commonplace things. Not the Adam and Eve painting."

"That's not enough," Jason replied, taking her hand. "Come on. Let's go back to the house, see if there are any other letters in any of Frau Heider's other trunks."

"What do you mean, that's not enough?" she asked as he pulled her through the crowds of the Hauptmarkt.

"That's not enough to prove that your Adam and Eve painting is the one being discussed."

"Of course it is!" she countered. "It is exactly what Herr Heider described to me. It says that they met in Basel, that this painter sent an Adam and Eve-a First of Man and Woman-to Durer."

"It's exactly what Herr Heider described? Are you telling me you crossed the Continent on a whim and the belief that that much was proof of a painting's . . . authorship?" Jason asked, his face complete astonishment. "Are there any dates on that letter? Any discussion of form and technique beyond studying horticulture? Any proof of receipt of the painting? Is the author of the letters recognized as an artist otherwise?"

"I don't think so," Winn replied. "But then again, there are not a lot of female painters recognized from this era, period."

That brought Jason up short, stopping in the dead center of one of Nuremberg's famous stone bridges. "The painter is a woman?"

Winn nodded. "They are signed by a Maria F. I can't make out the last name beyond the first letter."

Jason threw back his head and laughed. "Oh for God's sake! That's even worse!"

"How is that worse?" Winn asked, her brown brows coming down.

"Because the Historical Society is going to write those letters off as coming from a young girl overly impressed by a master artist, one who sent him a sketch she did in her adoration. Not this painting, not a serious work, nor someone to be taken seriously."

As Winn felt her blood rise, she wrenched her hand free of Jason's. "It will be enough to cast doubt."

"No it won't," Jason intoned seriously. "So you had better hope there is more conversation between Durer and this Maria F., and that it is a detailed account of Maria's talents as an artist and their relationship, because otherwise . . ."

Winn could only narrow her eyes and harrumphed. And then, of course, turned and walked briskly in the direction of the Durer House, Jason close at her heels.

They rounded the corner, coming onto the view of the Durer House just as they had a few short days ago, when they had met with the crowd of students paying homage. Only this time there were no students.

There was instead an instructor.

George. Next to him stood Totty, looking, if possible, both concerned and bored. They had been met at the half door by Frau Heider, her banked caution apparent to Winn and Jason, if no one else.

Winn froze solid upon seeing George, unable to move forward or backward. Luckily, Jason had the sense to pull her back beside the next building-hidden from view in the alley but within earshot.

"My affianced bride, you see, is terribly admiring of Master Durer," George was saying with a smile, his practiced charm diffusing any fear Frau Heider might have from his size. "But she is somewhat scatterbrained. We became separated recently, and I wondered if perhaps she had come here." He placed a concerned hand over the older woman's, eliciting a blush.

"Scatterbrained?" Winn whispered indignantly, forcing Jason to shush her.

"What is it with you English and your fascination with Durer?" Frau Heider was saying kindly, her stern visage warming to George's affecting countenance. "But I am sorry, there has been no single ladies here."

"Are you certain?" George replied earnestly. "She's small in stature, brown haired, somewhat plain?"

"Somewhat plain?" Winn couldn't help but repeat, incredulous. At this point, Jason rolled his eyes and gave up on shushing her, and instead simply placed a hand over her mouth.

"Small in stature?" Frau Heider replied, the wheels visibly turning in her brain.

"Yes!" George cried. "Her name is Winnifred Crane. I'm sorry, I never introduced myself. I am George Bambridge, professor at Oxford. Winnifred's father was my mentor . . ."

As George explained, the understanding on Frau Heider's face turned to surprised understanding, then anger. Jason and Winn watched as the older woman sputtered indignantly, then opened the door fully, admitting George and Totty.

"We have to go. Now," Winn said quietly after removing Jason's warm hand from her mouth.

"Right. We'll come back after they leave," Jason agreed.

"No, you don't understand, we have to leave Nuremberg," Winn replied, hedging out into the street. Then seeing that there was no one spying on them from the Durer House windows, shot out at a breakneck pace, running as fast as her feet could carry her.

"Winn, where are you going?" Jason cried, trying to catch up. "Winn!"

Arabella Arbuthnot Tottendale, affectionately known as Totty, was not a woman to be unseated, literally (she sat remarkably well upon a horse, and always had, despite her lack of practice in recent years) or metaphorically.

She had been utterly and completely shocked by Winn's plans to travel to the Continent alone, but not unseated by them. She had followed along and helped as best she could. Besides, Totty surmised, she had always been horrid at stopping mischief, so why not facilitate it instead, and make certain it was the least outrageous version possible?

Of course, somehow, her darling friend Winn had managed to find the most outrageous form of trouble possible by teaming up with an unmarried Duke on her cross-continent adventures, but then again, that child had always exceeded expectations. Still, said actions were not capable of unseating Totty. What left her dumbfounded, bewildered, and yes, unseated, was George Bambridge's reaction to them.

They had made the annoyingly tedious journey from Dover to Hamburg, following Winn's footsteps without so much of a trace of the flash of temper George had showed ever so briefly before they left. A flash that Totty had never been privy to before . . . but she feared Winn knew of it, more than she spoke.

Which was why Totty insisted on coming along. She would do her best to slow George down (counter to her promise to him), but she feared they would catch up with Winn all too easily, and there was no way she was going to let Winn face George alone.

Perhaps Winn had the same notion, and that was why she had the Duke of Rayne following after her like a lover on a lead.

At least, they assumed it was the Duke of Rayne. When they got to the Schmidt und Schmidt offices in Hamburg, they had met with a stereotypically efficient German-yet surprisingly English by birth-woman, Mrs. Schmidt.

"Yes, I directed the girl to a coaching yard," Mrs. Schmidt had told them after being assured not only of their interests in Winn but in their financial solvency. She pocketed the coin George had tossed her. "She was desperate to get to Nuremberg. Although what awaited her there, I do not know. She was always jabbering about old paintings and bothering the crew about mundane things, like what the rigging did or how they navigated by the stars. Oddly naive, that one."

George nodded sympathetically and agreed. "And do you happen to know where in Nuremberg she intended to go?"

"No," Mrs. Schmidt replied, "but that Duke fellow might know."

Both George and Totty froze at her words.

"What Duke fellow?" George asked finally. And at Mrs. Schmidt's shrug, put another coin in front of her.

"At least, I think he was a Duke. That's what he said he was, but he presented no card to me, or any such thing. Ran right on board the ship after Miss Crane, just as we were about to cast off."

"Did he happen to have red hair? A good height?" George continued. "Not as good as me, of course," he said with an offhand grin that Totty knew was intended to set people at ease.

"Yes," Mrs. Schmidt agreed. "Hair as red as the blazing sun. Miss Crane and the gentleman rarely spoke on board the ship, mind, but rumors were rampant that they were-"