Follow My Lead (27 page)

It did not assist that he still had no idea why they were going to Vienna. Winn was unable to give her explanation in the carriage, as two of the other passengers, ladies, began a conversation that did not stop, except for every time Jason or Winn tried to open their mouths to say something. Then it got so quiet Jason could swear that he could hear the ladies listening.

So Winn and Jason had to ignore each other, until finally the ladies settled down into snoozing. Which turned out to be Winn and Jason’s undoing.

Really, they would have been better off just keeping quiet the entire time.

“Now, do you mind telling me why we had to escape Nuremberg so quickly that we had to leave all our money behind?”

And that was it. That was the one sentence that had to be said that shouldn’t have been said. Because, as Jason should have learned by now, snoozing, carriage-bound Germans have the suspicious ability to hear (and understand) English extremely well.

“Driver!” one of the ladies cried, sitting bolt upright and banging on the roof of the carriage. The carriage lurched to an immediate stop, and the driver climbed down, followed by the light footsteps of Hans, the boy Jason had to bamboozle.

While the boisterous and, now that Jason thought about it, ugly and warted woman divulged—in rapid German, of course—through the window of the carriage everything she had just heard Jason say, he watched as the young boy’s eyes grew wide, and then as his face paled when the driver turned to him, his hand raised in a fist.

“No!” Jason bellowed as he leapt from the carriage, ran around to the other side, and came in between the driver and the boy. “He did nothing to earn a beating,” Jason growled, catching the driver’s arm.

“He cost me money!” the driver sneered. “He needs to learn a lesson. Or do you want to learn it for him?”

Jason breathed in the fumes of the beer on the driver’s breath and eminently regretted his decision to put his nose in the man’s face.

Now, Jason had only ever been in a single fight in his life, and it had been decidedly one-sided. And that side was his, facedown in the mud outside of a pub called the Oddsfellow Arms near his sister’s home. But he liked to think he could hold his own in one-on-one combat.

He was wrong.

Even a lifetime of beer drinking could not allay the sheer strength the driver had earned from controlling a team of horses all day, every day. Even as Jason managed to land a combination of blows to the man’s impressive gut, the driver’s fist came down onto Jason’s face and ribs in quick succession, felling him to his knees. Followed by a swift kick to the body, and Jason was sprawled on the side of the dusty road, reeling in pain.

Out of the corner of his red, addled vision, Jason could see the driver raise his fist again to little Hans. He moved to come between them, tried to sit up in time, but he had been incapacitated too neatly. He could not save Hans from his beating.

But Winn could.

She leapt out of the carriage and wedged the whole of her petite frame in between the large driver and his frightened charge.

“Don’t you dare!” Winn ground out, her eyes boring into the driver’s face. “Shame on you.” Jason struggled to his feet and watched as the sparrow confronted the elephant. “Shame on you!” she yelled, loud enough that it echoed through the rolling hills of the empty countryside.

Even though the driver may not have understood Winn’s English words, he understood the look in her eyes and lowered his arm, hesitating. He turned his head when he heard shuffling from the carriage.

“I knew they were trouble when they first boarded, didn’t I tell you, Uta?” the more rotund of the two ladies was saying in German as she maneuvered her weight to better see the dramatics unfold outside.

“Oh, leave them, driver!” the other lady, Uta, said. “We must be on our way.” She held up a pocket watch and shook it at him, as if to remind him of the time.

“Not worth it in any case,” the driver grumbled. He shot one last disparaging look at Jason, who had struggled to his feet and come to stand next to Winn, between the driver and the boy, his breaths coming in sharp, painful bursts. Whatever his condition, the driver dismissed it, and them, by climbing up to his seat on the carriage, flicking the reins, and pulling away with all possible haste, disappearing down the road.

Leaving Jason, Winn, and the young Hans on the dusty side of the long road, Nuremberg behind them, Vienna in front of them, and nothing but rolling hills dotted with farm animals in between.

Now, Jason liked to think of himself as a fairly reasonable man. He had only truly lost his temper once, and to be fair, alcohol had been involved, and the result had been, as it was so mentioned, to find himself facedown in the mud. But having, in just the past few hours, been forced into becoming a fugitive, his nerves a fraying wire, and then subsequently beaten by an oversized Bavarian, he was holding on to his good sense with both hands.

But there was Winn to think about—and the small, soft fingers prodding at him.

“Gah!” he cried when said fingers not so gently came across a sore spot on his ribs.

“Oh! I’m sorry,” Winn cried, immediately poking him again in the same spot. “Does it hurt there?”

“Yes, that’s what ‘gah!’ means!” Jason growled, enough of a warning so that Winn backed away. Instead, she turned to the boy, Hans, who was standing silent, shaking.

“Oh, Hans!” she said in English, so whether or not the boy understood her was suspect, but he looked up into her face with his big innocent eyes. “Are you quite well? No bumps and bruises? You should be thanking Jase—er, Mr. Cummings for his help. He took a beating for you.”

Hans nodded solemnly and, escorted by Winn, took tentative steps toward Jason . . . and promptly kicked him in the shin.

“You cost me my job!” the child cried, and then, turning on his heel, began running in the other direction, back toward Nuremberg.

“Wait!” Winn cried after him. “Where are you going?”

“Home!” the boy shouted behind him, and continued down the path, faster than either Jason or Winn would be able to catch up with him.

“What do we do?” Winn asked, the worry creeping into her voice. “Should we go after him?”

And it was the worry that did it. That small change in her pitch, the concern, the fear. It broke his anger free like no punch or blow ever could.

He began to laugh. But not his normal, amused laugh. This laugh sounded as though it were coming from another body, one that was quickly losing any sense of self-control.

“What the—?” Winn asked. “Did you get hit in the head? Have you gone addled?”

“Have I gone addled?” Jason repeated with disbelief. “Probably. But it’s nothing compared to you.”

“What—”

But she didn’t get very far into whatever question she was going to ask, because Jason’s laughter abruptly stopped.

“You! You are finally,
finally
, worried about something, and it’s
him
?”

“He’s a child.”

“He’s a native speaker who actually has some idea what he’s doing and where he’s going! And yet you worry about him.” Jason began to advance on Winn in small, methodical steps. Even in the middle of the road, with every direction to run, she couldn’t escape him. It had taken two weeks of travel, but he was finally, legitimately angry, and this conversation was long overdue.

“Now, I’ve seen you pull at your locket in a worrying way as you try to figure out your next move, I’ve seen you process through a thousand emotions, but I have never heard anything close to concern in your voice.

“No, you are too focused on your mission to think to worry—not only about me, and I have sacrificed a ridiculous amount to be here, but for yourself. But you
would
worry about this small boy! The only one of us who has a destination and knows how to get there. The boy will be fine!”

Winn stiffened her spine, her eyes flaring wide in indignation. “As I have told you before, you don’t need to be here—I do not need you to escort me across the Continent!”

“Oh yes, you bloody do!” Jason crowed. “And that’s the most frightening part of this whole thing. I know for a fact I am not the world’s best protector, but if I weren’t here, I cannot imagine what you would do or where you would be right now—you don’t speak the language, you don’t know when someone is bilking you . . . you never
think
, Winn. Oh, you think about your paintings and your letters and the history you learned from books, but you are never . . . practical!”

“You think to lecture me on practicality?” Winn scoffed. “You, who ran willy-nilly onto a ship that was setting sail for ports unknown?”

“Yes, because you are the one who ran willy-nilly onto a carriage heading for Vienna of all places! Would you care to finally tell me why you did that?”

“Happily,” she spat back, her hand gingerly digging into her pocket and pulling out the letters she had showed him so proudly just that morning. “Because
you
said I needed more definitive proof—you said I had better pray that there were more letters about the painting. And since George invaded the Dürer House, we couldn’t go back there . . . so, it occurred to me that there would be other letters—in Vienna.”

Jason quirked an eyebrow, a cynical invitation for her to explain further.

“These letters”—she gently waved them in his direction—“when they start talking about Lutheranism, there is a mention of attending services at Stephansdom—St. Stephen’s Cathedral, in Vienna. That’s where the artist who painted the Adam and Eve lived. That’s where we would find the other half of this correspondence—letters written in Dürer’s own hand.”

“Wonderful,” Jason drawled, clapping his hands slowly. “No, no, don’t look so peevish, I actually commend your reasoning. It’s wholly sound. Except for a few things.”

“Such as?” Winn’s brow went up.

“Such as,
if
these letters from Dürer exist in the first place, there is no guarantee that the family of Maria F., whomever she is, has kept them for the last
three hundred years
. And if they did—don’t you think letters written by Master Dürer would have come to light sooner?”

“Possibly not—after all, the Adam and Eve painting was not discovered until fifty years ago, and then ascribed to Dürer mistakenly . . .” Winn argued, her confidence beginning to waver.

“But your reasoning,” Jason continued, heedless of her argument, “does not explain why the hell we had to run from Nuremberg immediately! Leaving behind your bag, which had your clothes, your copy of the painting, and
all
our money!”

“Because!” Winn shot back. “George was there! He managed to find us already—we had to move!”

“But George would not always be there,” Jason yelled. “He would have left eventually. Nuremberg is a big town; we could have found a place to hide for the afternoon and come back in the night and gotten our things before haring out of town as if being chased by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!”

“He would have found us.” Winn shook her head. “And if he didn’t, he would have managed to get Frau Heider eating out of the palm of his hand—the minute we turned up there, she would have notified him. You don’t know him at all.”

“You’re right, I don’t know him—but I know enough to feel sorry for him,” Jason retaliated. He knew, when he saw the shock of pain in her eyes, that
this—
not maligning her common sense or her plans to find the accompanying letters—was the bridge too far, but he couldn’t stop himself. It just felt too good, too right to vent his spleen in this manner, that he plowed through any objection the small voice of his good sense might have had.

“That’s right, George Bambridge, I feel sorry for him. Because of you. You: tiny, little, five-foot-nothing Winnifred Crane, have been playing him for a fool. Of
course
he followed you here—if he knows you at all, the way I am getting to know you, he probably lost his mind with worry thinking of you traveling across the Continent alone. But the blasted thing is, if you’d had, at any point in the last
fifteen years
, the guts to mention to George that you no longer wished to marry him, you could have avoided this mess altogether!”

And that was the point at which Winn slapped him.

Over the course of their acquaintance, Jason had been hit accidentally by her hand, and hit purposefully multiple times by many other people. But he’d never felt the sting quite so harshly as when Winnifred Crane put the full weight of her five-foot-nothing fury behind her intentions.

It wasn’t the hand that hurt, nor the reddening impression that it left on the side of his unshaven face. It was the tears welling in her eyes, threatening to fall down her cheeks.

Jason could only stare, could only rein in the emotions that had been running out of control for the last few minutes. The last few weeks. His breath came in jerky gulps as his hand went to his burning cheek. Her breathing was the opposite—not erratic, but deep, furious, and controlled.

“You think I do not know I am in a mess of my own making?” she said quietly. “I’m well aware. But I am happy to report, it is a mess that no longer concerns you.”

And with that, she straightened her spine, in that Winnsome manner, and began to march down the road, in the direction their abandoning carriage had rumbled not ten minutes earlier.

“Winn . . . Winn, wait . . . Where do you think you’re going?” Jason called after her.

“Vienna!” she retorted.

She didn’t turn around as she spoke. So she didn’t see Jason rub his cheek gently, and with a resolved sigh to the heavens, begin to take stiff, painful steps after her.

T
HE sun was setting in the west, casting Winn’s shadow long before her as she set out on her path toward Vienna. She could hear the shuffling footsteps of Jason behind her. He kept a safe distance, about twenty paces—close enough that he could keep an easy eye on her, but far enough that if she happened to decide to strike him again, he would have time to set up defenses.