Behind her back, Edith heard a low whistle, a catcall that made the hairs on the back of her neck rise.
“He! Klaus, they have skirts here!” the soldier yelled over his shoulder to someone in the line behind him.
“Excuse me, madam,” the man said mockingly as he squeezed past Edith standing by the train window, pressing himself against her back more closely than necessary as he pushed through the narrow train corridor.
She refused to honor his vulgarity with a reaction, but her nerves were ruffled. Edith moved away from the fresh air in the window. She opened the door to a passenger car and made her way down the center aisle. The train car was filled with men, most wearing the same field jacket as her own, others in civilian clothes. She glanced beyond them, struggling to keep her emotions in check. She knew her eyes had to be red, her cheeks puffy. She felt their gaze on her as she hurried down the aisle, managing her large bag.
In the stifling air of the sleeping car, Edith finally exhaled. It was tightly spaced with two stacks of bunks, empty. All the other cars like this were filled with five or six soldiers. Being a woman, they had assigned her one to herself. Edith pressed herself into one of the lower bunks and turned her thoughts again to Heinrich.
Please tell me that you are not already taken.
Edith smiled even now through the blur of tears, thinking of Heinrich’s first words to her, two years ago, at a Bavarian festival in a popular Munich beer garden.
“Pardon me?” she had said to the tall stranger who pushed through the crowd of revelers, the handsome man with the lock of blond hair over his brow who dared to be so forward.
“You’re a beautiful woman,” he had said. “I only hope that someone has not already stolen you away so that the rest of us might have a standing chance.”
She’d laughed at him, admiring his audacity. Edith had always considered herself as plain as a kitchen mouse and had come to accept that she may spend her days as a spinster at her father’s side. The mere thought of Heinrich still had the power to make her stomach flutter, even when she conjured images of their first few headlong days together.
It was a daring beginning, but even after getting to know each other over months, Heinrich had truly won her heart. And when he came to her father to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage, Edith’s heart had been forever his. Heinrich knew that her father may not even remember his name, but all the same, he had treated him with respect and tenderness.
“Yes,” her father had said, and she knew that in that moment, there was not only clarity in his mind, but happiness in his heart.
A sliver of dim light remained outside the narrow window, but Edith was too filled with nervous energy to settle in her bunk. Instead, she stood again, turned her canvas bag on its side, and pulled out a small notebook. She stared at the blank page. Should she write a letter to her father? Would he understand where she had gone? Would he remember her at all?
Her neighbor, Frau Gerzheimer, had seemed more than willing to help. Edith held out hope that Frau Gerzheimer would have what it took to convince her father to cooperate. She trusted that Heinrich would stop by after working at his father’s store to make sure everything was all right, before he, too, had to board a train. And she prayed that the agency would send a relief nurse as soon as possible. The last thing she wanted was to see her father sent to a sanatorium where he might wither away.
Unable to find the words to say to her father, Edith put the pen to the paper and started a letter to Heinrich, but all she could think to write was how much she already missed him. Edith and Heinrich were heading separately to Poland, both pawns in a game that had grown larger than themselves. Names whispered to block leaders for the slightest suspicion. Jewish neighbors—men, women, even innocent children like the little Nusbaum boy—led from their homes in dark silence, amassed, corralled, and shifted like human game pieces on a great chessboard. And boys no older than fourteen, marching in uniform, their voices echoing in the streets.
Today, Germany is ours / tomorrow, the whole world.
Edith, Heinrich, and thousands of others across the Reich, she imagined, felt helpless, or too afraid of the consequences, to resist.
Would they find each other after their arrival in Poland? What would they find when they returned home, if they returned at all?
Edith hoped that the act of writing might calm her nervous stomach, might relieve some of the trepidation about what lay ahead. Instead, it only unleashed a flurry of unanswered questions in her mind. How had events escalated to this degree so quickly? Why couldn’t she, like Manfred, have foreseen what the museum directors were planning? And how had she—a lowly conservator toiling quietly in a basement conservation lab—been thrust into the middle of this conflict?
Edith felt her heart sink as the answer to the last question crystallized in her mind.
Because I am the one who brought their attention to these paintings. She felt like an idiot for not recognizing beforehand what she was being asked to do. For not understanding what it might mean and what might be the consequences of her seemingly benign research project in the museum library.
Edith pulled out the binder of folios she had made of the art the museum directors wanted to safeguard. She unwound the straps and began shuffling through the pages again. Surely these paintings only made up a small portion of what the Czartoryski family owned.
When Edith reached the reproduction of da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine, she paused. I am to blame for putting all these pictures at risk, she thought. It’s my fault that we are on our way to take these pictures from the Czartoryski family. My entire adult life has been dedicated to saving works of art. And yet, in one moment, in the name of doing my job, I have endangered some of the most priceless works of art in the world. Was there a way to undo the damage she had done?
The clack of the train wheels and the short bursts of steam set the pace for Edith’s racing thoughts. Outside the window, the treetops rushed by, a blur of shadows.
Edith’s mind searched for an answer, a way to save da Vinci’s Lady and the other pictures that she had put unintentionally in the line of fire. But as the ragged outlines of the trees disappeared and the sky began to turn black, Edith only felt the weight of despair like a stone on her chest. The paintings, too, had been cast like dice into a game that had spiraled out of her control, a series of events that Edith now felt powerless to stop.
12
Cecilia
Milan, Italy
January 1490
CECILIA HAD UNLEASHED A SERIES OF EVENTS THAT SHE would be powerless to stop. That’s what her brother had meant, even if he had written it in more eloquent language.
She fingered the broken seal on the parchment her brother Fazio had sent, a missive letting Cecilia know that their mother had arrived safely back home in Siena. Cecilia wondered how long it would take for her mother to speak to her again, if she would hear from her at all, ever.
Cecilia’s mother had understood that the moment when her brazen daughter had not bowed but dared to step forward and bare her teeth to Ludovico il Moro in an unabashed smile, there was no turning back. The Regent of Milan would claim her for his own. No one was in a position to stop him, especially not a portly Sienese widow in a dirt-caked dress. In the end, Cecilia pitied her mother, for there was nothing for her to do but scream, break a plate, rattle away in a carriage, and leave the Castello Sforzesco behind in a cloud of fog and mud.