THE NIGHT PORTRAIT
A NOVEL OF WORLD WAR II
AND DA VINCI’S ITALY
Laura Morelli

Copyright

One More Chapter a division of

HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published in the USA by William Morrow, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, New York 2020

This edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © Laura Morelli 2020

Designed by Diahann Sturge

Part title image © Alik Keplicz/AP/Shutterstock

Chapter opener grunge grey background © Nataliia K/Shutterstock

Laura Morelli asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

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Source ISBN: 9780008422714

Ebook Edition © 2020 ISBN: 9780008422707

Version: 2020-08-17

Dedication

For Max, and for all the others who work for good

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part I: War Machines

Chapter 1: Leonardo

Chapter 2: Edith

Chapter 3: Edith

Chapter 4: Cecilia

Chapter 5: Leonardo

Chapter 6: Dominic

Chapter 7: Leonardo

Part II: A Thing of Beauty

Chapter 8: Cecilia

Chapter 9: Dominic

Chapter 10: Cecilia

Chapter 11: Edith

Chapter 12: Cecilia

Chapter 13: Dominic

Chapter 14: Edith

Chapter 15: Leonardo

Chapter 16: Cecilia

Chapter 17: Dominic

Chapter 18: Cecilia

Chapter 19: Edith

Chapter 20: Leonardo

Chapter 21: Cecilia

Chapter 22: Leonardo

Chapter 23: Edith

Chapter 24: Dominic

Chapter 25: Cecilia

Chapter 26: Dominic

Chapter 27: Edith

Chapter 28: Dominic

Chapter 29: Edith

Part III: Hidden from View

Chapter 30: Leonardo

Chapter 31: Cecilia

Chapter 32: Dominic

Chapter 33: Edith

Chapter 34: Cecilia

Chapter 35: Edith

Chapter 36: Edith

Chapter 37: Cecilia

Chapter 38: Edith

Chapter 39: Dominic

Chapter 40: Cecilia

Chapter 41: Edith

Chapter 42: Leonardo

Chapter 43: Edith

Chapter 44: Cecilia

Chapter 45: Edith

Chapter 46: Cecilia

Chapter 47: Edith

Part IV: Object of Desire

Chapter 48: Leonardo

Chapter 49: Dominic

Chapter 50: Edith

Chapter 51: Dominic

Chapter 52: Edith

Chapter 53: Dominic

Chapter 54: Edith

Chapter 55: Cecilia

Chapter 56: Dominic

Chapter 57: Edith

Chapter 58: Dominic

Chapter 59: Edith

Chapter 60: Dominic

Chapter 61: Edith

Part V: Homeland

Chapter 62: Leonardo

Chapter 63: Edith

Chapter 64: Cecilia

Chapter 65: Edith

Chapter 66: Dominic

Chapter 67: Edith

Chapter 68: Dominic

Chapter 69: Edith

Chapter 70: Cecilia

Chapter 71: Edith

Chapter 72: Dominic

Chapter 73: Leonardo

Chapter 74: Edith

Chapter 75: Edith

Chapter 76: Cecilia

Chapter 77: Edith

Part VI: Recollection

Chapter 78: Dominic

Chapter 79: Edith

Chapter 80: Cecilia

Chapter 81: Edith

Chapter 82: Dominic

Chapter 83: Dominic

Chapter 84: Cecilia

Chapter 85: Leonardo

Chapter 86: Dominic

Chapter 87: Leonardo

Chapter 88: Cecilia

Chapter 89: Edith

Chapter 90: Cecilia

Chapter 91: Leonardo

Acknowledgments

P.S. Insights, Interviews & More …

About the author

About the book

Also by Laura Morelli

About the Publisher

Florence, Italy
February 1476

A DARK SHAFT IN THE HILLSIDE. IN MY MIND, I SEE IT.

Down the long passage, a forgotten recess beneath the city’s fortifications, I watch men loading charges of black powder.

The best laborers for this task, I think, mine coal by day. These men are used to toiling in the thin air, in the darkness, with the careful use of the torch and the pick. Their fingers and cheeks are permanently black, their breeches stiff with soil and char. For them, what better occupation than in the service of siege?

They are brave to advance in the darkness, their lights held high. Quietly, unsuspected, they unload black grit into the farthest recesses of the shaft. When they emerge, the cannoneer turns the wheel noiselessly on its cogs, moving the machine forward into the mine. Citizens scatter amid the chaos and explosions of spewing rocks. The enemy is soon in the attacker’s clutches.

The design lives only in my imagination, of course. I must admit that. Still, I am compelled to put it to paper. These thoughts, these machines. They keep me awake long past the hour when the sun turns the Arno to gold and then sinks behind the hills. These contraptions fill my dreams. I awake in a sweat, desperate to trap the images on paper before they dissipate like first morning fog on the river’s surface.

The fact is that I am surrounded by my old room, with its smoldering fire in the hearth, with precarious stacks of parchment sheaves on the table, with inkwells and their metallic fragrance, with oil lamps and their charred wicks, with an ever-shifting arrangement of lounging cats. I have secured the iron latch on my door to deter those so-called friends who might lure me to the taverns. They can have it all.

I have more important tasks at hand. If I don’t capture them between the pages of my notebooks, they flit away like colorful moths just beyond the reach of my net.

Never mind that troublesome distraction of the panel on my easel. There lies my improficient attempt to capture the likeness of a merchant’s homely daughter. But she glares at me from across the room. Dissatisfied, as she has every right to be. Her father has asked me to make her beautiful before he sends the portrait to a suitor in Umbria. My heart is not in it, if I am honest with myself, but I cannot argue with the remuneration. It keeps bread and wine on my table. Still, the tempera pigments on my poplar plank have long dried hard. I pull the drape over the portrait so that the girl’s reproving gaze will no longer distract me. I am anxious to turn back to my drawing. If only I could convince a patron to pay me for my war machines instead of replicating his daughter’s profile.

Then there are my own parts of my master’s unfinished works. An angel and a landscape for a baptism of Christ. The monks have been pestering Master Verrocchio for months. A Madonna and child—uninspired, if I am honest with myself—for a noble lady near Santa Maria Novella. She has written me another letter asking when it will be delivered.

How can I afford these distractions when there is so much for me to capture from my own imagination? I turn back to my notebooks.

Why the tunnels? They will ask me, these men who think as much of war as I. But I have already thought of that. How the enemy might be surprised when their attackers emerge from the earth to overcome them! They will see that the shaft driving the machine allows it to turn seamlessly, effortlessly, into the tortuous shafts below ground, without making a sound. And when these mines are not being exploded, what treasures might be hidden there from those who might steal them, deep in the underground reserves where there is copper, coal, and salt?

We must keep our enemies close. Or so they say.

But what do I know? I am only one who imagines such fantasies and puts them to paper. One who believes that sometimes, art must be put in the service of war.

I pick up my silverpoint pen and begin to draw again.

Munich, Germany
September 1939

EDITH BECKER HOPED THAT THE MEN AROUND THE TABLE could not see her hands tremble.

On any other Thursday, Edith would be sitting before an easel in her ground-level conservation studio, wearing the magnifying goggles that made her look like a giant insect. There, in the quiet, she would lose all track of time, absorbed in the task of repairing a tear in a centuries-old painting, removing grime built up over decades, or regilding an old, crumbling frame. Her job was saving works of art, one by one, from decay and destruction. It was her training, her calling. Her life’s work.

But for the last half hour, the eyes of the most important men of the Alte Pinakothek, one of Munich’s greatest museums, had been on Edith. They watched her unwind the straps from each binder and remove folios one by one, each one representing paintings in the private collections of families across Poland.

“The identity of the man in the portrait is unknown,” Edith said, passing around a facsimile of a portrait by the Italian Renaissance painter, Raffaello Sanzio. Edith watched their eyes scan the likeness of a fluffy-haired man looking askance at the viewer, drawing a fur cloak over one shoulder.

Edith was glad she had traded her usual faded gray dress and conservator’s smock for the smartest outfit she owned, a brown tweed skirt and jacket. She had taken the time to make sure her hair curled evenly on either side of her jawline, and the seams up the back of her stockings ran straight. The men gave her their undivided attention: the curator of antiquities, the museum board chairman, even the museum director himself, Ernst Buchner, a renowned scholar to whom Edith had never spoken directly before today.

“There have been several ideas about the identity of the sitter,” she said. “Some even believe it may be the artist’s self-portrait.”

Edith was the only woman in a room full of the museum’s executive staff. She wished they hadn’t asked her to abandon the peace of her conservation studio, where, for the last few weeks, she had been working to restore a large battle scene by the sixteenth-century Munich artist Hans Werl. At some point in the 1800s, another conservator had overpainted the human figures and horses in the picture. Now, working at a painstakingly slow pace, Edith was removing the overpaint with a small piece of linen soaked in solvent. She was excited to see the brilliant pigments that the artist had originally intended emerge from the canvas, one centimeter at a time. She wished they would let her get back to work instead of placing her at the center of attention.

Her eyes moved nervously around the table and finally landed on Manfred, a longtime colleague and museum registrar. Manfred peered at Edith over his small, round glasses and smiled, giving her the courage to continue. He may have been the only one in the room who understood how challenging it was for Edith to speak in front of the group.

Manfred, Edith realized, was also the only one of her coworkers who knew something of her life outside the museum. He understood the difficulty she faced in caring for her father, whose mind and memory had deteriorated, day by day. Manfred and her father had been classmates at the Academy of Fine Arts, and it was Manfred who had facilitated a position for Herr Becker’s diligent, studious daughter in the conservation department. Edith knew that if she was to keep her job, let alone find any success as a professional woman at all, she had to protect her personal life from the others. She clung to Manfred’s reassuring smile to help still her shaking hands.

“A masterpiece,” said the board chairman, handling the facsimile of the painting by Raffaello Sanzio with care. “I see that the Czartoryski family had an impressive ambition to collect Italian paintings.”

“Indeed.” Edith, too, had been surprised to learn of the treasures locked away in castles, monasteries, museums, and private homes in the lands to the east. There were vast family collections, amassed over centuries, across the Polish border. Prince Czartoryski’s family art collection alone served as a quiet repository of incalculable value.

And now, Edith was beginning to understand the point of all the hours, days, and weeks she had spent in the museum archives and library stacks. She had been instructed to pull together this research on paintings in Polish collections for the museum board. She didn’t know why it hadn’t become obvious before now. Someone wanted to procure these pictures. Who and why?

“And this is the last one,” she said, pulling the final folio from the stack of images from the Czartoryski collection.

“The one we’ve been waiting for,” said Herr Direktor Buchner, whose brows reached for the dark, wispy hair swept back from his high forehead.

“Yes,” Edith said. “Around 1800, at the same time that Adam Jerzy Czartoryski purchased Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man from an Italian family, he also bought Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine. He brought these paintings from Italy back home to his family collection in eastern Poland.”

“And it remains there?” the antiquities curator asked, suspending his pen in midair as if it were a cigarette. The curator’s old habit hearkened back to the time before the recent ban on smoking in government buildings; just months ago, Edith realized, the room would have been filled with smoke.

“No,” Edith said, relieved that she had reviewed her notes before the meeting. “The Lady with an Ermine portrait has traveled often over the last hundred years. In the 1830s, during the Russian invasion, the family took it to Dresden for safekeeping. Afterward, they returned it to Poland but things were still unstable, so they moved the painting to a hiding place in the family palace in Pełkinie. When things calmed down, the family moved it to their private apartments in Paris; that would have been in the 1840s.”

“And then it returned to Poland?”

“Eventually, yes,” said Edith. “The family brought it back to Poland in the 1880s. It was put on public display then, to great fanfare. That’s where many people first learned of the painting, and when historians began researching it. Several experts identified it right away as by the hand of da Vinci, and people speculated about the identity of the sitter. That’s how it ended up”—she gestured to her stack of folios—“widely published and reproduced.”

“Who is she?” asked Buchner, tapping his fat fingers on the tabletop.

“It is well accepted that she was one of the mistresses of the Duke of Milan, a girl named Cecilia Gallerani, who came from a Sienese family. She was probably about sixteen years old at the time that Ludovico Sforza asked da Vinci to paint her.” Edith watched the facsimile of the painting circulate from hand to hand around the table again. The men pored over the girl’s face, her bright expression, the white, furry creature in her arms.

“During the Great War, the painting came to Germany again,” Edith continued. “It was held for safekeeping in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, but it was ultimately returned to Kraków.”

“It is remarkable that the painting survived at all, given how often it circulated,” Manfred noted.

“Indeed,” said Herr Direktor Buchner, handing the facsimile back to Edith. She returned it to her thick binder and began to retie the straps. “Fräulein Becker, you are to be commended for your thorough background research in the service of this project.”

“A senior curator could not have done a better job,” the decorative arts curator added.

“Danke schön.” Edith finally exhaled. She hoped they would let her return to the conservation studio now. She looked forward to putting on her smock and starting on the stabilization of a French painting whose frame had been water damaged when it was placed in an unfortunate position under a plumbing pipe in a storage closet.

Generaldirektor Buchner stood. “Now,” he said, taking a deep breath. “I have an announcement. In recent days, I have had a personal visit from Reichsmarschall Göring, who, as you may know, has been engaged by our Führer in the search for masterpieces like the ones we have seen here this afternoon. There is to be a new museum constructed in Linz. It has been fully funded by our Supreme Commander, who, as you know, has a personal interest in great art and its preservation. The museum in Linz, once it is complete, will be a repository for the safekeeping of all important works of art”—he paused to look around the table—“in the world.”

There was a collective gasp. Edith let the idea sink in. Adolf Hitler had already opened the House of German Art, just a short walk away from her office. She and Manfred had gone to see the work of the officially approved contemporary sculptors and painters. But now … Every important work of art history in the entire world under one roof, all of it under the stewardship of the Reich. It was difficult—almost inconceivable—to envision.

“As you might imagine,” Buchner said, giving life to Edith’s thoughts, “this new vision of our Führer will be a massive undertaking. All of us in the art-related trades are being engaged as custodians in the service of safeguarding these works. As things become more … precarious … we must all do our parts toward this effort.”

“But that’s insanity!” the antiquities curator huffed out. “All the important works of art in the world? Germany will control the world’s cultural patrimony? Who are we to be custodians of such a legacy? And who are we to take them from their current places?”

The room fell into nearly unbearable silence, and Edith wondered if the poor curator was already regretting his outburst. Edith watched Manfred press his pen firmly onto his page, drawing circular doodles, his other hand over his mouth as if to stop himself from speaking.

The museum board chairman broke the silence. “No, Hans, it is a worthy cause. I have good evidence that the Americans want to take valuable European paintings and put them in Jewish museums in America. On the contrary,” he said, “the idea of a Führermuseum … it’s ingenious. And anyway, you must realize that this is just a start. We are also making lists of important German artworks taken by the French and English in past centuries. Those works will be repatriated to Germany in due time.”

Edith studied the director’s face. Herr Buchner ignored the commentary, stood up, and calmly continued, though Edith thought she detected a twitch of the muscles at the base of his neck. “All of us will be receiving orders from officials at the Braunes Haus. We will be working with Germany’s best artists, historians, curators, and culture critics. You will each be given jobs that match your specialty. Many of us, myself included, will be traveling afield to gather works to bring back to our storage rooms here, or to other German museums.”

“But what about our work here?” Edith could not help but ask. “The conservation lab …”

“I’m afraid that our current projects will be mostly suspended. As for the museum itself, we have already begun rearranging our collections in storage to accommodate the works that will be coming to us, and we’ve secured additional space off-site.”

“Where are we going?” asked the antiquities curator.

“We will be receiving our specific assignments later this week,” the director said. “Fräulein Becker, I suspect that there is a very good chance you will be going to Poland.” He gestured to the binders full of facsimiles that Edith had compiled.

Poland.

Edith felt her stomach seize.

“S-s-surely …,” she stammered, “surely we could not be expected to …”

“How long?” a curatorial assistant cut Edith’s question short.

Buchner shrugged, and Edith saw the twitch in his neck again. “Until our work is done. As long as it takes. We are at war.”

The director then picked up his stack of folders, nodded, and exited the room. The stream of museum staff followed.

Edith filed out behind the line of men. Reaching the familiar door to the ladies’ washroom, she pressed it open and sealed it behind her. She dropped her box of folios onto the floor, sat on the toilet seat, and pressed her face into her palms. She gasped for air, feeling as if she might faint.

Poland? Indefinitely? How would she manage? Who would care for her father? What about her plans to marry, finally, after so many years of hoping? Was she really being called to the front lines? In danger of losing her life?

After a few long minutes, Edith stood and splashed cool water from the tap onto her face and wrists. When she emerged from the washroom, she found Manfred pacing the hallway.

“Are you all right?” he whispered, taking her arm.

“I … I’m not sure, if you want to know the truth. Oh, Manfred …” She exhaled, stopping to press her back against the cool tiles along the corridor wall. “What news. I can hardly believe it.” Her hands were still shaking.

“I think we are all in a state of shock,” he said, “even those of us who … who have foreseen this outcome.”

Edith squeezed Manfred’s forearm. She had seen little of Manfred’s life outside the museum, but she knew that he had been an organizer in a Munich group that was known for opposing nearly all of the Reich’s policies, their ideas disseminated in weightless leaflets left on park benches and empty tram seats.

“You knew what they were planning?”

Manfred nodded, tight-lipped. “The Generaldirektor has already purchased several truckloads of pictures confiscated from Jewish collectors across Bavaria. If you don’t believe me, come up to the third floor. There are so many pictures in my office that I can barely walk to my desk.”

Edith felt her jaw drop. “I can hardly imagine it. But you … Where will you go?”

“I’ll bet they keep me here to catalog whatever comes in. They need me. Plus, I am an old dog.” He shrugged and mustered a smile. “It could be worse. Out of the line of fire. But you, my dear … How will you manage? Your father …”

Edith pressed her hands to her face again. “I have no idea,” she said. “Heinrich. My fiancé. He is also being shipped out to Poland.”

“Ah!” Manfred said, his eyes growing wide. “Then you are headed to the same place at least.”

“Yes, but … Heiliger Strohsack!” she whispered loudly. “This was not what I was expecting.”

“I wish I could say the same, my dear Fräulein Konservator,” Manfred said. “You are too young to remember the beginnings of the last war. And here we are again. All the same, what can we do? When the Führer calls, we hardly have a choice. They will issue us conscription papers. Saying no is not an option unless …”

Manfred gestured toward a window at the end of the hallway, one that overlooked the square where Jewish-owned shops had been forcibly closed or even burned in recent months. At this moment, Edith knew, Jewish families were boarding trams—either by choice or by coercion—that would resettle them in another place, that would consign them to a fate beyond her understanding. The Nusbaums, a couple who lived with their two young children in Edith’s apartment building, had left weeks ago. In the ground-floor corridor, under the sharp eye of their doorman, Edith had watched Frau Nusbaum piling worn leather bags and grain sacks full of their most precious belongings into a rickety barrow.

Edith knew that Manfred was correct in saying that refusing the Führer’s call was not an option, but her mind raced, looking for a way out of the predicament. Was it too much to ask, to return to her conservation studio, to her humble apartment, to her father, to a new life with her husband?

“Well,” said Manfred, mustering a tight grin. “Poland! Perhaps there is a silver lining. You will get to see all those masterpieces you’ve studied all this time.”

Munich, Germany
September 1939

EDITH WAS STRUGGLING WITH THE LOCK ON HER APARTMENT door when she heard her father shriek.

The fine hairs on the back of her neck tingled, and a jolt like a live tram wire ran down her spine. She had never heard that wrenching sound come from his mouth before. She rattled the door with all her force.

“Papa!”

Finally, the key clicked and the door opened. Edith nearly fell into the apartment. She dropped her shoulder bag, spilling the art books and folders she had brought home from work. Bookmarks and handwritten notes fluttered and spun across the worn, wooden floor. Edith rushed down the hallway, toward the loud voice of a radio broadcaster announcing that German troops had crossed the Vistula River in southern Poland. In the front room, she found her father seated in his chair, lashing out with his lanky arms and legs toward the slight woman looming over him.

“Herr Becker!” Elke, the woman who cared for her father while Edith was at work, struggled to grasp the old man’s forearms. Her hair had come loose from its pins at the crown of her head. Her face was a contorted grimace. Edith’s father’s long legs lashed out again, stiff and uncoordinated, toward Elke’s shins.

Then the smell of urine and excrement came over Edith, and she felt her heart sink.

“He refuses to walk to the toilet!” Elke finally let go of Herr Becker’s forearms and turned toward Edith. “I cannot get him to leave that chair!”

“It’s all right,” Edith said, trying to steady her voice. “Let me talk to him.”

Elke threw up her hands in exasperation and retreated to the kitchen. Edith strode across the room and switched off the radio, silencing the ranting announcer.

“Papa.” Edith knelt on the rug before her father’s chair, just as she had when she was a little girl, hungry for another one of her father’s stories about counts and duchesses from long ago. The floral patterns on the arms of the chair had worn pale and threadbare, the cushion sagging and now surely beyond salvage. Edith did her best to ignore the stench.

“That woman …” her father said, his eyes wide with uncharacteristic rage, cloudy orbs rimmed in yellow. From the kitchen, Edith heard water running, followed by the loud clang of pots.

Coarse white hairs protruded from his chin. Edith imagined that Elke had been struggling with her father for hours. It was becoming a daily occurrence, Herr Becker’s refusal to partake in the simplest tasks, from putting on a clean shirt to shaving. Getting him in the bath was close to impossible; in recent weeks he had developed an inexplicable fear of water. Edith felt pity for Elke, at the same time that she was frustrated that no one in the ever-changing group of caregivers that Edith had hired understood how to coax her father to cooperate. It required a high level of patience with a dose of trickery, Edith had to admit.

From the crease between the cushion and the frame of the chair, Edith excavated Max, the ragged, stuffed dog that had belonged to Edith as a child. Now, Max was her father’s constant companion, its white fur matted and stained irreparably.

“It’s all right, Papa,” Edith said, putting her palm securely on his forearm, with its thin, lined skin marked with darkened spots. With his other hand, her father grasped the ragged animal tightly to his side. Behind them, the Swiss clock ticked loudly. Messy stacks of art books lined the walls, slips of paper haphazardly sticking out of each volume. Dusty, yellowed pages of scholarly catalogs and journals her father had once devoured now stood abandoned.

“Shall we get you cleaned up? I have a feeling that you might have a visitor.”

Her father’s eyes lit up as he digested her white lie, and Edith felt a pang of guilt slide across her gut. None of her father’s friends were coming to visit. When her father no longer recognized their faces and could not recall their names, one by one, they dwindled away. Edith had watched wordlessly, powerless to stop it.

Her father no longer tracked time, but Edith knew that months had passed since their last visitor, with the exception of Edith’s fiancé, Heinrich. And even that was about to stop. Heinrich would soon be boarding a train for Poland, assigned to a newly formed infantry division of the Wehrmacht. As soon as the invasion of Poland had been broadcast across the radio and newspapers less than two weeks ago, Edith had held her breath and begun to pray, but Heinrich’s official orders had come anyway.

But Edith didn’t want to think about that now.

In the bathroom, Edith ran her hand under the tap until the water warmed. She would never have dreamed that the barrier of modesty between father and daughter would have fallen away so completely. What else was she to do? When the caregivers she hired inevitably gave up trying to wrangle her stubborn father, who else but his only daughter would care enough to loosen his trousers, to blot a damp cloth across his shoulders, to carefully run a razor across his jaw? Edith’s mother had been gone nearly five years now, and in moments like these, she missed her more than ever.

“Guten abend!”

Edith poked her head out of the bathroom doorway long enough to see Heinrich enter the apartment, greeting Elke as the stout nurse departed in a blur of blue raincoat and hat.

As much as her heart surged to see her fiancé, it also sank at Elke’s abrupt departure. Tomorrow there would be a visit to the agency and another search for a nurse so that Edith could continue her work at the museum and put food on their table.

Heinrich pecked a brief kiss on Edith’s lips. “What happened in here? It smells like a farm.”

Edith pressed her face into Heinrich’s neck and drank in his scent for a long moment. “I’m going to get him cleaned up now. I’m sorry. I don’t know whether Elke ever got to preparing dinner. Have a look in the kitchen.”

The voice of his daughter’s fiancé in the hallway had lured Herr Becker from the front room. Now, the old man braced himself against the doorjamb, his trousers sagging, a sideways grin on his face.

“Greetings, soldier!” Heinrich smiled at his future father-in-law and rushed to steady him. Edith watched her father endeavor to give Heinrich a firm handshake. “Looks like you’re in for a good shave from this lovely lady. Lucky man!” With gratitude and relief, Edith watched Heinrich steer her father successfully to the bathroom door.

Edith did her best to clean up Herr Becker, showing him as much patience and compassion as she could muster. When they emerged from the bathroom, her father dressed in clean pajamas, Edith saw that Heinrich had moved the soiled chair to air out by an open window and had brought a bowl of fruit and bread from the kitchen to the dining table. He was picking up the papers and books that she had spilled by the apartment door.

For a moment, she watched Heinrich kneeling over her satchel in the dim light of the entryway, a calm beacon in the storm. He was wearing the gray cotton collared shirt that brought out the sky gray of his eyes. She could hardly bear the thought of standing on a station platform, watching him wave to her from a small train window in a newly pressed field tunic.

“I’m sorry there is no dinner,” she said, kneeling beside him to pick up the last sheets of paper from the floor.

“We have bread. We have fruit. We have muesli, reheated from this morning, but healthy all the same. More than many people have, surely.”

Edith helped her father sit in his usual chair at the dining table and put a piece of bread in front of him. Finally, she took a deep breath and relaxed. She sat at the table and began peeling an apple with a worn knife.

“What’s all this paper?” Heinrich asked.

“Research,” she said. “They’ve asked me to compile a dossier of old master paintings in Polish collections. You remember I was telling you about all the library visits I’ve made in the past weeks? I had to give a presentation today to the director.”

“Herr Professor Dokter Buchner?” Heinrich raised his eyebrows.

“Yes.” Edith felt her stomach constrict as she thought about the room full of men, the Führer’s museum, the news that she had no idea how to break to Heinrich and her father.

“I thought they kept you locked up in the back storerooms with a paintbrush and chemicals,” Heinrich said.

She nodded. “Yes. It’s not my usual place, but Herr Kurator Schmidt asked me to do it. He said I have special knowledge of Italian Renaissance paintings. You know I am happy to stay hidden away in my little scientific department, not standing before an audience.”

Heinrich leaned back in his chair and thumbed through one of the large illustrated volumes that Edith had brought home from the museum library. Edith watched him nervously, wondering how to find the words to tell Heinrich and her father. How on earth would she break the news? When Heinrich reached a bookmarked, full-page color facsimile of a woman holding a small white creature, he stopped.

“Leonardo da Vinci,” Heinrich read the caption. “Portrait of a Lady with an Ermine.” He looked up at Edith. “What’s an ermine?”

Edith shrugged. “Ladies in the Italian Renaissance kept a variety of exotic pets. An ermine is something like a ferret.”

“No,” her father interjected, raising a crooked finger. “There is a difference. Ferrets are domesticated. Ermines are wild. Their fur turns white in the winter.”

Heinrich and Edith looked at each other, then laughed aloud at Herr Becker’s assessment. Edith’s heart surged whenever a spark of clarity flickered in the fog, when her real father came back to her, if only for a fleeting moment.

“Bravo, Papa. I had no idea,” Edith said, but the flicker was gone, and her father had returned to spooning watery muesli into his mouth. “That’s one of my favorite pictures,” Edith said. “Da Vinci painted it when he was still a young man, before he became well known.”

“A strange creature,” Heinrich said, tapping the picture with his finger, “but a beautiful girl.”

This was what she would miss most, Edith thought, sitting with her father and Heinrich, talking of art. She wanted to hear her father’s lessons again, random shards of information he pulled from the dusty corners of his brain, left over from years of teaching art history at the university, volumes of historical facts that he had transmitted to his daughter along with a passion for art. Was it too much to ask? She just wanted a laugh with her father and to eat a meal with the man she loved. She did not want to have to cobble together yet another caregiver to help her nearly helpless papa. And above all, she did not want to count the days left until Heinrich boarded a train. She pushed it to the back of her mind, stood, and began to clear the table.

Heinrich moved another armchair near the window and settled Herr Becker so that he could watch the lights begin to flicker from the apartment windows lining the edge of the park. He retrieved Max from the floor and pressed the old, ragged stuffed dog into Herr Becker’s lap. Then Edith heard Heinrich talking softly to her father, telling him about something funny that had happened at his father’s grocery market, just off the Kaufingerstrasse. She knew her father wouldn’t remember any of it after a few minutes, but no matter. The next time Heinrich visited, his kind, familiar face would be enough to lure her father from his chair.

Not long ago, Edith would have sat with her father after dinner, listening to his impassioned opinions of current events, his critique of the greed and corruption of government officials. Edith wondered if her father had any inkling of what was happening beyond the walls of their apartment now. Continued reports of corruption. The dismantling of synagogues. The confiscation of businesses and apartments belonging to Jewish neighbors. The heightened surveillance by their apartment block leaders, who seemed to record her every move. The swift, unexplained departure of two staff members from the museum. Non-German books pulled from libraries and burned in the streets. New laws that would punish anyone who listened to a foreign radio broadcast.

Most of all, she worried about the disappearance of the little boy at the bottom of the stairway. Edith used to look for the Nusbaums’ son every morning as she left for work. She’d find him sitting in the hallway with his pens and paper. She would stop to greet him and he would show Edith what he’d drawn that day. She would compliment him and tell him to keep drawing. But one day, he was gone, along with his innocent face and his fastidious drawings. The rest of his family were gone, too, simply walking away with the coats on their backs and a wobbly, wheeled cart.

While she did her best to stay focused on the details of her work and home life, Edith felt deeply troubled about how Munich had changed in recent months. More than that, she missed her father’s commentary on current events, which might have provided her with a compass to help navigate her way through the disturbing events that swirled around them.

“Edith?”

She turned to see her father’s wide, shiny eyes set on her, as if he had just recognized her face after not having seen her for a long time.

“Yes, Papa!” she said, laughing.

He held out Max the dog. “I believe this is yours.”

Edith stared down at the button eyes that her mother had sewn and resewn many times over the years. Max had occupied her bed as a child, then was cast aside as Edith grew into a young woman. When her father had rediscovered Max one day, shortly after her mother died and he began to decline, he had latched on to it like a beloved pet.

“Max,” she said, stroking the stuffed animal’s matted fur. “But I wouldn’t want to lose him.” She pressed him back into her father’s hands. “Will you take care of him for me?”

Her father settled the ragged stuffed dog back in his lap. “All right,” he said, deflated.

“I love you so much, Papa,” Edith said, squeezing her father’s hands. She tried hard not to let her voice crack.

When her father began to doze off in his chair, Edith joined Heinrich in the kitchen. He dried the dishes with a frayed rag and stacked them on the wooden shelves above the sink. “She’s not coming back, is she? The woman in the raincoat?”

Edith sighed. “I’m afraid not. I have to call the agency first thing in the morning. The problem is that he has become so stubborn! They are supposed to be professional nurses, but they don’t know how to coerce him into doing the most basic things! I don’t know what to do.”

Edith felt Heinrich’s hand on her back. She stopped and bowed her head, pressing her forehead to Heinrich’s chest. She felt his hands go to her hips and rest there. For a few long moments, they stood there, holding each other.

“I have no right to burden you with this when you have bigger things to worry about,” she said. “I’m sorry.” Edith pressed her face into his cotton shirt and felt his lean, hard chest under her forehead. She inhaled his clean, male scent as she listened to the clock tick loudly in the hallway. How would she break the news that he was not the only one with official orders?

“Edith …” he began softly. “They have given me a date. I have to report to Hauptbahnhof Station in two weeks.” He must have felt her body freeze under his grasp; he paused. “I just want you to know that, whatever happens …”

“Shh,” she said, pressing a finger to his lips and shaking her head, her light brown curls hitting her cheeks. “Not yet. Can we just make this last for a bit longer?”

Milan, Italy
December 1489

“THERE IS A LIVE ONE. I CAN FEEL IT CRAWLING.”

“Where?”

“Just there. Behind my ear.”

Cecilia Gallerani felt her mother’s thick, calloused fingertips slide through her dark strands, unraveling the twists. Her mother pinched her frayed fingernails along the length of one hair, yanking so hard that Cecilia bit her lip. She heard her mother swish her hand through the small bowl at her side, a mixture of water and vinegar with small, white nits floating dead on the surface.

“Did you get it?”

An exasperated cluck. “It was too fast. Will you sit still?”

A slow ache was working its way across Cecilia’s forehead. How many hours had they been sitting by the light of the window? Through its frame, Cecilia’s almond-shaped eyes scanned the layer of cold fog that had settled in the inner courtyard. She watched a dove flutter from the bare branches to a high windowsill overlooking the empty, symmetrical footpaths below. Such a strange place, this hard, wintry stone palace, with its fortified towers and armsmen pacing the upper galleries. So far away from the blindingly sun-filled squares and raucous, bustling streets of home.

As their carriage had rolled through the streets of Milan the afternoon before, Cecilia had watched the flat, vapid landscape suddenly turn to a jumble of fine buildings and crowded streets. The slow crawl through the crowds afforded momentary views of the spiky white spires of Milan’s cathedral under construction. She had caught fleeting glimpses of the city’s women, their long braids wrapped in silk and transparent layers of veil, men with fur-lined leather boots reaching to the knees and their breath sending vapors into the cold air. Cecilia had marveled at their odd Milanese tongue, a dialect that sounded clipped and harsh, at the same time that it flowed from their lips like a song. She grasped a few familiar words, but they spoke too quickly for her to understand the meaning.

At long last, they had reached the Castello Sforzesco on the outskirts of the city. Guards armed with spears and crossbows had lowered the bridge over the moat, and their horses’ hooves had echoed through the tunneled gatehouse into the fortified inner courtyard.

“Aya! I feel it moving again.”

Another tsk of exasperation. Her mother ran the comb roughly through a tangle. “Honestly, Cecilia, I hardly see the point. All this hair will be shorn within a few days.”

“That is not decided.” Cecilia felt the familiar squeeze of discontent across her stomach.

It made perfect sense. Of course it did. Her eldest brother, Fazio, their mother’s greatest pride, as well as their father’s namesake and successor, had laid it out in clear, logical terms. He had already made arrangements with the Benedictine sisters at San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore. Cecilia should consider herself fortunate to have such an opportunity, they told her. It was only through her brother’s position as a Tuscan diplomat to the court of Milan, a position that their father was never able to reach even after years of service as a petitioner at the ducal court, that the possibility was open to Cecilia at all. It’s what had brought them to this wintry palace in the first place.

“Soon enough,” said her mother, half under her breath. Cecilia caught sight of her mother’s brown hand and forearm, as thick as one of the piglets in their courtyard back home in Siena. Cecilia felt a veil of shame and embarrassment cover the two of them sitting at the window. It was laughable, her stout, sunspeckled mother sitting here among the pale, elegant ladies of the ducal palace. What place did the two of them have here? In Siena, they held their heads high, the wife and daughter of a petitioner at the court of Milan. But here, in this northern palace, the seat of His Lordship’s domain, Cecilia and her mother passed for little more than peasants. She felt certain that she could see the women in their silk gowns snickering at them behind their gloves and fans.

How quickly her fate had turned.

Only a season ago, her future had looked entirely different. She and Giovanni Stefano Visconti were set to wed, an arrangement that had been in place since she was barely old enough to take her first steps. It was a perfect solution, her father had said, to marry their youngest, the only girl, to the Visconti, a Milanese family with a noble legacy and ties to the Sforza ducal family. Giovanni himself was nothing so remarkable, little more than a lopsided grin of a boy not yet turned to man. A dusting of freckles spread across his nose, and the wide shoulders of his father’s overcoat hung from his lanky frame, but Cecilia had been at peace with the safety and security of marrying into a respected family. The two had already had a ring ceremony to commemorate the commitment, as perfunctory and devoid of emotion as it was legally binding. But Cecilia felt secure, content even, with the arrangement. She was accustomed to being in the company of boys and men, anyway. She had grown up in the chaotic tussle of a house with six brothers. Spending the rest of her days inside a cathouse of a convent sounded like the dullest possible fate.

But only months after her father was in the ground, the magnitude of her brothers’ foolishness had come to light. There was no more hiding it. Together, her brothers had frittered away Cecilia’s dowry, squandering it on ill-advised investments, dice games, and drink. Once things were out in the open, Giovanni Visconti’s father had burned the marriage contract in front of her brothers’ own eyes at the gates to their farm.

After that, there was a letter dispatched to her eldest brother, Fazio. Within a few days, Cecilia and her mother were loaded into a small carriage rattling north toward Milan, where Fazio had promised to make things right.

“But I don’t see why I must go to the Monastero Maggiore,” Cecilia said. It came out like a childish whine and Cecilia immediately cringed. Her mother yanked a little harder than was necessary.

“Aya!” Cecilia clasped her palm to her scalp.

“You should count yourself fortunate to have such a chance, Cecilia. We have already been over this. The cloister is the perfect place for a girl like you,” her mother said firmly, ignoring her daughter’s yelp and letting another twist fall from the pile of hair on top of Cecilia’s head. Cecilia had heard the arguments; she was intelligent, fluent in Latin, knew how to write poetry and play the lute. She came from a respected family. As if she read her daughter’s mind, Signora Gallerani added, “You will be able to do all those things you love—reading and writing and playing music. And you will be a woman of purity and high regard.”

“Then I might find myself a highborn husband right here in this castle instead,” Cecilia said. She had made sure that her brothers had signed not only her marriage annulment but also attested to her maidenhood before she had departed for Milan. She knew that she was considered a great prize as a wife; the beauty of Fazio Gallerani’s only daughter and her purity were whispered about in Siena. “Surely I could use my talents to hold court in a great house instead of behind the convent walls, where I will have no audience.”

Her mother crossed her arms across her broad chest and shook her head. Then she let out a sharp laugh that made her midsection jiggle. “What pride! Where did my daughter get such high ideas? If your father were alive, he would take a switch to your legs.”

A soft knock fell on the door, then her brother’s face appeared.

“My ladies,” Fazio greeted them with a brief bow, and their mother’s face lit up. She dropped the comb onto the inlaid table alongside the bowl of vinegar and dead lice, then clapped her hands together and pressed her palms to her eldest son’s cheeks.

“My beauty,” she said, stroking her son’s face as if he were a favorite horse. Cecilia had to admit that her eldest brother, at twenty-six years old and ten years her senior, had indeed grown into a handsome, capable man worthy of more than their father’s legacy at the court of Milan.

“They are ready for us at the midday meal,” Fazio said.

“Santa Maria!” Signora Gallerani exclaimed, swiftly returning to Cecilia’s back and weaving her hair into a tight braid. “Those blasted pests have caused us to work too long.” She quickly tied the end with a leather strap. Cecilia felt the braid thump down the length of her back.

“Fazio,” Cecilia said. “If I must live here in Milan, then I want to stay here in this palace instead of a convent.”

She heard her mother let out a guffaw. “She continues to talk nonsense,” she said, picking up the comb and waving it at Cecilia as if threatening to beat her with it. “We must get her out of this overblown pile of stone as soon as possible.” She cast her eyes to the gilded and brightly painted decoration in the coffered ceiling above their heads.

Fazio laughed. “Whatever do you mean, girl?”

Cecilia looped her hand through the crook of her brother’s arm. “Surely you, with your high rank here, are in a position to find me a husband.”

“A husband!”

“Yes,” she said, patting his hand. “One with a large house and a court full of people, full of poetry and music.” She did not dare to say it out loud, but the truth was that she also saw herself richer, cleaner, more elegant, just like the women she glimpsed outside the window, those whose lives she only imagined.

Cecilia saw her brother’s face waver, and then he exchanged a wary glance with their mother.

“But it is already arranged with the sisters,” he said, his brow furrowing.

“Fazio, you know well that I could be one of the most sought-after brides in our region. Plus, you owe me a new husband after what happened with the last one!”

For a few long moments, silence hung thickly in the air.

“Vergogna!” her mother broke in. “Prideful girl!” Her mouth had formed a deep scowl. “Your brother owes you nothing! He has already done more for you than you deserve. Besides, you will see. After only a few days with the sisters, you will understand that the convent is the right place for you, Cecilia. I have already told you—I have already told the prideful girl, Fazio—you will get to do all those things you love. And most of all, you will be a woman of purity and high regard. You will bring our family honor and you will pray for your father’s eternal soul on behalf of all of us.”

Her brother, a skilled diplomat, stepped sideways. He offered his remaining arm to his mother and steered the two women toward the door. “Shall we go eat? Rice again, I’m afraid, but I saw the cook adding pomegranate arils and citrus. I’m famished.”

Beaming at her son, their mother finally took his arm.

But no sooner had Fazio opened the door to the corridor than he stopped short, pressing the women behind him. A small crowd was making its way toward them from the end of a long corridor. As the cluster of courtiers approached, Cecilia watched her brother bow in deference. She and her mother attempted to follow his example, casting their eyes to the intricate patterns on the floor. Cecilia heard the hiss of silk across the marble and could only catch fleeting glimpses of velvet gloves and slippers, silk hose, polished buckles, transparent sheaves of black lace, ribbons of green and gold.

The man at the front of the crowd stopped, and the crowd circled behind him.

“Fazio Gallerani,” the man said. From behind her brother’s back, Cecilia could only see that the man was stout and black-haired, with a voice so deep that it sounded as if his mouth was full of pebbles.

“My lord,” her brother said, his head and shoulders dropping still lower in deference to the man.

“You have brought guests,” he said, the deep voice and his Tuscan words with their Milanese accent both strange and beautiful to her ear.

“Guests? Oh no, my lord. Just my mother and my little sister. They arrived last night from Siena.”

“Let us greet them, then.”

A few long, silent moments passed. Cecilia watched her mother stare down at her dress, where red earth was still caked to the hem and under her fingernails. She did not move from her place behind her son’s back.

Cecilia pushed her way in front of her brother, where she found herself standing face-to-face with a man who could be no other than the lord of Milan. Though at least twice her age, Ludovico il Moro stood eye to eye with Cecilia. His face was angular but mostly invisible behind a richly oiled black beard. His breast was covered in velvet and metal, each finger adorned with a colored gem. The front of his doublet hung heavy with jangling emblems, the sounds heralding his arrival as if he were a prized beast. He raked his dark eyes over Cecilia, then held her under a penetrating gaze for a few more long moments. Was he waiting for her to bow?

But Cecilia did not bow. She only met his dark gaze and smiled.

Florence, Italy
December 1476

A SODOMITE.

Is that all I have become? The sum of my work? The reward for my years of tutelage under Master Verrocchio? The sum of my gifts in designing siege machines and other useful contraptions for men of war?

My father won’t speak on my behalf; he never has gone out of his way to protect his bastard son, and why should he now? And my uncles only tell me that I must be more careful about who I befriend. They say I am naïve, that I have much to learn of the ways in which noble families of Florence are accused for no good reason. But I am old enough to know that all it takes is for a cruel, jealous person to slip an anonymous accusation into the letter box of the Signoria to send a man to the gallows.

They will never prove anything, of that tailor, of the goldsmith, or of me. They cannot produce evidence for anything that was scratched out on that piece of parchment and slipped into the Mouth of Truth in the middle of the night. And as for Saltarelli, that young profiteer who prompted the whole thing, I hope the Officers of the Night find him. The rumors about him being more than an artist’s model may be true, but in the end, it is little more than jealousy that sparked this fiasco. If Saltarelli knows what’s good for him, he will have left Florence before another denunciation is passed into the tamburo at the Signoria.

But now I see that the time has come for me to depart Florence, too. Two accusations in as many years. I am not as naïve as my uncles think.

Surely, beyond the city, there is honorable work. There are men who will pay for my talents, for my contraptions, for my vision. They will put a roof over my head and food on my table.

Far to the north of here, they are already at war. The men of Pavia, Ferrara, Milan. Especially Milan, where not even churches are safe. Milan, where we hear that Duke Galeazzo Sforza has just been stabbed to death in the Basilica of Santo Stefano during high mass. And now, his little boy, Gian Galeazzo, barely old enough to lift a crossbow, carries the burden of the duchy. If anyone needs my assistance with war machines, it’s the poor little Duke of Milan.

No one need know of the unfolding events here. My drawings speak for themselves. I need only find people with connections far beyond Florence. Men in power who will advocate on my behalf. The right letters of introduction from the right men.

The fat tabby leaps onto my writing table and nearly spills the glass well of indigo ink. I run my hand over her gray stripes and feel the contented rumble in her throat as the beast urges her bony head against my palm. Then the cat narrows her golden eyes to slits and I ask her the inevitable question.

Who will grant my safe passage out of Florence?

Normandy, France
June 1944

DOMINIC’S SHAKING FINGERS FIDDLED WITH HIS HELMET’S chin strap and he dug down deep for an ounce of courage. It’s about time, he told himself, a refrain repeated for months before he arrived here. I’m here to do a job after all; here to fight for something. We should have stood up to his madness long before now. How many lives might have been saved if the Americans and English had deployed troops months ago? Years ago?

He found himself running his fingers across the light stubble on his jaw. Dominic hated the feeling of having his hands idle. He was desperate for something to do with his nervous energy, something to think about that wasn’t being crammed shoulder to shoulder with thirty-five other men on the Higgins boat. Each undulating wave propelled them closer to the beach—and the enemy. Each man crouched in that hull was fighting his own internal battle to ignore the cold perspiration, pushing the fear down somewhere deep inside.

Let’s get this done, he thought. Let’s do the right thing, the just thing, so that we can all go home.

The sky was as gray as the sea; mist muffled the world around them so that even though Dominic knew there were thousands of other men aboard scores of landing craft all around them, it felt as though this little platoon was all that stood between the Nazis and the lives they strove to protect. As though only their little platoon would land on Omaha Beach and alone, face their fate.

Not quite alone. The shadow of a plane overhead chilled the air.

Instinctively, Dominic reached between the buttons of his fatigue shirt, only to feel a pang of longing when his fingers brushed against a ball chain and two dog tags. They had made him take off his Saint Christopher medal at basic training back in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. He had stored the medal inside a zippered pocket of his leather wallet, resolving that it would be safe there until the day he could finally exchange his dog tags for his beloved Saint Christopher.

How soon would this be over? Dominic closed his eyes, feeling the kiss of spray on his cheek, and dreamed his way back to a bright day that now felt another lifetime and a world away.

Swede Hill. Greensburg, Pennsylvania.

It had been Dominic’s whole world for twenty-two years. He had grown up there, in the bosom of the only “wop” family among the Swedes and Irish. At least that’s how people referred to the Bonellis, some jokingly, some with derision in their eyes.

Dominic thought of his mother, who had latched that Saint Christopher at his neck, stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek, and put on a brave face.

Just come back to us, amore.

He had met Sally there, seen his first child born there, too. His little Cecilia. Watching them wave good-bye was the hardest damned thing Dominic had ever had to do.

But Dominic knew what it felt like to be the target of prejudice, and besides, he had an important mission. He wasn’t about to duck away from doing his part. Dominic had been following the headlines in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette with his morning coffee for some three years now. The Nazis had stolen personal property and raped the countryside of Europe. They had murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people, most of them for nothing more than being Jewish. For two years, the newspapers had been reporting on the many thousands corralled in death camps across Germany, Austria, Poland. More than a million in Poland alone, he had read. Dominic couldn’t understand how anyone could stand by and do nothing. The Americans should have acted long before now, Dominic thought, and he knew many of his fellow soldiers felt the same.

Even though saying good-bye to his wife and daughter was the hardest thing Dominic could imagine, all the same, he and all the men around him were committed to face the enemy, to shut down Hitler’s machine. And now, finally, after months of training, they were ready to land on the beach. Ready to set things right in the world again.

Let’s do this thing, he thought, trying to still his trembling fingers.

A sudden wave caught the landing craft; a jarring bump and a splash of icy spray on Dominic’s face brought him back to the present. His medal was gone, even the photographs of Sally and little Cecilia taken from him, but he had to believe that God was with him regardless. Wasn’t he?

The dog tags jingled against his chest as he shifted his weight, trying to relieve his numb feet. The twin plates of metal held only the most basic information: Bonelli, Dominic A. Social Security number. Blood type O. Catholic. Just the essence of him, stripped of the details that made him human.

This was how the army saw him. A number. Cannon fodder. One of thousands of faceless men in colorless uniforms, packed like cattle into the claustrophobic landing craft. Dominic found himself twisting and untwisting the chain of his dog tags, rubbing them together. His hands felt empty again. Idleness before a mad rush.

At home, his hands had never been still. When he wasn’t shoveling coal in the mines below Pittsburgh, he was rocking his baby girl and singing to her in his rough voice; sometimes nonsense ditties he invented on the fly, sometimes old Sicilian songs his nonna had taught him but no one understood anymore.

Cecilia hadn’t cared. She had loved them all, cooing as she stretched her chubby hands toward his face. And when Cecilia was asleep and the house was filled with the sound of opera turned down low on the radio, he’d grasp a charcoal stick and sit sketching as Sally washed the dishes. He often thought of doing a landscape or a still life, but every night he ended up sketching the perfect lines of her hair, the curves of her body. The newest, a swelling of her belly filled with the promise of a second child. He kept looking up at her as he drew, but he knew it wasn’t necessary; Sally was imprinted into his mind’s eye, indelibly stamped into the fabric of his soul.

Especially her smile. It had captured his heart on an afternoon three years ago when he’d been walking up the hill toward home after work in the mines. He had spotted her in her parents’ garden orchard, picking apples. It wasn’t easy to win Sally’s heart. At first, she had refused to be impressed by his silly banter, refused to fall for his nagging, refused to be captured. She fussed at him and told him to get lost, but Dominic detected a smile beneath the sass. Dominic’s grandfather advised him that persistence would always win, and he was right. Dominic kept stopping at the corner on his way home until one day, she finally shared an apple freshly picked from the tree.

The fierce cry of his commanding officer brought Dominic back to reality. As the men around him scrambled to ready themselves for landing, Dominic’s heart fell through his boots. He looked up and saw the gray expanse of Omaha Beach thrown open before them; the mist and the drizzle enfolded it in wispy shrouds that hid the sinister enemy he knew must be lying in wait behind the dunes. He dropped his dog tags and laced his shaking fingers together to mask their tremor. The distant pop-pop of rifles somewhere was already making his heart beat faster; he knew that each of those soft cracks was the sound of death coming for one of the men on the beach.

“God help us,” gasped the soldier beside him. He saw the boy’s hands trembling, his bolt-action rifle shaking between his fingers.

His commander’s voice rang out again. “We’re off, boys!”

Operation Neptune.

Dominic watched his commander’s face, his lips moving, but the looming shadow and deafening roar of a plane engine drowned the rest of his words.

Dominic unlocked his fingers and grasped the barrel of his rifle. Beyond the rim of the boat, the beach was a mass of disembarking men and gunfire. It didn’t look like an organized assault; to Dominic, it looked like chaos. Already, muzzle flashes lit up the mist.

Dominic watched the hinged ramp of the landing craft creak open, then suddenly, it crashed down, a rush of cold water hissing inside. A desperate war cry tore from the throats of the entire platoon. Shoulder to shoulder, they rushed forward.

Florence, Italy
April 1482

THE BEST DESIGN FOR A BATTLESHIP, I THINK, IS ONE WITH a ramp that lowers from the mouth of the boat. A sort of landing craft. A boat with a hinged ramp that might open upon landing, spilling soldiers onto the ground to take their enemies by surprise.

Like most inspired ideas, it comes to me in the middle of the night. I barely have time to sketch it on paper before jogging across the bridge to the walled sculpture garden inside the palace of the Medici.

Now, I watch Lorenzo il Magnifico run the palm of his hand over his stubbled cheek, the thin line of his mouth tight and contemplating as his knowing, intelligent eyes scan my torn page. My lord must appreciate how such a craft might serve useful against the Pisans. Surely, for all their supposed prowess at sea, they have not come up with such a design.

I do not want to sound ungrateful, for I count myself lucky to have the favor of His Lordship’s attention at all. But I no longer hold on to any hope that Il Magnifico will give me a commission for a war machine. He will not save me a place at his table. He will not pay me a stipend or even grant me a commission. Permission to sketch ancient statuary in the peace of his garden is all I have earned after years of trying. At this point, all I can hope for is a word from His Lordship that might find me a patron far away from here.

“Yes,” Il Magnifico tells me, putting the parchment back in my hand. “I see how a warship with this ramp design might be advantageous. But not in Milan. How would you convey the value of this idea to a man born in Lombardy, a man who rules a vast, landlocked spread of flat wheat fields and rice paddies as far as the eye can see?”

He has a point. After all, Ludovico Sforza, the one they call the Moor, has seized control of the court of Milan without the slightest need for a boat. All he has done is poach his enemies—his own relations—one by one. He even pushed out the young boy-duke’s own mother and her closest, most trusted political and military advisers. And now, Ludovico Sforza is Regent of Milan—a duke in practice if not in name.

“We must make sure that Florence stays in alliance with Milan,” Il Magnifico tells me. I scramble to follow him down a long corridor adjacent to his lush garden filled with ancient statues pulled from the dirt around Rome. “Ludovico Sforza has proven himself a powerful force,” His Lordship says. “Any fourth son who manages to overtake his older relations is not to be taken lightly. We must watch him.”

“I might go to Milan on your behalf,” I offer. “See this court from the inside. I could keep you informed, my lord.”

Il Magnifico slows his hurried pace, then stops for a few long moments to examine the tender bloom of a white lily. For a moment I fear that he might pinch off the fragrant, dew-speckled flower of this giglio, the symbol of our city, but finally, he lets it spring back on its stalk. “Yes,” he says. “You along with others. We will organize a retinue of diplomats and court entertainers. You will make a gift to Ludovico the Moor from our Medici family.”

I pause to think. “An armored carriage. Or perhaps a wheel-powered catapult. My lord?”

“No,” he says. “A musical instrument. You are gifted with the lyre.”

“A lyre.”

He nods, his thin lips firm in decision. “Bring me a design.”

“But, with respect, my lord, the Regent of Milan might have need of defensive designs rather than musical instruments. You have said yourself that the Venetians plot against Ludovico il Moro from the east; from the north, the French. They even plot against him from inside his own palace. I have heard that his own court physicians mix poison for his closest relations—”

A small wave of the hand and I am silenced.

“You will follow a retinue of diplomats and musicians to Milan. My men will see to the arrangements. I will make sure you have a letter of introduction. You have only to make the lyre.”

“And for defensive designs …”

“If you want to elaborate on your skills for Ludovico il Moro, then you may attach your own list of qualifications.”

Milan, Italy
January 1490

HER SONG BEGAN WITH A PLAINTIVE NOTE.

Cecilia felt the first sound start low in her chest. A wobble; she fought to steady her voice. The sound grew, rising up as it began to take life. Then, it expanded into the space of the great audience hall of the Castello Sforzesco.

Cecilia could not bear to meet any of the pairs of eyes trained on her, those of a dozen or so visitors from outside the palace, dressed in finery like Cecilia had never imagined. Instead, her eyes trailed a length of ivy snaking along the gray, rough-hewn stones and red bricks of the window ledge. Beyond the window, Cecilia glimpsed the dank waters of the moat and one of the palace gates, where a man with a feathered helmet was patrolling on horseback. Far below this high floor of the castle, Cecilia imagined that there might be a labyrinth of passages used to defend it, if ever the palace came under attack.

Cecilia reached for the next line of the song. She sensed the familiar feeling of emptying her chest of air at the same time that she filled the air in the room with her voice. She concentrated on the formation of the words. Surely they could hear the pounding in her chest as much as the bright sound from her lips?

If she had had more time to prepare, she could have accompanied herself on the lute or the lyre, Cecilia thought. She had spent many hours playing and picking out notes to her own ear. But this is not how things would be done at the court of Milan. Marco, the court musician, did his job. He played effortlessly, watching Cecilia with a warm expression, letting his fingers pluck the strings of his lute as if with little thought.

Buoyed by Marco’s calm assurance, Cecilia dared to look into the crowd now. Her eyes landed on her brother, with his rapt expression, his frank smile. She tried to avoid looking at her mother, whose eyes were cast to her fingers fidgeting in her lap. Cecilia continued to sing each line with greater precision and power.

She would never have such an audience in a convent, Cecilia thought, or anywhere else for that matter. This was her one opportunity to work her way into the life of this palace, into another life altogether. Her one chance to escape inevitable imprisonment, of unthinkable tedium, behind the walls of a convent. One chance to avoid spending the rest of her days with a needle and thread alongside her mother, who would only spend the rest of hers criticizing Cecilia’s stitches. One chance to win the heart of a man who might transform her life with a wave of his hand. As long as she kept him captivated, that is. But Cecilia knew how to talk to men, how to advocate for her desires. I have to make this work, Cecilia thought as she reached the last line of the song. This may be my last opportunity to make something substantial of my life.

In the long moment of dead silence that followed the last note, her brother nodded his quiet approval. Marco pressed his palm to the lute strings to quiet them, then smiled at Cecilia. Then, suddenly, a deafening roar of applause filled the chamber. One of the men cried, “Brava!” A few of the palace guests stood and called out more verbal bursts of approval.

Only then did Cecilia find the nerve to set her eyes on Ludovico il Moro, seated in the center of the group. His chin lifted high, his expression was nonetheless difficult to interpret. His jaw was set and squared, but his dark eyes did not leave Cecilia’s face. Then, she detected one corner of his mouth rise.

Cecilia felt something like intoxication, bliss, fill her now. The sound of applause began to quell but the feeling stayed. She took a small, unpracticed curtsy.

This is it, she thought to herself. I’ve done it. This is what I was meant to do. My family. They will see. This palace. This court. This man. All of it is within my reach.

Northern France
August 1944

IN DOMINIC’S DREAM, SALLY STOOPED OVER A BASKET, pulling out a damp sheet with the businesslike strength that Dominic still found astounding in her petite figure. Her hair was tucked neatly behind her ears as she shook out the sheet and swung it onto the long piece of twine they had tied between two trees.

“Hello, ma’am,” Dominic said, taking off his cap. He pulled her close, smudging sweat and coal dust down the front of her dress.

“You need a bath,” she said in her crisp Irish accent, a fake scowl on her freckled face. Then she pressed the length of her body against him to kiss him with a passion that set him on fire.

Waking was like having shards of ice pushed through his heart. Dominic stirred to the harsh reality of the bottom bunk, his thin body separated from the metal frame by what seemed like half an inch of dirty mattress. He lay there, rendered motionless by agony for a few moments, then gazed listlessly at his surroundings. All around him, his comrades were smoking, nibbling on rations, lying on their beds and staring at the gently moving canvas ceiling of the tent. The floor was already damp with rain. Had it only been a few hours since they had pitched it? Perhaps they’d have the luxury of staying in the same place for a few days this time. Dominic had lost track of where they were now. France, Belgium—some forsaken corner of wet and war-torn Europe. He was weary of it already, at the same time marveling that he was still alive, that he had survived the brutal landing on the beaches and the intense gun battles that had ensued.

None of the others were paying him attention. Judging by the soft snoring coming from the top bunk, Paul Blakeley, the lanky private from San Antonio who had been commissioned with Dominic in a Military Police unit at Camp Glenn and shipped off to Normandy, was asleep. Dominic rolled over to his little knapsack and pulled out a scrap of paper he’d scavenged from outside the officers’ tent. It had been crumpled up and tossed to the ground, but despite the fragments of a telegram printed on one side, to Dominic it was pure gold. He’d also scrounged a stick of what passed for charcoal from a smoldering forest they’d passed a few days ago. And now, finally, he could bring the two together.

There was no question of what he would draw. The charcoal stick was forming her familiar curves on the paper before he could even ask himself the question. He drew her the way he loved her best, curled on her side in bed, her loose hair a tangle against the back of her neck. Even in black and white, in his mind, he could see the burning color of Sally’s hair on the pillow.

Suddenly, a grubby hand came down and grasped roughly at the paper. Instinctively, he snatched his hand back, but a tiny tear appeared in one corner and he reflexively let it go.

“Well, have a look at this!” boomed a coarse voice. “Who is this sizzling lady?”

Dominic rose to his feet, face burning. Private Kellermann was a towering mass of a man, with the thick shoulders and manner of a rhino. He held the sketch up to the light and laughed, the sound rolling out of him on a tide of vulgar intentions. “She’s a beauty, Bonelli. Don’t you want to share?”

Dominic’s fingers curled into fists. The idea of Kellermann’s eyes on even a fleeting likeness of his wife set his blood on fire. “Give it back,” he said.

But the other soldiers were already gathering around; a sweaty, smelly horde of half-starved men who hadn’t seen a living woman in months, and Dominic’s lifelike portrayal of his wife was more than enough for them. Hooting and yelling, they passed the sketch between them, and with each grubby thumbprint that stained the page, Dominic’s blood rose. Wolf whistles pierced the air as Dominic rushed from one man to the other, snatching at the precious sketch, but his slight frame kept him just out of reach of it as they passed it back and forth above his head.

“Jump, Macaroni!” one man’s voice howled. “Jump for your lady!” Dominic brushed off the all-too-familiar slur.

Finally, Kellermann had the picture again, and he waved it easily and tauntingly above Dominic’s head, leaning back against his bunk. “You heard the man, Macaroni!” he cackled. “Jump!”

Before Dominic could respond, the motionless lump that had been lying in the top bunk sprang suddenly to life. Paul’s hand flashed out from under the blankets and swiped the paper clean out of Kellermann’s hand in one brisk movement. Turning indignantly, Kellermann opened his mouth to protest, but when Paul sat up, he thought better of it. While Dominic’s bunkmate spoke with a Texan twang, his great height and clear blue eyes spoke of some Scandinavian ancestor that had chewed on shields in a berserker rage on Viking longboats a thousand years ago. The expression in his face warned Kellermann that he’d think nothing of doing something similar right now.

“Enough.” Paul didn’t speak much, but when he did, men listened. The group of men dispersed in bits and pieces until only Dominic was left, arms folded, staring Kellermann in the eye even though he had to tip his head back to do so. “That’s his wife, man. Stop it.”

There was a moment of icy silence between them, then Kellermann let out a scathing belly laugh. “Enjoy your little art project, wop,” he growled. “We’ll be off fighting a war.” He slouched off, turning his broad back only to spit on the floor a few feet from Dominic’s boots.

Seething, Dominic turned back to his bunk. Paul held out the drawing to him. “Thanks,” Dominic said, taking it back, surprised at how much his voice was shaking. He smoothed the paper between his rough fingers.

The silence stood heavy and painful. Paul pushed it gently aside. “It’s a really good picture,” he said quietly, his Texas twang softening the thick air between them. Paul had been a stalwart comrade ever since they’d ended up as bunkmates in boot camp. He was one of the few of their platoon who had survived the decimation on those grim beaches of Normandy. Paul’s sturdy good humor had made their slow advance over the devastated landscape less impossible. For all his size and quietness, Paul had quick hands and a quicker mind; the speed with which he’d plucked the drawing from Kellermann’s hands was echoed in card games and tricks by candlelight. Those moments were few and far between, not because they didn’t have idle time but, Dominic figured, because their spirit for games had been crushed on those beaches, all those weeks ago.

“I never knew you could draw, Bonelli,” Paul said.

Dominic shrugged, one-shouldered, then stood and began tidying the thin blanket on his bunk. “I’ve drawn since I was a little kid. I would have loved to go to art school, to find a teacher, but what could I do? I had to start working in the mines just after ninth grade. Then there was Sally, and the wedding, and Cecilia … and the war.” He touched his neck where the Saint Christopher medal was so conspicuously missing. “I just draw here and there when I’ve got a little spare time. Helps me relax, you know?”

Dominic realized that for all the time he and Paul had spent together since boot camp, they had only shared snippets of their lives back home. And yet, Dominic marveled, their time together in the face of ever-present threats had bonded them as if they had been together their whole lives. War could do that, Dominic supposed.

Paul had not spoken much of his family. Dominic knew that he had had little time for his father. The old rancher had fought in the Great War and come back broken; he had spent more time looking at the bottom of a bottle than at his son, and his family had suffered for it. Paul’s mother had wrestled five boys through the years of the Depression on a cattle ranch that was falling apart. It had been all she could do to feed the boys, let alone give them affection. Paul barely mentioned them. But he often mentioned Francine. He never once described the girl he loved as beautiful; but the look she put on his face certainly was. The mention of her name had lit him up from the inside out. Dominic knew the feeling.

“You always draw your wife?” Paul asked, his pale legs now dangling from the bunk above.

“Usually,” Dominic admitted, a smile creeping onto his face despite himself. “It’s always one portrait or another, though. I’ve drawn most of youse guys and slipped the pictures into my letters to Sally so that she can see what you look like.” He grinned.

“Sneaky. I knew I had to look out for you!” Paul joked. “Who’s your favorite artist?”

Dominic shrugged again. “I used to go down to the library when I was a kid to look at paintings in books. The old masters—Rembrandt, Rubens, you know. But Leonardo da Vinci was always my favorite. I suppose he’d have to be, being Italian and everything.”

“Ever been to Italy?”

Dominic shook his head. “My parents couldn’t wait to get out of there and make a new life in America. I guess they’re more American than Italian, really—they’ve got a full-size photograph of me in my uniform with a giant American flag.” He huffed out a laugh, then smoothed his hand down the front of the stained and tattered remains of his uniform, now a ratty shadow of the splendor that had been photographed that day. “I’d love to visit there someday, though. It would be something to see those masterpieces in real life.”

The bunk creaked as Paul flipped onto his back again, his voice growing muffled. “Someday you will, I reckon.”

Dominic wished he could share Paul’s optimism. He couldn’t emulate it, but he was grateful for it. Moments of peaceful conversation about anything other than war had been few and far between. Dominic had lost count of how many skirmishes they’d been in; each time his survival seemed even more like a miracle. Had Dominic’s little unit made a dent in the war against the Nazis? Had they made any difference at all? Even after all these weeks of narrow misses, he wasn’t sure. He only knew he had to keep going, had to keep focused on their mission to win this war. His officers complimented him on his sharpshooting skills and dedication to protecting other soldiers, but he knew that the only reason he was still here was luck. And perhaps the prayers of his mother, all the way back home across the ocean.

“Attention!” A sharp word from the door of the tent brought every soldier to his feet as automatically as machine-gun fire. They stood neatly side by side, feet together, arms by their sides, bodies as straight as their exhausted muscles could make them. An officer walked into the tent, the glittering badges on his shoulders marking him as a major. There was utter silence but for the squish of his boots in the mud that had pooled on the floor of the tent.

The major strolled down the twin lines of men, examining the names embroidered on their uniforms.

“Blakely!” he cried.

Then, his eyes settled on Dominic.

“Bonelli!” he boomed.

“Sir!” Dominic saluted.

“I hear you’re a good cover.” The expression in the major’s dark eyes was unreadable. He quirked an eyebrow. “Come. We have a job for you. Don’t want to keep the commander waiting.”

Milan, Italy
January 1490

“COME. YOU MUST NOT KEEP HIS LORDSHIP WAITING.”

Cecilia’s underarms raged as if a dozen bees were stinging her skin at once. Reluctantly, she raised her arms in the air again. Wearing only her sleeveless linen chemise, Cecilia let Lucrezia Crivelli, the dressmaid, fan her underarms with fluttering hands. Around Cecilia’s bedchamber, a dozen gowns in silk, satin, and velvet lay across every surface.

“Aya! What’s in this?” Cecilia huffed out three strong breaths, staving off the pain.

“A little quicklime, some arsenic, pig lard. A few other secrets. A favorite recipe of His Lordship’s mother. Not much longer,” Lucrezia said. “You’re supposed to say two Our Fathers.”

“Our Father, who art in heaven …” Cecilia began, but her voice trembled. She shivered in the frigid air and squeezed her eyes shut against the stinging.

“Get used to it. His Lordship doesn’t like his women with hair on their bodies.”

Cecilia opened her eyes wide now and stared at Lucrezia, a girl about Cecilia’s age who was tasked with attending Cecilia and helping with her hair and dress. She examined the girl’s wide, brown eyes to see if she might be teasing her. “Really? Nowhere on the body?”

Lucrezia shook her head. “We’ll do your pòmm next. Keep going.”

Cecilia didn’t know any Milanese words, but she could guess which body part might be up for the next depilation. She squeezed her eyes closed again, pushing through the cold and the nearly unbearable stinging. She got through the prayers, spitting them out as quickly as she ever had. While she prayed, Lucrezia dabbed at Cecilia’s underarms with her fingertips.

When Cecilia completed her Our Fathers, Lucrezia went to the hearth, where a pot roiled over the fire. She dipped a cloth into the water with tongs, then wrung it out and placed the steaming fabric under Cecilia’s arm.

“Aya!” The cold was replaced with scalding heat. Lucrezia roughly wiped away the vile mixture from both underarms, taking the hair out with it from the roots. At last, Cecilia let her arms, nearly numb, fall to her sides. She grasped a brown velvet mantle from a nearby chair and slung it over her shoulders. She brought her fingertips to her underarms, where the bare, raw skin throbbed but was undeniably smooth and hairless. The stinging, lingering but more tolerable, continued as Cecilia walked to the bed. She ran her palms lightly over the pile of dresses. Green satin. Purple velvet. Red silk with black lace and gilded wire threaded through the neckline.

“They are so beautiful,” Cecilia said. In fact, the dresses were the most beautiful things Cecilia had ever seen.

“Castoffs. You’ll need them altered to fit you. You’re a scrawny thing,” Lucrezia said, pressing her hands into Cecilia’s waist so hard that Cecilia flinched. Lucrezia shrugged. “We just pulled these from the wardrobe of the last mistress.”

A long pause. “The last mistress?”

Lucrezia nodded.

“What happened to her?”

“Oh!” A nervous laugh. “She didn’t last long.”

“Why not?” Cecilia studied Lucrezia’s face again to see if she might be setting herself up to be the butt of a joke.

“His Lordship tired of her quickly,” Lucrezia said, her voice suddenly sad in a way that, to Cecilia, sounded anything but sincere. “If you want to know what I think, it’s that she talked too much. Whatever the case, His Lordship’s … diversions … are usually brief anyway. Only little Bianca stayed behind.”

“Bianca?”

“Poor little bastard child.” Lucrezia shook her head. “She is a beauty, though. Hair as black as midnight. Just like her father’s.”

Cecilia flopped into a chair next to her bed and pulled the mantle tightly around her shoulders. Had she stepped into waters that might close quickly over her head? She wondered how many other important things she did not know.

A knock at the door. Lucrezia ushered in a gray-haired woman in a chambermaid’s dress. The maid uttered something to Cecilia in Milanese dialect, then bowed her head and extended a folded parchment with a wax seal. Cecilia recognized her brother’s elegant handwriting on the parchment but she hesitated. It was the first time anyone had ever bowed to her, and besides, Cecilia had no idea what the maid had said. The old woman met Cecilia’s eyes and smiled. Lucrezia stepped in and took the letter from the maid’s hand, then gave it to Cecilia. “A letter for His Lordship’s flower.”

Munich, Germany
September 1939

EDITH BRACED HERSELF AGAINST A METAL DOORFRAME as the train whistle sounded and the wheels screeched. She pressed herself against the window and watched the twin onion domes of Munich’s Frauenkirche recede into the dusk.

For weeks, Edith had been preparing herself to watch Heinrich board a train for Poland. She had pictured their farewell a thousand times, Heinrich handsome, tall, and lean in his uniform. She imagined herself running along the platform, pressed into a crowd of women as the train pulled out of the station.

Never did Edith foresee that she would be the one fastening up the buttons on a starched field jacket that had been cursorily modified to fit a woman’s shape. That she would be the one boarding the huffing train for Kraków, watching from the window while Heinrich ran along the platform waving, growing smaller as the train pulled eastward from Hauptbahnhof Station. Now she was the one holding conscription papers. There was no refusing the call. Her orders were little more than a signed, stamped shred of paper, a single folio that had the power to change her entire life. Maybe even to take her life, if she were one of the unlucky ones.

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.

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.

Cecilia could laugh about it now, she supposed, now that her mother was far distant from the palace. And Cecilia did laugh a little, quietly to herself. There was little else to do as she sat waiting for Ludovico il Moro, running her palms across the slippery silk dress. He should have been here long before now, but she imagined that he had other things to do than come visit her in her new bedchamber.

Ludovico surely was occupied, consulting with his military and political advisers. From her bedchamber window, Cecilia had seen diplomatic liveries cross the courtyard, flying the colors of Ferrara and Mantua. As Regent of Milan, Ludovico faced constant threats from Venice, Cecilia’s brother had told her, and from the French king’s army. Even from his own nephew. Ludovico had already sent his nephew’s closest advisers to the gallows, the dressmaid Lucrezia had told Cecilia as she brushed out her hair in the candlelight. When you were that powerful, the girl told her, anyone might be your friend one moment, and then your enemy the next.

So Cecilia waited. She had already gone over every inch of the bedchamber several times. There were so many books. A cabinet held stacks of folios stitched together with linen threads, long cords of vellum, and leather bindings. Some of the volumes were covered with stiff pasteboards and hinged spines. She had spent hours poring over the brown ink on parchment. She even found a lady’s book of secrets, a sort of recipe book with beauty concoctions like the one she had endured under Lucrezia’s insistence to remove every last hair on her body. She had looked and looked again at the painted images on the wall, paintings that brought to life the stories in many of those books—ancient tales of love, betrayal, battle, death, redemption. She had picked up each glass vial and gilded box on the table, watched the morning fog roll across the gardens outside the window, and tried on every dress of silk and velvet hanging in the wardrobe. She had let herself disappear into the piles of woolen and silk bedding and curtains draped around the high bed. From the open window, the aroma of rice cooking in diced onions and butter wafted into the room.

“My daughter is going to the convent. It is already decided!” Her mother’s words filled her head again, unbidden. “Otherwise, she goes back to the country with me. That is the choice.”

“And what will happen to her there?” Fazio had said. “If I had been home with you, maybe things would have been different, but as it stands, thanks to my brothers, she no longer has a dowry to marry her to a decent family. She will be nothing more than a country peasant. A spinster. Here she will be given riches and status. It is not forever, Mother.”

“And what convent will want her after she has lost her virtue?” her mother had challenged, her hands on her hips. “No man has touched her! You know it as well as I do.”

“I know it sounds strange,” Fazio had said, pacing before the window, “but being His Lordship’s inamorata will afford Cecilia a higher status than she has now. Even the nuns will respect it.”

Cecilia had watched as her mother’s round face reddened. “I refuse to leave my daughter here, with that … that little pompous ox.” She gestured as if to measure Ludovico il Moro’s stature with her hand. “He is too sure of himself, is he not? He will use her and throw her away. And then what will we have to show for it?”

Cecilia had begun to feel red anger swell inside of her own chest. How dare they act as if she was not in the room? How dare they act as if she was still a silly child with no thoughts of her own? She could, and would, make her own decisions.

“I am staying here,” Cecilia had said quietly.

“You will be a whore!” That was when her mother had thrown the plate, shattering it against the tiles.

“No, Mother,” Cecilia had said, as calmly as possible. “I will be a lady. I will be the head of this castle. You will see.” For a moment, she had seen an expression like pity on her brother’s face, but she couldn’t fathom why.

Her brother had told her that, after her vocal performance, Ludovico Sforza had been determined to bring Cecilia into his household. That there was something about Cecilia that he could hardly put into words. There was no deterring him on the matter.

Fazio had laid out Cecilia’s choices in clear terms. There were only two ways to stop His Lordship’s orders, he had told her. Cecilia could decide to preserve her maidenhood and return home with their mother, a choice that Cecilia could hardly bear. She could join the sisters at Monastero Maggiore, an even less desirable outcome in Cecilia’s eyes, even though her mother and her brother begged her to consider it again. But if she decided to stay in His Lordship’s care, Fazio told her, then there was no reversing the decision. And, he added, she would have to live with the consequences. At that point, there was little her family could do to help her and anyway, it was out of their hands.

But to Cecilia, only one thing mattered. Ludovico Sforza, Lord of Milan, wanted her and he could give her everything she ever wanted. In one second, he could transform her from a penniless country girl into a duchessa. At least she imagined so.

“I am staying,” Cecilia had whispered.

That was it. The turning point. And now here she stood, clad in silk in this beautiful bedchamber. There was no doubt in her mind that she was right where she was supposed to be. They would see.

At last, the door creaked open and Cecilia stood. She was ready, but the moment His Lordship entered the room, she felt her resolve waver. As much as she was resolute in her decision, she suddenly felt nervous being with him alone in this room. After all, he was a stranger. She could not show the turbulence that roiled through her veins.

Slowly, he walked toward her. She watched his eyes flicker in the lantern light. “It was a good decision to stay,” he said. “I can assure you that you will be adequately rewarded.”

“I was honored by your offer,” Cecilia said, casting her eyes to the floor.

His Lordship approached close enough so that she could smell the dank scent of his hair and beard. He took another calculated step toward her, closer than any man who was not her father or brothers had ever come. Then he set his eyes on her. They were as black as coals, so dark that she could not make out the pupils. She felt her stomach flutter as if it were full of moths. Their faces stood at the same level.

“You are a lovely woman,” he whispered in his deep voice, thick with its Tuscan tongue, tinged with the strange Milanese accent. She felt his hot breath near her neck and she fought against the tingle that ran up her back.

Cecilia cleared her throat. “I am also learned,” she said, taking a step back. There was still a quake up her spine, making her feel unsteady and unsure, but she did not want him to perceive the power he held over her. “Maybe you have heard.”

She thought she detected a teasing smile cross his face, but it was difficult to tell in the shadows, under the thick beard. The idea that he might be mocking her infuriated her, and she took another step back.

“Tell me more,” he said. She felt his fingertips grasp her hand, then move lightly up the silk sleeve of her dress. His eyes burned hot and focused.

“So much to tell.” She hoped he could not hear her voice waver. She wished that she had had even a little of the diplomatic training of her brother; only now did she realize that she did not know what to reveal and what to withhold. She was only sure that it was important to know the difference. “I can read and write in Latin. My father made sure that I had a good tutor. The best one in Siena. I can calculate numbers. I write verses. I can sing—you already know that. And I play the lute and the lyre. I play other stringed instruments, too, well, a little bit …” Was she already talking too much? Lucrezia had warned her.

Ludovico listened halfheartedly. His hand was gathering together the heft of her skirt, pulling it up toward her thigh.

“Is it true what I’ve heard? You still are virtuous? No man has touched you before?” His voice rose barely above a whisper.

Cecilia swallowed that truth like a stone and nodded. Of course this was why she was here. This is what a mistress did, why she was allowed to stay here in the castle with all these beautiful things at all. It had been her decision.

She swallowed hard again, then mustered her courage. “How … how much will you wager that I am smarter than any woman of this castle? Smarter than any mistress you have had before me?”

He barked a loud laugh. “I hope you are,” he said, but then she felt his hot breath on her neck, his beard against her jaw. She closed her eyes; she could not help it. His mouth seared her skin with heat as his hands continued their way up under her skirt.

“I … I want to be the lady of this castle,” Cecilia gasped the words out as his fingers found their way under her skirts and to the linen ties of her undergarments. She knew what was about to happen to her and in a moment of clarity, she realized that she didn’t want to just be a mistress. Before he could have her, before he could use her up and throw her out, she wanted his word.

“I want to be your wife,” Cecilia blurted.

A deep, rich laugh reverberated from his core. He pulled away and looked her in the eyes. There was something there more than fire, more than a burning, but Cecilia, in her inexperience, did not understand it fully.

“My dear girl,” he said. Then he pushed her toward the bed and turned her roughly onto her stomach.

Eastern Belgium
September 1944

DOMINIC STARED OUT OF THE OPEN SIDE OF THE QUARTERTON truck as it rumbled through the countryside. Countryside was the wrong word, he thought. Once, this part of Belgium must have been beautiful. Even now, in the treetops, the fragments of autumn pushing through the warm blanket of late summer held the promise of coming splendor. But the landscape was marred by the still-smoking remains of little villages. Dominic’s heart tightened at the sight. The earth was scarred and blackened in places, fields trampled by tank treads, shell casings, and scattered pieces of equipment strewn everywhere. An orchard stood in tattered ruins, the charred branches of fruit trees twisted and broken against the blue sky.

Paul Blakely tightened his hands on the wheel as they drove into the rubble. The truck crawled through the main street of what was, until recently, a village. Only its church steeple was left, teetering precariously on its half-ruined foundation. The cross at its tip was a brave and tragic silhouette that made Dominic’s fingers itch to sketch. But the rest of the town was anything but picturesque. Blackened shells and broken walls were all that remained of the houses and shops that had once lined this street. The truck detoured around a fallen lamppost and labored through the pockmarked road.

“Man, would you look at that …” Paul sat at Dominic’s side, gazing ahead to the wasted landscape, the strap of his helmet swinging with the motion of the truck. Dominic shifted his rifle, wishing he could lay it down, but this territory remained unfriendly. He had to be ready for action at any moment. Now, three months after landing on Omaha Beach, watchfulness had become automatic. His nerve endings felt frayed and electrified, ever on high alert. He wondered if he would ever lose the feeling that there were enemies stalking him.

Before he sent Paul and Dominic off with the empty deuce-and-a-half truck, a Military Police transportation officer had briefed them on their mission. “This new assignment is something different,” he had said. “You two will still be on security detail. But you’ll be part of a squadron of men with a unique job. Yes, we’re fighting Nazis, but we’re also trying to preserve as much as possible of this culture that’s so damned bent on destroying itself.” He gestured at the ruined landscape. “There are important buildings, monuments, and works of art everywhere you look. This war could be the end of all of it—priceless stuff, masterpieces we need to try to save at the same time that we’re trying to save our own asses.”

Dominic had leaned forward, his interest piqued. In his determination to beat the Nazis, to simply survive and go home to his family, he hadn’t considered the war’s impact on art and architecture.

“So we’re supposed to avoid damaging old churches and other monuments,” the officer had gone on. “That should be clear enough. But we’re also looking for paintings, sculptures. This regime has been stealing works of art all through the war, carrying them off to be displayed in their houses like trophies.”

“You mean they’re keeping them for themselves?” Paul had asked.

“Yep. Our intelligence is telling us that some of the highest-ranking Nazis are even hanging up da Vincis inside their own homes.” He had paused, and Dominic let that sink in. For years, he had been reading the news reports of the horrors of the Nazi death camps, of Hitler’s unceasing determination to take over the world. He felt stupid that he had not considered that they were also taking whatever they wanted, raping the countryside for treasures that they had no right to take—even priceless works of art.

The officer had continued. “Some things have already been destroyed, either by the Nazis or even by us. Accidentally, of course. Let’s face it, some destruction is just unavoidable, right? But the president has created a commission called the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Program—the MFAA. Monuments Men.”

“Monuments Men …” Dominic said.

“Mostly museum folks, art historians, people who know about that stuff. Our mission is to protect these works and to get them back from those Nazi bastards so that the works can be returned to their rightful owners after this fiasco is behind us.”

Dominic could hardly believe his ears. How could the American president be worried about paintings and sculptures when thousands of people were losing their lives? But at the same time, he couldn’t deny his wonder. “You mean these … Monuments Men … are just focused on saving art? How are they doing that?”

The officer shrugged. “There’s no guidebook for this stuff. We are looking at aerial photos, marking churches, bridges, monuments to be saved. And we’re going inside to see what’s left, what we can salvage. We’ve already found a bunch of important paintings and portraits, especially, some by the great masters—Rembrandt, Titian, big guys.”

Dominic sat back abruptly, awed. Faced with the prospect of possibly seeing some of those masterpieces, he couldn’t help but feel a thrill of excitement. He thought of da Vinci’s works bombed out and destroyed by the war, or hanging in Hitler’s palace, and bile rose in his throat.

“So your job, fellas, is to protect these Monuments Men,” the officer had continued. “They put themselves at risk daily. They go into some dangerous places to get that art back—and you two are here to watch their backs while they do their jobs. They’ve been waiting for MPs—and especially transport—for weeks now. We finally got the authorization.”

Ahead, on the scorched horizon, the gray encampment seemed almost as much of a blemish as the bombed-out buildings; rows of drab and uniform tents stood between watchful tanks. Paul switched off the truck’s engine, and rifles still held close, he and Dominic disembarked. Soldiers lounged between the sagging tents, their dirty uniforms smelling of unwashed men and gunpowder. At the sight of the truck, several of the men stirred, looking at Dominic and Paul with hopeful expressions. The ground was trampled and littered with shell casings and cigarette butts. Like all encampments, it was a mixture of strict discipline in the tight lines of the tents and messiness in the posture of the exhausted men. But to Dominic, it was beginning to feel more and more like home.

An officer approached but spared no pleasantries. “It’s about time you got here,” he said. “That’s your commander. Captain Walker Hancock.” He turned and walked into the encampment. Exchanging a brief glance, Dominic and Paul followed.

Even from a distance across the dreary camp, Dominic could see that Captain Hancock was as out of place as a mare among mules. Tall and lithe, his uniform draped elegantly over his lean frame. He looked like he should have been wearing a suit and swirling a glass of sherry instead. His piercing blue eyes were watchful as Dominic and Paul followed the officer over to him.

“Hancock’s not just a soldier,” the officer told them as they walked. “He’s some kind of famous sculptor, too.”

The educated, refined man seemed utterly incongruous here in this bitter and charred landscape, but with a shock, Dominic realized that he must have been commissioned as well.

The officer stopped and saluted; Dominic and Paul followed suit. “New men for the security detail, sir.”

Hancock turned and studied the men. Seeming to register the large white MP stamped on their helmets, he nodded. “Good,” he said. “We’ll need more of them as we move toward Aachen.” He drummed his fingers on the barrel of his weapon; Dominic could imagine them grasping a chisel. “Get them settled in.”

“Yes, sir.” The officer turned to lead the men away, but Dominic’s curiosity was getting the better of him.

“How will you go about finding these works of art, sir?” he blurted. He looked at the officer as he spoke, too nervous to meet Hancock’s eye, but the men all knew to whom the question was directed. Hancock merely quirked his other eyebrow and turned away.

The officer saved Dominic from his embarrassment. “A bunch of professionals in Europe and the US have been working on this thing ever since the war started,” he said. “Museum curators and such. They’ve been using their own research to make lists of these works and maps for where we might …”

The officer’s words were lost in a thunderous sound that electrified Dominic’s whole body. Bullets tore into the nearest tent, sending canvas flying in all directions. Shouts and gunfire filled the encampment and, in slow motion, Dominic saw Hancock turning, saw machine-gun fire tearing into the ground ever closer to him.

By sheer instinct, Dominic lunged forward and threw his short frame into Captain Hancock. He felt earth splatter on his boots from the spray of bullets, curled himself determinedly around the commander, and rolled behind the cover of the giant rubber tire of their two-and-a-half-ton. Bullets whined as they ricocheted off the hub. Dominic gripped his rifle, waited for a break in the thunder and returned fire, his gun kicking back against his shoulder. He emptied the magazine until he heard a scream and the gunfire abruptly ceased. A few long moments stretched, followed by the shuffle of boots, and then silence.

Panting, Dominic lowered his gun. As the smoke cleared, Dominic saw two German uniforms, bodies lying still at the edge of the encampment. Some Americans groaned among the tents, too, other men hurrying to their aid through the clearing smoke. Dominic was relieved to see Paul’s tall frame sprinting toward the injured soldiers.

Captain Hancock was sitting up, brushing dirt from his uniform. There was a smear of mud across his cheekbone. He studied Dominic, wide-eyed.

“Are you hurt, sir?” Dominic asked, reloading his rifle and stepping cautiously out from the cover of the tire. The encampment had the burnt, smoky smell of recently discharged guns, mixed with the salt tang of blood, a smell Dominic had come to know and hate. But both Americans who had been shot were stirring and swearing. Good news.

“No.” Hancock crawled out from behind the tire. Dominic extended a hand and pulled him to his feet. Hancock returned his grip and met his eyes, his face suddenly splitting into a dazzling smile. He squinted at the name on Dominic’s uniform.

“Bonelli, huh?” He pumped Dominic’s hand with a tight grip. “Welcome.”

Pełkinie, Poland
September 1939

THE HELMET ON EDITH’S HEAD HAD BEEN MADE FOR A man. It nearly covered her eyes, and the metal rattled against her skull along with the rumble of the Kübelwagen’s tires over the rocky terrain.

While she was compiling the facsimiles for the museum director and board, Edith had looked up Pełkinie in a dusty atlas pulled from the shelves of the museum library. She had never heard of it before, but she ran her finger across the map to a small village in far eastern Poland, near the Russian border. The Czartoryski family had had a country estate there for years, she had read. And now, Edith was pressed into the rear seat of the beige car along with two armed soldiers, heading straight for the Czartoryski estate itself.

She squeezed herself in as tightly as possible. She felt grateful to have claimed a seat by the deep sill of the vehicle, from which she could watch the Polish countryside unfold around her. The sun had risen around the time that the train arrived in the Kraków station, but Edith had yet to glimpse its rays. Instead, the landscape was cast in a gray haze, a combination of cloud cover and the dust from the rubble alongside the roads and the dirt kicked up by the Kübelwagen’s knobby tires. As they followed a bend in the road, Edith caught a glimpse of the rest of the long convoy of German vehicles behind theirs. She could not see the end of the line. She had heard that the Feldgendamerie had already secured the Czartoryski home. Did they need so many more soldiers?

For a while, the view flattened out into a series of fallow fields with a long, straight train track that ran parallel to the road. Edith heard a low train whistle, then turned her head to watch the train cars pass. The train should have easily overtaken the convoy, but for some reason, it was rolling slowly, a long chain of old, rusted-out cattle cars laboring along the track. When the train finally began to keep pace with the Kübelwagen, Edith caught sight of a small hand waving listlessly from one of the narrow, dusty windows in the side of the boxcar. After a few moments, the hand was replaced by the drawn face of a young woman, her eyes dark and sunken.

Edith felt a jolt slice through her as her heart sank. She recalled the Jewish families walking toward the train stations of Munich, their most precious possessions collected in pillowcases, small containers, and shopping bags. Was this train headed to a detention camp? The train finally picked up speed and the hand disappeared from the window. Edith dropped her eyes to her folded hands in her lap, knowing she would never forget the woman’s face, the haunted, sunken eyes.

The car finally turned into a long path lined with formal gardens and tall, manicured spruces. At the end of the path, Edith spied the grand, sand-colored palace. Pełkinie. Edith recognized its long, symmetrical façade of pilasters and windows from the books in the museum library.

It was a relief to step out of the car, where she had felt like a prisoner even though she was wearing the same uniform as the men in the vehicle. The men in the convoy proceeded to the palace in formation, squeezing Edith between them. She removed the bothersome helmet.

“Fräulein Becker.” An officer sliced his way into the formation, easily picking her out. “Lieutenant Fischer,” he said, his hands wound behind his back. “I am gratified to see that you have arrived safely. Come. They are waiting for you inside.”

Edith walked quickly behind Lieutenant Fischer as he snaked through the dozens of soldiers and through the central doorway of the house. Inside, there were more soldiers moving furniture and fixtures. Edith rushed to keep up, her surroundings a blur of gilding, crystal, polished wood, silver, and richly colored upholstery.

“We found the pictures in a secret room in the oldest part of the house, the part beneath the old watchtower,” Lieutenant Fischer said, and Edith followed him up a wide staircase into the diffuse light. “The door was hidden behind a piece of furniture.”

With each step, Edith thought about the family members who had abandoned their home for their own safety. She pictured the family living here, the children running through the vast rooms, laughing, chasing one another down the long corridors. She could imagine the adults, riding horses through the lush forest, picnicking on the lawn, gazing at the stars at night, living their lives in peace.

“The family …” she said, feeling a wave of trepidation. She did not know how to phrase her question.

The officer shook his head. “They had already fled before we arrived. The Gestapo is trailing them.”

A strange mixture of shame and relief washed over Edith. She personally had assembled the catalog of this family’s known paintings. Edith was responsible for the theft of some of the world’s most valuable works of art, the ransacking of this estate, and the confiscation of everything inside it. In the process, she had put people’s lives at risk. What if she refused to continue to help? Would her life be at risk, too?

Edith feared that she might vomit. She had never meant to send anyone into exile. She certainly didn’t want to have anyone killed. It was her fault they were not here anymore, she realized. But as she took in the vast scale of this operation—an entire convoy of armed vehicles, dozens of soldiers, officers, and military police—Edith realized it was too late. She was fully engaged in a conflict that was much bigger than herself, whether she had intended it or not.

Would the family get far enough ahead, or find refuge before the Gestapo found them? Until they could return to their home? An image of the sunken eyes of the woman on the train seared through Edith’s mind.

“They must have judged us idiots,” Lieutenant Fischer said, his eyes lighting up with self-satisfaction. “It was obvious that the narrow door had just been patched. The mortar was still wet.”

“A wall?” Edith asked.

He nodded. “They hid a lot of the things in an old room that you can access only through a narrow door hidden behind a cabinet. Made it appear like it was simply a wall. But it was poorly done. Our men found it within a matter of minutes.”

Edith felt a chill run down her spine.

Lieutenant Fischer turned a corner and an elegant sitting room stretched out before them. The room was cluttered with dusty furniture covered in sheets and tarps, neglected goods stored over many years. A half-dozen military police staff milled around idly among the disorder. The officer led Edith to a hole in the back wall, where bricks had been hastily removed.

“We received the information about this location from a Polish bricklayer, the one who walled up the door. He tried to keep it a secret, but he was not able to keep the truth from us.” Lieutenant Fischer gave her another thin smile.

A series of long tables had been set up around the room, each stacked with decorative items and wooden crates. On one table, two sets of paintings were stacked on top of each other. Edith wondered if the men knew how valuable these paintings and artifacts were. It seemed to her they had been careless in their movement of the items.

“I don’t know much about art,” Fischer said to Edith, “but it looks like a museum here to me.” He addressed the guards. “The lady is a specialist from the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Let her have free access to examine the works. She will decide what is to be loaded for transport.” The men stepped aside and Edith moved forward. Her hands shaking, Edith reached down and touched the frame of the first painting on top of the stack, a small landscape darkened by centuries of dust.

“I assume you know your duties here. I’ll leave you to your work,” Fischer said. “Just one more thing, Fräulein Becker.” He reached for her arm and lowered his voice. “Be careful about who you share information with. Our forces are easily taking the cities, but there are Polish resistance groups throughout the countryside.”

Resistance. What did that mean, exactly? Edith’s heart began to race in her chest.

Lieutenant Fischer seemed to read her mind. “They are more organized than our commanding officers in Germany realize. Someone might try to contact you or get information. It might be someone you think you should trust. Don’t be fooled by a handsome face, fräulein. Watch what you say and to whom.”

Suddenly, a muffled voice emerged from one of the large crates at the back of the room.

“Heiliger Strohsack!”

Everyone turned. A short soldier, his helmet and uniform coated in dust, emerged from the stacks of crates and gilded frames. Between his hands, he balanced a rectangular package wrapped in paper, its edges torn to reveal a section of a gilded picture frame.

“Look what I found!”

Florence, Italy
May 1482

BEYOND THE GATES OF FLORENCE, I FEEL THE CARRIAGE wheels shudder into the ruts of the road. I steady the wooden crate that bumps against my thigh.

Finally. After years of trying to gain favor at the Medici court, of trying to find a supporting patron, after years of holding my breath for fear of another accusation, I am leaving Florence behind for better prospects.

Buried deep inside one of the rocking mule carts behind us lie trunks full of notebooks, paintbrushes, charcoal, pens, pigments. Silken hose, gowns and caps of satin, linen undergarments, and my favorite cape of purple velvet. Milan is cold, they tell me.

I watch the gray-haired man seated across from me on the plush, embroidered cushions, one of Lorenzo il Magnifico’s notaries. His mournful eyes watch the towering clay dome of our cathedral grow smaller outside the carriage window. Alongside me, my young and beautiful friend, the singer Atalante Migliorotti, hums a tune under his breath. Il Magnifico has chosen well, I think. Surely we will impress the court of Milan. They say that the Milanese try to emulate our Florentine language and dress.

I have insisted on bringing a small notebook and a fresh stick of charcoal into the carriage so that I might sketch any sights that capture my fancy along the journey. And the crate. Of course, the crate. I have devised a wooden container filled with straw to transport the lyre, Il Magnifico’s diplomatic offering to Ludovico il Moro, Regent of Milan. I must not let it out of my sight.

The lyre itself is a wonder, if I do dare to compliment myself. I cast it in pure silver, in the form of a horse’s skull. It will accompany Atalante’s voice perfectly; we have already spent hours rehearsing together and have even practiced before the Medici women. And if the Lord of Milan asks me to play it, how could I refuse?

Along with the lyre, the crate also holds Il Magnifico’s letter of introduction on my behalf. Extraordinarily important. Disappointingly brief.

I cannot stop myself from sighing aloud. If I am to win any important commissions among the court of Milan, I must elaborate on my abilities. I turn to my notebook, where I have penned a letter. I have scratched out passages and rewritten them. Hopefully, by the time we reach the gates of Milan, the list of my offerings will be complete:

To the Most Excellent Lord of Milan, Ludovico Sforza

From your most humble servant, Leonardo da Vinci, in Florence

Most Illustrious Lord,

Having sufficiently seen and considered the achievements of all those who count themselves masters and artificers of instruments of war, and having noted that the invention and performance of the said instruments is in no way different from that in common usage, I shall endeavor, while intending no discredit to anyone else, to explain myself to Your Excellency, showing Your Lordship my secrets, and then offering them to your complete disposal, and when the time is right, bringing into effective operation all those things which you might desire.

In part, these shall be noted below …

1. I have plans for light, strong, and easily portable bridges with which to pursue and, on some occasions, flee the enemy; and others, sturdy and indestructible either by fire or in battle, easy and convenient to lift and place in position. Also means of burning and destroying those of the enemy.

2. I know how, in the course of a siege, to remove water from the moats and how to make an endless variety of bridges, covered ways and scaling ladders, and other machines necessary to such expeditions.

3. If, by reason of the height of the banks, or the strength of the place and its position, it is impossible, when besieging a place, to avail oneself of the plan of bombardment, I have methods for destroying every rock or other fortress, even if it were founded on a promontory, and so forth …

4. I have also types of cannon, most convenient and easily portable; and with these I can fling small stones almost like a hailstorm; and the smoke from the cannon will instill a great terror in the enemy, to his great detriment and confusion.

5. And if the fight should be at sea I have many machines most efficient for offense and defense; and vessels which will resist the attack of the largest guns and powder and fumes.

6. Also, I have means of arriving at a designated spot through mines and secret winding passages constructed completely without noise, even if it should be necessary to pass underneath a moat or river.

7. Also, I will make covered chariots, safe and unassailable, which will penetrate the enemy and their artillery, and there is no host of armed men so great that they would not break through it. And behind these, the infantry will be able to follow, quite uninjured and unimpeded.

8. Also, should the need arise, my lord, I will make cannon, mortar, and light ordnance of very beautiful and functional design that are quite out of the ordinary.

9. Where the use of cannon is impracticable, I will assemble catapults, mangonels, trebuchets, and other instruments of marvelous efficiency not in common use. In short, as the variety of circumstances dictate, I can contrive an endless number of items for attack and defense.

10. In times of peace I believe I can give as complete satisfaction as any other in the field of architecture, and the construction of both public and private buildings, and in conducting water from one place to another.

11. Moreover, work could be undertaken on the bronze horse, which will be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of the auspicious memory of His Lordship your father, and of the illustrious House of Sforza.

12. Also I can execute sculpture in marble, bronze, and clay. Likewise in painting, I can do everything possible as well as any other, whosoever he may be.

And if any of the abovementioned things seem impossible or impracticable to anyone, I am most readily disposed to demonstrate them in your park or in whatsoever place shall please Your Excellency, to whom I commend myself with all possible humility.

Milan, Italy
June 1490

CECILIA OPENED THE SONNET WITH A CONFIDENT BURST of air from her lungs. Just as her new singing tutor had shown her, she pushed all the air from low in the pit of her stomach.

Così del tuo favore ho qui bisogno …

She held the last note, setting her gaze on the broad window and to the vista beyond. The scent of summer was so thick in the air that it was nearly sickening, like the odor of flower stems that have been left to turn to slime in a vase. Above the sill, a bumblebee looped in drunken spirals, gorging itself on the red flowers spilling over the edge.

Even though there were only a handful of people in the room during this practice, Cecilia endeavored to sing as if the audience hall were full of courtiers. She took a deep breath, listened for the cue on the harp, and found her way to the next line.

Però mostra a Mercurio, o Anfione,

Che mi ’nsegni narrare un novo sogno …

She had improved, Cecilia thought. She wished that her brother were here, that he had not been dispatched on one of His Lordship’s missions far afield from Milan. She knew that Fazio would be proud of her, would heap praises on her new talents that were being developed under the tutelage of Ludovico il Moro’s court poet and musicians. And, if she were truthful with herself, she knew that Fazio’s presence would give her the courage she needed right now, practicing and preparing herself to sing before Ludovico, his court, and a room full of strangers.

Cecilia’s gaze rested instead on the court poet, Bernardo Bellincioni, a gray-haired man seated behind Marco at his harp. Bernardo’s eyes were bright and earnest, and Cecilia saw that his lips moved almost imperceptibly, mouthing the words of the song. He could not stop himself. He had written the words to this sonnet, and many others, himself. She hesitated, but Bernardo urged her with a small gesture. “Continue, cara.”

With Bernardo, Cecilia had spent hours delving into poetry, music, literature. In spite of the fact that Bernardo was old enough to be her grandfather, he was the closest thing to a friend that Cecilia had found in the ducal court. Together, Cecilia and Bernardo had composed a few bits of verse and song, the expert pleasantly surprised by Cecilia’s talent, and Cecilia enthralled by the beauty of his words and his practiced skill of arranging them together with little more than a fast scribble of his quill.

“Now stop,” instructed Bernardo, and Cecilia watched him scratch out a few lines on his parchment, whispering to himself as he adjusted words and rhymes as he went. “Give me a few moments,” he said.

Cecilia moved away from her page of music and to the window to breathe the heavy, flower-scented air. At the window sat Lucrezia Crivelli. Cecilia imagined that Ludovico, if he thought of such things, figured that Lucrezia might be a friend for Cecilia, but the girl was not interested in any of the things that Cecilia loved. She did not give the first thought to music, poetry, or myth. She seemed only to care about the clothing and manners of the court. When she wasn’t busy torturing Cecilia with the latest beauty treatment pulled from a book of women’s secrets, Lucrezia spent hours fanning herself by the windowsill or idly pulling a colored thread through her embroidery.

But Cecilia had no interest in spending her days as an idle courtier. She wanted more. She wanted not only to surround herself with talented musicians, poets, and writers like Bernardo; she wanted to be one, too. If she could prove her real worth to Ludovico il Moro and his court, then she wouldn’t be just another new plaything who shone brightly for a season, then just as quickly lost her luster. If she could demonstrate her literary and musical skills enough to entertain and delight Ludovico’s guests, then surely he would see the advantages of keeping her at his side for many years to come.

“His Lordship doesn’t care for the harp,” Lucrezia whispered, barely loud enough for Cecilia to hear, but out of earshot of Marco, the court musician.

Cecilia digested Lucrezia’s assessment, and then wondered what else she didn’t know about Ludovico’s peculiar tastes. If she was to be more than His Lordship’s plaything, she thought, she had better find out fast.

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