She rested back against the Duncan Phyfe sofa, trying to ease her tension, to think. Just a few minutes, she thought. If she just closed her eyes and emptied her mind for a little while, she would be better able to deal with the problems of her mother and the Minstrel’s Rough. She could feel the fire warm her feet. The Chopin sounded in her head. She listened to it, hearing it in a way she’d never heard it before. Closing her eyes at last, she let the sounds envelop her, then seep in, becoming a part of her.

After a while she became aware she was no longer alone in the house. She hadn’t heard anyone come in. Although preoccupied, she hadn’t been asleep and was certain an unusual sound-a door, a car-would have alerted her.

Very close to her a sandpaper voice said, “I don’t know why I don’t just wring your neck and be done with it.”

She opened her eyes, and when they fell on the solid figure of Matthew Stark, her heart skidded; she’d been missing him, she realized, wanting him here while she was hurting in so many different ways. “Matthew.” Could he hear the longing in her voice? “How did you get here?”

He glared down at her, his dark face lost in the shadows of the room. “I came through the goddamn kitchen door that you left unlocked.”

“If I hadn’t,” she said noting the socket wrench in his right hand, “you’d only have broken in. Then I’d have had to buy a new door. How did you find me?”

“Your Aunt Willie. She guessed you’d come here.”

“She did, did she? I didn’t think she had that much imagination. I’ve just been sitting here humming Chopin,” she said. As if to prove it, she hummed some for him. “That’s the one I’m supposed to be working on. Frederick Chopin’s Piano Concerto Number One. My uncle’s dead, Rachel Stein is dead, my mother’s been kidnapped, my aunt’s muttering about onderduikers and Nazis, I’ve been knocked around and have met a Dutchman who betrayed my family and the Steins to the Nazis-and I’m humming goddamn Chopin.”

Matthew let his gaze fall on Juliana and saw the wild, scared, determined look in her dark eyes, and he felt his heart leap as he thought, this lady’s getting to me. “So you ran into Bloch,” he said.

“Yes. A charming individual. His man Peters flattened me, but that’s okay because he didn’t hurt my hands. When I was in junior high and high school, I’d go to fine arts camp, and the keyboard people would all be on the same volleyball team. We consistently had the worst record because we were all so terrified of hurting our hands. We’d hit the ball with our forearms, elbows, shoulders, heads-anything but our hands. This was probably about the same time you were trying to stay alive in Vietnam. Silly, isn’t it?”

“Jesus Christ,” Matthew said, and couldn’t help himself. He was envisioning a bunch of piano players on a volleyball team, and it was so damn crazy, so ridiculous, that he started to laugh, Bloch or no Bloch.

“Damn you-”

Juliana reared back to smack him one, and he caught her hands and pulled her to her feet. Then she was in his arms and he stopped laughing and his mouth was on hers. They just couldn’t stop. She had on a gray turtleneck sweater that had come untucked from her pants, and she reveled in the feel of his hands on its softness, her softness. She slid her arms around him and brought him even closer.

“I’m becoming very attached to you, you know,” she whispered, her mouth close to his, and she wondered if she’d started this or if he had, but she didn’t care.

“Feeling’s mutual, although if anybody had told me a month ago I’d be in Vermont kissing a crazy, internationally famous pianist and chasing the world’s largest uncut diamond…” He grimaced at the thought. “Jesus.”

He let her go and watched her stumble back on the couch, and suddenly in the firelight he could see the swelling along the side of her neck, below her jaw. Bloch’s handiwork. Matthew felt a hollowness inside him-and a seething anger. “Tell me what happened.”

At first she said nothing.

“Juliana.” He spoke her name softly. “Talk to me now or I’ll leave you here and go find Bloch my own way.”

“You’d do that, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I wouldn’t blame you,” she said. “I’m not trying to be an ass-but it’s difficult to talk…My mother…”

“Tell me, Juliana.”

It wasn’t a command, but more of a plea, not to tell but to share, not to throw the burden onto him but to transfer some of the weight of it to him. Juliana nodded, and in a surprisingly clinical manner recounted what had happened in Catharina’s Bake Shop. She held together because she had to. If she was going to help her mother, there was no choice. She couldn’t fall apart.

Matthew stood through the whole thing, pacing in front of the fire. When she’d finished, he said, “That’s not everything.”

Her ice-emerald eyes widened as she glanced up at him. “What do you mean?”

“The Minstrel’s Rough,” he said. “You have it, don’t you? That’s why you came here.”

“Is that why you did?”

His eyes held hers. “No. I came because of you.”

Looking into his face, reading what perhaps no one else could see, she believed him. “What about Aunt Willie? What have the two of you been up to?”

Matthew dropped the topic of the Minstrel for the moment and without preamble or sugarcoating told her. “We should give her a call,” he said.

“Can’t. I don’t have a telephone here.”

“Charming, but I doubt it’d make any difference. She feels a responsibility toward your mother, I gather, and if it comes to it, she’ll go with Bloch.”

“Are you going to tell me about him?”

“Are you going to tell me about the Minstrel?”

She jumped up, going into the doorway to the bedroom. They were at an impasse, she thought. Up against a brick wall. She wasn’t sure she was ready to tell him about the Minstrel. Four hundred years of tradition were at stake. She tucked in her sweater, wincing at the sudden stab of pain down her neck and into her shoulders. She felt woozy and confused, fleetingly guilty. She didn’t like stonewalling Matthew, didn’t like his black gaze on her like that, searching, wanting. It’d help, she thought, if he took off that damn leather coat.

“There’s a bed upstairs,” she said. “The room’s unfinished, but you’ll survive. It’s ridiculous to think either of us will be able to accomplish anything tonight.” Her entire body felt as if it were ready to turn to liquid and seep into the cracks in the floor. “Good night, Matthew.”

She went into the bedroom and, although she never did when she was alone, shut the door behind her.

The fire had died, and she hadn’t turned up the thermostat. It was chilly in the house as she padded upstairs in her bare feet, guided only by the starlight and the reflection of the night sky off the snow outside her windows. The stairs were as old as the house, and they creaked. Her parents didn’t like her coming here alone. If she didn’t have a husband, they thought she ought at least to have a dog.

She came to the upstairs landing. The ceilings were low, lending to the cozy atmosphere. On stormy days, she liked to flop in the bed up here and curl up under the quilts and read while listening to the pitter-pat of the rain on the roof. Sometimes she just liked to lie and daydream about not always being so alone. And yet she didn’t mind solitude. At least, not always.

There was no door to the small bedroom on the right. The old plaster walls had crumbled, and the floors were covered with layers of ugly linoleum, and there were no curtains on the one small window. Restoring the room was in her “one of these days” plans; it wasn’t something she worried about. She’d picked up an iron bed at a flea market, several quilts, and a big old trunk, and that was the furnishings.

She could see only the foot of the bed from the door, a darker outline against the general darkness. Holding her breath, she took a step into the room.