Now she was heading down to the port, where John was waiting for her.
John.
She couldn’t get the red-haired, freckled, eternally grinning lad out of her mind. He buzzed through her thoughts like a fly. She was attracted by his charm and his wit, and most of all the ease with which he viewed the world. It was an ease both she and her father lacked.
Greta’s shoes sounded loud on the cobbled street. Now that it was evening, the lanes were quieter. Business was finished for the day, and the hordes of officials and courtiers were sitting in the castle or in their villas with a glass of wine. Since their hasty goodbye earlier that day, Greta had thought about the previous night again and again. It had been wonderful—more than wonderful. She and John had made love in the royal gardens of Blois for hours on end. She hadn’t felt the cold or the stones or the wet grass beneath her. In John’s arm’s Greta had slept well for the first time in a long while, without nightmares of dead children and a chalk-faced man beneath a bridge.
If he had noticed that it was her first time, he hadn’t let on. Greta was confused. She barely knew John, and yet he felt so familiar. She thought of his touch and his kisses and walked faster. Her mind was spinning. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing him so soon after they’d met. She wanted to learn more about him, wanted to make love to him again, wanted to make love to him many more times. And now she would stay here at Château du Cloux with her father and Karl, and he would carry on his journey toward the Atlantic.
The Atlantic.
Greta stopped in the middle of the street. She had been unsure for so long, but now she believed she knew what she had to do. If John would have her, she would go with him! She could work just as hard as any man, and the boat would carry her far away—far away from all the horror and dark memories. John would take her to a better world. What did she have to lose? Her father had reached his destination; maybe Leonardo da Vinci would truly be able to help him. Karl would be fine without her. The two of them would understand. They had always known that it would come to this one day.
It was time to say farewell. Her life was heading in a new direction.
Greta arrived at the harbor with a spring in her step. Sweating laborers carried crates past her; the air smelled both of stale water and of the great, wide world. Greta counted the vessels; there were more than this morning, a confusing maze of masts and sails. She walked toward where the Étoile de Mer had been.
And stopped dead in her tracks.
The boat was gone.
Greta looked around. She had to be mistaken. Perhaps it had been moved? But search as she might, the Étoile de Mer was gone. Finally she stopped one of the laborers and asked him in broken French about the boat. The man gave her a quizzical look at first, then his face brightened.
“Ah, l’Étoile de Mer!” he said. “Elle a quitté le port, il y a deux heures.”
Greta tried to clarify several times, but the man insisted.
The Étoile de Mer left port two hours ago.
Greta suddenly felt exhausted, as if she’d been walking for days. She dropped onto one of the bollards and stared out over the river, where vessels drifted past in the light of the early evening. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She felt so stupid, so ridiculously simple and naive, like a young girl from the country. She had made a mistake that she’d never made before.
She had trusted a man.
And she had been terribly disappointed.
9
IN THE WEEKS AND MONTHS TO COME, JOHANN WOULD often think back to the time he had spent at Château du Cloux with Leonardo da Vinci. He relished every minute, and every word uttered by the famous artist seemed to give him strength. Leonardo also flourished, despite his age and illness. It was as if two halves that had used to be a whole had found one another: on the one side there was Johann’s analytical, crystal-clear reason and his ambition, and on the other was Leonardo’s creative, chaotic way of thinking, as if he viewed everything through the eyes of a child and saw coherences where no one else had ever noticed any. Leonardo da Vinci was Johann’s new teacher, and Johann drank in each of the old man’s words.
Together they often strolled through Leonardo’s garden, which had the dimensions of a park. A few years ago all this had been swampland, but then it was drained with the creation of canals. Now cheerful brooks bubbled through a shady wood, lambs grazed by their mothers, and there was a vegetable garden, a glass house in which Leonardo cultivated rare plants, an atelier bathed in light thanks to hundreds of small panes of glass, and an herb garden with both kitchen herbs and poisonous and medicinal plants that Leonardo used for experiments.
Leonardo had invited Johann, Karl, and Greta to stay at Château du Cloux on the very first evening they arrived, and days had turned into weeks. Their walks were often interrupted because the great artist would observe something new in the garden: the cumbersome flight of a bumblebee, water cascading into a pond, the movements of the clouds above, the complex structure of a beehive. On such occasions, Leonardo pulled out the little notebook that always dangled from his belt and wrote a few lines or drafted some sketches. Since he was left-handed, his paralysis didn’t bother him much. There were times when Leonardo seemed perfectly healthy, but then a trembling would overcome him and he’d have to sit down, illness and
