I grabbed her hand, heart pounding as we waited.

“I’m positive.” A man’s voice echoed up to us. “I saw lights about halfway up, and they were moving. I vow to you, there’s someone in this tower. And either Thornhill doesn’t know about it or he lied. Which means this is sure to be a find.”

I shot to my feet and put my face to the tiny, barred window, straining to peer out.

“What is . . . what is all this?”

The footsteps slowed, shuffling through the grit of the main floor.

“James, look, there are people here. Not a person, but . . .”

Their voices mingled into one low discussion as they moved about.

“Mrs. Schumann, I think you should come in here,” a firm voice called out. “Take a look at these faces. See if there’s one familiar.”

Movement. More shuffling.

“No,” said a clear feminine voice. “He isn’t here.”

My heart thudded. “He’s here! Go up!” My voice echoed off the rounded stone walls, bouncing about to every part of the tower.

A murmur of low voices, then the footsteps pounded, echoing a hurried march up the steps. They were coming. All of them were coming.

Police? Asylum doctors? Who had Leizel Schumann persuaded to bring her to the tower? Soon a light bobbed along the stairwell, bouncing off the grimy walls. I clutched the bars.

Then they were there, on our landing. The slender veiled woman paused, looking in each cell until she came to ours. “There. She is there, de woman who knew my name.”

“Come, let her out, haste!”

They unbolted the door from the outside and it swung wide with a rusty groan of old hinges, and I was facing them, standing in the light of their lantern. Shoulders back, I walked from that cell and held out my hand, brushing straw off me with the other. “Gentlemen, Mrs. Schumann, I am Vivienne Mourdant.”

One man blinked at me from behind spectacles. “The pianist, Vivienne Mourdant?”

I gave a single nod.

The other men shrugged, apparently not having heard of me.

I turned to the petite woman watching me from behind her veil, at her features pale with strain and determination. “Come, I will take you to your husband.”

They let me pass toward the upper stairs, blocking my exit to the lower—likely so I could not escape. Crowded together, we moved up the stairs with me in the lead. “They call it the lost tower, because it’s where people go to be lost—who need to be lost. I don’t know why, though.”

“My husband, he has enemies,” said the German woman in a poised but trembly voice. Her gloved fingers clutched the handles of her bag. “They vish to quiet him because he disprove their research. He more clever than them, and they don’t like.”