I reached the bottom of the robin’s-egg-blue box, and my fingers brushed against a painting in a simple wood frame, the size of my two open palms side-by-side. My heart leaped. “What’s this?”

No signature. The canvas was frayed in the back, the strange little painting grimy and crackled. The artist had painted a swaddled baby in the middle of his parents’ bed. The image was too dirty to make out the details, but I could tell I wasn’t holding a masterpiece—the colors off, the brushwork stiff. Not Vincent’s. All my wild hopes crashed. I wouldn’t have bought the piece if I had come across it in a Goodwill bin.

Johanna might have painted it. Weren’t young ladies required to learn music and art back then? They had drawing rooms, didn’t they? Or was that Regency England?

Johanna did have a baby at one point. I couldn’t wait to read how Theo won her over.

I held the uninspiring piece up for Violet. “Do you know who this is?”

Chapter Six

Johanna

1888, December, Paris, France

I was stalking Theo in Paris.

I’d meant to avoid him, but then I realized I could never forgive myself if I ruined his and Dries’s friendship. I wanted to erase any tensions between the two of them, if I could. To achieve this, I had to talk to Theo—without giving him false hope that I sought him out because I’d reconsidered his proposal. And without letting him see that I was on the brink of falling apart from heartbreak.

I strolled along the Boulevard Montmartre and admired the shops decorated for Christmas. Unfortunately, when I finally reached the Galerie Goupil, I couldn’t peek past the paintings in the window. The largest one in the middle—dancers on a stage—was enough to block most of the gallery’s interior. The signature said Degas, a name unfamiliar to me.

The cold crept through the bottom of my boots and made it impossible to stand still for too long. I had to move along, if only to generate heat.

“Excusez-moi, mademoiselle.”

“Pardonnez-moi, monsieur.”

In Paris, nobody looked at me twice for walking alone. The French had a relaxed view of propriety. Or maybe I escaped attention because I was the least fashionably dressed woman on the street. Paris’s sparkling flair overshadowed Amsterdam’s Protestant modesty that my plain clothes reflected. I felt invisible in the visual feast that surrounded me, like a sad pigeon among dazzling parrots.

I strolled to Rue de Richelieu and stopped to allow a couple of hansom cabs to pass by, the clopping of horseshoes on cobblestones giving rhythm to the music of the city.

The wind blowing around the corner had me tucking my neck into the collar of my old brown coat. Instead of crossing the street, I turned around to go back to Goupil’s for another look.

This time, fate favored me.