Springtime of the Spirit by Maureen Lang Page B

While mildly respected, the painter’s work had never garnered the attention he would have liked, not even upon his death. The artwork her father owned had been appealing enough, a nice use of color, which was why Annaliese thought it might sell on the black market. But when her father took it to an art critic who recognized it as the work of a famous Flemish artist, the price had leaped to the sky.
    What had changed? The painting?
    No, only its perceived value. Her father sold it immediately, pocketing a hefty profit.
    She shook her head, refusing to compare her present dilemma to a capitalistic phenomenon. This was far more personal than that.
    And yet what had caused the value of being with Jurgen to do just the opposite—to plummet? Had he changed? Had he done anything to make her see him differently? She’d known he had flaws since the day she met him. Like his pride. It had never bothered her much; she knew it took confidence and self-assurance to draw others to a vision.
    But what he wanted to do involved her, and so personally . . . though it was almost as if he thought it had only to do with him.
    And then there was Christophe.
    His face often came to mind. Even if she’d been wrong about the letters he wrote to Giselle, even if they’d been written on the heels of battle fatigue or some kind of shell shock–induced hatred that had long since faded, he was still judgmental and rigid. Even if Giselle had been wrong to be inspired by what must have been a whim of passion in him, he was still responsible. He also thought her wrong to ignore her family.
    His presence had brought with it a reminder of every rule she’d been raised with, about virtue and fidelity and the bonds of matrimony every good girl ought to long for. Worse, he reminded her of all those childish dreams she once had about falling in love and then having a wedding, the kind of wedding her father could afford. Jurgen might compose unforgettable poetry about women and love, but not a single verse would he write about marriage; she knew that well enough.
    Annaliese rounded the corner near the butcher shop and all thoughts abandoned her. There was a crowd outside the door, and from the clamor she knew it wasn’t just a busy day of recruiting. Too much noise for that, and an undercurrent of tension in the shouts.
    She hurried her steps and pushed through the crowd into a room full of chaos. Neither Jurgen nor Leo was in sight. The uneasiness was tangible. A crowd several layers deep huddled around what she knew must be someone sitting at the typewriter, perhaps one of their writers eager to get copy off to their press.
    “What is it?” she asked Ivo, who towered above most others. “What’s happened?”
    He reached out to her, then pulled back, as if shy of his deformed hands. She caught him, though, because she’d once held his hand in a march and knew such contact didn’t hurt him.
    His palm closed around her hand. “One of the foremen at the tool works factory was thrown over a bridge. He hit his head on a piling and drowned. It happened after Jurgen’s visit.”
    “Oh no!”
    “The police are holding Jurgen for questioning.”
    “But he’s a member of the council! He would never incite violence. How can they hold him against his will?”
    “They say they’re holding him for his own good,” Ivo told her. “To protect him in case some of the bourgeois blame him for the death.”
    Jurgen couldn’t go to jail, no matter why they said they were holding him. Not again, not after he’d spent so many months in the hands of the government. It had been a government under a different name when he’d been imprisoned the first time, but that would hardly matter. Not if he was to be deprived of his freedom.
    And what would this do to the election? To have one of Eisner’s most prominent supporters thrown in jail, no matter the reason, was surely a disaster.
    “Where is Leo?”
    “He’s there, at the typewriter. Getting out a flyer