Read Until I Find You for Free Online Page A

chest-to-chest. One night at the D’Angleterre, Jack had tried to hug his mom that way. Alice had been impatient about holding her breath. Feeling the thump of her heart, which seemed to beat at a slower, more measured pace than Lottie’s, Jack said: “You must be alive, Mom.”
    “Well, of course I am,” Alice replied, with more detectable impatience than she had demonstrated when he’d asked her to hold her breath. “You must be alive, too, Jackie—at least you were, the last time I looked.”
    Without his knowing exactly how or when, she had already managed to extricate herself from the boy’s embrace.
    The next day, before the sun was up—in Copenhagen, at that time of year, this could have been after eight o’clock in the morning—Jack’s mother took him to the Frederikshavn Citadel. “Kastellet,” the historic fortification was called. In addition to the soldiers’ barracks, there was the commandant’s house and the Citadel Church—the Kastelskirken, where William Burns had played.
    Is there a boy who doesn’t love a fort? How exciting for Jack that his mom had brought him to a real one! He was more than happy to amuse himself, as Alice asked him to do.
    “I would like to have some privacy when I speak to the organist,” was how she put it.
    Jack was given the run of the place. His first discovery was the jail. It was behind the Citadel Church, where a prison aisle ran along the church wall; there were listening holes in the wall, to enable the prisoners to hear the church service without being seen. It was a disappointment to Jack that there were no prisoners—only empty cells.
    The organist’s name was Anker Rasmussen—a typical Danish name—and according to Alice, he was both respectful and forthcoming. Jack later found it odd that the organist was in uniform, but his mother would explain that a soldier-musician was what one might expect to find in a citadel church.
    During William’s brief apprenticeship to Rasmussen, the young man had mastered several Bach sonatas as well as Bach’s Präludium und Fuge in B Moll and his Klavierübung III. (Jack was impressed that his mom could remember the German names of the pieces his dad had learned to play.) William was quite the hand at Couperin’s Messe pour les couvents, too, and Alice had been right about the Christmas section from Handel’s Messiah.
    As for the seduced parishioner, the military man’s young wife, Jack’s mother told him little—only enough that the boy assumed his father hadn’t been asked to leave Kastelskirken for flubbing a refrain.
    When Jack tired of the jail, he walked outside. It was freezing cold; the medium-gray daylight merely darkened the sky. While the boy was thrilled to see the soldiers marching about, he kept his distance from them and went to have a look at the moat.
    The water around Kastellet was called the Kastelsgraven; to a four-year-old’s eyes, the moat was more of a pond or a small lake—and to Jack’s great surprise, the water was frozen. He’d been told in Tattoo Ole’s shop that the Nyhavn canal rarely froze, and that the Baltic Sea almost never froze; except in only the coldest weather, seawater didn’t freeze. What, then, was in the moat? It had to be freshwater, but Jack knew only that the water in the moat was frozen.
    There are few wonders to a child that equal black ice. And how did the four-year-old know the water was frozen? Because the gulls and ducks were walking on it, and he didn’t think the birds were holy. Just to be sure, Jack found a small stone and threw it at them. The stone bounced across the ice. Only the gulls took flight. The ducks raced to the stone as if they thought it might be bread; then they waddled away from it. The gulls returned to the ice. Soon the ducks sat down, as if they were having a meeting, and the gulls walked disdainfully around them.
    At times far away, at other times marching nearer, the soldiers tramped around and around. There was a wooden