That she bore an uncanny physical resemblance to her mother was one thing. She had the same dark, wavy hair—although Hannah’s was starting to show streaks of silver—and the same strong build. Perhaps a little too tall and well built for a woman, but certainly no beanstalk to get blown over with the first decent wind. Hannah’s eyes sparkled like pebbles of coal, while Flora’s were the brown of chocolate. Hannah considered her daughter to be pretty, but knew she was no ravishing beauty. And most of the time, at least, she was also a very nice young woman.
Twenty-one years earlier, if Hannah had not been pregnant with Flora, she would never have left Nuremberg for G?nningen, at the edge of the Swabian Mountains. She would very likely have spent her entire life as a maid at her parents’ inn, or married to some Franconian grouch. Without this child, she would never have won Helmut, the man who loved her so much that it sometimes hurt. Admittedly, he had not been thrilled to see her when she first arrived in G?nningen on that cold December day, with her traveling bag in her hand, and told him the “good news.” Still, he had done what an honorable man in such a situation was supposed to: he had married her. A great love? Not at the time. That came only through their years together. Today, Hannah could not imagine life without Helmut. Nor could she imagine living any differently than as a seed trader from G?nningen. She wanted that same happiness for her daughter.
Flora, the goddess of flowers . . . yet this Flora did not want to be a seed trader; she dreamed of something else and had nothing in her head but flowers. Could that foolishness be tied to her name?
It was Helmut who had suggested her unusual name. “A child born out in the open air, surrounded by nature, must be named after the goddess of flowers,” he’d said. Hannah had not objected. In those days, she hardly had been able to form a single clear thought. Her water had broken out in the fields—to this day, she had trouble believing it! Flora’s speedy arrival aside, she had not been a difficult child. She had been charming, in fact, and everyone in the village had a kind word for the little girl with her bouquets of flowers.
Hannah smiled at the memory, but sighed again a moment later. The way Flora had been behaving lately, no one in their right mind would call her “charming.” And now she sat there with a look on her face as if she were being driven to the scaffold.
“I know you still dream of becoming a florist. Everybody has dreams. But you didn’t like it at all when you worked at the Grubers’ nursery in Reutlingen. You were no better off than a maid, slaving away for other people, while I had so much work at home that I didn’t know which way to turn. It was very generous of your father and me to let you go to Gruber’s. You wanted to learn something, and we didn’t want to stand in your way. But what came of it? You dreaded the kind of work they did, and you practically begged your father not to make you go back. Please stop the coach!” she said, suddenly addressing the driver.
“Here? Now you don’t want to go to Tausend-Seelen-Gass?” The man shook his head sourly, but he helped Hannah unload their luggage.
“That was not a proper florist’s shop. It was more like a farm. I would have learned far more about floristry somewhere else,” Flora said sulkily, scratching a hole in the snow with the toe of her shoe.
Hannah wanted nothing more than to take her daughter in her arms, but instead she said, “Be that as it may, now it’s time for you to work with us, just as your friends are doing with their parents. Not that they all have it half as good as you. Think about poor Suse, for example, going off with her mother to the south of the Black Forest. Almost all their customers are poor. But Baden-Baden! Hardly anyone can boast a Samenstrich as good as this.” Hannah hoped that Flora would become as enthusiastic as she herself was about Baden-Baden.
“Where are we going? I would have preferred to ride.”
Hannah smiled. “I want to show you a little of the town. The train trip was not so tiring that we can’t go on foot for a while.”
“If we have to.” With a sigh, Flora picked up the linen bag and the seed sack and Hannah took the traveling case, and they strode off across one of the bridges that crossed the Oos River.
“That is called the Conversationshaus,” Hannah said as she pointed to a large building. “It’s home to Baden-Baden’s famous casino, and I’ve heard that there are dance halls and a fabulous restaurant and all kinds of things.”
Flora screwed up her nose. “Bit pretentious, isn’t it?”
Hannah decided to overlook her daughter’s tone. “You’ll see. Baden-Baden has many lovely aspects. Besides, it’s a safe place to travel, and we’ll be staying in a good guesthouse with a nice hostess. What more could you want?” Hannah shook her head. She could hardly believe that she was out in the icy weather trying again to show Flora the advantages of this trip. They had had similar talks through Christmas and New Year’s. Sometimes she wondered if she and Helmut were not too good-natured altogether.
When Flora did not reply, Hannah continued, “Your father bought this Samenstrich from Martin Gsell for a great deal of money, as you know. He wanted you to have a particularly good territory to sell your seeds. Most of the customers in Baden-Baden are flower growers, so it’s made for you! You can earn a very good living here. I admit that this war has made things difficult, at least for a while, but that makes it more important for us to be here this year. If we didn’t come, our customers would go and buy their seeds somewhere else, and the money we paid for this territory would be thrown away.”
Hannah shook her head.
“Flora, don’t make this so hard for me. If I’d known how horridly you were going to behave, I’d have stayed home! Then you would have had to figure everything out by yourself.” Hannah stamped her foot and involuntarily let out a groan. Although her boots had heavy leather soles, the cold had already crept into her bones. Since an accident many years before, in which her leg had gotten caught in a fox trap, she had been more vulnerable to cold weather.
Flora looked up, her face shocked and guilty.
“Oh, Mother, I’m sorry. Don’t be mad at me. I am grateful to you and Father, really. I only wanted—”
Hannah took her daughter in her arms.
“Your dreams. I know, my child.”
Chapter Two
Mother and daughter marched on, arm in arm. Flora had to admit to herself, if not her mother, that now that she was seeing Baden-Baden for the first time, she was quite taken with it. There was Lange Strasse, which was lined with beautiful hotels, and the Conversationshaus, and now they were on the pretty avenue called the Promenade, with one lovely little shop after another, left and right. Flora gazed in amazement at the colorful display in the window of a hatmaker’s shop. And what was that? Flora lifted her nose in the air. Lavender. In the middle of winter? The fragrance emanated from a parfumerie in which golden chandeliers illuminated thousands of small bottles, jars, and crucibles—how splendid it looked!
“They call these shops the Promenade Boutiques,” said Hannah. “I really wanted to go a little way along Lichtenthaler Allee and then turn back to the town center over one of the bridges farther down, but it is only a little longer to our guesthouse this way.”
Flora nodded. So many beautiful stores—she could just imagine telling her best friend, Suse, about them. She pointed to the signs on the shops on the opposite side of the Promenade. “Maison, confection, chocolatier—don’t you think all the French is a little, well, affected?”
“With all the French tourists, I’d call it good for business. But who knows if they’ll be back in the future?”
“Mother, look, a florist!” Flora stopped short in front of the last shop in the row. The three large display windows were decorated with huge bouquets of roses set up in silver containers, and between the gold-framed windows themselves stood large pails, each with a fir tree. Everything looked very fine and exclusive.
This shop had nothing in common with Mrs. Gruber’s nursery, where along the rows of flowers and vegetables one always found muddy shoeprints on the floor.
“These colors . . . where do they find blooming roses in the middle of winter?” Flora’s voice had grown very quiet. Then she turned to her mother and asked vehemently, “Oh, Mother, can we go inside? Please? Just to look? Now that we’re here.”