Or they’re cleaning all the pollen off their clothes and furniture, Flora thought grumpily as she wiped the window clean for what felt like the fiftieth time that day. As pretty as she found the chestnut flowers, she could certainly do without the mess of pollen that came with them.
What she needed was a miracle. She would have been happy with a moment of epiphany, something to explain why her ideas had not brought in any new customers.
The shop was filled with potted lilies of the valley that no one wanted to buy. She had sold no more than half a dozen. In the past, Flora had always found their unique fragrance intoxicating. But now, amid a sea of them, she found the smell merely pungent and pervasive.
She had dug dozens of the flowers out of the garden behind the house, but most of them she had bought from Flumm’s Nursery.
“‘Lily of the valley and the nightingale’s song herald the joy of love and the coming summer’—that’s all well and good, but are you sure you want to put all your money on one horse? Why not buy some other flowers, too, like before?” Flumm had not been enthusiastic about her idea.
Lily of the valley was also considered a harbinger of a new age, which was exactly what the Sonnenschein shop needed urgently, Flora had replied.
Ernestine and Friedrich had pleaded for her to buy a wider range, too—and why hadn’t she listened to them? What was she supposed to write to her parents, from whom she had borrowed the money to pay for the plants? She had had no money of her own now for weeks.
Everything was going wrong. Her ideas were simply not good enough to save the shop. Why didn’t she go off in search of a position as a domestic or a chambermaid in one of the hotels?
Flora’s eye fell on the tall stack of booklets that she had collected proudly from the printer just the week before. Flora’s ABC of Flowers. The lilies of the valley were not the only lame horse she had banked her money on.
And yet the booklet had turned out so beautifully. Seraphine and Flora had selected more than a hundred different flowers for it, from simple meadow flowers to expensive nursery varieties. She had agonized over every word of the meanings. The texts were splendid, and Seraphine’s illustrations were lovely. Flora had been thrilled to hand over her work to the printer a little farther up the street. And the printer had made a huge effort to have the job completed by mid-May—he looked on the work as a service to another local, he’d said.
The day after collecting the finished booklets, Flora had gone to the hotels and handed out more than fifty of them as welcoming gifts for the incoming seasonal visitors. And each booklet was accompanied by a bouquet of meadow flowers. But for what? Since then, not one of the visitors had come in to show any kind of appreciation for the ABC, although her address was printed very clearly on the handwritten leaflet she had appended to each one.
She had copied the names of the new arrivals and hotels they were staying at from the guest list in the Badeblatt. Friedrich had pointed out that this was where the names of the newly arrived guests were listed, and Flora had been scrupulous in spelling each guest’s name correctly. Princess Nadeshda Stropolski, she had written on one. Prince Vladimir Menshikov, His Highness Nikolaj M. Romanov . . .
If she was being so generous toward people she had never met, Friedrich suggested, then she should certainly give one of the booklets and a bouquet to Lady O’Donegal—the Englishwoman had also arrived for the start of the season. Ernestine, however, wrung her hands and asked if this kind of petitioning was even proper.
Proper? When your stomach is growling with hunger . . .
Flora banged the palm of her hand hard onto the shop counter. She felt like curling up in a ball and crying in anger and disappointment.
Perhaps the booklet would at least go over well with her parents’ customers. A hundred and fifty copies had been sent directly from the printer to G?nningen—Helmut and Valentin wanted to take Flora’s ABC of Flowers with them on their next journey.
In the meantime, Baden-Baden had filled with people visiting the spa. Some days, Lichtenthaler Allee was so crowded, it was almost impossible to get through. But no one walked as far as their shop.
Flora abruptly jumped to her feet. Out! She needed to get out before the fragrance of lilies of the valley made her sick.
“Excuse me, I—” Taken by surprise, Flora let go of the door, on the opposite side of which was an older woman wearing a bright-pink dress.
“Am I in the right place? Sonnenschein’s?” the woman asked in broken German.
Flora nodded. The woman’s sudden appearance had given her quite a shock. Or was it the woman’s perfume making Flora dizzy? It smelled of cinnamon and other spices, and it was so penetrating that it overwhelmed even the scent of the lilies of the valley.
“Good, good. I don’t have much time.” The woman waved a copy of Flora’s little book in the air. “I am planning a vernissage for a Bulgarian artist, and of course I am going to need flowers. The artist loves grand gestures, so I picture something opulent—roses, lilies, orchids. What can you offer me?”
Flora’s heart felt as if it might burst out of her chest at any moment, it was beating so hard. Opulent flowers? She didn’t have anything like that! And what the devil was a “vernissage”?
“That’s a . . . sensitive matter,” Flora said, just to reply with anything at all.
Her first foreign customer, and from her accent Flora guessed she was Russian. And all Flora could do was stammer out meaningless words.
The woman fiddled with the dozen or more strings of pearls around her neck. “What is so sensitive about a few flowers to go with some paintings?”
Paintings! So a vernissage was an exhibition of paintings.
Flora gulped nervously. In her mind, she heard her father, in a singularly Swabian way, say, “The woman fernelet!” And this woman in her pink dress truly was a classic “distant beauty”—she looked youthful and attractive from far away, but close up her face was as wrinkled as an old turtle’s. And her makeup did nothing to alter that.
Flora cleared her throat. “First and foremost, the pictures themselves need to be allowed to open up to the observer. Flowers can only help the beauty of the art to unfold, no more.” Considering that she had no idea where she was going with her words, she sounded quite certain of herself. “Opulent varieties like roses and orchids would only be a needless distraction for the eye.”
The woman frowned.
Flora hastily picked up her thread. “I would recommend something white. White is the color of purity, and white is also the color of the artist’s canvas before the first stroke of a brush.” She picked up a particularly pretty lily of the valley and turned it lovingly in all directions. “In the language of flowers, lilies of the valley are a sign of the joy that recurs every year, and they are also the herald of a new age.” As she talked, she tried to puzzle out how she would integrate the tiny flowers into an exhibition of paintings. Beside the enormous canvases painted by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, no one would even notice the lilies of the valley. White lilies, callas, or orchids, those would be just the thing—the “distant beauty” was right about that. “Which is why we have lilies of the valley, symbolizing so perfectly the start of the new spa season. But they are also the ideal flower to accentuate the beauty of art.”
The woman clapped her hands together. “I like this language of flowers very much,” she said. “All right. The vernissage is to take place this coming Saturday.” She gave Flora the address and told her what time she would expect her there. “Bring two hundred of these . . . lilies of the valley, you called them? Or no, let’s say five hundred.”
When the woman left, Flora quickly hung the “We’ll Be Right Back” sign on the door and ran off toward the Trinkhalle. She found Friedrich in the middle of explaining the frescoes on the wall to a group of older English women.
“Friedrich, we have a problem!” Flora cried breathlessly, ignoring the astonished looks from the English guests. “Where in the world can I find another four hundred lilies of the valley at short notice?”