“No . . . are you serious?” Friedrich interrupted her in disbelief.
“It’s true!” Flora laughed out loud. “Even when I was a little girl, there was nothing I liked more than putting together bouquets. The seed business just doesn’t interest me like the flowers themselves. I would love so much to change places with you! Life can be so unfair sometimes.”
Hannah, who had been talking to their hostess at the bar, came back to the table.
“Isn’t it a lovely evening? Didn’t I tell you that a merchant’s life was fun?” she said triumphantly.
Flora and Friedrich looked at one another. Then they burst out laughing.
Chapter Five
The rest of their trip proved to be as busy and successful as the first day had been. Wherever Hannah and Flora went, they were welcomed warmly. And the customers were buying. Because of the war, many of the gardens had lain fallow the year before, or the growers had made do with whatever leftover seeds they had. But now they were in a mood for billowing seas of flowers, for color and fragrance, for something to help drive out the memories of anxiety and terror.
None of their customers had deserted them, a piece of good news that Hannah could hardly wait to report to Helmut.
After ten days, they had ticked off every customer on their list. Mother and daughter were looking forward to getting home again, to sleeping in their own beds, to eating food cooked on their own stove. Helmut would not be there—he and his brother Valentin were expected back from Bohemia only around Easter—but at least the twins would already be home. Their Samenstrich—the territory where they sold their seeds—around Herrenberg was far less productive than Baden-Baden and did not require them to stay away as long.
Flora could not say that she had really enjoyed her first seed trading travels, but most of her hostility, at least, had evaporated. She found their talks with the various customers interesting, and she had not previously realized that the demand for different types of flowers was driven at least partly by fashion. This year, their customers were less interested in low-growing types, while long-stemmed flowers were highly sought after. Intense colors were also on the rise, pastels not.
As an experienced seed trader, Hannah was naturally able to accommodate all her clients’ wishes. But would the customers buy just as much from her, Flora, next year? She resolved to spend the summer learning more about the traits of unusual varieties, so that she would be better prepared for dealing with the customers.
She saw Friedrich Sonnenschein only once more, on the morning after they had talked in the restaurant. She and her mother had just stepped out of The Gilded Rose when he came along the narrow street.
“That wasn’t just talk, last night?” he asked without preamble after he had greeted them. “I mean, what you said about your greatest dream?”
“No, it really wasn’t,” Flora said, and laughed.
“Life is mean and skewed sometimes,” he murmured to himself, and went on his way without another word.
“And what was that all about, may I ask?” Hannah said.
“Oh, nothing.” Flora let out a little sigh as she watched Friedrich walk away.
How right he was . . .
The train started with a jerk, and as it rolled away, Hannah leaned back deeply into her seat. “Done!” With a smile, she held out her right hand to Flora, sitting opposite. “Congratulations. Your first sales trip. And you did really well.”
Flora smiled back. “Do you really think so?”
Hannah nodded. “I do. And that’s why . . .” She rummaged inside her traveling bag and produced a small package wrapped up in brown paper. “For you! A keepsake to remember your first time.”
Frowning, Flora untied the string around the package.
“The Language of Flowers—oh, Mother!” Flora’s delighted squeal made their fellow travelers jump. “I hadn’t even thought of it again. When did you—”
“Our hostess went to the shop for me,” Hannah interrupted her. “I thought you might enjoy it.”
Flora had thought that she might have a day or two’s rest after the trip to Baden-Baden, but she was mistaken. The morning after their return to G?nningen, her mother called her into the packing room, where Gustav and Siegfried, the twins, were already at work. Flora was handed a pile of order sheets, and then she set to work weighing seeds, filling packets, and labeling them. For their bestselling seeds, they used special stamps with the necessary details, which Flora liked more than laboriously writing all the information by hand. Once an order was complete, she wrote the name and address of the recipient on the package. Now, for every name, Flora remembered a face, which made the work more interesting and, in turn, more bearable. Soon, the parcels were stacked high in the packing room and the hallway in front of it. Twice a week, they were picked up by a wagon and delivered to the train station, so that everything would arrive well before the planting season began.
“In the past, we took everything around ourselves by horse and cart,” Hannah had told her children countless times. “It was a real headache in the snow and ice, not to mention dangerous.” And Flora and her brothers rolled their eyes behind Hannah’s back. Always the same story!
Flora thought often about Friedrich Sonnenschein and his father. She wondered how the old man was and whether his health had deteriorated even further, to the point where he could no longer run his shop.
As the weeks passed, her memories of the incident in Baden-Baden melted away like the snow with the arrival of spring. By mid-March, more and more green appeared in the meadows every day, and by the end of the month, winter seemed long ago.
Flora walked to the hills or the fields to watch nature’s springtime advance as often as she could. The first flowers started to appear at the beginning of April—cowslips, daisies, and pennywort. One still had to look closely to discover the tiny flowers hiding among the faster-growing grass, but Flora was happy with every little bouquet she tied. She could not get enough of the delicate colors of the flowers, which looked as if brushed on with watercolors.
For the first time in her life, Flora did not simply give the bouquets she made to the first person to happen along, and that was because of the little book—almost forty years old, she discovered—her mother had given her. The Language of Flowers—what a lovely title, Flora thought every time she held it in her hand. And what an amazingly exciting subject to write a book about.
Flora found, for example, that giving someone cowslips could mean “How gladly would I win the key to your heart.” It made her laugh now to think that just the year before she had given a bouquet of cowslips to the local butcher, a drinker of some renown!
As for the pennywort, she read that joy in springtime did not necessarily mean that a happy autumn would follow. It was therefore probably not a good idea to give a pennywort bouquet to the Widow Schlagenh?fer, who was in mourning from dawn to dusk for her beloved and prematurely deceased Eugen.
To Flora’s surprise, Seraphine showed great interest in the book. Her aunt praised its beautiful flower illustrations, and she was interested in what it meant to present someone with certain flowers.
“Listen, Flora. Milkwort means ‘I have to forget you, though it makes my heart bleed.’” With gleaming eyes, she had gazed at her niece. “Please never give me a bouquet like that.”
Flora, who had no idea where to even look for milkwort and who was rather confused at Seraphine’s request, simply nodded.
“Your aunt really is a bit strange,” said Suse, when Flora told her about it.