They walked off into the snow while the driver hung feed bags for the horses.
“Winter smells so lovely. A little like freshly washed clothes,” said Flora, lifting her face to the sun. How late is it? she wondered. Not yet midday, surely. She jumped over a small snowdrift. And so what if it was? It made no difference now. She was allowed an occasional bit of lunacy, wasn’t she? Still, after a few steps, she turned around. It wasn’t necessary to drag out their stroll unduly.
“And the contours of the trees and houses are razor-sharp. No color anywhere, everything black and white, like a pencil drawing, don’t you think?” said Konstantin, and he lifted a branch for Flora to pass underneath.
“Or like a silhouette cut from paper. But at least we are not as motionless as that,” said Flora, scooping up a handful of snow. She formed it into a snowball, then laughed as she threw it at Konstantin.
It took Konstantin a moment to realize that the snow had not fallen from one of the trees.
“Now you’re in trouble!” he said, already crouching and scraping together a snowball of his own. But Flora had her second snowball ready to go and hurled it at him mercilessly.
They romped in the snow, and Flora’s stomach hurt from laughing. She could not remember the last time she had been so carefree.
Tears of laughter streamed down Konstantin’s face, too, as he tried to swat a handful of snow on her head, but she kept twisting free of his grip.
They both saw the group of nuns moving past the sleigh on their way to a barn outside the nunnery walls, but they paid them little attention.
Soon after, loaded with bales of hay and straw, the nuns returned, watching the young couple curiously in passing.
Chapter Forty-Five
Two days later, Ernestine received a letter from Sybille. Strange . . . it was neither Christmas nor Easter. For a moment, she thought about opening it at the dinner table and reading it aloud to the others. A letter from the nunnery was something special, after all. Hannah would certainly be impressed. But then her curiosity got the better of her, and she tore the envelope open.
“The girl’s gone completely out of her mind now,” she murmured to herself when she had reached the end of the letter. To claim that she had seen Flora in the company of an unknown man close to the nunnery! How would Sybille even have recognized her sister-in-law? She had only ever met Flora once, although Ernestine knew that Sybille also possessed a wedding photograph of Flora and Friedrich.
She had written something about a snowball fight right outside the nunnery walls, but part of her text was all but illegible. Sybille had written the words very small and tightly spaced to save room on the side for a Bible passage.
Ernestine glanced toward the door. Flora and her mother were both in the store, thank God!
Sybille wrote that she had seen Flora on Tuesday, and Ernestine knew perfectly well that Flora had gone to visit Princess Stropolski at the Europ?ischer Hof on Tuesday. Flora had been delighted to go and visit her very first customer so early in the year, and she had spent almost half the day with her. In the end, however, the princess had been unable to decide what kind of party she wanted and what kind of floral arrangements she would therefore need. Well, that’s how rich people were, sometimes.
Ernestine shook her head. What had driven Sybille to write such a confused missive? Did she envy Flora? Was she jealous because of everything Flora had done for the family? Or was it perhaps a moment of religious mania?
The child had always been a little strange. Ernestine only had to recall the penetrating gaze that Sybille liked to put on, as if she were trying to read her thoughts. It was downright spooky at times.
Sending her off to the nunnery had been the right decision, at least, Ernestine thought as she threw the letter into the stove, where it flared brightly and disappeared into a thousand tiny grains of ash. It really would not do to have Friedrich or someone else stumble across Sybille’s muddled lines. She would do best to forget all about it herself, and the sooner the better.
Despite her resolution, however, Ernestine could not drive Sybille’s words out of her mind; come evening, she could no longer stand it. She thought it was only right to tell Flora about it—at some future point, the two young women would certainly cross paths again, and Flora would be better prepared if Sybille began espousing her confused imaginings.
“Now don’t go looking so shocked,” she said to Flora, after telling her in minute detail about the contents of the letter. “Sybille must be jealous because of your good fortune. In the past, you could see the envy on her face if I so much as picked up Friedrich in my arms, as if I were not allowed to do that!”
Flora grasped her mother-in-law’s arm. “Ernestine, on that day, well, there was—”
Ernestine interrupted her with a sad voice. “You don’t have to say a word, dear child. It is abundantly clear that the signs of delusion Sybille exhibits in her letter have upset you, and I feel just the same, which is why I understand you without you having to say a word. But with my own daughter, well, we never really got on. It is so good to have you here!” She embraced Flora so tightly that Flora could hardly breathe.
The old proverb that Flora had quoted on that stormy, snowy Candlemas Day, February 2, 1873, turned out to be true: old man winter faded fast, and when the first violets showed their pretty faces through the previous year’s leaves, no one shed a tear for him.
“My two months here have passed in the blink of an eye. Where have the days gone? And why are we G?nningers always saying goodbye?” Hannah said, and she sighed so dramatically that Flora almost laughed out loud, although she felt more like bursting into tears.
Her mother was going home, and later the same day Friedrich would also be setting off on his own journey. Flora did not know exactly when his train would leave for Bad Ems.
“Come back soon,” she urged her mother as the two held each other and rocked back and forth.
Sabine stood beside them on the platform, holding Alexander in her arms. Hannah looked yearningly at her grandson. “If it were up to me, I’d be on my way back tomorrow. It almost breaks my heart to leave the little boy.”
“I’ll write you every week, and next time you visit, bring Papa along, too. And Seraphine. And Valentin, too, of course. Oh, bring everyone!” said Flora. She sniffed, teary-eyed.
Flora did not have much more time to digest the painful farewell. Hardly had she arrived back in the shop when a widower from the neighborhood appeared, wanting to use the language of flowers to turn down a woman who was getting a touch too persistent.
“It’s the wrong time of year for goosefoot,” Flora told him regretfully. But she could offer him dried autumn asters. Together with Flora’s ABC, the woman would certainly get his message—namely, goodbye. The man left with a basketful of the dried flowers.
Sabine, who had brought Alexander in to be fed and who had observed the exchange, shook her head.
“People are cowards,” she said. “They need your flowers to express if something annoys them or pleases them.”
Flora laughed. “Does it matter? If everyone could say what they felt as beautifully as the poets, I would be out of work. Give me the boy before my breasts explode!”
“Say hello to the princess for me.”
“And don’t forget your promise, all right?”
“We’ll see,” Flora said with a smile.
Friedrich watched his wife wave after the departing man, and his forehead rumpled.
“That was that Konstantin Sokerov, wasn’t it? What was he doing here? Wasn’t he here just yesterday? And what was that about a promise?”