“But, Mother! Father would never have wanted Flora—”
“Your father is dead! But we must go on,” Ernestine said, cutting him off again. “Flora, if your flower primer has to be ready for the start of the season, then you will have to hurry. Who knows? Maybe I might even be of some use to you and your aunt, at least a little?”
Chapter Thirty-Three
As she did every year, Princess Nadeshda Stropolski, known to her friends as Püppi, had rented a suite with a balcony at the Europäischer Hof for the season in Baden-Baden.
She pulled her wrap closer around her shoulders and gazed out from the balcony at the surrounding parks and buildings, all of it silvery in the light of the moon and stars. She loved the view from so high—even in the hours when everyone else was asleep, there was something captivating about it. The enormous trees that marked the course of the Oos River looked like monsters angling for human sacrifices. Soon—when the dawn fog thinned and a pale sun crept above the meadows—the morning concert of the birds would ring from those same trees. Püppi would have been pleased to see how the moon-silvered landscape transformed into a brilliant watercolor, as if a painter had managed to cover his canvas with every shade of green there was, all at once.
By then, though, she would be going to sleep. As she did every day once dawn had broken. Because then she was safe.
From the balcony, she slipped quietly back into the sitting room of her suite. She glanced toward the bedroom, where Konstantin was sleeping—he had no need to fear the kiss of death at night. That was her prophecy. Even after all these years, she heard the voice of the wart-faced gypsy woman in her ears.
Isa, Püppi’s little dog, had curled up beside Kostia’s head as she did every night. Soon, both would awaken, rested and ready to take on the world, while she was old and tired and could finally go to bed.
A shudder went through her. She drank a mouthful of tea and pulled a face. The girl had brought the tray an hour earlier, but until now Püppi had ignored the sharp aroma of the brew in the hope that Konstantin might wake and join her for a cup of tea. The tea was cold, and Kostia still asleep.
It was not so long ago that, drunk with sleep, he had called her to him in bed and they had made love. Love . . .
Püppi’s gaze was drawn to the crackling fire in the fireplace. The maid had kindled it when she had brought the tea. Did she feel so cold because she was tired? Or was it because she was afraid? Fear could feel as cold as ice, too. Püppi knew that better than anyone.
They had arrived in Baden-Baden just the day before. Piotr had traveled with them, which had made the long drive less tedious, at least for Konstantin. That same evening, Count Popo hosted a welcome dinner—nothing big, though, because not all of their friends had arrived yet.
They had all been so overjoyed to see each other again! Prince Gagarin had been so carried away at their return to Baden-Baden that he proclaimed that he was contemplating having a church built in the town. And Matriona Schikanova had announced that in a few days her husband and four sons would be arriving—much to the pleasure of Popo and Piotr, because the Schikanov men were considered outstanding riders and cardplayers whose presence had been sorely missed the previous season when business had kept them in Saint Petersburg. Her dear friend Anna had told the guests about an opera premiere that she had attended in Cairo of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida.
Irina Komatschova had not talked about it, but Püppi knew that she had spent the winter visiting her estates on the Crimean Peninsula. When Konstantin talked about the marvels of Monte Carlo, Irina’s expression had turned dour, and she had asked if he had at least managed to do a little painting, since the Mediterranean coastline, unlike Crimea, certainly had no shortage of scenes worth immortalizing in watercolor.
Püppi had hurriedly changed the subject. The thought of Konstantin and his painting always made her a little sad.
Dear Konstantin! The urge to go in and embrace him was almost overwhelming. She loved him so much! And he seemed to love her in return, for he had put aside his plans for painting just to be with her through the winter. And, she knew, he had wanted to paint so very much. The winter jasmine. Monte Carlo harbor with all its boats. She herself with her parasol in one of the many parks. But no, for her sake, he had buried his dream of one day being celebrated as a great artist.
Konstantin was still extremely affectionate with her, yet there were moments when Püppi sensed that he paid less attention to her than he did at the start of their travels together the previous October. Sometimes she believed that she even sensed a trace of impatience in him.
As she had the previous evening.
Gagarin’s nephew had begun to play his violin, and Kostia had danced. With Anna. With Matriona. He had even asked Irina to dance, which had softened her sullen expression. The only one he had not danced with was her, Püppi. “I’m sure you must be tired after the long journey,” he had said, and told her that she should look after herself.
Püppi swept a strand of gray hair out of her eyes. She had not been tired, but whenever Konstantin talked like that, she suddenly felt tired. And old. And worn out.
And yet she would have given anything to be young! For Konstantin. For their love . . . or in the end he would regret that he had chosen her over his art after all.
Frowning, she looked at the small bouquet on the table in front of her. Flowers were the favorite subject of many painters, but did Konstantin paint them, too? Or was he more of a portrait artist? Or interested in landscapes?
The truth was that she did not know. She had never asked him to show her his portfolio.
Why hadn’t she become some kind of benefactress for him, a patroness of his art?
So far, she had done nothing—absolutely nothing—for him in that regard.
Someone must have put the bouquet in the room the evening before. Konstantin? No, the pretty arrangement of buttercups, willow herbs, and yellow twigs that Püppi did not recognize did not carry his signature at all. When he gave flowers, it was usually opulent arrangements with roses and lilies that were meant to impress but did not last long. The hotelier, perhaps?
Püppi’s heart suddenly began to beat faster, and she let out a little giggle. Did she perhaps have a secret admirer?
Then she saw the leaflet attached to the bouquet: Sunshine from Sonnenschein’s, it said. Advertising for a florist’s . . . Püppi grimaced. So much for her secret admirer! She’d do better to think about how she could promote Konstantin’s paintings.
Beneath the leaflet she discovered a small booklet: Flora’s ABC of Flowers.
Püppi flipped through the pages curiously. Everybody knew that a four-leaf clover meant good luck, but she was intrigued to see that lavender could be read as a symbol of love and devotion—how very interesting! She went on until she came to the buttercups that made up much of her bouquet, and read: Give buttercups if you can recognize beauty even in old age, and if you love change.
Püppi was taken aback. She loved beauty, and she had no objection to change if it was in her favor.
The illustrations of the flowers were certainly very lovely. In fact, the entire booklet was lovely . . .
Without warning, Püppi had an idea, one that was so thrilling that she grew quite dizzy. A vernissage! An exhibition of Konstantin’s pictures! And this florist would supply symbolically fitting flowers for it.
Dear Konstantin, he should know what it felt like to be a celebrated artist.
The sun was rising slowly into the sky when Püppi finally went to bed. When she woke up, she would seek out the florist behind the bouquet. Change? She was more than ready!
Chapter Thirty-Four
As so often in the late afternoon, the end of the street where the flower shop was located felt all but deserted. The housewives who had done their shopping in the morning were now busy cooking or doing laundry. And the tradesmen and merchants whose workshops and establishments lined the same street as the flower shop were all inside, at work.
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 Gönningen—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?”
Chapter Thirty-Five
“Oh God, I don’t have the slightest idea what happens at a vernissage! Is it just invited guests or can anyone walk in? Do they hang the pictures on the wall, like you’d expect? And where am I supposed to put my flowers? What do you think—is this dress all right?” Flora babbled away without waiting for answers and held up her dark-blue dress in front of her for Sabine to inspect.
The maid, who was sitting on the bed in Flora’s bedroom and eating a wrinkled apple, shrugged. “It’s been sewn up once along the hem, but what difference does that make? The guests won’t see you.”
“But what if they do?” Flora rummaged on through her wardrobe. She had never put much store in clothes. All her skirts, blouses, and dresses were either dark brown, dark green, or black, and were chosen for practicality rather than looks. She had not given much thought at all to the fact that she would need “fine” clothes for “fine” customers.
“Maybe the vernissage is a kind of art market. Like a normal market, but with paintings instead of vegetables. Friedrich should know this sort of thing,” said Sabine.
“He’s never been invited to anything like this, either,” Flora replied distractedly. Of course, her favorite blouse just had to be missing two buttons. “But he knows about Princess Stropolski, he says. She spends every season living in the Europäischer Hof. But he’s never heard of a painter named Konstantin Sokerov.”
“He’s probably an old-timer like that Mr. Winterhalter,” said Sabine between bites of her apple.
“At least it’s not starting until the afternoon. I’d feel bad having to close the shop on a Saturday morning,” said Flora.
“Madam could have filled in at the counter in an emergency. Or me.”
Flora did not seem to be listening to her. Her hands planted on her hips, she mumbled angrily to herself, “What kind of fool am I! Every child in Gönningen knows that you must present yourself well if you’re going to get anywhere in business. The seed merchants always look after their appearance. I don’t even have a good dress to put on.” Like a damp sack, Flora plopped onto the bed beside Sabine.
The Flower Shop (The Seed Traders' Saga Book 2) Page 20
