“The two young ones are too stupid, and Thomas Heimer can’t win an argument with his father. What are you hoping for?” Peter asked calmly. “You’ll just have to speak your mind again and take what comes.” He gave her a friendly nudge and grinned.
“You’re the only one who thinks that. I’d rather bite my tongue!”
“And? Is there anything new with Ruth and Thomas?”
“Have you ever seen a man with such handsome green eyes?” Johanna said, mimicking Ruth’s dreamy tones. “He spends most of his time staring at her as though he’s forgotten how to count to three.” She made a face. “All that’s missing is for him to let his tongue hang out and to start drooling! If you ask me though, Thomas isn’t the kind of man who’s looking to get married. Otherwise he’d be engaged by now, wouldn’t he? But Ruth thinks that she’s going to be Mrs. Heimer any day now. To be honest I’m not sure I would even want the two of them to get married. They don’t seem suited to one another.” She raised her eyebrows again and added, “At the moment she says she’s gone out for a walk—just how stupid does Ruth think I am? She’s meeting him, of course. I only hope that she knows what she’s doing.”
Peter kept quiet. He couldn’t stand Thomas, not only because—unlike himself—the young Heimers had something to offer a bride, but also because he knew both sides of Wilhelm Heimer’s eldest. Most of the time Thomas was a dull dog but bearable, at least. But it was another story if you came upon him when he’d had one too many at the fair or the village dance! When he was drunk, he bragged and snarled and picked fights. Since Johanna and her sisters had hardly joined in the social life of the village while Joost was alive, they knew nothing about this side of him.
“Whether you like it or not, the two of them will get together if they want to, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Ruth will know the right thing to do, don’t worry. The more you go clucking over her like a mother hen, the harder she’ll fight back,” he said.
Johanna turned to look at him. “You can talk! You only have yourself to look after. If I don’t keep an eye on everything, things will soon go off the rails in our household.”
If anyone else had said such a thing, he would have dismissed it as pompous nonsense. But Peter knew that this was exactly what Johanna believed. “It’s not good for you to spend all your time worrying yourself sick about other people. Let them think for themselves.”
“I can’t rely on my sisters much when it comes to household matters.” Her face clouded over. “And I’m just as bad! We had so much work that I forgot to get firewood for the winter while it was still cheap. Now I don’t know where we’ll get the money for that. You can’t truly expect Ruth or Marie to be any help there.”
“What about me? Don’t you expect me to be of any help?”
“Expect you to? You . . . you’re not responsible for me and my troubles.”
Oh but I would like to be, Peter thought once more. “I can help you all the same, can’t I? In any case, if it’s firewood we’re talking about, that’s easily solved. I haven’t even used my rights in the forest this year. My share of wood is still standing there on the slopes, but we can soon change that.”
“Do you really think so?” Johanna asked skeptically. “Are the guild masters at the foundry going to let you just give your wood away?”
“They don’t care what I do with it. The statutes were drawn up hundreds of years ago, and a master glassmaker is allowed to take a certain amount of wood from the forests each year and that’s that. Those rules still apply today. The master makers have always taken a bit of the wood to use at home. “
A spark of hope flared up in Johanna’s eyes.
“You girls will have to come help me get it of course,” Peter said sternly. Johanna wasn’t generally one to take help, but Peter knew that if he gave her a chance to work for it, she would swallow her pride. Darned if he didn’t know the woman better than she knew herself.
Lo and behold, Johanna smiled at him. “When shall we go up to the forest?”
Peter laughed. “Tomorrow, if you like.”
14
She’d gotten the idea from a basketful of vegetables. A red cabbage, shimmering violet; the dark-green cucumbers, which looked as though they must taste bitter; a thick bunch of carrots with earth still clinging to them; and pods full of peas waiting to be shelled. All this bounty had spilled out over the brim of the basket onto the wooden kitchen table where Edeltraud worked. Marie had only caught a glimpse of the basket on her way through to lunch, and she hadn’t gotten the chance to go back for a better look. Violet and green, green and orange—although the colors clashed, they somehow went well together all the same. Once she was back at her workbench, Marie had found herself looking at a stack of plain glass platters that were to be given a band of white enamel around the rim. It was simple tableware, which Heimer said was destined for a hotel in Dresden. How would they look with a basket full of vegetables—or fruit, perhaps—painted into the bowl of the dish? Before she could give it any further thought, Wilhelm Heimer had turned up with a whole box of silvered candlesticks, and she and Eva had spent the rest of the afternoon painting them with flower motifs. But the basket of vegetables and the bare glass dishes hadn’t been far from her thoughts since.