“I didn’t laugh when I had to tell Strobel what we’d done, mind you,” Johanna said bitterly. “It was only the third time I’d ever been into Sonneberg on my own, and I had no idea how to talk business. I was all of sixteen years old, and I stood there stammering away. I was sure he wasn’t going to take those bottles.”
“You talked him round somehow, though.” There was a trace of awe in Marie’s voice, even after all this time. “A few weeks later Strobel gave you another order, with ‘Roi de Paris’ on every single bottle!”
“Ha! I daresay he sold them to the French at twice the price and claimed the new name was all his own idea!” Ruth wrinkled her nose. “How I longed for a bottle of French perfume for myself! I used to dream about it. One morning I woke up and thought I could smell it in the room. Lilac and lily of the valley.” She sighed.
“If Father had had his way, you would have gotten a bottle,” Johanna replied. “He made me go and ask Strobel whether he could get hold of some perfume for us. I didn’t think much of that idea—what does a fourteen-year-old girl need with perfume, after all?—but Father always did what he could to make you happy.”
Ruth looked as though she wanted to answer back, but she bit back her words.
They each sat there with their own thoughts. There were so many stories.
Ruth’s head nodded forward onto her chest, once, then twice, but when Johanna suggested that they take turns with the wake so that they could get some sleep, Ruth and Marie refused. Not long after that, however, Ruth’s head sank forward onto the table, and Marie’s did the same. Johanna sighed. They would have been more comfortable if they’d gone to bed.
She stood up quietly, not moving her chair. She was exhausted herself. She took a candle and went into the workshop. Her gaze lingered on her father’s workbench and lamp. The tools that lay there were worn smooth with use, apart from the gleaming silver pipe that connected their house to the new gasworks. It shone in the candlelight, and Johanna felt a pang of pain in her breast. She had worked so hard to persuade Joost to have that pipe put in. Father had never liked change. If it had been up to him, he would have spent the rest of his life blowing glass over an oil lamp.
Why now? she wanted to scream out into the dark sky above. Her eyelids burned. She took a deep breath.
But once he had gotten used to the “newfangled nonsense,” he had been so proud! The gas flame was hotter than the old lamp, and he could blow bottles and test tubes with much thinner walls. From then on not an evening passed down at the Black Eagle when he didn’t try to persuade the last few glassblowers who were not on the gas mains that it was the only way to work.
Her father. She would miss him so. Her heart was a gaping wound.
Their mother had died when she was eleven, Ruth was nine, and Marie seven. For a whole year they hadn’t been able to sleep unless Joost left a lamp burning in their room all night. Every evening he would tell them how beautiful it was up in heaven, how happy Mother was there. It became part of their bedtime routine, instead of prayers. And every night the girls took turns getting up out of bed to go check on Father. They had been so afraid that he would leave them too. He had been kind and patient with them, and at last the fear faded away. But now it was back, seeking to devour her, swallow her whole. Johanna fought it as she looked down at her father’s face in the candlelight, her heart heavy with love. Joost had spent years teaching them to be strong, and his lessons would not be in vain.
Joost Steinmann. The widower whose daughters had ruled the roost. One evening at the Black Eagle one of the men had dared to tease Joost for having fathered three girls but never a boy in all those years. He had ended up with a black eye for his pains, and couldn’t see straight for a week. “Why do I need sons?” Joost always said. “Steinmann girls are worth twice any boy in the village!” Johanna swallowed hard.
She looked at him and stroked his cheek. “I don’t know what we’ll do now,” she whispered. “But I promise you one thing.” Her hand felt hot against his cold skin, and she had to steel herself to keep it there. “We won’t make you ashamed. When you look down from heaven at us, you’ll be proud of what you see!”
By morning, Johanna had cried all the tears she had. While Ruth and Marie sat by the dead man’s bedside, she went up to sleep for a few hours. She woke up a little before noon. There was still a lot to be done before Joost’s funeral.
4
“Gone at last!” Ruth had been scrubbing the front step with a cloth. Now she stood up and threw it into the sink with the pile of dishes still waiting to be washed. Then she flopped down onto the bench next to Marie and Johanna.