Marie opened her eyes again.
She shivered.
A warm summer rain might be refreshing, but it still left you wet and cold. They were daydreams, nothing but daydreams!
Wilhelm Heimer would laugh if she were to show him her spiral. One of his sons or Eva might even make an indecent joke out of it—Marie believed them entirely capable of it. There was not a glassblower in Lauscha—not one—who would take a chance on making her design a reality. The best thing would be to shut it away in a drawer. Marie laboriously collected all her pencils and packed them away.
She put out the light in the workshop, then stood in the doorway for a moment and looked longingly over at Joost’s gas burner. That flame had the power to breathe life into her pictures. But she, Marie Steinmann, had no such power.
If only she knew how to blow glass!
32
Once all the roads outside of town were open for travelers again, the buyers came to Sonneberg in droves. Over the next few weeks, the bell over the shop door tinkled so often that Johanna wondered how it could ever have startled her back when she was new in the job. There was still a mountain of paperwork to get through for the Woolworth order, but she kept having to put it aside to help Strobel. Though she delighted in being part of the hurly-burly of business life, she had to admit that she had rarely worked so hard in her life. In addition to the workload itself, Strobel was visibly on edge. As the date of his departure drew nearer, he grew increasingly irritable. Johanna would never have thought such a self-possessed and worldly man could lose his composure so easily.
When he finally marched off to the railway station one Monday morning, Johanna heaved a secret sigh of relief. If he had tried to tell her one more time what to do while he was away, then she would probably have left town. He warned her at least half a dozen times to keep a close eye on the cash till. And the catalog. He was practically sick with worry that his competitors might find some way to spy on his samples book while he was away. In the end he had put Johanna herself so much on edge that she took the cash and the catalog with her into her room every night and hid them under her bed.
Over the next few days, however, Johanna realized just how different it was to have to shoulder all the decisions herself, great or small, rather than just carrying out orders. Should she let Monsieur Blatt from Lyon have that discount he wanted, even though it was more than Strobel had told her to allow? Which glassblower should have the order for five hundred silvered goblets now that Bavarian Hans had sprained his wrist and couldn’t take it on? Was it her place to tell off Sybille Stein for neglecting the housekeeping ever since Strobel had left?
All in all, though, the first week passed without any major disasters, and Johanna was pleased with how she had handled her new role. All the same, by Friday she was exhausted, so she spontaneously decided to stay the weekend in Sonneberg for the first time. She scribbled down a quick note for her sisters and gave it to one of the messenger women who came by the shop every day at noon.
When she went to bed that evening at eight o’clock instead of setting off for the long trip home, it was an unfamiliar but pleasant feeling. That she didn’t have to get up at any particular hour the next morning was a great relief.
By the time Johanna finally awoke the following day, it was noon. She staggered to her washstand and looked at herself in the mirror incredulously, shocked that she had slept so late. Sybille Stein did not come in on weekends, so there was no hot water either. She splashed her face with cold water until she was well and truly awake. Then she put up her hair, chose a cream lace collar for her blue dress, and got dressed. It was a strange and seductive feeling to have a whole day ahead of her and no need to hurry or fret.
She was just on her way to the kitchen when a knock at the door made her jump. She thought of the money and the catalog under her bed—thieves!—but came to her senses a moment later. Thieves would hardly come knocking. Annoyed at her own fearfulness, she went to the door and pulled it open.
“Ruth!” She felt a chill in her bones. “What’s wrong? Is it Marie? Did something—”
“Everything’s fine,” Ruth hurried to reassure her. “We got your message. And I thought, if you’re not coming to us, then I’ll just come to you.”
Johanna’s heart slowly stopped hammering.
“You certainly wouldn’t come to visit me out of sheer affection,” she said suspiciously. “There’s another reason, isn’t there?”
Ruth raised her eyebrows. “And what if there is? Do I have to tell you out here in the street?”
“You’re going to have a baby?”