The Champagne Queen (The Century Trilogy Book 2) Read Free

had no idea how to even hold a paring knife.
    That evening, when she had told her mother about her helplessness at Josephine’s “housewarming party,” her mother had replied with those pregnant words: “Don’t worry your pretty head about it. You were raised to marry, not to peel potatoes!”
    At the time, Isabelle had thought no more about it. People like her hired staff for such work. That’s just the way it was.
    Perhaps her parents would have done better to raise her to survive, she thought now, when she paused, panting, atop the rise behind the farm. Then perhaps her adjustment to the life she now had to lead would not be so difficult.
    She narrowed her eyes to see better. The fog had thinned somewhat, but from up there, she couldn’t see any sign of Leon. She sighed. To a point, she could understand Leon’s passion for cycling—after all, she had been part of the sport herself until just recently. But things couldn’t go on like this, she concluded, as she slipped and stumbled back down the hillside. Something had to happen, or she’d go out of her mind before spring arrived.
    The next few hours passed very slowly. Isabelle paced around their bedroom, the floorboards creaking tauntingly with every step. Like all the upstairs rooms, the bedroom was not heated. Isabelle pulled a woolen shawl around her shoulders, but it didn’t help much. Going down to the heated parlor was not a good alternative, because it meant having to put up with the pipe smoke from Oskar Feininger and his even more taciturn brother Albert, who also lived on the farm.
    Feeling depressed, she looked around the dimly lit room. She’d run out of reading material weeks before, and there was nothing in the Feininger house to read apart from a Christian periodical. Finally she sat down and began to write a letter to her friend Clara. But she stopped as soon as she’d written Dear Clara . Apart from her moaning and misery, she had nothing to write about. As a doctor’s wife, Clara managed a large practice. And, of course, she had her own household to look after, as well as little Matthias—a full schedule, really, and then some. When Clara found out that Isabelle was sitting around twiddling her thumbs—even though she had no choice in the matter—her reaction would certainly be one of incomprehension.
    The same would be true of her friend Josephine, who was running a successful bicycle business with her husband. And when she thought about Lilo in the Black Forest! Lilo and her husband managed no fewer than three luxury sanatoriums. Isabelle had imagined something similar for her own life in the Palatinate. In her naïveté, she had dreamed of taking control of the winery, together with Leon.
    Dreams . . . as a young woman, she’d had more than enough of those. Maybe that’s why our friendship held? she thought, still staring at the unwritten page in front of her. Apart from the fact that all three of them had lived on the same street, Clara, Josephine, and Isabelle could hardly have been more different. Clara, the good pharmacist’s daughter; Josephine, the rebel of the trio; and then Isabelle herself, the rich daughter of a factory owner. But whenever they were together, they laughed and told each other their secrets, and what they had in common had been stronger by far than all the social differences that separated them. Each of them had her dreams, and to all appearances, her friends had made theirs come true. But here she was, stuck in the wilderness, all out of dreams.
    Disgusted, Isabelle threw her pen and stationery into a corner before a thought occurred to her: The letter that her mother-in-law had been so excited about—why hadn’t Isabelle taken it with her? Then she would at least have something to read. And the letter would probably affect her, too, wouldn’t it?
     
    When she abandoned Berlin so precipitately, she did not tell anyone except Clara what her new address would be. Even so, it had obviously been easy