The Queen of Beauty (The Century Trilogy Book 3)

by Petra Durst-Benning

  ALSO BY PETRA DURST-BENNING

  The Glassblower Trilogy

  The Glassblower

  The American Lady

  The Paradise of Glass

  The Century Trilogy

  While the World Is Still Asleep

  The Champagne Queen

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2015 Petra Durst-Benning & Ullstein Buchverlag GmbH

  Translation copyright © 2017 Edwin Miles

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher. Previously published as Bella Clara by Ullstein Buchverlag GmbH in Germany in 2015. Translated from German by Edwin Miles. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2017.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477806128

  ISBN-10: 1477806121

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  Contents

  Start Reading

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Afterword

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  Become the woman you are.

  —Hedwig Dohm

  Chapter One

  Late summer 1906

  The August air in the Berlin courtroom was stale and thick. The spectators were packed shoulder to shoulder on the public benches: sales-women who had left their market stalls in the care of an employee for a few hours sat beside elegant townswomen who waved at the soupy air with lace-trimmed fans. Several respectable-looking men—doctors from nearby hospitals—had come to show support for one of their own. Or to witness his demise. A door opened and three honorable gentlemen entered the courtroom. A draft of fresh air slipped in with them.

  “Here’s the judge,” said a redhead in the front row, taking a quick bite of her sandwich.

  The woman beside her slid to the edge of the bench to see better. “Looks like an executioner in that black robe, don’t he?” Her eyes gleamed luridly. “Look at all the files he’s got on his desk.”

  “Oh, I’d love to sneak a peek at those. They must be filled with exciting tidbits,” the redhead said and giggled. After the last mouthful of her sandwich disappeared between her gaudily painted lips, she wiped her hands on her skirt. They could get started any time as far as she was concerned.

  “Whose neck is on the block today, then?” asked a mailman as he squeezed in next to the women. His cap had an oily shine to it, and he put it on the floor in front of him, pulled an apple out of his pocket, and bit into it so hard that the juice spattered the redhead’s face.

  The woman wiped her cheek and gave the man an irritated look. But then malicious delight took over, and she said, “It’s a doctor’s wife. Fooling around with her lover in her own house while her husband was working.”

  “In front of her children,” the second woman added as she wiped a sweaty strand of hair from her forehead. “And the doctor’s boss, some professor so-and-so, walked in on them. Oh, can’t you just picture it!”

  “A scandal is what it is!” the first woman said.

  The mailman’s eyes narrowed viciously. “Well, I’d have whipped her.”

  The redhead pointed frantically at a petite chestnut-haired woman who entered the courtroom through one of the doors at the front. “Is she the one?”

  The second woman furrowed her brow. “That pasty thing? Nah, she must be the court scribe.” She rolled up the sleeves of her blouse indifferently and scratched at the dry skin on her right arm. A moment later, the redhead jabbed her in the ribs.

  “No—that’s her!”

  The audience looked on with a mix of astonishment and fascination as the elegant young woman took her place in the dock, just in front of the judge’s bench. A collective murmur rumbled through the room.

  “She looks harmless,” said the mailman. He sounded disappointed.

  “The innocent-looking ones are always the worst!” the redhead hissed.

  In the row behind them sat two women who held hands, as if trying to give each other courage. One, Isabelle, was a little taller, also a redhead. The other, Josephine, was blond. They were around the same age, in their midthirties, and dressed in the latest fashions. With their pinned-up hair, chic handbags, and elegant shoes, they looked as if they had taken a wrong turn. They would have fit in perfectly at a café on the Spree or at the premiere of a new play. Unlike the people around them, they were mostly quiet. They only had eyes for the woman in the dock. And in stark contrast to the sensationalism infecting the others, their eyes were infused with affection, compassion, and concern.

  “She looks good,” Isabelle whispered to Josephine, softly enough so no one else would hear. “Composed.”

  “I’m proud of her,” Josephine whispered back. “When I think of what she’s going through to finally be free again . . .”

  The accused woman turned around, her brown eyes filled with fear as she scanned the room. But when she saw the two women in the second row of the gallery, relief flickered over her face.

  Josephine offered an encouraging gaze to the accused. “You can do it, Clara,” she mouthed insistently.

  Clara responded with an almost imperceptible nod.

  A clerk pounded on the floor with a staff. “Silence in the High Court! The court considers the divorce proceedings of Dr. Gerhard Gropius and his wife, Clara Gropius, née Berg.”

  “A traveling salesman?” The judge nodded. “Perhaps you would be so good as to tell the court on what business the gentleman traveled?”

  “The business of love!” came a voice from somewhere in the middle of the gallery. The spectators laughed, and the clerk banged his staff on the floor in annoyance.

 
Clara swallowed hard. She’d prepared herself for public malice and had made up her mind to ignore it. If things became too unruly in the courtroom, the clerk would establish order. At least, she hoped he would.

  Not one of you has spent a month or a week or even a day in my shoes, she thought bitterly. Yet you think you have the right to judge me.

  She straightened her shoulders. “He . . . he represented a knife company in Solingen,” she said, keeping her voice as steady as she could.

  “Knives?” asked the judge, opening his eyes wide in exaggerated shock. The audience instantly broke into outraged hissing.

  Clara fell silent. What else was she supposed to say? If she had wanted to stab Gerhard to death, she could have done it with her own kitchen knives—and the judge was perfectly aware of that. Old fool.

  “And how often did this traveling salesman visit Berlin?” he asked.

  “Once a month,” Clara replied.

  The women in the front row clucked their tongues and inhaled sharply, and the doctors shook their heads in disapproval. Gerhard Gropius, who sat to the left of the judges’ bench with his lawyer, glared at Clara.

  “If I understand you correctly, this was not merely a one-time transgression on your part. Once a month, you transformed your lawfully wedded husband’s house into a love nest. Is this correct?”

  Clara nodded, feeling the blood rise to her face. She wished that the floor would open and swallow her up. Because, despite her confession, she had done nothing of the sort.

  Clara had traveled to the other end of Berlin to seek the advice of a lawyer. “How can I initiate a divorce?” she had asked the lawyer, without beating around the bush. It seemed not to be the first time he had heard the question, and together they reviewed the few options available to her. This had all taken place a year earlier, shortly after the death of her parents.

  Her husband, the lawyer explained, would probably not apply for a divorce if there were only a one-time indiscretion on her part. From what she had told him about her husband, Gerhard was far more likely to make her life a living hell than divorce her. If she really wanted to “force” him to take such a serious step, then she would have to push the circumstances. An affair, one in which she got caught in flagrante, ideally with an honorable guest present as a witness—that would be the deepest disgrace, and her husband would have no choice but to start divorce proceedings.

  “But why must I be the guilty one?” Clara had asked desperately. “Why can’t I simply tell the truth? My husband beats me, he mistreats me, and his abuse grows worse with every passing year!”

  “But is he actually trying to kill you? Only then could you use his beatings as grounds for divorce. However, I would advise against that. Your husband would almost certainly deny everything,” the lawyer had explained. And, he added, there were many judges who, instead of a divorce certificate, would give a couple no more than a few sanctimonious words to take away with them.

  Sanctimonious words? Clara had heard more than enough of those from her parents.

  “Why don’t you simply leave him?” the lawyer had asked. “Many couples discreetly lead separate lives. So discreet, in fact, that the separation is hardly recognized by those in their social circles.”

  Live apart? Clara had shaken her head and laughed bitterly. Then who would play the maid for Gerhard? Who would be his scapegoat when things were not going well with the professors at the university clinic, or with his patients, or with God knows who else? And what of all his pent-up rage? Who would he work that off with, physically, carnally? Gerhard would drag her back home by the hair if she even considered living apart! She would get not so much as a penny from him, and he would take away her children, too, that much was clear.

  The lawyer had nodded knowingly at Clara’s litany. “Sadly, the rules of law give little latitude in such cases. Where would we be if just anyone could apply for a divorce?” The lawyer laughed at that, as if he had made a joke. But to Clara, it had sounded like a rebuke.

  “Simplest of all would be for you to catch your husband in an affair,” the lawyer had said.

  But at that, too, Clara had shaken her head. She did not know whether her husband had affairs. Because of the children, she spent most of her time at home, so spying on him was out of the question. And at the social gatherings to which he had to take her, she had seen no suggestion of anything of that nature: in public, he played the role of the good husband very well.

  In the end, she had left the lawyer’s office forty marks poorer but with an important realization: if she wanted to be free of Gerhard, then she would have to compel him to apply for a divorce. Even if it meant branding herself a sinner. Even if it meant receiving no alimony. She would keep her parents’ pharmacy, and the money from the lease would keep her head above water. Nothing else was practicable.

  Though it had quickly become clear who would appear as her “lover,” it had taken her a full year to execute her plan. She had looked for a young, impoverished actor. There were plenty of potential beaus, actors who frequented the city theater in the hope of reading for a role in a new Arthur Schnitzler production. More difficult was coming up with the money she needed to pay the actor. Gerhard gave her barely enough for the household, and she was only occasionally able to save a little off her meager spending allowance. Eventually, she had gathered the money she needed, so all that had remained was finding the right day.

  On the first Monday of every month, Gerhard’s mentor from his student days, Dr. Kälblein, paid them a visit. The old man and Gerhard would disappear into the library to discuss the world over brandy and cigars.

  If she took the children to Josephine for the evening and managed to smuggle her “lover” into the house . . . Just the thought of the farce she was planning had made Clara’s knees tremble. Did she really have the nerve to pull it off?

  And now, a year later, she sat in the dock of a Berlin court, Clara the adulteress, answering the judge’s questions in a steady voice.

  After a good hour in the courtroom, the facts were on the table. Clara, guilty of adultery, was responsible for the failure of their marriage—there wasn’t the slightest doubt of that, for either the court or the public.

  What would my parents say about it all? Clara thought as the judge salaciously read through her transgressions one more time before handing down his divorce judgment. Sophie and Anton Berg, her parents, the respected couple from the pharmacy in the Luisenstadt district of Berlin . . . they would turn in their graves if they knew what their daughter was doing. Her mother had never wanted to believe that Clara was unhappily married.

  “If you provoke your husband, it’s no wonder he gets angry!” “A marriage is not always a bed of roses.” “Other women would be thankful to have a doctor as a husband, but all you do is complain. Ungrateful, that’s all you are!” Her mother’s words still rang as clearly in her ears as if she had heard them only the day before.

  The bruises, the welts on her upper arms, the bald patches from when Gerhard had dragged her by the hair through their apartment—all of it counted for less to her mother than the prestige of having married off her daughter to a doctor. There had been times in the year that her parents had been dead when Clara—the good girl, the pharmacist’s daughter—had wished she were dead, too.

  She was thirty-two years old. Her son, Matthias, was eleven, her daughter, Sophie, whom Clara had named after her mother, six. She had asked herself a thousand times whether she should stick things out longer for the good of the children. Gerhard was not a bad father. He had not once raised a hand to the children. Only to her. A wrong word here or a thoughtless remark there was all it had taken to bring Gerhard’s ire down on her, and over the years, his abuse had grown worse and worse.

  “. . . to which I will now pronounce judgment . . .”

  The judge’s words pulled Clara out of her thoughts. She inhaled anxiously.

  “Adultery, gross ingratitude, and not the slightest sign of remorse—rarely in any divorce h
ave the facts in the question of guilt been demonstrated so clearly. The application for divorce by Dr. Gerhard Gropius is hereby upheld. No right to maintenance on the part of the guilty party exists,” the judge announced in his most accusatory voice. The crowd squirmed feverishly on the benches.

  The judge cleared his throat. “Let us move on to the details: the German Civil Code states that the principle of administration by the husband is deemed to apply to the statutory property of the husband and wife. I quote . . .” The judge balanced a pair of spectacles on his nose to help him read, then continued. “By way of marriage, the assets of the wife—that is, the estate brought by her to the marriage—are thereafter subject to the control and the rights of use of the husband. The estate brought to the marriage also includes such assets as may be obtained during the marriage by the wife. In your case, Mrs. Gropius, we are talking about house number fourteen in Görlitzer Strasse as well as the Berg Pharmacy. Both will pass into your husband’s possession with this divorce.”

  Clara could not believe what she was hearing. The house and the pharmacy were her inheritance! She had counted on them continuing to be hers. She needed the money from the lease!

  “Custody of the children is to be divided. The son, Matthias, is to reside with his father, and the daughter is to live with her mother. Dr. Gerhard Gropius is obligated to pay support for the daughter.” The judge looked with raised eyebrows at Gerhard, who returned his gaze calmly.

  Clara looked from her lawyer to the judge and back. The lost house and pharmacy and the threat of poverty were of little concern compared to her children. She would only be getting Sophie? “Children belong with their mother. Most judges, as a rule, will honor that,” her lawyer had told her. Clara had been relieved to know that. As long as she could have the children, she didn’t care about anything else.

  Unrest spread among the public, too.

  “Order! I am aware that, at first glance and considering the wanton behavior of Clara Gropius, it would seem appropriate to leave both children in the care of their father,” the judge continued. “However, I do not think anyone here would doubt that a six-year-old girl is more urgently in need of her mother than her father. I am thus prepared to make this generous concession. However, I attach two conditions. First, that you, Clara Gropius, may not leave Berlin with your daughter. Second, you are obligated to grant Gerhard Gropius visitation rights at any time, whereby he is not obligated to grant you the same with respect to your son, Matthias.” The judge removed his spectacles and leaned across his bench in Clara’s direction. “I can only hope that you show a greater sense of responsibility with your daughter than you did with your marriage. You have this afternoon to return to your old home and pack your belongings and those of your daughter. After that, you no longer have any right to enter the house of Gerhard Gropius. Do you understand?” he asked sternly.