The Queen of Beauty (The Century Trilogy Book 3)

by Petra Durst-Benning

  “Benno von Nordmannsleben!” Therese cried. “Oh, Clara, I don’t think I’ve ever loved a man as much. All I have to do is look at him, and I get all warm and shivery.” She leaned toward Clara confidingly. “Benno is in Queen Olga’s dragoon regiment in Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, but he and three other officers are in Friedrichshafen now with the king.”

  Clara did her best to stifle a yawn while she brewed her coffee. An officer. Here today, back in Ludwigsburg tomorrow. Or worse, off to some war. This can’t end well, she thought. Poor Therese.

  “We had a date to meet at three. Benno was going to pick me up in his automobile, and we were going to drive to Friedrichshafen. He wanted to show me the castle there,” said Therese, and she looked as if she would break into tears at any moment.

  “Maybe the king had something important for Benno to do, and he simply couldn’t get away.”

  “Do you think so?” Therese sighed, but then the next moment, she sounded again like her usual chirpy self. “You’re probably right. Benno’s such a wonderful man, you know. He . . .”

  Clara sipped her coffee as she listened to Therese’s seemingly never-ending tribute to the dashing officer.

  “You’re yawning!” Therese cried in horror. “Is what I’m saying so boring?”

  “No!” Clara exclaimed, just as horrified. She had been trying to suppress her yawns.

  Therese’s expression grew serious. “You don’t have to fake it for my sake, Clara. I can see how exhausted you are. But is it any wonder when you slog away from morning to night? Where’s that husband of yours, by the way? Loafing around again at your expense, is he?”

  “Therese, what are you talking about?” said Clara brusquely. “Stefan’s social contacts mean so much for my business. And I’m glad I don’t have to polish myself up for every party in town. Apart from that, he takes care of the bookkeeping and lots of other things.”

  “Other things. Uh-huh.” Therese raised her eyebrows skeptically. “I’d love to hear about these other things.”

  Just then the doorbell rang. “My customer,” Clara said with relief, and went to the front of the shop.

  “I think I could get used to an automobile like that,” said Stefan as casually as possible, but his heart was beating hard. What a beautiful machine! “Think about whether you might want to part with it after all. I’d be interested.” With one hand, he caressed the highly polished bodywork of the Benz landaulet where it gleamed in the light of the setting sun.

  “I’ve taken her up to thirty-five miles an hour, but the manufacturer claims she’ll go seventy-five,” said Martin Semmering, the owner, proudly.

  Stefan nodded as if he heard such numbers every day. “And the horsepower? Forty?”

  “Thirty-five. With a four-cylinder motor.” Semmering, a good-looking man in his late forties, with dark hair and graying temples, opened the hood to give Stefan a look at the inner workings of the car.

  “Impressive,” Stefan murmured. But what interested him more than the technology was the question of how it would feel to drive alongside the lake in the beautiful machine.

  As if he could read minds, Martin Semmering said, “Take my word for it, when you’re driving along in this, everyone turns to look!”

  “Then think about your price, and I’ll think about whether it’s the one for me or if I wouldn’t rather buy a new automobile,” Stefan replied.

  “Can you even afford a machine like this?” Semmering asked directly.

  They left the car behind and headed back into the Bar Coco, also Semmering’s property. The bar, which offered a dozen kinds of champagne, was popular with the summer tourists. They closed in winter, however, and the Semmerings went down to a house they owned in the south of France. “Fog puts Viola in a bad mood,” Semmering had once told Stefan, who had nodded but inwardly rolled his eyes. A bad mood because of fog?

  “Do you think I’d be interested in it if I didn’t have the money?” said Stefan with a trace of annoyance.

  Semmering shrugged. “I mean to say . . . your darling wife would have to sell a lot of jars of cream.”

  The two men took their places at the round table where they had previously been part of a small group drinking champagne. The others had also heard Semmering’s last remark, and they laughed.

  “If she’s really interested in actually selling anything at all,” said Josef Meininger, a shoe manufacturer from Pirmasens sitting across the table from Stefan. “Your wife advised my Hilda to go for a swim in the lake once a day, and she said that that would make her skin stronger than any cream could. Hilda was very impressed when she told me about it. Now she goes down to the beach in front of our hotel and splashes about in the water every day.” The man shook his head dourly, then leaned across the table toward Stefan. “If you want my opinion, my dear Stefan, your wife is not a particularly capable businesswoman. Though I doubt that any cream would do my Hilda much good. She’d have to bathe in pure gold!”

  The two women at the table squealed in delight at that. One of them was Meininger’s secret lover, but Stefan had no idea who the other was. They seemed to enjoy the fact that a man would talk about his wife with such disparagement.

  “Then why not treat your little turtledove to her rejuvenating gold bath every day? If anyone here can afford it, then you can!” Semmering said.

  “I’d rather treat myself to something younger,” Meininger said, pinching his lover on her cheek.

  Stefan joined in cheerfully with the general laughter, but he was boiling over on the inside. So Clara had been throwing around her “valuable” advice again. Walks in the fresh air. Enough sleep. Swimming in the lake. How many times had he asked her to keep that nonsense to herself? But when it came to her convictions, Clara was as stubborn as could be. He was waiting for the day when she started telling her customers to fill bottles with Lake Constance water and rub that into their skin instead of her expensive creams. But it wouldn’t go that far. He could not simply forbid Clara to have contact with her customers, but he had a plan that would kill several birds with a single stone.

  He looked around at the wealthy businessmen and smiled. I’ll show all of you, he thought. You—and Clara, too.

  “Champagne for everyone!” he called out, waving his wallet in the air.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Clara was up early. The evening before, she had made a batch of lavender soap, and she wanted to get it ready for sale before she opened the shop. She looked lovingly at her sleeping husband and then went down to the laboratory, where she eased the soaps out of the molds and wrapped them in tissue paper. For some time, she had been pouring the viscous soap mixture into the flower-shape molds, instead of cutting the soap from a large block. She had had the molds made to order in a small factory that normally made forms for confectioners. “You can use my molds for cakes or soap or anything else you like,” the factory owner, a gray-haired gentleman, had explained. “Would you like to draw the flower you have in mind, or do you already have a template?” he asked.

  Clara, who had been prepared for a longer discussion, was surprised and happy to find the man to be so professional and willing to help her with her special request. A little shyly, she produced a page that she had torn out of a women’s magazine. It showed pictures of various flowers. She had pointed at a dahlia and said, “I want it to look like this. What do you think? Would you be able get in all the petals?”

  The man had laughed. “If I can work a rabbit’s whiskers into an Easter mold, I think I can do a flower,” he said, adding that the molds would be ready in four weeks.

  The exchange had made Clara think back to her years in Berlin. She had always admired businessmen like Isabelle’s father, Moritz Herrenhus, but when she had contact with such men, she could never get a word out and felt small and stupid. Now, though, she worked with men like that every day. Times changed, certainly.

  Her flower soaps had become so successful Clara was considering having other molds made. A heart shape, perhap
s? Or a four-leaf clover? Happy with herself and her world, she inhaled the scent of lavender.

  She had just finished wrapping the first three dozen bars of soap when Stefan appeared.

  “Surprised you, didn’t I, mia cara? Well, I can get up early when it counts,” he said with a laugh when he saw her astonished expression. “And today, it counts! I have a big surprise for you. Come, let’s go.” Even as he spoke, he stepped behind her and began to untie the knots on her apron.

  “Stefan, what are you doing? As much as I love your surprises, I can’t just leave. I have to get the soap stocked at both shops, and I must ship a package to Baden-Baden, too. My first customer arrives at nine. She’s booked a pedicure and foot treatment, and I want to show her how she can massage her feet herself before going to bed so they don’t swell up overnight.”

  “So you can sell one lotion less, right?” Stefan said with an undertone of mockery. “Don’t worry, Evi Förster will take over with your customer. It’s all taken care of.”

  “But Evi Förster has enough to do in the Residenzia—”

  “No buts!” He took her hand, and it seemed to Clara he did so in the way he would that of a young and obstinate child. Clara was left with no choice but to follow. And she was, in fact, rather excited to find out what Stefan was planning.

  It was a glorious day, no longer summer, but not yet autumn, either. The hectic tourist season was over, and Clara felt as if the world all around her had let out a long, deep sigh of relief. If only I could do the same, she thought, her mind still on the soap she had left behind half-finished.

  “Where are we going?” she asked as they walked farther and farther out of town.

  “Wait and see . . .”

  The next moment, she saw from far off a heavyset woman coming toward them. Wasn’t that Sabine Weingarten? Clara’s eyes lit up. Did she have something to do with Stefan’s surprise?

  “Look at that blubbery creature,” Stefan murmured. “We’ll hear a loud bang any second and she’ll explode.”

  “Stefan, that’s mean,” said Clara quietly. She waved to the pharmacist’s wife and wanted to say hello and exchange a few words, but Stefan crossed the street and Clara could only give Sabine an apologetic look.

  Arriving at the edge of Meersburg, Stefan stopped in front of a large, plain, and obviously empty building.

  Clara frowned. She had never taken any notice of the building before, and she did not have the slightest idea of what they were doing there.

  With exaggerated flamboyance, Stefan produced a key from the pocket of his pants and unlocked the massive door.

  “May I welcome you to . . . our new cosmetics factory! Until a year ago, they made tin cans for preserving fish. Apparently, the owner sold his product all through the empire. But his process for sealing the cans—with lead, as it turned out—caused lead poisoning for those who ate the contents. His reputation was ruined, and he had to close.” Stefan placed his hands on Clara’s shoulders from behind and steered her into a large room. Inside, on long tables, all kinds of machines were still set up.

  “Look around, Clara! He left everything behind. I’m sure we can use a lot of it, and if we can’t, out it goes. We’ll set up everything just like you want it.”

  Struck dumb, Clara looked from her high-spirited husband to the metal presses and punches and back again. She was seldom at a loss for words, but this was one of those moments. So she was supposed to make her beautifully scented, delicate creams in a former tin-can factory?

  “Did I come up with the perfect surprise or not?” Stefan laughed. She didn’t reply immediately, so he went on: “It might be enough at the beginning to mix your cream in a small pot like a housewife makes her soup, but the Bel Étage has taken on new dimensions, and you’ve been struggling to keep up with production for too long. Think about the future, Clara! We want to grow, don’t we? So we take on some hardworking people to do the work for you, and you do the final quality check!” With unmistakable pride in his voice, he handed her the key. “Prego! The lease is already signed.”

  “You want me to hand over the production to strangers? To reveal my secret recipes? I’ve said I don’t want to do that. And I’m supposed to pay the rent for this huge place, of which all I’ve seen is this single room? You signed me up for all this behind my back?” Clara’s voice was decidedly shrill and louder than usual. “And it never occurred to you, even once, that you ought to discuss it with me?”

  “All you want to do is discuss, discuss, discuss. But I want to roll up my sleeves and get to work!” Stefan said firmly, his Italian accent coming through strongly. “Why can’t you just say you think my idea is good?”

  Clara snorted. “You’re acting like I am procrastination personified. Getting to work, as you put it, means more than signing a lease prematurely. I’m not sure at all if the recipes for my creams can even be scaled up to increase the production. The recipes for the tinctures and soaps shouldn’t be a problem. But doing any of it means having a good chemist who knows how the different ingredients react with one another. And—”

  Stefan raised his hand imperiously, stopping her short. “I’ve already found a chemist. Do you think I haven’t thought this through? His name is Klaus Kohlwitz, and I met him through Martin Semmering. Kohlwitz’s last position was in a factory that made boot polish and soft soap, and he was responsible for developing the various products. He told me he knows a great many manufacturers of glass containers, tubes, and other packaging materials. You will like the man, I’m sure. But more importantly, he will be a great help to you.”

  “A man who knows his way around soft soap and boot polish, aha. Do you really see that as a qualification for making the most delicate of face creams? And don’t you dare tell me you’ve already hired him,” Clara practically hissed, and she felt real anger rearing up inside her. How could Stefan overstep his authority like this?

  “Of course not. Only you can make a decision as important as that,” Stefan replied. “I simply asked him to come for an interview. Would it work for you to meet him this afternoon?” Clara realized that for the first time that morning Stefan sounded less than sure of himself.

  She was silent for a long moment as her gaze swept across the production area. It looked well cared for, and she could detect no odor of fish at all. Heavy ceiling-high iron shelves lined the white-painted walls on all sides. One could certainly store a lot of products here, far more than in the cramped corners of her tiny laboratory. The ceiling lamps shone brightly, and they surely would provide enough light even on the darkest winter days. And the location, on the road that led to Friedrichshafen, was good . . .

  Clara stalked past Stefan and out of the room without a word. Just as silently, she climbed the stairs to the second floor, where three doors opened from a square hallway. Clara opened the nearest door and found herself in a large room with two long windows, and spontaneously let out a little shriek of joy. “What a fantastic view!” she cried, and went over to look out the window.

  Stefan, who had followed her, stood in the doorway.

  Clara turned around to look at him and was met by his smile. “Don’t you go grinning too soon, darling. I haven’t said yes yet,” she said as sternly as possible, as the most beautiful visions began to take shape in her mind. She could set up a laboratory there with absolutely every technical refinement she needed! With a decent Bunsen burner and gas bottle. Her desk would go under the window, and on the opposite wall she would have a huge bookshelf for her reference library.

  “Think about it, mia cara,” Stefan said quietly. “Once you’ve got the production off your hands, you can dedicate yourself to research. You could try new cosmetic products like rouge for the cheeks and eye shadow. It isn’t only actresses like Beate Birgen painting their faces these days. I see it every time I go out in the evenings. More and more women are using makeup, although it must be said that the results are not always very successful. You could be the one to make all those women happy.”

&nbs
p; A dream come true. Clara pursed her lips, thinking. But what about the cost? She would need to take out a loan. She couldn’t afford to set up this place from her own reserves. And could she really bring herself to entrust her recipes to a stranger?

  Her own factory . . . that would certainly be a change from beauty shops. If she went to a lawyer as “Clara Berg, factory owner,” he would have even better arguments in the battle for visiting rights for her children. Next spring! Next spring she would finally take up the battle with Gerhard anew.

  The lake glittered bluer than it usually did and the sun shone a deep golden as Clara turned back to Stefan. With confidence she said, “You can tear up your lease. If I’m going to do this, then I’m going to buy this building, not rent it. If the owner is willing, if my bank comes to the party, and if the price is reasonable, this will become the Bel Étage Manufactory!”

  The bank to which Clara applied for a loan was more than happy to oblige. It even provided the extra sum that Stefan needed to finance the purchase of his first automobile. “With a car, we can commute between Meersburg and Baden-Baden quickly, and I can use it to deliver the products from the manufactory,” he explained to Clara.

  Clara had no objections. Her first real estate investment was so monumental that buying an automobile paled by comparison.

  And so, at the end of the 1909 season, Clara came to own her first piece of property, and Stefan his first car. And both were happy and content.

  A period of new directions followed. Unlike most of the tourist businesses, which had to let people go in late autumn, Clara was interviewing for new staff. First in line was the chemist that Stefan had met through Martin Semmering.

  Klaus Kohlwitz was in his midthirties. He had brown eyes and thin brown hair, but a mustache as black as if he’d painted it with the boot polish he made in his previous job. He wore checked pants and a flamboyant red sports jacket. His attire and his spectacular mustache reminded Clara of the caricatures of gigolos in the women’s magazines. But the reference that he produced from his last employer praised him glowingly—the factory closing its doors in spring clearly had nothing to do with the chemist. He listened carefully, keeping focused on what Clara said. She could not tell what it was that finally convinced her to take him on as the manager of her new factory. Was it the deep seriousness with which he spoke of his old job? Or that he had gone to the trouble to find out in advance what kinds of products Clara manufactured and seemed to learn fast? Was it his friendly nature? Or the honesty she thought she saw in his eyes? She trusted her feeling that Klaus Kohlwitz was the right man. If in the end he absconded with her recipes, then she was out of luck. But she did not want to think about that.