Epilogue
The raspberries are at their best this week, and I know it, and Clara knows it, because she’s a woman who pays attention to fruit.
I spot her coming across the square before she reaches my stall. You can’t miss her. Hair like fresh snow, loose down her back, and those two little ones orbiting her.
“Frau Bittner!” little Liesl calls, already running. “Are the raspberries good today?”
“The raspberries are perfect today,” I tell her, and she skids to a stop in front of the crates, then studies them with her hands clasped behind her back, just like her mother taught her.
She’s a serious little thing. Six, maybe seven, and looking at my fruit like a jeweler with a loupe.
She has her mother’s hair, white as milk, and purple eyes that catch you off guard every time.
The boy arrives second because he stopped to look at Herr Vogel’s ridiculous cuckoo clocks, as he does every single week.
He’s darker than his sister and mother, with hair black as a rook’s wing, stubbornly sticking up in the back, and eyes a deep blue.
He plants both hands on the edge of my table and grins up at me with a gap where a tooth used to be.
“We need the best ones,” Konrad announces. “It’s important.”
“Is it, now?” I ask.
“Papa’s making a Sunday cake,” Liesl says. “He says if the raspberries aren’t perfect, the cake is a—” she squints, retrieving the word carefully, “—travesty.”
“He talks like that.” The boy nods solemnly. “All the time.”
I wonder if their daddy also says the word travesty with an adorable lisp. Probably not.
Clara catches up, a basket on her arm, laughing before she even reaches us, and I could swear the woman hasn’t aged a day in over ten years. “Sorry. We got waylaid by clocks. Good morning, Frau Bittner.”
“Good morning, dear. I hear there’s a cake at stake.”
“There’s always a cake at stake. He’s very intense about baking. He’s very intense about everything.” She surveys the crates and taps the fullest one. “Go on, you two. Pick the best ones for your daddy. Every single berry gets inspected. You know the standard.”
Well, they take this assignment like it’s a royal commission.
Liesl selects each raspberry individually, holds it to the light, turns it, sets it in the paper punnet with the care of a surgeon.
Konrad has a different method. He picks two, examines them both, puts one in the punnet, and puts the other directly in his mouth.
He thinks I don’t see. He thinks he’s very sly, this one, with his cheeks going round as a hamster’s, watching me sideways the whole time.
I busy myself straightening the plums.
Some things a woman doesn’t need to see officially. Especially when the mother rounds up at the till every week without fail and waves off the change like it offends her. Whatever that boy eats, believe me, it’s been paid for three times over.
People talk, of course. This is a small town and talking is the local sport.
They talk about the castle up in the forest that nobody remembers being there, and then one day there were power lines going to it and delivery vans grinding up a brand-new road.
They talk about the young heiress who bought half the district’s goodwill with old gold.
And they talk—oh, how they talk—about the father, because in all these years, Clara has never once brought a man to town.
Never been seen with one. No husband at the school pageant, no man at the Christmas market, nothing.
Just her and the little ones and, once, a gray cat riding in the car like it owned the vehicle.
Elsa Fischer from the bakery swears the father is a recluse. Herr Vogel says a foreign prince. His wife says there is no father at all and taps the side of her nose like that means something.
Me, I don’t ask. The children are fed and loved and loud, and Liesl says please and Konrad pilfers fruit like a happy little criminal. Then there’s their mother. Every time the children’s father is mentioned, her expression softens. You can’t fake that kind of love.
“Two punnets,” Clara says, and slides me a bill that is far too large. “Keep it. Don’t argue with me, Frau Bittner, you always lose that fight.”
“You spoil me,” I complain halfheartedly.
“That’s the plan.” She herds the children back to the car. Konrad waves at me like I can’t see his berry-strained fingers.
“Say hello to your papa!” I call after them.
I’m still smiling at my plums when old Herr Brandt shuffles over from his honey stall, moving at his usual speed—that of the continental drift.
“That’s her, then,” he says. “The castle woman.”
“That’s Clara, yes.”
He leans on my table and looks off in the direction they went. “My grandmother used to tell stories, you know. From her grandmother, and hers before that.”
I roll my eyes. “Your grandmother told a lot of stories, Anton. Half of them started with schnapps.”
“These were the old ones.” He lowers his voice like the plums are eavesdropping.
“About the wise women who lived in these valleys, long ago. Beautiful ones. They’d help the townsfolk with fevers, hard births, cattle sickness.
You’d leave bread on the stump at the forest’s edge, and your troubles got smaller.
” He nods slowly. “They were driven out, in the end. Or burned. Or they just went. But my grandmother said the last matron of them, the great one, the one who could see down the years like looking down a road—”
“Anton.”
“—white hair, she had. White as milk. And eyes like violets.” He straightens up as much as his spine allows and looks at me with terrible significance. “Violets, Hilde.”
I look at him. He looks at me. Across the square, faintly, I can hear Konrad arguing that he did not eat any raspberries, an argument I’m sure he is losing on account of his tongue being pink.
Then I laugh and flap my apron at Herr Brandt like he’s a pigeon on the strawberries.
“Witches,” I say. “Honestly. Seventy-nine years old and telling fairy stories before lunch. Go back to your honey, you old goat.”
He shuffles off, chuckling, entirely unrepentant.
Witches. That’s just silly.