A debutante’s evening dress should have a neckline exactly three inches below the collarbones. After marriage, it can be as low as you wish, as long as you do not display so much that the man seated opposite you finds it impossible to move his gaze from your bosom to his soup. You must be ruthlessly honest with yourself, however, about the first hint of crepe about your skin. After that, a chiffon scarf, in flattering pale pink, will distract from wrinkles.
Miss Lily, 1914
MAY 1925
HANNELORE
One does not open a factory if one is a prinzessin. Only Sophie perhaps could have considered it.
A prinzessin might, however, write to a friend in Australia, might even, just possibly, visit her there. Hannelore would have been tempted if Sophie was just a little less intelligent. Dolphie must find his place in this new Germany. It was essential that no one — particularly a woman who ran an international company — know exactly Dolphie’s role in the lead-up to the mustard gas attack at Ypres.
Sophie’s bank draft had been with a Belgian bank and so could only be cashed in Belgium. Before Hannelore had recovered enough to do so Germany’s reparations to France officially began.
The mark was suddenly worth only a hundredth of what it had bought the day before. Within a month the mark had depreciated by a factor of a thousand. The already generous amount Sophie had given her suddenly become a fortune in bankrupt Germany.
Hannelore bought land, to begin with. Farmland, to grow food, and then the hunting lodge from Dolphie, for he would not accept money from her — especially Sophie’s money — but he needed to look well, and live well, to get a position in the new government.
And then as the government stumbled, recovered, stumbled and recovered again, and Germany sank still deeper into poverty, she visited Dolphie’s sister-in-law for introductions.
And started the factory.
She herself did not start it, of course. A prinzessin could not do that, not and retain her dignity and valuable mystique. A manager was suggested; an old factory site was purchased. Her role was to provide the money, to sign the papers.
She did not even know exactly what the factory produced. Not soup, of course — there was still little surplus food to can — but ‘components’ — metal fabrications that might differ from one week to the next, depending on what the larger companies they supplied needed.
Labour was cheap, but Hannelore made sure that her workers could live on their wages, because behind the factory was a farm growing cabbages and potatoes and corn, as well as raising cows and pigs, and each factory family was entitled to a share in its produce as part of their wages. Their children could attend the school at the Lake Lodge.
She desperately wanted to write to Sophie, to say thank you and to tell her the money had been well spent. She did not. That time in both their lives was over. She had no wish to hurt Sophie by making her remember. In ten years’ time perhaps she might send a letter. Sophie might even write back. It was so very hard to lose a friend, but duty, after all, was duty.
A prinzessin could supervise a school, and did. It filled in her days and gave her purpose. It was not the purpose she had longed for, back in the days at Miss Lily’s, when she had hoped to lend her hands to creating peace between the empires. Teaching children who were not ragged only because their mothers were industrious with needle and thread, even cobbling boots from scraps of leather, was not the world of an empress. But sometimes, when a child showed her proudly a whole page of writing with only four spelling mistakes, she might even be content.
Until the weekend (such an unimaginable word for a prinzessin to use before the war, or that she nor anyone she knew might be bounded by a Monday to Friday work regime) that Dolphie brought a visitor to stay at the lodge — a discreet place, for extremely discreet discussions. A most interesting man too, who like them had hated war. A man like them who dreamed of prosperity for Germany, and peace.
A most wonderful man, indeed . . .