While the World Is Still Asleep (The Century Trilogy Book 1) (11 page)

Lilo leaned close to her and whispered in her ear. “Can I tell you a secret? Lately, I haven’t just been borrowing Mr. Braun’s bicycle. I’ve also been borrowing an old pair of gardening pants of his that he keeps in the shed for when he’s working out in the garden.”

For a moment, Josephine thought she must have misheard her friend. But when she turned to look at Lilo, she realized she had heard exactly right.

Lilo’s eyes sparkled. “It’s a completely different experience, riding like that. What’s even better is that if I put on a hat and wrap a scarf around my neck to hide my chin, no one even recognizes me. Just the other day, I passed my teacher out on the road when I was dressed like that—you know I’m doing an apprenticeship as a nurse’s assistant in the new sanatorium—and when I saw Dr. Jacob, I nearly had a heart attack! But he greeted me like I was just a patient.”

An apprenticeship as a nurse’s assistant. Cycling in disguise. A trip to Berlin to visit her great-aunt Frieda—Lilo certainly led an exciting life. “One thing I have to give
you
 . . .” said Jo. “You’ve got some spunk. What I wouldn’t give to be able to go cycling through a forest again. Or along an open road toward the horizon . . . I’ll never forget that feeling of freedom.”

“Then why don’t you do it?” Lilo replied, a hint of challenge in her voice. “I’d die of boredom if all I could do was ride in a circle. It doesn’t matter if it’s on a racetrack like this or in Isabelle’s father’s yard. And oh, that artistic cycling that Clara keeps going on about!” She made a face as if she’d tasted something sour. “In any case, I’ve got a new plan. The next time Mr. Braun goes away, I’m going to ride from Schömberg to Pforzheim in my own clothes. We’ll see what people have to say about it.”

“You’re
what
?” said Josephine, loud enough that she drew puzzled looks from the people nearby. Even one of the riders on the track who was riding by just then looked over at her. As he did, he swung dangerously close to the rider on his right, and the front wheels of their two bicycles touched. A moment later, the young man slammed into the fence. It was the blond man whom Josephine had been admiring.

Josephine threw both hands over her mouth. “My goodness, are you all right?” she said. Leaning over the fence, she suddenly found herself gazing into a pair of gray-green eyes more enchanting than anything she had ever seen before. A strange and not unpleasant feeling ran through her. She blinked and reached out to help the young man up, but he ignored her hand and got to his feet on his own. He brushed the dust from his clothes and gave Josephine an unfriendly look.

“Why don’t you take your gossiping elsewhere? We’re engaged in some serious sport here, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“But . . .” Josephine tried desperately to find an appropriate reply, but the young man with the beautiful eyes climbed onto his bicycle and rode away without a backward glance.

Chapter Nine

The accident happened a week later.

It was a sweltering, sticky summer evening. Clouds swelled over the western part of the city, the sun long since vanished behind them. Occasional lightning cut through the sky overhead, and the outside walls of the houses almost shimmered in the heat. Not a single leaf moved, and in the silence before the storm, the machines inside the factory halls seemed to drone even more loudly than usual. The storm would break very soon.

Isabelle and Josephine stood a little more than arm’s length apart in the yard of the Herrenhus villa. Each held a broom in the air, the brush ends crossed in the space between them while Clara and Lilo ducked and rode through this makeshift gate on the bicycles. Isabelle had told the others she thought it would improve their sense of balance. Of course, she had been the first to try it, and she passed through it with flying colors. The girls had already tried riding in the stooped position of the racers, but they did not like it.

“This isn’t so hard,” Clara whooped as she steered Moritz Herrenhus’s bicycle through the narrow gap—wobbly but with success.

“Then let’s make it harder,” Lilo said and let go of the handlebars. “
This
will definitely help your balance!” With her head high, she rode with no hands across the yard.

“My new bicycle! Watch out!” Isabelle shouted after her.

Josephine lowered her broom with relief. The new exercise certainly didn’t need an honor guard. Normally, she would have wanted to match Lilo’s feat immediately. But she was tired, her clothes were clinging uncomfortably to her body, and her arms ached from the long hours in her father’s workshop. It had been oppressively hot all day, and more than once she had felt as though she was glowing with heat—much like the horseshoes her father held in the fire. The horses had all been skittish, constantly flicking their heads to fend off the flies. A brown gelding had thumped her in the side, and her ribs still hurt.

She’d had enough for today.
One more glass of lemonade, then I’ll go home,
she thought. Just then, she heard Clara shouting from behind.

“I can do that, too! Look at me, look at me!”

Clara had actually succeeded in letting go of the handlebars. Although her friend’s hands hovered only a few inches above them, Josephine would not have credited Clara with so much pluck. But the handlebars suddenly swerved to the left, and before Clara could grab them, the front wheel turned, the bicycle came to an abrupt stop, and Clara was thrown headfirst over the handlebars. She lay in the dusty gravel, whimpering, her right leg strangely twisted.

Josephine ran to her friend. “Are you hurt? Clara, what’s the matter? Say something!” They registered Clara’s grazed, bloody knees and the small stones, dirt, and threads that clung to them. Blood was running down her right calf.

“My leg. It hurts so much . . .”

While Lilo held Clara’s head, Josephine tore frantically at Clara’s skirt, which had gotten caught in the spokes of the front wheel. She finally pulled it free with a loud rip. Carefully, she tried to stretch Clara’s twisted leg straight, but Clara shrieked with pain at the first touch. Josephine let it go.

“I think her leg’s broken,” said Lilo softly. “I’ve seen something like this before, with a cow. The poor creature. We had to—”

“That’s enough,” Isabelle broke in harshly.

They crouched and looked at their friend helplessly as she lay crying on the gravel. Just then, the heavens opened, and fat, penny-sized raindrops began pelting down on them.

It was Isabelle who recovered from the shock first. She looked frantically from Clara to the others.

“We have to get her away from here. And the bicycles have to go back in the shed right away. If my parents find out how Clara hurt herself, they’ll never let me ride again.”

Josephine looked at Isabelle in disbelief. “How can you think of yourself at a time like this? We need to fetch a doctor, immediately.”

Lilo shook her head. “A doctor couldn’t help her. Clara has to get to hospital. A break like this needs to be splinted. She might even need an operation,” she said, at which Clara wailed even louder.

“Not so loud,” she hissed, glancing up at the house with a fearful expression. “I’ll get help, I promise! But the bicycles have to go back in the shed first. Then we’ll carry Clara out to the sidewalk and say she broke her leg out there.”

“It was the skirt!” Josephine looked firmly at Isabelle and Lilo. “If it hadn’t got caught in the spokes, Clara wouldn’t have fallen.”

“If only we’d given her my bicycle, then Clara wouldn’t have fallen so idiotically and we could keep on riding,” Isabelle grumbled.

Jo glowered at her friend.

They had just visited Clara, whose leg really was broken, in the Deaconess Hospital. A day had passed since the accident. Lilo had taken Clara some fruit from Frieda’s garden, and Isabelle brought her newspapers and candy that they all shared. But after a few minutes a stern-looking nurse had bustled in and driven the girls out, informing them that the patient needed rest. They had eventually found themselves sitting together in the backyard at the Herrenhus villa, tired and listless from the August heat.

“Maybe she hit a hole and her skirt only got caught in the spokes when she actually fell,” said Lilo, poking the white gravel with a stick.

“There aren’t any holes. Look around,” said Isabelle sharply.

Lilo nodded despondently. “I wish I hadn’t shown her I could ride with no hands . . .”

“She didn’t have to try to copy you. She knows full well that she isn’t the best cycler,” Isabelle replied.

It wasn’t the first time they had been through this.

Moritz Herrenhus had seen right through their fabricated story—that Clara had broken her leg falling on the sidewalk—and called them silly, careless ninnies. Then he’d stated loudly that, in his opinion, women were far better suited to sitting at a sewing machine than atop a bicycle. He’d gone on to ban them from riding either of the bicycles until further notice.

Josephine looked longingly toward the shed where the bicycles stood. She doubted that Isabelle’s father would ever allow them to ride again.

“If Clara’s skirt really caused her to crash, then it’s all the more reason to ride in pants,” said Lilo, looking defiantly at the others. “Why won’t you give it a try?”

“Because it’s a downright horrible thought! And completely unfeminine, to boot.” Isabelle shuddered. “I’d never put on anything so uncomfortable or so tight.” She placed her hands protectively on her skirt with its yellow-white flowers, as if she thought someone might try to rip it from her body.

“When I think of the greasy pants my father wears, ugh! I honestly can’t imagine putting on anything like that,” Josephine added. “Besides, it hardly matters since we’re not allowed to cycle now.”

“Who cares?” Lilo rolled her eyes. “You think you’re all so progressive here in the city. But what would you say if I told you that in France, it’s actually the fashion for women cyclers to wear a kind of divided skirt when they ride?” Josephine and Isabelle looked intrigued, so Lilo went on. “Last spring, a group of women stayed in our sanatorium as guests. One of them had brought a bicycle along with her. When she rode it through Schömberg, the people just stood there and gaped!” Lilo giggled. “And she was wearing just such a divided skirt. After a few days, I worked up my courage and asked her about her unusual outfit. She said that where she came from in Paris it wasn’t unusual at all. You could even buy them in the shops, ready-made. She called it a
costume rationnel
.”

“A sensible outfit,” Isabelle said, translating, and she chewed her bottom lip. She abruptly stood up and started gathering the material of her skirt together in the middle. “If one were to pleat the material here and, let’s say, sew it up with a few stitches below the knee, would that turn it into a
costume rationnel
?”

Lilo shrugged. “That’s about what it looked like.”

Holding the material of her skirt in the middle with her right hand, Isabelle lifted her right leg as if climbing onto a bicycle. “That’s definitely much easier!”

“Altering a skirt to make it as comfortable as pants for riding but so it still looks like a skirt . . . It’s not a bad idea,” Josephine murmured to herself. She looked up. “My skirt is old, and I won’t be able to wear it much longer anyway. If you like, we could try it out on mine, just as a test. Isabelle, we just need a needle and thread . . .”

Josephine sat there in her underskirt as the other two quarreled about how high the inner seam should go.

“Just above the ankle, no more than that. Any higher would be indecent,” Isabelle said.

“No point stopping halfway,” said Lilo, and Josephine agreed. With more or less even stitches, they sewed the cloth up the middle to just above the knee, creating two “legs.”

“How can you go around in a rag like this! There’s as much here that needs to be patched as stitched. If only Clara were here,” Isabelle muttered as she sewed. Like Lilo and Josephine, she was not exactly a talented seamstress.

Time to try it on. Accompanied by the laughter of the others, Josephine pulled on her newly divided skirt.

“Well . . . from a distance, it still looks like a skirt,” said Isabelle. “How does it feel?”

“Quite good,” said Jo. “But I can’t judge whether it’s really any more practical than a normal skirt without getting on a bicycle.”

“You know that my father prohibited us from doing that,” said Isabelle, but after some hesitation she went into the shed to get her father’s Rover. She warned Jo to stay out of sight behind the shed, then she let her take the handlebars.

“So?” asked Isabelle and Lilo simultaneously when Josephine was firmly mounted on the seat.

“Getting on is easy enough . . .”

“But?”

Josephine pointed at the back wheel. “Look. The material can still catch in the spokes back here.”

“The Frenchwoman’s looked different, too,” said Lilo, her head tipped to one side and a critical expression on her face. “The material was sort of gathered around the hem at the bottom of each leg, like with linen underwear, you know? Like some kind of . . . knickerbockers.”

“You want us to cycle in underwear now?” Isabelle asked, her eyes wide.

Josephine could hardly suppress a grin. “Who knows? Maybe they’ll be all the rage one day, and your father will be making them in his factory.” She looked down at herself. As misshapen as her skirt looked, she could still get away with wearing it in the smithy. So she took a deep breath and said, “It doesn’t matter now anyway. Let’s really turn these into knickerbockers!”

This time, she wielded the needle herself, careful not to make the “legs” of the skirt too tight. When she was finished, she pulled the garment back on and turned around to show her friends how it fit. “How do I look?”

“I don’t know,” said Lilo. “The
costume rationnel
was more elegant, somehow.”

“Plain ridiculous is how it looks!” Isabelle cried. “Jo, absolutely not. You’re never going to—”

“Aren’t I?” Jo said, laughing, then swung herself onto the Rover again. She looked down critically at her legs. Instead of coming dangerously close to the spokes, her skirt now hugged her legs but without restricting them. Her ankles and a small section of her lower legs were visible, but her knees were covered. What more could she want?

“How does it feel?” Lilo asked.

Jo looked at her and smiled. “What was it you said? A completely different riding experience!” And she rode off around the yard without giving a second thought to her skirt.