Free A Glove Shop In Vienna by Eva Ibbotson

have
seen
the flowers! They are probably full of dead birds they have eaten for their dinner.’
    ‘Please, Jacob.’
    So it ended as it always ended… As it had done in Berlin in a blizzard which had cut off all supplies to the city; in Paris with the streets sealed for some visiting dignitary so that Jacob, with an hour to spare, found himself begging for a single bud from a bad-tempered gardener in the Tuileries; in Bucharest where every available rose had been pounded into attar for the tourist trade.
    ‘You cannot wear a
white
rose for Carmen,’ Sternhardt had yelled at her years and years ago, when he had at last persuaded her to try the mezzo role. ‘Carmen wears red flowers always -scarlet, crimson — she is a
gypsy
!”
    But Nina, who stood so patiently while they fitted her costumes, who would put herself out for the most insignificant member of the chorus, only said very quietly that if they wanted her to sing Carmen they would have to find her a white rose. And as with Carmen, so with Violetta (whether or not she was the
Dame aux Camellias)
, with Mimi and Gilda and Butterfly.
    So now poor Jacob stepped out of the resplendent foyer with its gilded mirrors and corpulent muses, to search among the frangipani, the hibiscus and the voracious orchids in that steam-bath of a city for the flower which alone linked this lovely, deeply weary woman to her youth.

    In his ornate gold-leaf and red-plush box next to the stage, a man whose look of extreme distinction even the recent months of strain and agony could not eradicate, waited — entirely without interest – for the curtain to rise.
    As usual in these times of slump and mismanagement there had been a muddle about the posters. The company was second-rate, the opera was
Carmen —
that was all he knew and it was enough to have kept him away but for the need to kill time for an evening before the arrival of the tycoon from Sao Paulo to whom he was selling ‘The Dragonfly’. Everything else was sold already: the other boats, the carriages, the antique silver and fine furniture he had shipped out from Europe. Only for Roccella itself had he found no purchaser. Soon now the lovely Palladian yellow-stuccoed house with its blue shutters, its flower-wreathed arcades, its fountains and terraces, would vanish in the murderous embrace of the jungle from which he had wrested it.
    ‘Look, Mother, there’s Mr Varlov! So he can’t be in prison yet,’ said the convent-fresh daughter of a Portuguese customs official, looking raptly at the solitary figure in the box.
    ‘Don’t stare, dear,’ said her mother, irritably aware that neither disgrace nor bankruptcy would dim the image of this curiously magnetic figure in her daughter’s eyes.
    But the girl’s father did stare, and nodded, for it seemed to him that Varlov had had a raw deal. Though he had been among the wealthiest of the planters and hospitable to a fault, Varlov had not indulged in the pranks of so many of the others -washing their carriage horses in champagne, sending their shirts back to Paris to be laundered. Varlov had built houses for the
serengueiros
who tended his thousands of acres of wild rubber, and schools for their children. It was to save these that he had gone to Rio when the crash came, to raise more money by means which, though he could not have known it at the time, had turned out to be illegal and now left him facing, along with the men he had trusted, a charge of malpractice and fraud.
    Leaning back, indifferent to the looks he was attracting, Paul looked round the Opera House that he had helped to bring into being. It was he who had insisted on the best Carrara marble, he who had suggested that de Angelis himself be fetched from Italy to paint the ceilings. He had put thousands of pounds of his own money into this crazy, lovely building and for one reason only. Obsessionally, doggedly, idiotically, Paul had been convinced that one day
she
would come.
    Well, she had not come. He had