Free The Glimmer Palace by Beatrice Colin

to make up for the textbooks. God, all-seeing, knew, so why didn’t she?
    “My office,” the nun repeated.
    By the time that Sister August summoned Lilly, as she was known from that day, from the bench in the corridor where she had been waiting, her fury had subsided. She had lost three hundred marks, but the children wouldn’t starve. Her own battle, however, was looking increasingly like one she was going to lose. Still wearing her white dress and crown, Lilly stood for several moments before the nun noticed her. And when she spoke, it was not in her usual voice.
    “You know,” she said softly, “when I joined the order, I thought I could do some good, save some poor innocent children from the clutches of poverty and evil. But now I’m not so sure.”
    Lilly struggled for something to say.
    “Apart from taking the bishop’s chair from the chapel,” she said eventually, “you made a mockery of the saints.”
    “She was real. I read about her in a book.”
    But Sister August’s mind was already elsewhere and she didn’t appear to hear Lilly’s reply.
    “You can go now,” she said.
    Lilly ran out of the orphanage and stumbled straight through the general’s rose garden, scattering loose petals and string and bamboo stakes. She tripped on a root and grabbed hold of a briar. A drop of blood beaded on her finger. It ran down her hand, mixing with gold paint until it left a trail of sticky, gory glitter. How could she have been so wrong? She threw herself down on the damp black earth and let self-pity overwhelm her.
    It was late summer. Autumn was in the air and she shivered as she lay prostrate in the rose patch. The sky was steel gray and punctured with stars.A motorcar passed on the street outside and blew its horn.A formation of wild geese flew just above the rooftops toward the river.
    And then she noticed that many of the precious roses, the Schneekönigins and Gallicas, the Albas and the rare Damask Perpetuals, some grown from cuttings by the general himself, were headless.
    “You’ve been stealing roses,” she whispered to Hanne that night.
    “Sister August will find out.”
    Hanne rolled over until she was facing Lilly. Her lids were heavy and her lips were dark red in the moonlight.
    “Why should I care?” Hanne replied.
    “Because stealing is a sin,” Lilly said automatically.
    Hanne barely blinked.
    “The more you pick, the more grow back,” she said. “So how can it be a sin?”
    For a moment the two girls looked at each other: Hanne, limp and always tired, her arms draped around her small blond head; Lilly, wound up, curled round and round like a spring, her eyes so large that she seemed closer, much closer than she really was.
    “Don’t you want to know what I do with them?” asked Hanne.
    “What?”
    “I go to bars and tingle-tangles and sell them,” she said. “Men buy them for their sweethearts. I’m saving up.When I’ve got enough, I’m leaving this place and I’m taking the boys with me.”
    Tingle-tangle: Lilly repeated it over and over in her head. Even though she knew a tingle-tangle was just another name for a seedy bar with performing girls, the word itself somehow suggested someplace magical.
    “Hanne?” Lilly whispered.
    She stirred.
    “What is it?”
    “Can I come with you?” Lilly asked. “Can I help you sell roses?”
    “Course,” said Hanne. “Why else do you think I would have told you?”

Tingle-tangle
    E very evening for a year, barring church holidays, and days off due to ill health, Arnold von Heidle and his wife, Hilda, attended the Union Movie Theater in Alexanderplatz, Berlin. Two hundred fifty films they witnessed, incognito, to assemble their extraordinary statistics. And this is what they saw: ninety-seven murders, fifty-one adulteries, nineteen seductions, thirty-five drunks, and twenty-five practicing prostitutes.
    The von Heidles, upstanding members of the Catholic Church, darlings of the diocese, give well-attended talks to church