The Woman Who Heard Color by Kelly Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

already spent on this project, how very close she felt right now.
    “Yes, originally purchased from Kandinsky,” Mrs. Fletcher said, “but we are getting ahead of the story.” Lauren smiled and nodded, detecting a little shake of the finger in Isabella Fletcher’s voice.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Hanna
    Munich
October–November 1900
     
    When Frau Hirsch took ill, and was confined to her bed, Frau Stadler, the head cook, asked Hanna to take the tray in to the mistress, a request she eagerly accepted. She was curious to get a look at the wife who had sent her stepdaughter away, a woman Hanna had already decided she did not like.
    Frau Fleischmann was sitting up in bed when Hanna entered the room. Her skin was soft and pale with the slightest blush in her cheeks. Long blond hair fell over her thin shoulders, and an oval-shaped locket lay in the hollow of her slender neck. As Hanna approached she noticed the woman’s eyes, rimmed with dark lashes. They were the most unusual color she’d ever seen. They were not brown, or blue, or green. Her eyes could only be described as golden, and there was the softest, sweetest, saddest timbre in the color. Hanna could hear it clearly.
    A book was folded across her lap. She looked up and smiled, and instantly Hanna knew she could not hate this woman who smiled at a stranger.
    “Thank you, Hanna,” she said, addressing her by name. “ Bitte , the tray goes here.” Her voice was nearly the same color as her eyes, which startled Hanna.
    “You are Käthe’s sister?”
    “Yes, Frau Fleischmann,” Hanna answered, placing the tray on the table beside the bed. She removed the lid, just as Frau Stadler had instructed her, poured coffee from the silver pot, added two drops of cream and a lump of sugar, and placed a spoon on the saucer.
    “You look very much like your sister.”
    Hanna was surprised, again, that she knew her sister’s name, that she knew what Käthe looked like. She had a thought lodged in her mind that Frau Fleischmann cared little about the household help. Hanna studied the cover on the book. A novel. The author Theodor Fontane.
    “Do you read?” Frau Fleischmann asked, stirring her coffee. Her eyes rose up to meet Hanna’s. She was much younger than Hanna had expected. She knew she was younger than her husband, but she looked barely older than Käthe, who at eighteen was two years older than Hanna. And yet there was a weariness about her, shadows under her golden eyes that made Hanna think she had lived for many years.
    “Yes, I read.” She had never officially gone to school, but her mother, who believed an education was important even for a farmer’s daughter, had taught the children to read, or perhaps they had taught one another, as there were no grade levels, no tests, and everyone advanced at their own pace. Hanna was always curious—“my curious little bunny,” her mother called her. And a dreamer. She loved the stories, but also the histories. She would read anything and everything she could find, and her mother would take them to the lending library in Kempton once or twice a month when she was well.
    Frau Fleischmann asked that Hanna read from the book, then motioned that she draw the chair, which sat near the vanity across the room, closer to the bed.
    Hanna sat on the soft pink cushion, opened the book, and began to read. She didn’t understand much of what she read. Frau Fleischmann listened intently, tore pieces from her breakfast roll with nervous fingers, and drank two cups of coffee, then wiped her delicate, thin lips on the white linen napkin that Hanna had folded on the tray just as Frau Stadler had instructed her.
    “Danke,” she said after a while. “Thank you.” She placed her napkin on the tray and lay back as if the effort to eat had exhausted her. “Please inquire of Frau Hirsch’s health. I hope that she is doing much better.”
    Hanna never had the opportunity to wish Frau Hirsch well. She learned when she returned the tray to the