While the World Is Still Asleep (The Century Trilogy Book 1) Read Online Free

bakery. In the Berg family, being ill was always cause for celebration, like a birthday or christening. Ever since Clara had nearly died at the age of seven from an inflamed appendix, her mother, Sophie, would have liked nothing more than to keep her daughter packed in tissue paper. Josephine had always envied her a little. At home, it was always, “Hurry up and get better, the work won’t get done if you’re lazing around in bed.”
    They had looked through the magazines, and Clara had fallen in love with one dress in particular. Jo found it hard to believe that Clara and her mother would make a special trip all the way to Kurfürstendamm Boulevard to purchase it. The clothes that Josephine and her sisters wore—purchased at Reutter’s Emporium, down on the corner—paled in comparison to Clara’s stylish wardrobe.
    When they’d grown bored with browsing through the magazines, Josephine suggested that they pay a visit to Frieda, an older neighbor who would surely offer them some lemonade and let them sit in her garden. Besides, a visit to Frieda was always interesting. The old widow lived a life they could only dream about. No tiresome rules or duties, no dull daily routine. Ever since her husband had died, Frieda did whatever she liked, and Josephine admired her tremendously for that.
    But Clara shook her head. “I’m sick. Besides, Mother doesn’t like my visiting Frieda so often. Just yesterday she said Frieda is the kind of woman who’ll put ideas into your head before you can say boo .”
    Josephine had stayed on a little longer out of sympathy, but, enveloped by the intense smell of lavender and the bright floral wallpaper, she felt unable to last much longer. She stood up abruptly, crossed to the window, and threw it open.
    Luisenstadt, always so bustling during the week, had looked utterly lifeless that day. Everything the residents of the district needed was within an easy walk: Just down from Clara’s house, on the corner, was the large Reutter’s Emporium. Then there were bakeries, butchers, grocery stores, Clara’s father’s pharmacy, and Schmied-the-Smith’s forge. A few narrow apartment buildings were across the road from the pharmacy, and among those was a single, tiny, freestanding house where old Frieda lived. The lower end of the street was taken up entirely by Moritz Herrenhus’s clothing factory, which extended almost as far as the park known as Schlesischer Busch. But the area had been going through a transformation of late: more and more skilled craftsmen were moving to the outskirts of the city where they could produce their goods more quickly and cheaply.
    “Let ’em go,” Schmied-the-Smith was often heard to say. “It may well be the end of the line for an old ropemaker’s shop in the city, but horses will always need shoeing. I won’t run out of work anytime soon.”
    Her father shod eight to ten horses every day, and it was often ten in the evening before Josephine was finished clearing and cleaning up the smithy. No one expected Felix to lend a hand. He was the little prince, after all. While she was no more than the maid. And he was the reason she had to miss out on visiting her aunt . . .
    Work, work, work, from morning till night—that was all Josephine ever did! She had stared morosely out Clara’s window and wished herself very far away.
    Sophie Berg had appeared in Clara’s room, interrupting Josephine’s peevish thoughts. “There’s smoke coming from your father’s forge and on a Sunday at that—what do you think it could mean?” she had asked with a furrowed brow—
    Josephine closed her eyes. She didn’t want to remember. Not here, not now. But her thoughts would not stop. They rampaged through her head like wild horses.
    The barn door had been latched shut from the inside. She could smell the stink of the fire and burning hoof trimmings as she shouted Felix’s name. The little villain! How many times had her parents forbidden him from touching the