High City on a Hill (Ch2)

And finally, after almost eighteen months, we have an edited and proofread chapter 2!

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Chapter 2 — “We Can Make it Work”

I’d been married to Raoul for nine months, but I’d known him since we’d first come to Paris.

We’d left Vienna and the big house on the Praterstraße after my brother Rudolf died. It had been a hot summer, and he’d gone swimming with his friends and taken a chill that turned into a fever. I could still remember those last days, with all the windows shuttered and my mother drifting like a ghost through empty room after empty room, in those apartments that had once been so full of music and eager talk.

Without Rudi, nothing had ever been quite the same. My father had taken us first to Baden Baden, then to Paris, where he had business interests. My mother’s piano stood unplayed and she rarely left our lodgings. I was lonely and awkward, a growing girl in a city that made little distinction between Viennese and the hated Prussians. We’d been outsiders back home, though my grandfather had been baptised as a Christian, but somehow it had never seemed to matter. Now I was an outsider and a foreigner.

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