Scarlet letters on a creamy ground: Frau Graube’s School of Stitches – tailoring to order. Here, Emma Rimmele had found Angela Enke. The girl’s mother had told me that her daughter often went to see Frau Graube in search of work, and that she sometimes slept at the homes of girls who worked there, too. I lifted the latch and a bell tinkled. A dozen ornate iron pillars held up a low ceiling above the bonnets of a score or more of young women who were sewing and stitching in the large room. An older dame, the proprietor of the place, was seated at the far end behind a desk which was raised on a high dais. Ruth Graube was a well-known figure in Lotingen. A half-blind widow in her sixties, she had been justly famed for making bridal gowns and christening smocks with exquisite stitching. Frau Graube herself had made the clothes in which my two eldest children had been carried to the Pietist chapel to be baptised. One of her girls had made the shift in which little Anders had recently been laid to rest.
