The Star of Kazan

by Eva Ibbotson

  But when they went up the stairs and came out in the riding school itself, everything changed.

  It was like being in a ballroom: the crystal chandeliers blazing with light, the white walls, the red velvet on the banquettes, the huge portrait of Charles VI on his charger. The band played soft music, and below her, the russet sand was raked into swirls like the sea.

  Loremarie was at the other end of the row, wriggling and showing off, but Annika had forgotten her.

  The band broke into the national anthem, everyone rose to their feet; the emperor in a blue-and-silver uniform came in, with his guest – the portly English king – and Ellie sighed with pleasure. She dearly loved the emperor, who was so old, so alone and so pig-headedly dutiful. Then everyone sat down again, the band started to play the Radetzky March, the great double doors opened – and two dozen snow-white horses came into the ring.

  They came like conquerors, in perfect formation and in perfect time to the music, lifting their legs high, bringing them down exactly on the beat, and as they came level with the place where the emperor sat, they stopped as one and the riders swept off their cockaded hats in homage.

  Then they began. They started with the simpler movements: the passage, which is a kind of floating trot, the piaffe, where the horse trots on the spot, the flying changes, the turn on the forelegs . . . The tall riders in their white buckskin breeches sat silent, guiding the horses with movements so small they could not be noticed – or even just with their thoughts. The understanding between the stallions and the men who rode them had been built up during the long years of training. There was no need any longer for commands.

  Now the younger horses left the ring, the band played a Boccherini minuet and three of the most highly trained stallions did a pas de trois: weaving the earlier steps into an intricate and faultless dance.

  ‘They’re so beautiful,’ whispered Annika. Light poured from their white skins, their manes and tails tossed like silk, they held their heads like princes.

  The three stallions disappeared through the huge double doors. The horses which came in now were riderless; their riding masters walked behind them, holding them only on the long rein. These were the most experienced horses, who could do the steps on their own – the one in the lead was the emperor’s favourite, Maestoso Fantasia, the horse Annika had seen on the poster.

  If Annika had chosen to come to the horses to get even with Loremarie, she had long forgotten it. Beside her Pauline, who was always doubtful about horses – the way they tossed their heads and stamped their feet – was hanging eagerly over the balustrade.

  And after the interval, the climax of all those years of training, the famous ‘airs above the ground’, with the riders riding without stirrups as they took their mounts through the levade, known to Vienna’s children because of the many statues where the horses sit back on their haunches and lift their legs into the air . . . and the courbette, where the horses don’t just rear up but jump forward on their hind legs and one can see their muscles bunched and rippling with the effort . . . And the most difficult of all, the dazzling ‘leap of the goat’, the capriole, where the horse really seems to be flying, and Annika, along with most of the spectators, let out her breath in an ‘Oh’ of wonder.

  The show ended with the famous quadrille, ‘The ballet of the white stallions’, in which all the horses took part.

  Unlike the other children in the audience, Loremarie had found it impossible to sit still. She fidgeted and fussed and dropped her purse and picked it up again . . . Now she stood up and pointed at one horse in the centre of the row of stallions weaving faultlessly between the pillars.

  ‘That horse is the wrong colour,’ she said loudly. ‘He’s brown; he isn’t white. He shouldn’t be there!’

  She was hushed not by her doting parents but by an old gentleman in the row behind who told her to sit down and be quiet.

  ‘You had better study the traditions of the Imperial Spanish Riding School before you come here again,’ he said sternly.

  Loremarie shrugged and sat down, and the dance went on.

  Then once more the riders raised their hats to the emperor, the horses’ ears came forward, acknowledging the thunderous applause – and it was over.

  ‘It makes you proud to be Austrian,’ said Ellie as they stood up to go, and nothing more was said about the money being better spent on new buildings for the university.

  The Eggharts hurried Loremarie away without speaking and were driven home in their enormous yellow motor, but the professors now led the way to Sacher’s restaurant, where they had booked a table, for on Found Days they were very democratic and ate with their servants.

  And at the end of the meal, they had something important to say to Annika.

  ‘We have decided that from now on you do not have to call us “Professor”. You may call us “Uncle”,’ said Professor Julius. ‘Not Professor Julius but Uncle Julius.’

  ‘And not Professor Emil, but Uncle Emil,’ said Professor Emil.

  And they smiled and nodded, very pleased with this gesture. Professor Gertrude did not say that she could be called ‘Aunt’ because she had wandered off inside her head, where she was composing a sonata for the harp, but she too nodded and smiled.

  So all in all it was a splendid evening and as they got off the tram in the Keller Strasse and turned into the square, the party was in an excellent mood, singing and telling jokes.

  Then suddenly they stopped.

  In front of the Eggharts’ house a white motorized van with high windows was parked. There was a red cross painted on the side and the words ‘Mission of Mercy’ written above it.

  Had there been an accident? No one liked the Eggharts, but that did not mean they wanted them to be hurt.

  The door of the van opened, and two nurses in navy-blue uniforms got out. Then they turned back to the van and fetched something – a bundle of shawls and blankets. One nurse took hold of one end of the bundle and the other nurse took hold of the other end and they began to carry it towards the house.

  ‘What is it?’ whispered Annika – for the bundle seemed to weigh more than one would expect from a pile of blankets.

  At this point the bundle twitched and said something. It gave a jerk and a nightcap with a ribbon fell out on to the pavement. Not a bundle then, a person. And a person who was not pleased.

  Meanwhile, the driver of the van had got out and rung the Eggharts’ bell. A maid came and seemed to be giving instructions, pointing upwards. There was no sign of the Eggharts, though Annika saw the curtains of the drawing room twitch.

  Then the manservant, the snooty Leopold, came out and opened the back of the van and took out a battered-looking trunk, which he carried into the house. When he had done that he returned and pulled out two wooden boxes and these too he carried in.

  Presently the door opened once again, and the two nurses got back into the van, the driver returned, and the van drove away.

  As the birthday party crossed the square to their own houses, they were very quiet. No one sang now or told jokes.

  It had been a strange arrival. Was it really a person who had been delivered so carelessly? And if so, what did it mean?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE COUNTESS OF MONTE CRISTO

  For a few days after the bundle, looking like a pile of unwanted clothes, had been carried into the Eggharts’ house nothing more was heard. The Eggharts didn’t speak to anyone and of course rumours flew round the square. The bundle was a madwoman like Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre, who laughed hideously and would set the place on fire . . . or she had bubonic plague and had to be sealed up and quarantined.

  Then Pauline read a book called The Count of Monte Cristo about a man who had been wrongfully imprisoned in a dungeon in a castle on an island in the middle of the sea.

  ‘That’s what she’s like. She’s a Countess of Monte Cristo,’ Pauline said. ‘They’ve walled her up and she can’t get out.’

  It was Annika who found out that the
‘countess’ lived not in a dungeon but in an attic. It exactly faced the attic where Annika slept, across the square, and on the third day she saw something carried to the chair beside the window. Then the window was opened, and the old lady was aired – like the washing, thought Annika – before the window was closed again and she was carried back to bed.

  It was not until the beginning of the second week that Mitzi, one of the Eggharts’ maids, was able to slip into Ellie’s kitchen for a cup of coffee and tell them what was going on.

  The old lady was Herr Egghart’s great-aunt. She was ninety-four years old and sometimes wandered in her mind, and the Eggharts had done everything they could to find a hospital or old people’s home where she could be looked after.

  ‘They put her in the asylum – the one they’re going to pull down, behind the infirmary,’ said Mitzi, ‘but the man who ran it found she was related to the Eggharts and he said she wasn’t mad and they should take her in. She’s very frail and he said she wouldn’t live long. There was quite a fuss, but the Eggharts were afraid of what people would say so they agreed. She has a nurse in the morning and evening to tidy her up, but she can’t get downstairs and most of the time she just lies in bed. She’ll go soon; old people know when they aren’t wanted.’

  ‘Poor soul,’ said Ellie, stirring her coffee. ‘It’s hard to be old.’

  This annoyed Annika, who was sitting on her stool in the corner, stringing beans. ‘No it isn’t. It won’t be for you because I shall buy a house in the mountains and look after you – and Sigrid too.’

  ‘Mind you, she can be a handful, the old lady,’ Mitzi went on. ‘She didn’t get on with her family and when she was fifteen she went her own way and the family lost touch with her.’

  The Eggharts had been forced to take in their great-aunt but that was all. They never mentioned her to visitors who came to the house, they never took her out. It was as though they were pretending to themselves that she wasn’t there.

  What happened next was odd and Annika couldn’t make sense of it. Loremarie stopped to speak to her when she met her in the street – and not to sneer or to show off. She was polite, almost friendly, and though she still stuck out her behind, the black eyes, sunk so deep in her face, did not seem quite so baleful.

  The first time Loremarie came up to her was when Annika was wheeling out the new Bodek baby in his ancient, rickety pram. Usually Loremarie walked past all the Bodeks with her nose in the air, but now she forced herself to look under the hood and even asked how old he was.

  The second time, Annika was returning from the shops with a basket of new potatoes and this time Loremarie actually crossed the street to speak to her.

  But it wasn’t till she found Annika leaning over the rim of the fountain, crumbling bread into the water for the goldfish, that the reason for Loremarie’s friendliness became clear. She wanted something from Annika and it was the last thing that Annika expected.

  ‘You know you’re poor,’ she began, ‘aren’t you?’

  Annika shrugged. She was worried about the goldfish – one of them had fungus on his fins – and though it would have been nice to hit Loremarie, there was always a fuss at home when she hit people.

  ‘So would you like to earn some money?’ Loremarie went on, looking back at the windows of her house to make sure her mother wasn’t watching.

  Annika crumbled the last of the bread into the water.

  ‘How much money?’

  ‘Quite a lot. Twenty kreutzers. Each time you go.’

  ‘Each time I go where?’

  Loremarie looked round again furtively. ‘Go and read to my great-aunt. Sit with her. I’m supposed to do it for half an hour every afternoon. The doctor told my mother that she was lonely – the old woman. But I can’t. I tried once and it was awful. She dribbles and her head wobbles and suddenly she goes to sleep and her mouth falls open.’ Loremarie shuddered. ‘It made me feel sick.’

  ‘Yes, but how could I do it instead of you? Your mother would know.’

  ‘No, she wouldn’t. I go up between tea and supper when she rests. Anyway, even if she did find out she probably wouldn’t mind as long as it keeps the old woman quiet. The doctor is horrid to us. He says we’ll be old one day and we should be kind to her. But we won’t – not like that . . . poor and mad and dribbly . . .’

  Annika was thinking, wringing the water from the ends of her hair. ‘I can’t come till next week when school breaks up and even then I have jobs to do. But I’ll come when I can. Only you must give me twenty-five kreutzers. Twenty isn’t enough.’

  If she could stick it out a few times she’d have enough money to buy a proper birthday present for Ellie.

  ‘All right. I’ll leave the money on the window sill in the scullery, in an envelope. You’ll come in by the back door, of course, being a kitchen child, so you’ll see it.’

  Annika nodded. It was odd how people thought she wanted to come in by the front door instead of straight into the nice, warm, friendly kitchen of whatever house she visited.

  School had finished; exams were over and so was the tidying up, which was almost worse. Pauline had come top in everything except gymnastics, in which she got a very low mark indeed, and this set her worrying about a man called Ferdinand Haytor, who had become wrestling champion of Lower Austria even though he had been born with his left foot the wrong way round.

  ‘I don’t know why I can’t be like him,’ she said.

  Annika was still very busy. Ellie had decided that she was old enough to make a proper apple strudel entirely by herself.

  Making an apple strudel on your own is a bit like climbing Everest without oxygen. Only one very special type of flour will do, the dough has to be teased out to be paper-thin and laid over a tablecloth, and the apple slices and melted butter and nuts and spices have to be poured on without making a single hole, before it is rolled into a dachshund shape and baked.

  Annika managed it, but it was a mixed blessing because Ellie then said it was time she started working with aspic.

  ‘Quails’ eggs in aspic – now there’s a dish!’ she said.

  In the holidays, too, Professor Emil liked to take Annika behind the scenes in the art museum, to the restoration room, where men in baize aprons were at work cleaning old paintings.

  ‘Look at that!’ he would say as the halo of some tortured saint turned from grubby brown to shining gold under the restorer’s hand. ‘Isn’t that splendid? And that idiot Harteisen actually thinks pictures shouldn’t be cleaned! The darker and dirtier they are, the better he is pleased.’

  But on Saturday the children still escaped to their deserted garden. Stefan’s older brother Ernst came too and they acted the whole of The Count of Monte Cristo with the hut as the dungeon on the island and the steps of the ruined house as the palace of the villain who had plotted the count’s downfall.

  In the story the count escaped and vengeance was done. But in the Eggharts’ attic, the other prisoner still lay unvisited and alone.

  The first time Annika went to sit with the Eggharts’ great-aunt, Loremarie was waiting to show her the way. As she tiptoed after her up the stairs, Annika’s feet sank deep into the patterned carpet; Chinese vases stood on pedestals, there was a smell of hothouse lilies.

  After the third flight of stairs they came to a landing with a wooden partition and a door. This led to a last flight of stairs, but these were very different: narrow and bare and airless, and instead of the scent of lilies it was the smell of disinfectant that drifted towards them.

  Here were the two attics where the servants slept, and a third one, which now housed the unwanted old lady.

  Loremarie turned the handle, pushed Annika into the room, and closed the door again.

  The room looked like a lumber room. The trunk and the two wooden boxes that had come in the ambulance were stacked in the corner; nothing seemed to have been unpacked. In the middle of the floor was a narrow bed with a chair beside it. On a bedside table was a jug of water, a glass an
d a pile of books. No flowers, no fruit, nothing that was usual in the bedrooms of the sick.

  The Eggharts’ great-aunt was snoring, small snuffling snores like the snores of a pug dog; and her mouth hung open, just as Loremarie had said.

  Annika walked to the window. It was strange seeing her own house and her attic from the other side of the square.

  Behind her, the snoring had stopped. She turned.

  The old lady was so small and wizened that she scarcely made a hump in the bedclothes. Her white hair was so sparse that you could see the scalp through it. She might have been dead already.

  But not when she opened her eyes. They were very blue and her gaze was steady.

  ‘You’re not Loremarie,’ she said.

  Annika came over to the bed. ‘No.’

  The old lady gave a grunt of satisfaction. ‘Well, that’s a good thing anyway,’ she said.

  Annika smiled. She knew she shouldn’t but she did. ‘Would you like me to read to you?’

  The great-aunt sighed. ‘Not really. Not from those dreadful books.’

  Annika picked up the top book on the pile. It was the colour of bile and the title was Meditations of a Working Bishop. The one below that was called The Evening of Life by One Who Has Suffered.

  ‘They’re not exactly cheerful books, are they?’ said Annika.

  ‘No. No indeed. But then the Eggharts are not exactly a cheerful family. That’s why—’ She was stopped by a fit of coughing.

  ‘Would you like some water?’

  ‘Yes. You’ll have . . . to help . . . me to . . . sit up.’

  She was so light and bony and frail, it was like propping up a bird.

  ‘So . . . who are you if you’re not Loremarie?’ she said when she could speak again.

  ‘I’m Annika. I live across the square. And I’m a foundling.’

  ‘Ah, that explains it.’

  ‘What does it explain?’

  The old lady lay back on her pillows. ‘Foundlings make their own lives.’ For a while she was silent and Annika was wondering if she should go, when she said, ‘We could tell stories instead of reading them.’