by Eva Ibbotson
She waited for sympathy, but what came from Edeltraut was more in the nature of a snort.
‘How were you injured?’
‘A harp fell on me from the top of the stairs. A very large harp, a most dangerous instrument.’
‘A harp! How on earth—’
‘A woman came with a harp and said she was sent by the Duchess of Cerise to give a concert to the girls. But I became suspicious – I am always concerned with the safety of the girls – and sure enough she was an impostor. So I ran out to stop her . . .’
She described the horrible events of that day in detail. When she had finished she leaned back on the pillows, overcome by the memory, but both her visitors were unimpressed.
‘What was the harpist like?’
‘A middle-aged woman with a bun of hair. She looked perfectly respectable. So did the boy who was with her, a peasant boy but well spoken. I didn’t suspect until—’
‘Wait,’ interrupted Edeltraut. ‘This peasant boy, what was he like?’
‘He had fair hair and blue eyes. He was just the servant who helped to carry the instrument. I’m afraid you must ask my secretary to come to me – I’m feeling faint.’
But Frau von Tannenberg was already on the way to the door.
Outside she turned to Oswald. ‘Professor Gertrude was a harpist. And the boy fits the description of the washerwoman’s child whom Annika befriended. Could they have had anything to do with this? If Annika wrote a letter to Vienna and said she wasn’t happy?’
‘How would she get the letter out? All the post is read.’
‘She might have got one of the maids to post it for her. You know how she always clung to servants. Unless Gudrun told them where Annika was, but she swears she didn’t.’
‘Gudrun is my daughter; she wouldn’t lie.’
Edeltraut ignored this. ‘There can’t be any other explanation. She’s either in Vienna or running round the countryside and I don’t know which is worse.’
When they returned to Spittal she found a letter from Profesor Julius explaining that they had taken Annika away from Grossenfluss and she was safe with them.
‘How dare he?’ raged Edeltraut. ‘Annika is my daughter and I am her legal guardian. These professors are going to be very sorry for this. Very sorry indeed!’
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
IS SHE COMING?
It was as though the city knew that Zed was leaving and that everything had to be as beautiful as possible. The sun shone, the lilacs and laburnums were in full bloom, the cafe tables were out on the pavement . . .
Annika behaved as though she had arranged all this for the benefit of her friend. She wanted to show Zed everything and take him everywhere. The professors had given her some pocket money and Zed had saved some of his earnings, so they began by exchanging presents in the marzipan shop in the Karntner Strasse: a spotted ladybird for Annika, a bushy-tailed fox for Zed.
‘We have to eat them at once,’ said Annika, ‘otherwise we won’t have the courage.’
They went to the fruit market, where the stallholders all knew her and made remarks about her handsome friend.
She took him to the cathedral, with its solemn paintings and the pile of skulls in the crypt from the days of the great plague. She led him behind the scenes in the art museum, where Uncle Emil’s friends were cleaning a picture of John the Baptist’s head, and past the statue of St Boniface under which Sigrid’s uncle, the one who had eaten twenty-seven potato dumplings, had hidden on his wedding night.
And as they walked, they talked. Annika still knew nothing of what her mother had done, she never mentioned Spittal. These few days in Vienna had to exist without a future or a past.
They stood on the big State Bridge and watched the Danube, which flowed wide and deep and rather murkily grey, down to Budapest in Hungary, and on through the plains of Eastern Europe.
‘You could put a message in a bottle if you wanted me, and throw it in the river,’ Zed suggested. ‘Then I’d find it when I was out riding and I’d come. Messages in bottles are important; I wouldn’t ignore it.’
‘Yes, I could do that . . . if I was here,’ said Annika, and this was the closest she came to saying how uncertain she felt about the future. ‘Perhaps by that time you’ll be married to Rosina.’
‘Rosina?’ Zed looked at her, puzzled, and she was glad he had forgotten the name of the girl who had tried to give her a kitten. And, ‘No, I won’t,’ he said firmly when she had explained, and he looked at her in a way that made her feel absurdly happy.
‘Still, we might never see each other again,’ she said.
‘Yes, we will,’ said Zed. ‘We will.’ And he put his hand over hers for a moment as it rested on the parapet.
They took the tram back to the Inner City and walked past the arcaded Stallburg, where the Lipizzaners lived, towards the Imperial Palace. When they came to St Michael’s Gate, Annika stopped suddenly and took hold of Zed’s arm.
‘Look, there he is!’
And it really was the Emperor Franz Joseph, driving out in a carriage with golden wheels to inspect the Razumovsky Guards, and putting up a white-gloved hand to wave, even to this one schoolgirl and her friend.
Zed followed the carriage with his eyes. ‘I’m glad I’ve seen him. It’s like seeing a piece of history.’
‘You would stay if you could, wouldn’t you, Zed? Stay in Vienna?’
She had annoyed him. He stopped dead and turned to face her.
‘What do you think?’ he said angrily. ‘There’s everything I’ve ever wanted here: books to read and a chance to learn things, and Ellie and Sigrid treating me as though I was their son . . . and friends. I’ve not had friends before – I was always on my own. You think life with the gypsies is romantic because you saw them one night round the campfire, but it isn’t. It’s hard and rough – and it can be cruel.’ He broke off. ‘Oh, never mind, you wouldn’t understand.’
‘Perhaps I would,’ she said very quietly. ‘Perhaps I do. I’ve had to leave here once and probably—’
‘No.’ He interrupted her, and then remembered that she knew nothing of the suspicions surrounding her mother, or of the plan the professors had made.
In the afternoon, when Pauline and Stefan returned from school, all four of them took Rocco to the deserted garden and let him graze.
Stefan was resigned now to following his father as a groundsman in the Prater.
‘What’s the point of making oneself miserable?’ said Stefan. ‘There’s no money to train as an engineer and that’s the end of it. And at least you’ll have someone to take you round the fair and get you in half-price.’ He turned to Zed. ‘You’ll see tomorrow when we go on the Giant Wheel. It really is something. There isn’t a higher one in Europe.’
Tomorrow was Zed’s last day but one, and they were going to spend it in the Prater. But when the morning came it turned out to be a very different sort of day, because, as soon as they had finished their breakfast, the professors sent for Annika.
‘We have something to tell you,’ they said.
It was not a nice ‘something’; Annika could see that at once. All three professors were looking grim – indeed they had only just stopped arguing about whether what they were about to do was right. Professor Gertrude was against it: ‘There’s no need to tell her, it’ll only make her miserable.’
But both Julius and Emil said she should know. ‘Truth is important,’ they said, ‘even for children. Particularly for children.’
All the same, they did not find it easy to begin.
‘It’s about your mother,’ said Professor Julius.
Annika’s heart began to beat wildly. ‘Is she coming?’
‘Yes, she is coming. She is staying at the Hotel Riverside and she will be here tomorrow afternoon to fetch you. We wrote to tell her that you were safe with us, and that we took you away from Grossenfluss because you were unhappy there, and that we think you should not return. Dr Flass has given you a medical certificate to say
it would be bad for your health.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But there is something . . . Perhaps we should explain why Zed came to Vienna. He had found out that the jewels in the trunk which the Eggharts’ great-aunt showed you were real.’
Annika looked at him in amazement. ‘But they can’t have been. She told me all about them . . . how the jeweller in Paris had them copied.’
‘Nevertheless, they are real.’ He told her the story of Fabrice’s deception. ‘He was very fond of the old lady, so he played a trick on her.’
‘A kind trick,’ said Annika. ‘I wish she’d known. Or perhaps it was best as it was.’
‘And it seems,’ the professor went on, ‘that the jewels are worth a fortune – and that they were left to you. Fräulein Egghart left you the trunk and all it contained; the lawyers have confirmed this.’
Annika was bewildered.
‘But where is it then? My mother thought that Zed had taken it and at first . . . But I’m sure he didn’t. I’m absolutely sure.’
‘We are sure too.’
‘But then who did?’ Annika was completely at a loss.
‘When Fräulein Egghart showed you the jewels,’ the professor went on, ‘did you see a brooch shaped like a butterfly?’
‘Yes, I did. Blue sapphires for the wings and filigree gold for the antennae with rubies for the eyes. I suppose I should have known the stones were real, they were so beautiful.’
Professor Julius picked up a letter on his desk. ‘Yes. That is an exact description. We asked a friend in Switzerland to make some enquiries and his letter came this morning. Your butterfly brooch has just been sold by Zwingli and Hammerman for two million Swiss francs.’
‘I don’t understand. How did the brooch—’
Professor Julius put a hand on her shoulder. ‘We think your mother may have taken it. That your mother and your Uncle Oswald took the trunk. The description of the woman who brought the brooch to the jeweller fits your mother perfectly.’
‘NO!’ Annika pulled away from him. ‘It isn’t true. I don’t believe it. My mother wouldn’t steal from me – why should she? Anything that belongs to me I’d have given her. She knows that.’
‘It would have to be proved, and since it is you who have been robbed it is you would have to bring the case against her. If she was convicted and sent to prison we would ask the courts if you could come back to us, at any rate for the length of the sentence. This would mean that you could stay in Vienna and—’
But Annika couldn’t take in another word.
‘NO!’ she said again. ‘It isn’t true. You’re lying!’ And she turned and ran from the room.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
THE RIVERSIDE HOTEL
Frau Edeltraut sat at the dressing table of her room at the Riverside Hotel, brushing her hair. Bottles of scent and ointments, her silver combs, her powder puffs were spread out in front of her; sunlight filtered in from her private veranda with its deckchairs and pots of hanging carnations. Oswald was in an adjoining room, gazing at the paddle steamer and the colourful pleasure boats on the river through his binoculars.
Mathilde had been difficult, before they left for Vienna.
‘I don’t see why you should use Oswald all the time to fetch and carry for you,’ she had said, glaring at her sister. ‘Oswald is my husband; he doesn’t belong to you.’
‘I never said he did. If it’s of any interest to you, I find Oswald extremely dreary. He has no breadth – no vision,’ said Edeltraut. ‘But I need him for this last journey to Vienna. Once we have Annika back at Spittal I will find a person to be with her at all times and see that there’s no more nonsense. If necessary . . .’ But this was a sentence she did not finish, since Mathilde was weak and dithery and had been fond of Annika. ‘And I have to point out that you were pleased enough to come to Zurich and spend my money.’
‘Your daughter’s money, you mean.’
Edeltraut ignored this. ‘If the truth came out you’d be in quite as much trouble as Oswald and myself.’
‘No, I wouldn’t. I didn’t steal the trunk. And Gudrun knows nothing about it, nothing at all.’
‘Well, of course not. Nor does Hermann. One would hardly bring children into something in which secrecy is essential. But I tell you, if we don’t get Annika away from Vienna, and quickly, and make sure she cannot escape again, everything we have worked for could fall to the ground.’
‘Well, all right,’ said Mathilde sulkily. ‘But this is the last time – and I shall expect you to bring back a present for Gudrun. I suppose you won’t go back to the Hotel Bristol.’
‘You know perfectly well that I can’t go back to the Bristol,’ said Edeltraut, who had left without paying her bill.
‘Well, in that case why don’t you stay near the river instead? There’s a good hotel by the Danube – the Riverside. Oswald thinks we need a new boat for the lake and there’s a boat-builder near there.’
‘Oh, Oswald wants me to buy him a boat now, does he?’
But she did in fact book two rooms at the Riverside Hotel on the edge of the city, and when she and Oswald arrived in Vienna she was glad she had done so, because the weather was fine and warm and the hotel, with its verandas over the water and its riverside walks and its view of the landing stage where the steamer unloaded its cargo of passengers, was a very pleasant place to be.
‘I have business to attend to in the morning, as I told you,’ Edeltraut told her brother-in-law when they arrived. ‘I shan’t need you for that. But in the afternoon I want you to come with me to fetch Annika. I have full legal rights as her mother, but I don’t trust these professors.’
‘You don’t think they suspect something?’
‘Don’t be silly, how could they? Zed’s with the gypsies in Hungary and no one else knows anything.’
So now she was busy creating herself in readiness for another day. Her morning dress of coral silk was protected by a chiffon peignoir; her coral earrings and matching necklace were waiting on the jewellery stand. She had powdered her face and darkened her eyelashes. Her long hair, washed the night before by the hotel hairdresser, hung loose down her back and she was brushing it. One could never brush hair hard enough, or for too long.
She was interrupted by a knock at the door and a hotel page announced that there was a young lady to see her.
‘Did she give her name?’
‘No, madam. She’s very young; just a child. Shall I send her up.’
‘Yes, you had better do that.’
Annika had been awake the whole night. The professors’ accusations went round and round in her head, and every time she pushed them away they came back again.
The professors were lying; they had to be. They may not have meant to lie but they had lied just the same. It was not possible that her mother was a thief. If she was guilty, she had not only stolen the trunk but blamed Zed for the theft – and that was impossible.
Annika remembered the joy of that first meal in the Hotel Bristol, the excitement and pride of finding that she belonged to such a beautiful woman. The hope with which she had travelled to Spittal . . .
Perhaps Uncle Oswald had done it? He was always doing things for her mother; yes, it could be that. And her mother hadn’t known till it was over.
Oh God, she had to believe that her mother was good. How did people live if they thought their mother was dishonest?
As soon as it was light Annika had got dressed and crept out of the house. She had to see her mother at once and she had to see her alone and find out the truth. Nothing mattered except that.
The journey to the Riverside Hotel was long and wearisome: the tram to the terminus, then the little train which steamed along the Danube, and a dusty walk from the station to the hotel.
But as she came up to the front entrance with its flowering trees and its awnings and verandas, her mood lifted. This was a place for summer and happiness, not for lies and intrigue. In ten minutes, in five, the nightmare would be ov
er.
Her mother would put her arms round her and tell her the truth. And the truth would set her free!
‘Come in,’ called Edeltraut. She sprayed herself with scent once more and shook out her hair so that it mantled her shoulders. Then, her brush still in her hand, she rose quickly and went to the door.
‘Annika, my dearest child! My own darling! What is it – you look so pale?’
Annika had not come forward. She was still standing, very straight, her back against the door.
‘What has upset you so, my child? What have they been telling you to make you look like that?
‘They told me that it was you who stole La Rondine’s trunk,’ Annika said steadily. ‘You and Uncle Oswald – because the jewels in it were real.’
Her mother’s hand went to her throat.
‘How dare they? How dare they tell you such dreadful lies! No wonder you look so upset.’
‘Zed came – he’s in Vienna. He heard the story from Baron von Keppel and—’
‘Zed! Zed is in Vienna?’
‘Yes.’
For a moment there was complete silence. Annika had not moved from the door, nor had her eyes left her mother’s face. When she spoke again her voice was very low, but each word was absolutely clear.
‘Could you please tell me the truth,’ said Annika. ‘Just the truth, Mama. Nothing else.’
Edeltraut had slipped off her peignoir; in her coral silk dress, her wonderful hair mantling her shoulders, she was dazzling. Her scent was different; not strange and exotic but light and summery. Beautiful people always surprise one afresh, but Annika stood her ground.
‘Please, Mama.’
Then something extraordinary happened. The tall proud woman in her silken dress seemed suddenly to crumple. She took a few faltering steps – and then she dropped on to her knees in front of Annika.
‘You shall have the truth,’ she said brokenly. ‘Yes, I did it. I made Oswald fetch the trunk – it was addressed to me, remember? I took the jewels and took them to Switzerland. But before you call the police, would you try to understand? Not to forgive, that would be asking too much, but to understand.’