The Star of Kazan

by Eva Ibbotson

  Eva Ibbotson was born in Vienna, but spent her early childhood travelling backwards and forwards across Europe between the homes of her father, a scientist, and her mother, a novelist and playwright, who separated when she was three. When the Nazis came to power, her family fed to England and she was sent to boarding school. She planned to become a physiologist, but hated doing experiments on animals, and was rescued from some fierce rabbits by her husband-to-be. She became a writer while bringing up her four children, and her bestselling novels for both adults and children have been published around the world. She lives in Newcastle.

  The Star of Kazan won the Nestlé Silver Award and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.

  Journey to the River Sea won the Nestlé Gold Award, was runner-up for the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award, and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. Anne Fine, then Children’s Laureate, said of it: ‘Any reader presented with this book will be enriched for life.’

  For more information about Eva Ibbotson and her

  books visit: www.bebo.com/evaibbotson

  and www.panmacmillan.com/evaibbotson

  Books by Eva Ibbotson

  The Dragonfly Pool

  The Star of Kazan

  Journey to the River Sea

  The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

  The Great Ghost Rescue

  Which Witch?

  The Haunting of Hiram

  Not Just a Witch

  The Secret of Platform 13

  Dial a Ghost

  Monster Mission

  For older readers

  A Song for Summer

  The Secret Countess

  The Morning Gift

  Praise for The Star of Kazan:

  ‘Every bit as compelling as . . . Journey to the River Sea. An ingeniously plotted story, with a compelling sense of character and place’

  The Times

  ‘Eva Ibbotson creates a marvellous world of rich and poor, kind and unkind, young and old against a background of Viennese convention. The Star of Kazan is a heartwarming, old-fashioned adventure . . . as absorbing as Ibbotson’s prize-winning Journey to the River Sea’

  Julia Eccleshare, Guardian

  ‘Eva Ibbotson is one of our most enjoyable writers for the young. She tells stories with humour, warmth and perfect clarity in a way that children follow completely . . . Ibbotson builds her story with cliffhanging chapter endings . . . on the way we fall, not only for the heroine and her friends but for the real city of Vienna and its Lipizzaner horses, big wheel and irresistible pastries. The book, too, is delicious’

  Sunday Times Children’s Book of the Week

  ‘This is a great big fat engrossing read. It draws you in and won’t let you go until the last page is turned and the last sigh is sighed’

  Books for Keeps

  ‘Eva Ibbotson is writing better than ever . . . The Star of Kazan . . . should pick up more prizes’

  Independent

  ‘Fans of Eva’s last novel, Journey to the River Sea, will be glad to know she’s back and on top form . . . An amazing adventure that will launch you into a Viennese whirl!’

  Sunday Times (‘Funday Times’)

  ‘[The Star of Kazan] eschews magic . . . Ibbotson excels at describing not only the world of the senses but that of the heart . . . Ibbotson’s genius is for creating people (and animals) whom you instantly recognize and love’

  The Times

  ‘The bookshops are crammed with children’s titles, but where is the quality in all that quantity? Amid the flurries of new titles, what do you choose? This summer the problem is solved. Ibbotson has written a new novel, The Star of Kazan’

  Dina Rabinovitch, Guardian

  ‘A fabulously satisfying read’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘This is a solidly traditional piece of story-telling . . . There is more to the book than a good story, expertly told’

  Times Educational Supplement

  ‘This is a beautiful, simply written and enchanting story that will keep you in suspense until the very end. An excellent read’

  Publishing News

  ‘The Star of Kazan weighs in at an impressive 380 pages, and that is important because when you are presented with story-telling of this calibre, you simply never want it to end’

  Lindsey Fraser, Bookseller

  EVA

  IBBOTSON

  MACMILLAN CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  First published 2004 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  This edition published 2008 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  This electronic edition published 2008 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-330-47741-3 in Adobe Reader format

  ISBN 978-0-330-47740-6 in Adobe Digital Editions format

  ISBN 978-0-330-47742-0 in Mobipocket format

  Copyright © Eva Ibbotson 2004

  The right of Eva Ibbotson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.

  For Rowan

  CONTENTS

  1 A Person is Found

  2 The Golden City

  3 The Sinking of the Medusa

  4 White Horses

  5 The Countess of Monte Cristo

  6 The Star of Kazan

  7 A Swallow Set Free

  8 The Christmas Carp

  9 The Giant Wheel

  10 Happiness

  11 Journey to Norrland

  12 The House at Spittal

  13 Lunch at the Hunting Lodge

  14 Finding the Foal

  15 Hector

  16 Healing Waters

  17 A Smell of Burning

  18 Annika Breaks a Promise

  19 Gypsies

  20 The Godfather

  21 The Eggharts are Disgusted

  22 Hermann’s Honour

  23 Beachcoming

  24 Zed Rides

  25 Annika’s Surprise

  26 The Harp Arrives

  27 The Uncle’s Story

  28 Collecting Evidence

  29 The Palace of Grossenfluss

  30 Switzerland

  31 Pupil Number 126

  32 Ragnar Hairybreeks

  33 The Rescue

  34 Stefan Confesses

  35 The Emptying School

  36 Is She Coming?

  37 The Riverside Hotel

  38 The Letter

  39 Rocco

  40 Pauline’s Scrapbook

  41 The Danube Steamer

  42 Found Day

  43 Hermann Changes His Mind

  44 The Emperor’s Horse

  CHAPTER ONE

  A PERSON IS FOUND

  Ellie had gone into the church because of her feet. This is not the best reason for entering a church
, but Ellie was plump and middle-aged and her feet were hurting her. They were hurting her badly.

  It was a beautiful sunny day in June and Ellie and her friend Sigrid (who was as thin as Ellie was portly) had set out early from Vienna in the little train which took them to the mountains, so that they could climb up to the top of a peak called the Dorfelspitze.

  They went to the mountains on the last Sunday of every month, which was their day off, changing their aprons for dirndls and filling their rucksacks with salami sandwiches and slices of plum cake, so that when they got to the top they could admire the view without getting hungry. It was how they refreshed their souls after the hard work they did all week, cleaning and cooking and shopping and scrubbing for the professors who employed them, and who were fussy about how things were done. Ellie was the cook and Sigrid was the housemaid and they had been friends for many years.

  But on this particular Sunday, Ellie was wearing new boots, which is a silly thing to do when you are going on a long excursion. They were about halfway up the mountain when they came to a flower-filled meadow and on the far side of it, standing quite by itself, a small white church with an onion dome.

  Ellie stopped.

  ‘You know, Sigrid, I think I’d like to say a prayer for my mother. I had a dream about her last night. Why don’t you go on and I’ll catch you up.’

  Sigrid snorted.

  ‘I told you not to wear new boots.’

  But she agreed to go ahead slowly, and Ellie crossed the wooden bridge over a little stream, and went into the church.

  It was a lovely church – one of those places which look as though God might be about to give a marvellous party. There was a painted ceiling full of angels and golden stars and a picture of St Ursula holding out her arms, which made Ellie’s feet feel better straight away. The holy relic wasn’t something worrying like a toe bone or a withered hand but a lock of the saint’s hair in a glass dome decorated with pearls, and though the church stood all by itself away from the village, someone had put a bunch of fresh alpenroses in a vase at the Virgin’s feet.

  Ellie slipped into a pew and loosened her shoelaces. She said a prayer for her mother, who had passed on many years ago . . . and closed her eyes.

  She only slept for a few minutes. When she awoke the church was still empty, but she thought she had been woken by a noise of some sort. She looked round carefully, but she could find nothing. Then, peering over the edge of the pew, she saw, lying on the crimson carpet at the foot of the altar steps – a parcel.

  It was about the size of a vegetable marrow – quite a large one – and Ellie’s first thought was that someone had left it there as a harvest offering. But harvest festivals happen in September not in June. And now, to Ellie’s amazement, the marrow made a noise. A small, mewing noise . . .

  A kitten . . . a puppy?

  Ellie did up her shoelaces and went over to look.

  But it was worse than a kitten or a puppy.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Ellie. ‘Oh dear, dear, dear!’

  Sigrid had reached the top of the mountain. She had admired the view, she had eaten a salami sandwich and she had breathed deeply several times, but there was still no sign of Ellie.

  Sigrid was annoyed. When you are on top of a mountain admiring a view you want somebody to do it with. She waited a while longer, then she packed the rucksack and made her way back down the rocky slope, through the pine woods, till she came to the meadow with the little church.

  Ellie was still inside, sitting in the front pew – but she was holding something and she looked bewildered, and flushed, and strange . . .

  ‘Someone left this,’ she said.

  Ellie pushed back the edge of the shawl and Sigrid bent down to look.

  ‘Good heavens!’

  The baby was very, very young, not more than a few days old, but it was quite amazingly . . . alive. Warmth came from it; it steamed like a fresh-baked loaf, its legs worked under the shawl – and when Sigrid stretched out a bony forefinger to touch its cheek, it opened its eyes, and there, gazing up at them, was a person.

  ‘There was a note pinned to her shawl,’ said Ellie.

  On a piece of paper, smudged with tears, were the words: ‘Please be good to my little daughter and take her to Vienna to the nuns.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ asked Sigrid.

  She was upset. Neither she nor Ellie was married; they knew nothing about babies.

  ‘Take her to Vienna to the nuns, like it says in the note. What else can we do?’

  It took them an hour to carry the baby down to the little village of Pettelsdorf. No one there knew anything about a baby, no one had seen anyone go into the church.

  ‘She’ll have come up from the other side, over the pass,’ they said.

  A peasant woman gave them a bottle and some diluted milk from her cow, and they trudged on to the small lakeside station to wait for the train back to Vienna.

  It was late by the time they arrived in the city with their damp and fretful bundle, and they were very tired. The only convent that they knew of which took in foundlings was a long way from the house of the professors, where they lived and worked, and they didn’t have the money for a cab.

  So they took the tram, and though it was one of the new electric ones it was almost dark as they walked up the drive to the Convent of the Sacred Heart.

  The wrought-iron gates were shut; from the low white building came the sound of singing.

  ‘She’ll be all right in there,’ said Ellie, touching the baby’s head.

  Sigrid pulled the bell rope. They heard the bell pealing inside, but nobody came.

  She pulled it again, and they waited. Then at last an elderly nun came hurrying across the courtyard.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, peering into the dusk.

  ‘We’ve brought you a foundling, Sister,’ said Sigrid. ‘She was left in a church in the mountains.’

  ‘No, no, NO!’ The nun threw up her hands. She seemed to be horrified. ‘Take her away, don’t stay for a minute; you shouldn’t have come! We’re in quarantine for typhus. Three of the sisters have got it and it’s spreading to the children.’

  ‘Typhus!’ Ellie shivered. It was a terrible disease, everyone knew that.

  ‘Take her away quickly, quickly,’ said the nun, and she began to flap with her arms as though she were shooing away geese.

  ‘But where can we take her?’ began Sigrid. ‘There must be somewhere else.’

  ‘No one in Vienna will take in children while the epidemic lasts,’ she said. ‘It’ll be six weeks at least.’

  Left outside, the friends stared at each other.

  ‘We’ll have to take her back with us and try again tomorrow.’

  ‘What will the professors say?’

  ‘They needn’t know,’ said Ellie. ‘We’ll keep her below stairs. They never come down to the kitchen.’ But there she was wrong.

  The three professors had lived in the same house since they were born.

  It was on the south side of a small square in the oldest part of the town, not far from the emperor’s palace and the Spanish Riding School. If you leaned out of the upstairs windows you could see the pigeons wheeling round the spires of St Stephen’s Cathedral, which stood at the very heart of the city and therefore (to the people who lived in it) of the world.

  But though one could walk from the square to all the important places, it was as quiet and contained as a room. In the centre of the cobbles was a statue of General Brenner riding a bronze charger, which pleased the children who lived there because there is a lot you can do with the statue of a horse: pretend to ride it, pat it, shelter under it when it rains. The general had been a hero and fought against Napoleon, and because of this the square was named after him: Brenner Square.

  Next to the general on his horse, there was a fountain with a shallow basin and a wide stone rim, and sometimes there were goldfish swimming in it because the children who won fish at the funfair in the Prater, a park in the n
orth-east of the city, tipped them in on the way home.

  The west side of the square was taken up by a church named after St Florian, who was the patron saint of fire engines. It was a pretty church with a grassy graveyard where wild flowers had seeded themselves, and on the opposite side to the church was a row of chestnut trees in iron corsets, which sheltered the square from the bustle of the street that led into the centre of the town. There was also a small bookshop on one corner, and a cafe with a striped awning on the other, so really the square had everything a person could need.

  The house the professors lived in was in the middle of the row. It was the largest and the nicest and had a wrought-iron balcony on the first floor and window boxes and a door knocker shaped like the head of an owl.

  Professor Julius was the oldest. He had a pointed grey beard and was tall and serious. Once many years ago he had very nearly got married, but the bride he had chosen had died a week before her wedding day, and since then Professor Julius had become solemn and stern. He was a scientist – a geologist – and lectured in the university, where he told the students about fluorspar and granite and how to hit rocks with a hammer so that they did not get splinters in their eyes.

  His brother, Professor Emil, was quite different. He was small and round and had almost no hair, and when he went upstairs he wheezed a little, but he was a cheerful man. His subject was art history and he could tell just by looking at the toes of a painted angel whether the picture was by Tintoretto or by Titian.

  The third professor was a woman, their sister and the youngest of the three. Her name was Gertrude and what she knew about was music. She gave lectures on harmony and counterpoint and she played the harp in the City Orchestra. Having a harp is rather like having a large and wayward child who has to be carried about and kept from draughts and helped into carriages, and Professor Gertrude – like many harpists – often looked worried and dismayed.

  Needless to say, none of the three had ever in their lives boiled an egg or washed a pair of socks or made their beds, and when Ellie and Sigrid had their day off they always left a cold lunch laid out. But by evening, the professors needed help again. Professor Julius had a whisky and soda brought to his room to help him sleep; Professor Emil, who had a delicate stomach, needed a glass of warm milk and honey; and Professor Gertrude suffered from cold feet and always had a hot-water bottle brought to her before she got between the sheets. So now they waited for their servants to return. Sigrid and Ellie were always back by nine o’clock – but not today.