The Star of Kazan

by Eva Ibbotson

  On a wheel fixed to the chimney was a pile of sticks – a messy and untidy pile, as though someone was going to light a bonfire. And sitting on the pile, looking very large against the smallness of the house and very pleased with themselves, were two storks.

  ‘Storks bring luck,’ Ellie had told her. ‘They come back year after year if they like a place and they bless the house.’

  Annika stood still for a while, her head tilted back, and the storks clattered their beaks together, making an amazing din. They did not seem to be in the least shy or bothered by her presence.

  But now she had seen the paddock ahead of her – and walking towards the gate, one arm thrown round the neck of his horse, was the boy she had seen out of the window when she woke.

  Annika waited till he came up to her, and introduced herself.

  ‘I know who you are,’ said the boy.

  ‘And you’re Zed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He was taller than Hermann, and older she guessed, thirteen perhaps, and he had an unexpected sort of face. His skin was a clear olive and he had thick, dark hair that looked as though it had been cut with shears – but his brown eyes were flecked with lighter colours; with bronze and hazel and with gold.

  And he was eating something, a slice of some large root with white flesh, cutting off pieces and sharing them with the horse.

  Annika sighed. She had a message from Hermann and she found that she didn’t really want to think about Hermann.

  ‘Hermann said could you please bring his horse round at three o’clock tomorrow.’

  The boy stopped eating. ‘Really,’ he said, grinning. ‘Hermann said please?’

  ‘Well, I may have put that in,’ Annika admitted. ‘He said bring it into the courtyard, to the mounting block, not into the lane.’

  ‘He’ll never make a soldier if he can’t mount without a block,’ said Zed.

  ‘But isn’t it difficult? Hermann’s no bigger than me. How big is his horse?’

  ‘This is his horse. Everything in the place belongs to Hermann, surely you know that, even if you only came last night.’

  Annika was silent. She had felt sure that the horse that was resting his muzzle on the boy’s shoulder belonged to him.

  ‘Does he know he belongs to Hermann?’ she asked. ‘The horse, I mean?’

  Zed looked at her sharply and did not answer and Annika asked him the name of the root in his hand.

  ‘It’s a mangel-wurzel. We grow them for the sheep, but they’re not bad. You need to pick a small one.’

  ‘Can I try a bit?’

  Zed nodded and cut her a piece, shaving off the skin.

  She chewed it carefully, then nodded. ‘It’s nice and crisp. Is there any more?’

  ‘They’re in the root cellar; I’ll show you. You better ask me till you’re used to the place; you have to make sure there’s no mould on them.’

  Annika smiled, and the boy looked at her, noting the way her face changed; she had seemed rather forlorn when he first saw her. ‘I never thought I’d be eating the sheep’s mangel-wurzels now that I’m a member of the aristocracy.’

  ‘We all eat them down here – those of us with teeth,’ he said, glancing at old Wenzel, who was shooing the cows out into the field.

  He had begun to lead the horse out of the paddock and Annika walked by his side. She had been wrong about the stallion’s colour; in the full light of morning he was not black but a rich chocolate colour, with a darker mane and tail. There was a white star no bigger than a coin between his eyes, which looked both gentle and intelligent.

  As they passed the empty sheds and byres and stalls again she said, ‘Do cows and sheep and pigs have to go away to be cleaned too? Or reframed in Bad Haxenfeld?’

  Zed turned his head and saw that behind her flippant words there was anxiety.

  ‘It used to be a big farm when the Master was alive. Everything was different then.’

  ‘I know I’m asking a lot of questions, but who was the Master?’

  ‘The Freiherr von Tannenberg. Your mother’s father. Your grandfather, I suppose.’

  The man who had been so strict and fierce that her mother had not dared to bring her baby home!

  ‘We had some marvellous riding horses then. Rocco is the only one left.’

  ‘Is that what he’s called? Rocco?’

  ‘Yes.’ They had stopped in front of a stable with an open door. ‘I’m going to groom him now,’ he said.

  ‘Can I help? Have you got more than one brush?’

  Zed looked at her curiously. ‘If you like.’

  He handed her a brush, and showed her how to use it, moving away from the horse’s head in slow, steady strokes. Then he took down a wisp of plaited straw and began to rub Rocco’s flank. After a while he said, ‘You’ve been used to work, I see.’

  Annika stopped, her brush in mid-air. ‘Oh no, don’t say that. I’m not supposed to help. I tried to help Bertha carry a basket of logs and it’s the wrong thing to do because my mother doesn’t want people to know I was brought up as a servant.’

  She looked so upset that Zed said, ‘Well, I’m a servant too. It seems to me that servants are the only people who can actually do anything. It’s who you choose to serve that matters.’

  ‘Yes, I know . . . only I have to learn to be a von Tannenberg.’ But she had taken up the brush again. ‘It’s going to be difficult – I’m so used to working. I’ll have to be careful.’

  ‘No one will see you down here.’

  ‘I know. But I’ve only just found my mother. I don’t want to disobey her even in secret.’

  They went on grooming in silence for a while. Then she said, ‘When I saw you riding this morning it reminded me of seeing the Lipizzaners in Vienna. I know they were white and they were dancing . . . but they seemed happy like your . . . like Rocco. Sort of light and floating . . .’

  Zed had wheeled round to face her. ‘You’ve seen the Lipizzaners? The ones in the Spanish Riding School?’

  ‘Yes. I went for my last Found Day . . . I mean I went with the people I lived with. I don’t know anything about horses, but there are things you can see . . . like the way they do everything so willingly when they must be strong enough to break away.’

  ‘Were they using Maestoso Fantasia? Is he still the lead stallion?’

  ‘Yes. He’s old, but the Viennese love him.’

  ‘Lipizzaners don’t get old for years. What about Pluto Nobilia? He had a tie-back operation last year.’

  Annika nodded. ‘They used him for the “airs above the ground”. When he did his caprioles everyone cheered.’

  But some of Zed’s eager questions were difficult to answer. Had the riders used stirrups for the quadrille? Did they use the long rein or the short rein for the piaffe at the pillars?

  As she answered him she was frowning, trying to remember everything that had happened on the day of her treat. Then suddenly the remembering went wrong. She forgot the horses and felt Ellie’s warm bulk beside her, and remembered the way she had stood up at the end and said, ‘It makes you proud to be Austrian.’ She remembered Pauline, hanging over the balustrade . . . and afterwards the meal at Sacher’s, where the professors had told her that she was to call them uncle. And her eyes filled with tears, which she tried in vain to hold back.

  ‘It’s the wind,’ she said angrily, and Zed agreed that it was the wind.

  ‘There’s always a wind here,’ he said politely. ‘Even in the stable.’

  She wiped away her tears and for a while they went on working in silence while Rocco blew contentedly through his nostrils. Then Zed put down his brush and said, ‘Come on. I’ll show you where I live.’

  Where he lived, of course, was in the house with the storks on the roof. The birds were still on their nest, managing to looking both absurd and regal.

  ‘You’re so lucky to have storks! Why aren’t there any at the big house?’

  ‘Storks go where they want,’ said Zed.

  He open
ed the door and she stepped into a tiny, dark room with a scrubbed, flagged floor, plants on the window sill – and a big tiled stove, which was alight and gave off a marvellous warmth. Round the stove was a wooden bench on which lay a neatly folded blanket.

  ‘Bertha sleeps there,’ he said. ‘It’s her house. I sleep out at the back on a truckle bed.’

  Annika was looking round her with pleasure. The house she had thought of as a hovel was cosy and in a way familiar. Ellie too had a pot of chives on the window sill and a picture of the emperor on the wall – only this was the Emperor Wilhelm, whose expression was much fiercer than that of the Austrian ruler.

  ‘Is Bertha your grandmother then?’

  Zed shook his head. ‘She’s no relation. She was the Master’s nurse; she came when he was a baby. The Master asked me to . . . look out for her – that’s why I’m still here.’

  ‘She seems very old to do the work she does up at the house. I suppose she doesn’t want to retire?’

  ‘She wants to all right. Sometimes when she comes back she can hardly walk, her joints are so stiff. But no one else will work up there for nothing.’ He went over to the table and lifted the muslin cover from a blue jug. ‘Here, drink this. We don’t have much, but there’s always milk.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  As she drained her glass and stood up to go, she heard the sound of barking coming from an outhouse at the back.

  ‘That’s Hector. He’s woken up.’

  ‘Could I see him?’

  ‘No, not now. You need . . . a lot of time for that, and I’ve got to go and feed the pigs. Anyway, you’d better get back; they’ll be wondering where you are.’

  He had suddenly withdrawn and she made her way to the door, trying not to feel snubbed.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, turning to smile at him.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘The mangel-wurzel, the milk . . . letting me help with Rocco.’ Outside the dog stopped barking and began to whine. ‘I’ve always wanted a dog,’ she said wistfully.

  ‘You wouldn’t want this one,’ said Zed.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  LUNCH AT THE HUNTING LODGE

  Annika’s new-found aunt, who was married to the red-haired Uncle Oswald with the feather in his beard, lived some five kilometres from Spittal in the middle of a wood.

  There were a number of such patches of woodland dotted about the great plain of Norrland, and as Uncle Oswald drove them along the lane to his house, Annika was surprised by how closely the dark pines and firs were packed together. The daylight, even now at midday, seemed to have trouble in reaching the ground; they might have been in Siberia.

  Her mother’s sister was called Mathilde. She was tall and dark like Edeltraut, but Annika could see that she was a very different kind of person. Where her mother was regal and dignified and stately, Aunt Mathilde was shrewish and pathetic with a whining note to her voice.

  ‘So this is Annika,’ she said. ‘Well, well . . . we must just hope . . .’ and broke off as she encountered her sister’s raised eyebrows. She kissed Hermann, who closed his eyes and endured it, and then introduced her daughter, Gudrun.

  ‘Gudrun has been looking forward to meeting you,’ she said and the two girls shook hands.

  Gudrun did not look as though she had been looking forward to meeting Annika or indeed anybody else. She was very thin and very pale and very tall, with the same light hair as her cousin Hermann, but her single plait, like Gudrun herself, seemed undernourished and ended in a discouraged-looking wisp. If one had not known that she was Gudrun Brigitta von Seltzer one would have taken her for an orphan in an institution – the kind of girl that is seen standing listlessly at the orphanage gates, not even playing with a ball.

  Next to his wife and daughter, Uncle Oswald looked even pinker and ruddier than before with his shiny skin and ginger beard and the dramatic scar running down his cheek. It was a duelling scar, her mother had explained: Oswald had got it when he was a student. It was the longest scar anyone had got that year and he was very proud of it.

  The von Seltzers’ house, which was on the edge of the Spittal estate, was a hunting lodge set right in the thickest part of the forest. It was called Felsenheim and was built entirely of wood, with carved shutters like those of the alpine houses Annika was used to seeing in the meadows of her homeland, but there were no pots of geraniums on the window sills, no smoked hams hanging from the rafters.

  What there were . . . were antlers. There were antlers everywhere. Antlers on the walls and antlers making up the furniture. Some were huge and branched, some were small and sharp and spiky, and some weren’t strictly antlers but simply horns.

  Those antlers that were not part of the furniture still had their heads, and their glass eyes, and were nailed to the wall. The stuffing was coming out of them here and there, but no one who came to visit could doubt that this was a house devoted to the chase.

  Ye t here too there were those curious spaces on the wall and in the display cabinets which held antique guns and skinning knives and bullet-holders, as though many of the treasures had been removed.

  ‘Did you bring anything?’ Annika heard her Aunt Mathilde ask her mother.

  ‘What should I bring?’ her mother answered. ‘Anyway Oswald brought you three of our mallards the day before yesterday. Surely you can’t have eaten them all?’

  Mathilde sighed. ‘Gudrun is growing,’ she said.

  Annika, who had managed to avoid sitting on an antler chair and was perched on a stool made of deerskin stretched over two logs, was getting a little worried. It was half-past one, and they had definitely been asked to lunch, but she could smell nothing at all. Even if the kitchen was quite far away, surely there should be some smells? Onions softening in butter . . . a joint roasting . . . and with the serious smells of the meat a lighter smell. Vanilla, perhaps, or cloves added to simmering apples. They must have put apple rings down in the autumn to dry.

  ‘It’s the maid’s day off,’ said Mathilde. ‘So we are having a cold collation.’

  Annika did not know what a collation was, but the lunch they had was definitely cold. The dark thighs of some muscular waterbird, which arrived on a platter, were cold and so were the pellets of lead embedded in the flesh. The potatoes, sliced but without any dressing, were cold. The three pickled gherkins, cut up to go round, were cold, and also slightly slimy.

  There was no dessert.

  All the dishes were left on the table, and Annika was frowned down by her mother for automatically starting to gather up the plates. The two sisters and Uncle Oswald now made their way to the study. It was apparently to do some business rather than to eat lunch that they had met.

  Gudrun and Annika, meanwhile, were sent out for a walk.

  ‘Only be careful not to take the path down to the spring,’ Mathilde told them. ‘They’ve dug a pit there. Not that they’ll catch anything.’

  Hermann refused to go with them. This was the time when he studied the maintenance of gun carriages, and he had brought his book.

  ‘What sort of thing would they catch in a pit?’ asked Annika.

  ‘Someone saw a bear, but I don’t suppose he’ll come again.’ Gudrun sighed. ‘A bear would feed us for weeks.’

  ‘I’ve never eaten bear. Is it nice?’

  Gudrun shrugged. ‘Meat is meat,’ she said in a gloomy voice.

  But it was Hermann that Gudrun wanted to talk about. Clearly she hero-worshipped her cousin.

  ‘Don’t you think he’s wonderful,’ she said. ‘The way he goes on with his studies. He does everything he would do at St Xavier’s, and at exactly the same time that they do it.’

  ‘Bayonet practice you mean?’

  ‘Everything. He got the prospectus with their timetable straight away when he thought he was going. He gets up at six and salutes the emperor’s picture – he can’t do proper reveille because he hasn’t got a bugle – but then he has his cold bath and does his exercises and then he has a kit inspection. He inspects
everything and if something isn’t absolutely clean he polishes it. Then he does drill – all before breakfast – and then he arranges his soldiers on the carpet; he sets up a different battle every week. At the moment he’s doing the campaigns of Frederick the Great . . .’ She went on through her cousin’s day: the fencing lesson, the horse riding, the shooting practice . . . ‘And he has to do everything himself. That awful stable boy won’t help him with anything though he’s only allowed to stay because he looks after Hermann’s horse. You must be really proud to have a brother like that. I keep offering to help, but he’s very independent.’

  ‘But why can’t he go to St Xavier’s if he’s so keen?’

  ‘I’m not sure . . . my mother won’t talk about it. But she says it’s all going to be different very soon. There’s a plan, only I’m not allowed to know what it is.’

  They had taken a path which led downhill from the house. Annika had expected to see clearings with patches of bilberry leaves and bubbling streams, but the forest was not like the ones she knew. It was tangled and dark and difficult to walk through; logs had fallen across the path, briars caught their skirts. It was wild and should have been beautiful but it was not.

  ‘My father’s going to get it cleared,’ said Gudrun. ‘When . . . when he can get the men.’

  They passed a wire enclosure with a number of wooden kennels and heard the sound of excited barking.

  ‘Can we go and see them—’ began Annika, but Gudrun shook her head.

  ‘They’re hunting dogs. Papa doesn’t like them to be fussed over.’

  Then she stopped suddenly in the middle of the path and turned to Annika. Her face was flushed and she spoke with a kind of nervous excitement. ‘Is it true that before you came here . . . that at the place where you were before . . . they treated you like a servant?’

  Annika met her eyes. ‘They did not treat me like a servant. I was a servant,’ she said clearly.

  Gudrun poked at a fir cone with her shoe.

  ‘Then why are your clothes so nice?’

  ‘Sigrid made my clothes. The housemaid. She was a very good needlewoman.’

  ‘And that scarf?’ She pointed to a red-and-white kerchief which Annika had knotted round her neck. ‘She didn’t make that?’