The Star of Kazan

by Eva Ibbotson

  ‘I shan’t call the police,’ said Annika. ‘Not ever. You’re my mother. But I’d certainly like to understand.’

  ‘Of course, of course . . .’ Edeltraut rose from her knees and fell back into a low chair. She stretched her hands out to her daughter, trying to conceal the relief she felt. Annika took them, but her eyes were still fixed steadily on Edeltraut’s face.

  ‘If you could try to imagine,’ said Edeltraut, ‘I was only twenty when I married – far too young to be a judge of character – and when I realized that my husband was a compulsive gambler I was very much afraid. There was no one to turn to, no one to help me. Week by week, month by month, I saw the house stripped of all its treasures; the paintings, the books, my own jewels, and my sister’s. Well, you know all that – but remember, my darling, I was a von Tannenberg. We’re a proud family. The shame of being beggars . . . of people turning their faces away when they met me – people I’d known all my life . . . oh, it was dreadful!

  ‘Then my husband fled to America and I was quite alone at Spittal, with a young son to care for. I didn’t know what to do; I saw Spittal becoming a ruin . . . and there have always been von Tannenbergs at Spittal. And then my father died and I had an idea, which lifted my spirits; no, more than that – it made me wonderfully happy. Can you guess what it was?’

  Annika shook her head.

  ‘I would find my little daughter, the one I had been forced to abandon when she was only a few days old. And suddenly life seemed to have a meaning and a purpose once again.’

  Edeltraut had soaked a handkerchief. She crumpled it into a ball and picked up another.

  But still Annika did not speak.

  ‘It was hard to find you. I went to Pettelsdorf and there I learned that you’d been adopted and taken to Vienna, and then I tramped the streets, trying to find out where you were. I found a lawyer, a famous man – Herr Pumpelmann-Schlissinger – and he helped me . . . and then at last I found you. Oh, Annika, when you came in through that door in the professors’ house and I saw you there before me with your father’s eyes and hair and that look of trust . . . I think it was my first happy day for many years.’

  ‘Yes. I was happy too,’ said Annika quietly.

  ‘But of course I was worried about bringing you to Spittal. We were living . . . well, like peasants, with no money at all.’

  No, Annika wanted to say. Peasants don’t live like that. They cook and clean and chop wood and make do – but she did not speak.

  Edeltraut got up and walked to the window.

  ‘But you see, Annika, the lawyer had found out something else about you. An old lady who lived in the square had left you a trunk full of keepsakes; the will was still being proved and you knew nothing about it. Then, when I went back to Spittal to get ready for your arrival, my uncle told me the story about La Rondine’s jewels and that they were real but nobody knew it.

  ‘Of course I should have told you – but I didn’t know if the story was true; the jewels might have been fakes, as everyone believed. And I had this dream, Annika – the dream of making Spittal great again and you and Hermann living there in comfort. I have made a will, you know, leaving you a share of Spittal. Not just Hermann, you. Oh, Annika, I have been so very foolish.’

  ‘I would have given you the jewels for Spittal. I would have given you everything I had,’ said Annika quietly.

  ‘I know – oh, I know now, my darling. But remember, I hardly knew you then. I could see that you were sweet and pretty, but a little girl can have her head turned by sudden wealth. I should have trusted my own daughter – my own flesh and blood – but I had been hurt so much.’

  Annika was very tired. Something seemed not to fit, but she was too weary to work it out.

  And Edeltraut’s eyes had filled with tears again. She put a hand on Annika’s shoulder. ‘We could start a new life together, you and I. We could make my dream for Spittal come true together. There is a lot of money left, and you shall decide how it is spent. Without Hermann I am so very much alone. Say it isn’t too late. Say you’ll come, my darling. I need you so very much.’

  ‘I won’t go back to Grossenfluss. Not ever.’ In spite of her exhaustion, Annika’s voice was firm.

  ‘No, no, of course not. It was wrong of me to think that you might be happy there. I thought you needed companionship of your own age, but the school has changed completely in the last few years. I should have taken you there and seen for myself instead of letting you go with Mathilde; I have been guilty there too – dreadfully guilty. You shall never go back there, I swear it.’ She had found another handkerchief and managed to smile through her tears. ‘My poor, pale darling, don’t stand there by the door. Let the sun warm your face, come out on to the balcony.’

  Annika let herself be led out of the French window. In front of her was the dazzling water with its gaily painted boats. Tulip trees were in flower along the bank; children splashed in the shallows. The world was still there and it was very beautiful.

  ‘Look, there’s the steamer just going off to Regensburg.’

  Annika nodded. ‘It’s the Princess Stephanie.’

  Her mother had put her arm round her and her scent stole into Annika’s nostrils.

  ‘There’s so much to see, so much to do. Couldn’t we do it together?’

  Still Annika was silent. She did not think that she had ever been so tired.

  ‘I’ve had such an idea,’ said Edeltraut eagerly. ‘We could go back home on the steamer. Go back by river. The boat goes quite a long way into Germany, we’d have days on the water before we had to change to a train. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You like travelling by boat.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ll come then, my darling? You’ll forgive me?’ She stretched out her hands imploringly and looked deep into Annika’s eyes. ‘Because if I don’t have your forgiveness I don’t know . . . how I shall live.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  THE LETTER

  Nobody could believe it.

  ‘You’re not going to do anything about the jewels? You’re going to let her have them and say nothing?’

  Everybody was amazed and distressed, but Pauline was furious.

  ‘You must be completely mad,’ she said.

  They had all gathered in the courtyard to find out where Annika had been.

  ‘Would you give your mother up to the police?’ asked Annika. ‘Would you, Ellie?’ She turned to the professors. ‘Would you?’

  For a moment she had silenced them. Ellie remembered her mother, who had once taken a small wilted sprig of parsley hanging down from the side of a market stall because the stallholder was busy serving a queue of customers and she was in a hurry. The following day she had sent Ellie to walk five kilometres in the heat down a dusty road to find the woman and pay her.

  ‘You see,’ said Annika, ‘you wouldn’t. Not your own mother.’

  But what they minded – what was almost impossible to understand – was that Annika was going back of her own free will to Spittal. She wasn’t even going to try and stay in Vienna.

  ‘She asked me to forgive her; she went down on her knees to me.’

  Pauline snorted and the professors frowned at her, but it was true that they too were very much upset. They had given Annika a way out and she had not even tried to take it.

  ‘It’s just snobbishness,’ said Pauline. ‘You really like being a “von” and having people bow and scrape to you. You must like it or you wouldn’t be so feeble.’

  ‘No.’ Annika’s wretchedness was beyond tears. ‘I don’t like it.’

  The boredom of life at Spittal came back to her. The long empty days, not being allowed to help . . . and she would go back without Zed, without Rocco’s whinny of greeting when she went down to the farm. Without the farm . . .

  She set her teeth. She had given her word and she could see no other way. Perhaps people who had always had mothers felt differently, but to her, her mother’s arrival after the years of daydreaming abo
ut her had been a miracle. She could not now turn her back on the person who had given her life.

  ‘It’s in the Bible,’ Annika said wearily. ‘It’s where Ruth says, “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”’

  But it was not wise to quote things to Pauline, who had always read more than anybody else. ‘Ruth didn’t say it to her mother, she said it to her mother-in-law, and that’s completely different.’

  But Annika had fought her battle on the way back from the Riverside; no one could shake her decision. If people did not forgive those closest to them, how could the world go on?

  ‘It’s in the pictures too, everywhere.’ She turned to Uncle Emil. ‘The whole museum is full of mothers holding their children.’

  Emil, however, could see no connection between Frau von Tannenberg and the Holy Mother of God, and said so.

  The person who said the least and perhaps understood the most was Ellie – but her hurt was absolute. She knew that Annika was not a snob and that she was unimpressed by riches. Annika was a person who was interested in doing things, not in having them. Only an overwhelming love for her mother could make her behave as she had done.

  Up to now Ellie had hoped that her foster child still remembered her old life with affection. Now she faced the truth, but she did not know how she was going to endure a separation for the second time.

  ‘I think I’ll go back to my people,’ she said to Sigrid. ‘They’ll be glad of some extra help. They’d take you in too.’

  Ellie’s cousins ran a little hotel high in the Alps.

  ‘I’m sure it’ll be better up there,’ she went on. ‘The mountain air’s so thin it makes you see things differently.’

  But the air would have to be very thin indeed, thought Sigrid, to make either of them forget the girl they had brought up.

  Annika had asked for two days more in Vienna. She wanted to say goodbye to Zed – and she wanted, for the last time, to cook a meal.

  ‘I shan’t try and help or interfere at Spittal,’ she said to Ellie. ‘They’ve got servants and there would be no point. But I’d like to make one meal for all of you tonight. If the professors don’t mind we could all eat in the dining room. And I’d like to ask Frau Bodek.’

  She began the preparations for the farewell meal at once, writing the menu down and assembling the ingredients.

  ‘Would you like me to help you or do you want to work alone?’ said Ellie.

  ‘I would like it if you helped me, Ellie. Please. And Sigrid. It’s not a difficult meal, but I’ll need lots of ice . . . and somehow I’ve got to get hold of molasses.’

  ‘Molasses?’

  ‘You’ll see. I want to make those Norrland Nussel – at least I do if you’ve kept the recipe I sent you.’

  ‘Of course I’ve kept it. It’s on the back of the envelope it came on. I put it in the black book.’

  ‘You haven’t tried them yet?’

  ‘No. I wasn’t sure if I could get tansy, but Sigrid says she’s seen some in the market.’

  ‘Good.’ Annika had finished scribbling. ‘I’m going to start with beef broth with very small dumplings; they’ll be light for Uncle Emil’s stomach. Then roast saddle of venison with peas and celeriac and potato puffs . . . then a strawberry bombe – and with the coffee, the Norrland Nussel. How does that sound?’

  ‘It sounds just fine,’ said Ellie. ‘Now you just tell us what you want us to do.’

  They cooked together all afternoon. Cooking is hard physical work, and while they were busy pounding and stirring and chopping and sieving, the grief of the parting that was to come could be pushed to the back of their minds, and be endured.

  ‘Now for the Nussel,’ said Annika. ‘I do hope I can get them right. I can’t see how they can help being heavy with the molasses and the chestnuts . . . but the ones I had in Bad Haxenfeld were really light. And she was such a nice woman, the one who gave me the recipe.’

  Ellie was reaching up for the black book, looking at the envelope she had placed between its pages. Annika’s handwriting sprawled over the back. ‘It’s the egg white that will keep them light,’ she said. ‘Twelve eggs, it says here; we’ll have some beating to do.’

  ‘You can get egg-beaters that work mechanically,’ said Annika. ‘I saw one in a shop.’

  ‘Over my dead body,’ said Ellie. ‘No egg is going to be touched by that new-fangled machinery in my kitchen.’

  But Annika was looking at the envelope. ‘What an idiot – I sent it on the back of the letter I found in the desk at Spittal. I suppose I’d better take it back with me when I go.’

  And suddenly the lull in which the three of them had worked together, as so often before, was over.

  The farewell meal had been cleared away. The food had been a triumph, but no one felt very cheerful and Pauline actually lost her temper and stormed out before the strawberry bombe, though this was her favourite dessert. It happened when Frau Bodek asked Annika if she really had to go back to Spittal and Annika said, ‘She is my mother,’ in a way that made Pauline, she said, feel sick.

  ‘Did you like the Norrland Nussel?’ Annika asked Ellie. ‘What did you think?’

  ‘They were good,’ said Ellie, who did not feel like saying that the whole meal had tasted to her like sawdust. And, looking at Annika’s anxious face, ‘I think you ought to copy the recipe into the book.’

  ‘Really?’ Annika was pleased. ‘Then you can cook them when I’ve gone.’

  And Ellie nodded, though she thought that nothing was less likely than that she would swallow a Nussel ever again.

  ‘I’ll do it in my room,’ said Annika, and she took the black book and the envelope and kissed Ellie and Sigrid rather quickly, because this was not a night for lingering over anything emotional.

  The house was very quiet. Zed had gone to say goodbye to Stefan’s uncle. He had already packed up his belongings in the bookshop and set up his camp bed in Sigrid’s ironing room, ready for an early start.

  The cathedral clock struck eleven. This time the day after tomorrow she would be gone. No, that was silly, she wouldn’t think like that. There might be an earthquake. She might die in her sleep.

  She reached for the black book and for her pen and inkwell.

  ‘Twelve egg whites, seven ounces of chestnut purée, six tablespoons of molasses . . .’ wrote Annika.

  The letter was still there inside the envelope – probably it was just an old bill, in which case there was no point in taking it back to Spittal.

  She finished copying in the recipe, and slit open the envelope.

  Annika read the letter once, peering at the old-fashioned, looped handwriting. Then she read it again.

  It was definitely not a bill.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  ROCCO

  Zed had not forgotten the police officers who had stared at him so hard in the Prater, but as the time to leave came closer he was sure that he would get away.

  So when the bell rang early in the morning as he was packing his saddlebags he did not think it had anything to do with him. Then Sigrid came and said there were two uniformed men at the door, asking for the boy with the bay horse.

  Zed’s first instinct was to go into the backyard and ride Rocco away down the lane. But it was already too late. The front door was open, the tall man with the bushy eyebrows was standing in the hall. He did not look like someone with whom one could play cat-and-mouse for long.

  ‘I’ll show them into the sitting room,’ said Sigrid.

  Zed squared his shoulders. It had come then. Prison for him for stealing a horse – and for Rocco, what?

  The two men were standing beside the porcelain stove: the very tall one and the smaller, tubby one with the gingery moustache.

  At least they were polite. They said good morning, shook hands, asked his name.

  But then came the words Zed had heard so often in his head.

  ‘We would like you to come with
us. You and the horse. Just halter him – no need to bring his tack.’

  So they weren’t just going to charge him. They were going to confiscate the horse.

  ‘Come along, boy; we have a lot to do.’

  There was nothing for it. Zed led them out of the house and into the courtyard.

  Rocco was not a vicious animal, but he could bare his teeth as threateningly as the next horse when he wanted to. Now, however, he let Zed down badly, rubbing his face against the uniformed sleeve of the tall man as though he was meeting his oldest friend.

  Zed slipped on the halter. His hands were clumsy; misery engulfed him. It was over then, everything was over.

  What happened to horses who were taken away by the police? Did they get sold on or spend their days in some wretched compound, a sort of dumping ground for equine down-and-outs?

  Or did they simply get shot?

  He led the horse round by the back lane and into the square. Rocco was stepping out as if to a party, his feet high, his neck arched, as though impressing the policemen who walked beside him was the most important thing on earth. So much for the instinct of animals, thought Zed bitterly.

  They began to cross the square, making their way towards the chestnut trees and the Keller Strasse.

  How long did one stay in prison for stealing a horse? Two years, three . . . no, more probably. Much, much more. Would they put him in a dungeon, or in a cell with murderers and drunks?

  ‘Stop. STOP, Zed. Wait!’

  He turned round and so did the two men who were taking him away.

  ‘Good heavens!’ said the taller one.

  A girl with streaming corn-coloured hair was running across the cobbles towards them. She was barefoot, and still in her dressing gown, but even without shoes she ran like the wind.

  ‘Stop, stop,’ she cried again – and Rocco too turned his head and recognized someone he knew, and came firmly to a halt.