Eva Ibbotson - The Star of Kazan

Meanwhile, in her attic, the old lady was coming near the end of her story.

‘I went to live in a little room on the Left Bank and I was all right. I bought a dog.’

‘What kind of dog?’ asked Annika eagerly.

‘A little schnauzer. I would have liked a big one, but not in the middle of town.’

‘Yes, schnauzers are good,’ said Annika and sighed, for her quest for a dog of her own was not making any progress.

‘So I was all right. I still had my jewels you see. I still had the Star of Kazan and the butterfly brooch and the diamond tiara and the rings… I used to look at them, when I was alone. They were so beautiful. And while I had them I was still rich — very, very rich. But of course one by one I had to sell them to buy food and pay the rent.’

‘Were you very sad?’

‘Yes, I was. But I had a friend — such a good friend. He was really a saint, that man; he was a hunchback and he was a brilliant jeweller — he built up one of the most famous jewellery businesses in Paris: Fabrice, he was called. He remembered me from when I was famous and he helped me. Whenever I needed money, I would take him a piece of jewellery and he would sell it for me at the best possible price. But — this is what was so special — every time he sold a piece for me he had it copied in glass or paste so that it looked almost exactly like the original. He sold my Star of Kazan and copied it, and my butterfly brooch and my cluster rings… and after a while I got just as fond of the copies as the originals. I thought they were just as beautiful even though they weren’t worth anything at all. Wasn’t that kind of him?’

‘Yes, it was. It was very kind.’

‘And so I managed for twenty years. I suppose I could have saved some money, but I didn’t and there were other people as badly off as me whom I wanted to help. Perhaps I had got into the habit of strewing. Then the day came when I didn’t have anything left to sell, and just about this time my jeweller friend died.’

Annika leaned forward. ‘What did you do?’

‘What everybody does when their luck runs out. I was old by then. I got what work I could, cleaning the streets… scrubbing… There were quite a few of us — people who’d been on the stage or in the music world. And there were soup kitchens… I managed. Then I decided to come home to Austria. I suppose I wanted to die here, or perhaps I thought my family would… and you see in the end they did take me in, though I don’t know why.’

Annika did know why. It was because Herr Egghart wanted to become a statue and you can’t become a statue if you leave your aunt to die in an asylym — but of course she said nothing.

‘Anyway I’m glad I did,’ the old lady went on, ‘because I made a new friend and not many people make friends at ninety-four.’ And she stretched out her hand and laid it for a moment on Annika’s arm.

Ellie was right about the Eggharts’ great-aunt. She was getting very weak. Sometimes now when Annika came she would do no more than smile at her before she drifted off to sleep, and when she spoke it might be just a few words, which did not always make sense.

‘A rose garden in the sky,’ she said once, and the maid who had come to straighten the bed said, ‘Poor old thing, she’s wandering in her mind.’

But just a week before the Eggharts were due to return, Annika found the old lady alert and excited with a mischievous look in her eye.

‘I’ll show you something,’ she said, ‘if you can open the trunk. It’s locked, but I wouldn’t let them keep the key. I made them give it back and then I forgot where I’d hidden it, but now I’ve found it. It was in my other bedsocks.’

The trunk was a big one, banded in rings of wood, but Annika found she could pull it over to the bed.

The key turned easily in the lock and Annika lifted the lid.

Inside were dresses in gauze and satin, wisps of muslin, a wreath of daisies, silver gloves… The clothes were very old; some were a little torn, here and there were splashes of powder still clinging to the material, or dabs of greasepaint. It was like opening a door on to a theatre dressing room.

‘Now take off the top shelf…’

The trunk was separated into two parts, like a box of chocolates. Annika took off the top — and found herself looking at a large number of parcels wrapped in newspaper.

‘Go on. Unwrap them.’

Annika took out a packet wrapped in paper so old that it was beginning to crumble, and unwrapped it.

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Oh, how beautiful!’

She was holding a necklace of rubies, the jewels seeming to flash fire against the setting of gold.

‘The stones came from a special mine in Burma. I was given it after I was an Eastern Princess and strewed lotus blossoms. I think it was lotus blossoms… You wouldn’t know the stones aren’t real, would you?’

‘No. And anyway it doesn’t matter — they couldn’t be more splendid.’

‘Go on; unwrap them all. I’d like to see them once again.’

The next parcel was a butterfly brooch in sapphires — the stones as blue as the famous morphos of the Amazon. The wings were outlined in tiny diamonds and the antennae trembled with filigree gold.

‘I wore that when we were presented to the Duc d’Orléans. And those earrings were brought round after I was Cupid and strewed pink-paper hearts. The diamonds were eighteen carats — if I still had the real ones you could have bought a castle with them. But you can see what a craftsman that jeweller was. You’d have to know a lot about jewels to tell the difference.’

One by one Annika unpacked the parcels and laid them on the bed, till the old lady seemed to be floating on an ocean of colour: the piercing blue of the sapphires, the warm glow of the rubies… and the brilliance of the Star of Kazan from the country of dark firs and glittering snow…

Right at the bottom was a small parcel, wrapped not in newspaper but in a piece of black velvet. Inside was a box which opened to show a picture of a man and a woman standing in front of a house — a woman with thick, light hair, a man with a lean, intelligent face. It must have been one of the earliest photos ever taken, but Annika knew at once who they were.

‘That’s you and your painter, isn’t it? You look so happy.’

The old lady took the photo in its wooden frame, and as she cupped the picture in both hands, the jewels heaped on the bedspread were forgotten. ‘So happy…’ she said softly. ‘So very, very happy…’

‘You see,’ said Annika, when she got back home, ‘I told you she would get better.’

But the next day the old lady asked for a lawyer, though she had no money to leave, and for a priest. That evening the doctor’s carriage was seen in front of the Eggharts’ house. It was still there two hours later — and then the young maid was seen running wild-eyed towards the post office.

Although the Eggharts had been sorry to cut their holiday short, the funeral which they gave their great-aunt was a very respectable affair.

‘No one can say we have not done all we should have done,’ said Herr Egghart as he pulled on the trousers of his funeral suit and fixed a black rosette into his buttonhole.

‘No indeed,’ said his wife. She had bought a new black-silk suit and her hat was veiled in yards of black netting. ‘In fact I’m not sure you haven’t overdone it a bit. With the church so near we could have had the coffin carried over by hand.’

‘Well, a bit of show doesn’t hurt,’ said her husband and he looked out of the window at the four black horses with their mourning headdresses of jet feathers. The coffin was just being loaded on to the hearse, and the horses would pull it across the square so that everybody could see that they had not stinted on the old lady’s funeral. ‘After all, she was an Egghart,’ he said.