Eva Ibbotson - The Star of Kazan

And yet that night, the last night before Christmas, she felt restless. A single word kept going round and round in her head, and the word was nutmeg .

Only why? Nutmeg was a lovely spice, but there wasn’t a word about nutmeg in the instructions for the sauce. Other spices, yes, and other herbs… but not that.

‘I mustn’t,’ said Annika again. ‘I mustn’t change anything or add anything. It’s got to be the way it always was.’

The bells woke her in the dark on the morning of the twenty-fourth. She shrugged on her clothes, and then she and Ellie and Sigrid went across the square to church for early-morning mass.

When she got back she knew with a deadly certainty that lunch was going to be a failure. The carp would come apart, the sauce would curdle, the stuffing would leak. Fighting down panic, she went to the larder to fetch the fish and put it in the oven.

Then, right at the last minute, she did something she knew she would regret.

The three professors were dressed in their best clothes, their starched napkins were ready round their necks, their eyes were expectant and the table was set with the gold-rimmed Meissen plates, which were only used on very special days. Then the door opened and Annika entered with the carp.

The professors smiled benevolently. Ellie brought the vegetables and the sauce. Professor Julius began to cut the fish into slices.

‘Delicious,’ they said. ‘Absolutely delicious. Just as always.’

But when Ellie and Sigrid and Annika sat down in the kitchen to their share of the fish, the worst happened.

Ellie put a helping of carp to her mouth. Her face clouded. Annika had seldom seen her look so angry.

‘What have you done ?’ she asked, aghast. ‘What have you done, Annika? My mother would turn in her grave.’

She took another mouthful. An awful silence fell.

Then Sigrid said, ‘Just taste, Ellie, just taste, don’t lecture.’

Ellie speared another piece of fish in its dark sauce… and another… She closed her eyes. She still did not speak, but when the first course was finished she got up and fetched the black book from the dresser and with it a pen and a bottle of ink.

Then, ‘You can write it in,’ she said to Annika. ‘Don’t smudge it.’

Annika took the pen. ‘What do I write?’ she asked, bewildered.

Ellie pointed to the instructions for cooking the Christmas carp. ‘Here… Under the last line write: “A pinch of nutmeg will improve the flavour of the sauce.”’

The tree did not catch fire. Sigrid had made Annika a brown velvet dress with a wide lace collar, and Ellie gave her a silver charm to add to her bracelet. Later the Bodeks came and Stefan lifted up the smaller ones to get their sugar mice and gingerbread hearts from the tree.

All in all it had been a wonderful Christmas; ‘the best ever,’ Annika said, as she said each year, and meant it. She had quite forgotten her doubts and sadness. Her future lay clear before her; she would learn to be the best cook in Vienna — perhaps even a famous cook who had dishes named after her. Certainly there was no better place to grow up than here in this familiar square in the most beautiful city in the world.

She opened her double windows, which she was not supposed to do, and held out a hand to catch a snowflake. Faintly, across the cobbles, there came the noise of a child screaming. Then the Eggharts’ door opened and Loremarie threw her new skating boots out into the street.

‘They’re the wrong colour,’ she yelled. ‘I told you, I wanted them to be blue !’

And Annika, who had prayed only that morning not to think unkind thoughts, felt that this was the perfect end to the day.

At the end of February the funfair in the Prater, which had been closed in the winter, prepared to open once again. This meant taking the tarpaulins off the roundabouts, reassembling the shooting booths and checking the machinery of the famous Giant Wheel with its large, closed carriages.

And on the last Saturday before the fair opened officially, the men who worked there, like Stefan’s father and the other groundsmen and mechanics and carpenters, were allowed to invite their family and friends to come to the Prater free.

Stefan went, but his elder brothers all had Saturday jobs, so Annika went with him. Pauline too was invited, but she knew that the day would mostly be spent on the Giant Wheel, which she found alarming and far too high, and her grandfather was expecting a new delivery of books, so she stayed at home.

Pauline was right. Annika and Stefan went round on the Giant Wheel three times, but then Stefan caught sight of the engineer who serviced it and went off to talk to him — so that the last time Annika went up, she was alone.

Perhaps it was because of this that she saw everything so vividly.

There is a moment when each carriage stops with a little click and just hangs there in space. The music ceases, one can hear the wind — and there beneath one lies the whole city. To the east, the Danube, to the north and west the Vienna Woods… and to the south (but one has to look very hard for this) just a glimpse of the white peaks of the Alps, where the snow is everlasting.

Everything she saw now seemed to be part of her own life. The spire of the cathedral where, on Easter Sunday, Aunt Gertrude had knelt on a dead mouse… The roofs of the palace where the emperor slept on his iron bed, and the Spanish Riding School where his Lipizzaners had danced for them…

The copper dome of the art museum where Uncle Emil had told her so many important things about the painting of human flesh, and the opera where he had picked Cornelia Otter out of a chorus of thirty well-covered village maidens and decided to adore her.

She ran from side to side, looking, looking… Here was the park of the Belvedere, where soon now she would go and search for the first violets… and the pond in the Volksgarten where they had found an injured duckling and brought it to Ellie to heal. Beyond the marshy islands on the Danube ran the great plain which stretched all the way to Budapest and — nearer again — the graveyard where Sigrid’s uncle was buried after he ate twenty-seven potato dumplings in a row and fell senseless to the ground. And Annika, on a level with the clouds, thought of her friend, the Eggharts’ great-aunt, who had swung and strewn high over the stages of the world — and she had a great longing to break the windows of the carriage and strew something marvellous over the city: flowers, thousands and thousands of flowers, which would land in the wintry streets to please the people who lived in Vienna and had made it beautiful.

‘Oh, Stefan, we’re so lucky,’ she said, when she was down again. And as he looked at her puzzled she added, ‘To live here, I mean. To belong.’

Afterwards it seemed strange to her that she had said those words on that particular day.

They got off the tram a stop early because the snow was almost gone at last and the sun was shining.

‘Goodness,’ said Annika, as they turned into the square. ‘There seems to be a meeting.’

There were certainly a lot of people standing by the fountain: Josef from the cafe, with his mother wrapped in a shawl. Father Anselm from the church. The Eggharts’ maid, Mitzi. Frau Bodek, with the baby in the pram and the three-year-old Hansi clinging to her skirts, and not only Pauline but Pauline’s grandfather, who hadn’t been seen outside his shop in months.

And in the centre of the group was the coal-man, who had been delivering bags of fuel to the professors’ house, and to whom they were all listening.

‘I tell you,’ he was saying, ‘there was Ellie slumped at the kitchen table, crying her heart out, and Sigrid looking at me as though she’s never seen me before, when I’ve been to their house once a week for the past—’