Eva Ibbotson - The Star of Kazan

‘You can imagine how much I shall enjoy dressing my little girl,’ she told Sigrid. ‘It’s what every mother dreams of.’

And Sigrid sighed, for she too would have liked to take Annika into a dress shop and fit her out without worrying about the cost, but she said nothing.

Rather a lot of people were saying nothing, it seemed to Annika. The professors, the Bodeks, Pauline… it was as though they didn’t understand the marvellous thing that had happened to her. Only Loremarie’s family seemed impressed. Her father had looked up Spittal and found that it was mentioned in the guidebooks as an interesting fortified house of the seventeenth century. To see Loremarie curtsying when she was introduced to her mother had given Annika a moment of pure pleasure.

Pauline had hardly come out of the bookshop since the day Frau von Tannenberg arrived, and Annika was puzzled. She couldn’t believe that her friends were jealous of her, but why couldn’t they share in her happiness?

Then, on the day before she was due to leave, Stefan and Pauline asked her to come to the deserted garden.

The snow had melted at last, but it was still very cold. They sat inside the hut, wrapped in a blanket; Ellie had prepared a picnic but no one felt much like eating.

Both of Annika’s friends had brought farewell presents. Stefan had carved her a little wooden horse.

‘To remind you of when we went to see the Lipizzaners,’ he said.

‘I won’t need reminding,’ said Annika.

Pauline had copied the best of her scrapbook collection into a special notebook that could be fastened with a ribbon. All her favourite stories were there: the one about the girl with measles swimming the Danube, the one about the champion wrestler with the back-to-front foot — and a new one about a boy who was herding his mother’s cow across a frozen lake when the ice broke and the cow fell into the water.

‘He held the cow by the horns and he just held on and held on till help came and his fingers were so badly frostbitten that one had to be amputated, but the cow was saved.’

Annika took the book and thanked her warmly. It must have taken hours and hours to copy all the stories in.

‘I know you don’t need to be made brave because you are brave, but one never knows,’ said Pauline.

But the real reason they had brought her to the hut was to tell her that whatever happened to her in her new life they would never forsake her.

‘I really hate aristocrats, as you know,’ said Pauline, ‘always grinding the faces of the poor.’

‘My mother wouldn’t grind the faces of the poor,’ said Annika.

All the same, she knew how Pauline felt. Last spring they had acted the story of Marie Antoinette going to the guillotine. Annika had been the doomed queen and she’d been shocked at the glee with which Pauline and Stefan had jeered at her as she bared her throat for the knife.

‘On the other hand it isn’t your fault that you’ve turned out to be a von Tannenberg,’ Pauline went on. ‘So if you need us, just say the word.’

‘Yes,’ said Stefan, nodding his blond head. ‘Just say the word.’

After that the hours rushed by and suddenly her suitcase was packed and it was time for the last goodbyes.

She had said goodbye to Josef in the cafe, and his mother, to Father Anselm in the church, to the lady in the paper shop…

Now she went upstairs to say goodbye to the professors, who weren’t professors any more but uncles, and to Aunt Gertrude, who suddenly bent down to kiss her, bumping her nose.

Then came Sigrid and Ellie…

They had prayed and they had practised. Now they stood dry-eyed and side by side to give Annika a cheerful send-off.

But as Annika put her arms round Ellie something horrible happened to her. It was as if she was being disembowelled — as though her insides really were being pulled apart.

‘I’m coming back ,’ she cried. ‘I’m coming back often and often. My mother says I can.’

Why did no one listen ; why did no one understand that she was coming back?

‘Yes, dear; of course you’re coming back,’ said Ellie quietly.

Then the carriage was at the door. Though Annika had already taken leave of everyone, they had all gathered in the square to wave. The same people as had been there just a few days ago, when she and Stefan had come back from the Prater. The Bodeks with the baby, Pauline and her grandfather, Josef from the cafe…

Annika climbed into the carriage, where her mother sat waiting. As it clattered away across the cobbles, the Bodek baby in his pram began to scream. He screamed and he screamed and he screamed long after the carriage had turned into the Keller Strasse and was out of sight.

Nobody hushed him. Instead, as he became more and more purple with sorrow and rage, they nodded their heads.

‘Exactly so,’ they said to each other. ‘Yes, yes, exactly so.’

They had travelled all morning and for the best part of the afternoon. The train was stuffy, but when her mother opened a window the wind that blew in seemed to be full of knives.

Annika had looked out eagerly as they had crossed the Moravian hills, stopped at pretty towns with onion-domed churches and trundled over gorges cut by rushing rivers. Now, after several hours, she was getting sleepy and the landscape had changed. As they went north, and still further north, there was just a wide plain with patches of trees and pools of water circled by dark birds. Snow still lay in the hollows and the gnarled trees were bent by the wind. This was Norrland and the site of her new home.

Frau Edeltraut had said little on the journey; just smiled at Annika from time to time and reached out to pat her hand — and Annika was free to imagine what she would find… the farm, the dogs and horses… and Hermann… A brother: she had not dared to imagine a brother in her dreams.

They did not go to the dining car; just bought some rolls from a woman with a basket at one of the stations, and Annika remembered hearing that aristocrats did not get hungry like other people, nor did they mind being uncomfortable. The seats of the railway carriage were surprisingly hard.

The light had begun to fade by the time the train stopped at Bad Haxenfeld, and they climbed down on to the platform. It was bitterly cold and a strong smell of rotten eggs drifted over from the town. Rather a grand town it seemed to be, with big hotels and a casino, so the smell surprised Annika. Was it the drains?

‘That’s the sulphur you can smell,’ said her mother. ‘It’s in the water — it gushes out of the rocks above the town and that’s why people come here to take baths in it and get cured. Sulphur is good for a whole lot of diseases. I have an old uncle who lives in one of the hotels here; he has arthritis.’

Annika nodded. The Eggharts came here too, she remembered. They had been at Bad Haxenfeld when news reached them of the old lady’s death.

As they crossed the platform to leave the station, a large number of men in dark suits — thirty at least — got out of the back of the train. They had badges pinned to their lapels and obviously belonged together.

‘I think they must be dentists,’ said Frau Edeltraut. ‘Unless they’re undertakers, but I believe my uncle said dentists. They come here for conferences. One month it’s dentists, one month it’s undertakers or locksmiths or bank managers. They stay in the hotels and take the waters and talk about teeth or coffins or whatever.’

Annika watched the men, still streaming out of the train. As they alighted, uniformed porters with the names of the hotels on their caps fetched their trunks and suitcases out of the luggage van and trundled them out of the station, and the dentists followed. Tall dentists, small dentists, fat dentists, thin dentists…