Eva Ibbotson - The Star of Kazan

As soon as she woke, Annika opened her attic window and looked out at the square. She did this every morning; she liked to see that everything was in order and today it was. The pigeons were still roosting on General Brenner’s head, the fountain had been turned on, and Josef was putting the cafe tables out on the pavement, which meant it was going to be a fine day. A door opened in the ramshackle little house on the opposite corner and her friend Stefan came out and set off across the cobbles with a can to fetch the milk. He was the middle one of five flaxen-haired boys and his mother, Frau Bodek, was expecting a sixth child any day. She had said that if it was another boy she was going to give it away.

Now a solitary dog came sauntering between the chestnut trees, from the street. It was a dog she did not know and Annika looked out eagerly — perhaps it was a stray and ownerless and if it was, Ellie couldn’t refuse to let her keep it, surely? After all Ellie had taken her in when she was ownerless; she’d been a sort of stray left in a church.

But behind the dog now came a lady carrying a lead, so that was no good. The church clock struck seven and Annika turned from the window to get dressed. No school today — it was Saturday, so she could leave her hair unbraided and put away her pinafore — but there was still a lot of work to do before she could go out and find her friends.

Nearly twelve years had passed since Annika had been carried into the kitchen of the professors’ house. When the typhus epidemic had come to an end, and the Convent of the Sacred Heart had sent word that they were out of quarantine, Ellie had bundled up the baby, and she and Sigrid had gone upstairs to seek out their employers.

‘We’ve come to say goodbye,’ they’d said. ‘We’ll find some way of providing for her, but we can’t give her up.’

The professors were deeply offended. They were puzzled. They were hurt.

‘Have we complained about the baby?’ said Professor Julius stuffily.

‘Have we made any objections?’ asked Professor Emil.

‘I’m sure I never said a word,’ said Professor Gertrude, blinking and looking stricken.

Sigrid and Ellie had looked at each other.

‘You mean she can stay?’

Professor Julius bent his head.

‘We shall of course expect her to be useful ,’ he said.

‘Oh, she will be,’ cried Ellie. ‘She’ll be the best-trained child in Vienna.’

And she was. By the time she was seven, Annika could bake and ice a three-tiered chocolate cake, and bring a roast to the table. At nine she could cut cucumbers so thinly that you could read a newspaper through the slices, and when she was sent to do the marketing, the stallholders brought out their best vegetables and fruit because the little girl was famous for her eagle eyes. Sigrid had taught her how to polish the parquet floors by sliding over them with dusters tied to her feet, and how to clean silver, and how to crochet and knit and sew — and from both women she learned that work was something that had to be done, and how you felt had absolutely nothing to do with it.

But neither Ellie nor Sigrid had taught the child how to dream. The ability to disappear into her own head had come from the unknown parents who had abandoned her.

Ellie was grinding coffee and putting the bread rolls to warm in the oven when Annika came down, but she turned to give her adopted daughter a hug. She had stopped expecting to hear a knock at the door at any minute and see a strange woman standing there, claiming the child — but all the same, every morning when Annika came down from her attic, Ellie gave thanks.

‘Have you washed behind your ears?’

Annika nodded and extracted an ear for inspection. She was a sturdy child with heavy corn-coloured hair, thoughtful grey eyes under level brows, and a wide mouth. There were many such pleasing, clear-eyed girls at work in the Austrian countryside — goose girls and dairy maids and girls who took the cattle to the high pastures in the summer — but not many with Annika’s look of eager intelligence. More than that, she was a child who comforted others; she had done so from the start.

Now Annika, returning Ellie’s hug, drank in the scent of green soap and fresh bread that clung to the cook’s white apron, and wrinkled her nose with pleasure, because coming into the kitchen was coming home. Nothing changed here: the table was always scrubbed to whiteness, the emperor’s picture hung above the stove, the calender sent each year by the Bavarian Sausage Company stood on the window sill beside Ellie’s pots of herbs — and on a sacred shelf beside the dresser lay the worn black recipe book that had been Ellie’s mother’s and her mother’s mother’s before her.

But it was time to start work.

Annika put out the apricot jam for Professor Julius and the raspberry jam for Professor Emil and the honey for Professor Gertrude and carried them upstairs to the dining room. Then she laid out the napkins, saw that the sugar bowl was filled and came down again to fetch a jug of hot water for Professor Julius to wash in, and down again to fetch another one for Professor Emil.

By this time Sigrid had swept the downstairs rooms and tidied them and she and Ellie and Annika had their own breakfast at the kitchen table. Then the bell rang from Professor Gertrude’s room and Sigrid went to fetch the black-silk skirt she had ironed and from which she had removed a small piece of cheese that had got stuck to the hem, and gave it to Annika to take upstairs. Gertude was playing the harp in a lunchtime recital and it was always necessary to clean her up before she left.

And now the bell rang again and it was Professor Emil, who had lost his cravat, followed by Profesor Julius, who gave her ten kreutzer and asked her to go and buy a copy of Vienna Today from the newsagent round the corner.

‘That idiot Jacobson has published a piece about the origin of volcanic rock which is absolute rubbish,’ he said. ‘I had to write a letter — they should have printed it.’

So Annika ran across the square and through the chestnut trees into the Keller Strasse, hoping that they had printed it, because when they didn’t print his letters he got very upset.

The lady in the newspaper shop was a friend of Annika’s and she had already seen that the professor’s letter had been put in.

‘So he’ll be in a good mood,’ she said. And then, ‘I hear the Bodek baby is due any minute.’

Annika nodded. ‘If it’s a boy she’s going to give it away.’

When she got back with the paper she was sent out again to the flower seller who sat with her basket beside the fountain. It had become Annika’s job to choose the flowers that Professor Julius put every Saturday in front of the picture of his Beloved — the one who had died before her wedding day. Today, with summer on its way, Annika bought gentians and edelweiss from the mountains and took them to the professor’s study, where he was reading the letter he had sent to the paper for the third time.

His Beloved, whose name had been Adele Fischl, lived on a table near the window, and as she arranged the flowers, Annika thought again how sad it was that she had died. She was a serious-looking woman with a strong nose, and Annika was sure that she and the professor would have suited each other very well.

After this Sigrid put her to polishing the silver candlesticks and then it was time for her elevenses — a glass of frothy milk and a golden vanilla kipfel straight out of the oven which she took out to the cobbled yard behind the house.

Annika loved the yard with its vine-covered door to the back lane. The wash house was there and the clothes line and the woodshed, and the old stables which were no longer used for a horse and carriage but acted as a storeroom. Ellie grew tubs of geraniums and petunias there, and in a sunny corner by the house was a blue bench on which the servants liked to sit when they had a minute to themselves.