Eva Ibbotson - The Star of Kazan

For the first week Annika still hoped. She hoped that her mother meant well by her and that something good could be made out of her new life. Perhaps there would be one teacher who could make her subject interesting; one girl who would show her friendship.

She set herself to work hard. She learned to walk downstairs with wooden blocks on her head so as to aquire an iron-straight back, and to recite the family tree of Europe’s noble families from the Almanach de Gotha . She learned poems about the glory of war, and who should be placed above a field marshal at the dinner table. There were even a few proper lessons, but not many because the teachers were as cowed and miserable as the pupils and the sound of the headmistress’s stick along the corridor sent all ideas of grammar or arithmetic out of their heads.

In the afternoon, if it did not rain, they were taken for a walk, lining up in pairs, but not allowed to choose their partners in case they formed special friendships. The walk took forty minutes exactly, marching down the avenue, turning left at the gate along the road to the village, then back to the drive behind the house. At all other times it was forbidden to go out of doors.

Annika’s mother had told her that it was difficult to get into the school, but it seemed to her that all the girls were there because they were not really wanted. Olga’s mother was dead and her stepmother did not like her. Ilse had a club foot and was teased by her sisters. Hedwig had been brought up by grandparents who found the care of a young girl too much for them.

‘Don’t let anyone tell you different,’ she said to Annika. ‘We’re here to be out of the way and because we don’t have to pay. The Fatherland could manage without us very well.’

The food was worse than Annika could have believed and the punishments were endless: being shut in a dark cupboard, kneeling on dried peas… Minna was served her breakfast four times then sent to the isolation room for a week.

Annika lost weight. She found it difficult to sleep. One day she asked Olga what had happened to pupil 126.

‘Hedwig is 125 and I’m 127, but who is 126?’

Olga looked down at her feet.

‘We are not allowed to talk about her.’

But Annika found that she already knew. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ she said. ‘She died in the school?’

‘Don’t ask me any more,’ said Olga. ‘I’ll get into trouble.’

But Annika was not so easy to shake off. ‘What was she like?’

‘She had nice hair,’ said Olga, and walked away.

All the same, some part of Annika would not give in to total despair. She forced herself to remember details of her life when it had been good; when she was busy and fufilled. So, lying in bed at night, Annika recalled her time in Ellie’s kitchen — and when she felt misery engulfing her completely she cooked the Christmas carp. She didn’t leave anything out. The part at the beginning where she washed the fish four times in cold water. Then the marinade: chopped onions, herbs, lemons and white wine. Not any old white wine but Chablis, which was the best and which Sigrid had fetched for her from the cellar.

Lying in her cold and narrow bed, Annika took herself through all the stages and when she reached the moment when Ellie had taken down the black book and told her to write ‘A pinch of nutmeg will improve the flavour of the sauce’, she could usually drop off to sleep.

But then came the night when she was going through the ingredients for the stuffing: truffles and chopped celery… grated honey cake and lemon rind and chestnut purée… but there was one other thing. One thing that was really important. Not chopped prunes — the lady in the paper shop had suggested chopped prunes, but Annika hadn’t used them. But it was something like prunes… Oh God, what was it? If she forgot that, if she forgot how to cook, everything was lost.

She sat up in bed in the dormitory where the girls snored and snuffled and whimpered in their sleep — but she could not remember.

And at that moment she was defeated, and she sank down into a dark place where nobody could reach her.

‘Ithink Herr Zwingli is right,’ said Edeltraut, sipping her coffee. ‘We’ll sell the butterfly brooch next. That should bring in enough to finish the repairs at Spittal and enable us to live in comfort for two or three years.’

‘And at Felsenheim,’ put in Oswald. ‘The repairs at Felsenheim aren’t finished and Mathilde wants a new carriage.’

Edeltraut put her cup down with a clatter.

‘Oswald, how many times do I have to tell you that Annika is my daughter, not Mathilde’s. When Annika signed away her belongings, she signed them over to me, not to you or your wife.’

‘Yes. Yes, of course. But Mathilde feels—’

‘I’m not interested in what Mathilde feels. I shall do exactly what Zwingli suggests and sell the pieces at intervals so as not to attract attention. After the butterfly brooch the emeralds, and then the earrings. And I think he’s right — the Star of Kazan should wait till the end: it’s such a showy piece. Questions might be asked.’

They were sitting at a table in one of Zurich’s most luxurious cafes overlooking the river. A chestnut tree beside them was just coming into blossom; there were flowers in tubs on the pavement; everything sparkled with cleanliness: the streets, the buildings, the people…

Getting hold of the trunk had been ridiculously easy. As soon as she received the note from the stationmaster that a trunk addressed to her was waiting at Bad Haxenfeld, Edeltraut had driven in with Oswald.

They had loaded the trunk into the carriage, driven to a remote shed on the Spittal estate and transferred the jewels to Oswald’s locked leather shooting bag. Then they waited till dark, returned to Spittal and threw the trunk into the lake.

That, of course, was only half the battle. They had to find out if the story that the Baron had overheard at Bad Haxenfeld was true and the jewels were real, and to do this they had gone to Zurich.

Zurich is the biggest town in Switzerland and it is a beautiful place, built on either side of a fast green river which flows into a wide lake ringed by mountains. The streets of Zurich are elegant, the shops are sumptuous and the hotels are as comfortable as palaces.

But what makes Zurich important in the eyes of the world is its banking houses. Many of the best-known banks in the world have their headquarters there and they are famous for being discreet and reliable, with underground safes where people can keep their money or their gold bars or their jewels in numbered boxes, and no one asks any questions about what is stored there or for how long.

And along with the banks, the city had the best jewellers and lawyers and accountants in Europe.

It was to the firm of Zwingli and Hammerman, the best-known jewellers in Zurich, that Edeltraut, with Oswald and Mathilde, had taken the jewels from Annika’s trunk, and as they unpacked them and laid them on the green baize table in Herr Zwingli’s strongroom their hearts were beating very fast.

‘I can’t give you an opinion on these straight away,’ he said. ‘I shall have to get my experts to look at them.’

So he gave them a receipt and looked at their documents of entitlement and they waited for two days in their hotel for what the experts would say. They were the longest two days of their lives, but when they returned they knew by Herr Zwingli’s beaming smile that their troubles were over.

‘Yes, all the pieces are genuine, and I have to say I have not seen such a collection for a long time.’

And he suggested it would be wise to sell the pieces one at a time, with intervals in between, and keep the rest in the vaults of the Landesbank, in a strong box.