Eva Ibbotson - The Star of Kazan

‘No, mine!’ said the other child — and he kicked the ball hard on to the cinders.

‘Stop, Fritzi,’ screamed his mother. ‘Stop, STOP!’

But Fritzi did not stop.

‘Ball,’ he cried passionately — and trotted on his fat little legs right across Rocco’s path — and fell.

Zed didn’t have time to think. Rocco gave a shrill whinny of fear, and then he reared up… and up on his hindquarters with his hoofs pulled under him…

The child’s mother screamed again, there were cries from the bystanders, a soldier let go of the girl on his arm and moved forward.

Rocco’s hoofs were poised over the little boy’s body as he lay tumbled in the earth. But they did not come down. Rocco still held his levade and Zed gave no command, only adjusted the weight of his body imperceptibly to help the horse to stay as he was.

A levade can only be held for seconds, even by the strongest and most experienced horse, but these were long seconds. When Rocco came down again, slowly, carefully, the soldier had run out and snatched the little boy to safety.

After that there was pandemonium. People shouted and cheered; there were cries of ‘Did you see that?’ and Fritzi’s mother burst into tears of relief.

But Zed was watching two men only: the tall man in his dark-brown uniform and the man beside him with the ginger moustache. They were staring intently at the horse, but not in an excited way like the people in the crowd. The tall man had taken the other’s arm and they looked serious and businesslike.

‘We’ll have to look into this,’ Zed heard him say, and his companion nodded and took out a notebook and pencil. ‘A bay stallion. It all fits.’

‘I’ve seen him before,’ said the other man.

Zed heard no more. He urged Rocco into a canter — but as he made his way back to the square he realized that time was running very short. The two officers had looked like policemen. Not ordinary ones, they were too smart for that, but officers perhaps in one of the special units which flushed out people who had no right to be in the city: spies for one of the Balkan countries intent on destroying the empire, anarchists wanting to blow up members of parliament… and thieves… Horse thieves in particular. Frau Edeltraut must have issued a description of Rocco… he was distinctive enough with his single white star.

When he had stabled Rocco and rubbed him down, he made his way into the kitchen

‘Sigrid, I have to go soon. Tomorrow… I’m sure I saw two men in the park who guessed that Rocco wasn’t really mine. They looked like special police.’

But Sigrid was too preoccupied to worry about Rocco.

‘Professor Gertrude’s had a telegram from her brothers,’ she told Zed. ‘She’s in a dreadful state. Stefan’s up there now trying to calm her down; you go up too while I make some coffee.’

Gertrude was sitting in a chair holding the telegram in her hand. It was a long telegram and obviously very upsetting.

‘They want me to come to this place called Grossenfluss and give a harp recital. On my concert grand — the new one. They say I must come quickly; it’s urgent. There’s something about a child known to us all.’

‘Annika,’ said Zed instantly, and Stefan nodded.

‘Yes, but why do I have to go and play the new harp? It isn’t ready yet. And why do I have to play military music? I never play military music: it isn’t what I play,’ said poor Gertrude. She looked at the telegram again. ‘And there’s something about a man called Ragnar Hairybreeks. It all seems to be in code.’

But Pauline, hurrying in from the bookshop with The Dictionary of Myths and Legends under her arm, solved this particular problem.

‘I’ve found it,’ she said. ‘It’s in the Saga of the Nibelungen. Ragnar Hairybreeks was a Viking warrior whose wife was hidden in a harp. There’s a lot more, but that’s the bit that matters.’

The children looked at each other. They were beginning to understand.

But Professor Gertrude was desperate. ‘I can’t go all that way with the instrument. I can’t carry it by myself.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Stefan quietly.

Sigrid came in then with a tray of coffee, and a second telegram, which had just been delivered. Gertrude tore it open eagerly. Perhaps her brothers had seen sense and she did not need to go.

But the message was simple.

‘Bring Emil’s stomach powders,’ it said.

It was Olga who found out that there was to be a harp recital in the school on Sunday evening.

Annika lifted her head from the handkerchief she was hemming.

‘A harp? Are you sure?’

For a moment the cloud in which she lived rolled away and a door opened on the past. Professor Gertrude was carrying her harp downstairs; she was wearing the black skirt from which Sigrid was always removing small pieces of food, and both she and the harp smelled overpoweringly of lavender water.

‘She’s French, she’s called Madame La Cruise. A friend of the princess sent her to show us that you can play patriotic things on the harp.’

Annika bent her head again over her sewing. It was strange how hope could die even if you hadn’t had any hope. Aunt Gertrude seldom left Vienna and it was impossible to imagine her playing patriotic songs on the harp.

It was the patriotic songs that were particularly worrying Gertrude as she sat in the parlour of the inn going through the plans for Annika’s rescue.

She had transposed a song called ‘Slay and Smite if God Demands It’ and another one about a soldier’s death on the battlefield with a refrain about the red-soaked earth renewed by the warrior’s spilt blood.

‘I can’t do any more,’ she said miserably to her brothers. ‘They’re nasty.’

‘It doesn’t matter. The girls won’t know what you play,’ said Professor Julius. ‘School concerts aren’t about music; they’re about not having to do homework while they’re going on.’

Stefan thought that the songs Gertrude was going to play would be the least of their worries. The plan, which had been explained to him when he arrived, seemed to be full of holes.

He and Gertrude were to unload the harp from the carriage and wheel it into the school. In the hall they would take the harp out of its case, leave the case in the cloakroom and ask for help in carrying the instrument up the stairs.

In the interval of the concert, Annika would say she felt sick and hurry to the toilet in the downstairs cloakroom. Stefan, who was guarding the harp case, would help her into it and, when the concert resumed and everybody was out of the way, he would carry her out to a closed carriage in which Ellie was waiting with a change of clothes. Annika would be let out and driven away to the station, Stefan would take the harp case back to the cloakroom and, at the end of the concert, he and Professor Gertrude would go home with the harp in the usual way.

‘I’ll have to have a reason for taking the case out in the interval,’ said Stefan. He was not a boy who worried easily but he was worried now. ‘In case anyone sees me. Maybe I would need to fix a new wheel on the base.’

‘We’ll just have to improvise,’ said Professor Julius grandly. Since he was to wait for them at the station he could afford to be relaxed. ‘After all it will be dark.’

Both the professors had been determined to return to Vienna and leave Ellie where she was. However much Annika disliked her school, she had been put there by her mother, and they were not the sort of people who planned cloak-and-dagger rescues, and interfered with authority.

But what they had learned from the maid at the inn about pupil 126 would not go out of their minds.