Eva Ibbotson: The Star of Kazan

For a couple of hours they suffered shipwreck, thirst, terror and cannibalism. Then suddenly it was over. They ate their sandwiches — Pauline and Annika sharing theirs with Stefan, whose mother never had any extra food to give him. When the clock struck six, they came out of their private world, tidied the hut, padlocked the door and crawled back through the hole in the wall.

In the square they separated and became their ordinary selves again.

Later that evening, when Annika was sitting in the kitchen dunking strips of bread into her eggs-in-a-glass, there was a knock at the back door and Stefan came in.

‘It’s come,’ he said. ‘The baby.’

Everybody waited.

‘It’s a boy,’ said Stefan.

Annika pushed back her glass. ‘Will she give it away then?’

Stefan grinned. ‘Not her. She’s holding it and petting it and telling us what a lovely baby it is. She even thinks it’s got hair.’

Ellie got up and fetched a shawl she had been knitting for the baby and a bonnet Sigrid had crocheted.

‘Are you sure she won’t give it away?’ asked Annika a little anxiously after Stefan had gone.

‘Not her,’ said Ellie. ‘Mothers don’t give away their babies,’ she began — and broke off, seeing Annika’s face. She laid her hand over Annika’s. ‘Your mother would have kept you if she could, you know that, don’t you?’

And Annika did know. When she was in bed in her attic and had put out her lamp, she told herself the story she told herself night after night.

It began with the ringing of the door bell — the front door bell — and a woman stepped out of a carriage. She had thick auburn hair under her velvet hat; her eyes were almost the same colour as her hair, a rich warm brown; and she was tall and beautifully dressed, like the woman in the painting Professor Emil had in his room, which was called The Lady of Shalott . She swept into the house, saying, ‘Where is she? Where is my long-lost daughter? Oh, take me to her,’ and then she gathered Annika into her arms.

‘My darling, my beloved child,’ she said, and she explained why she’d had to leave Annika in the church. The explanation was complicated and it varied as Annika told herself the story, but tonight she was very tired so she skipped that part and went on to where her mother turned back to the carriage and a dog leaped out — a golden retriever with soft moist eyes…

‘I brought him for you,’ her mother said. ‘I was sure you’d like a dog.’

And Annika was asleep.

There was only one child in the square whom Annika couldn’t stand. Her name was Loremarie Egghart and she lived in a big house opposite the house of the professors.

The Eggharts were extremely rich because Loremarie’s grandfather had been a manufacturer of soft furnishings and in particular of duvets and pillows. These were stuffed with goose down from the plains of Hungary, where the poor birds were rounded up and plucked naked, but the Eggharts did not worry about the geese, only about the money.

Loremarie’s father still took money from the factory, but he had become an important councillor and went each day, with a flower in his buttonhole, to sit at a large desk overlooking the Parliament Building, where he helped to make boring laws and shouted at the people who worked for him in his foghorn of a voice.

What he wanted more than anything was to become a statue. Not a statue on horseback, he knew that was unlikely, but a proper statue on a plinth just the same. There were many such statues in Vienna: statues of aldermen and councillors and politicians, and Herr Egghart thought that if he could become one too, his life would have been worthwhile.

Loremarie’s mother, Frau Egghart, spent her time spoiling her daughter, shopping, gossiping and looking down on her neighbours, particularly the Bodeks, who, she felt, should be rehoused somewhere else. She was driven everywhere in her husband’s brand-new canary-yellow motor with its outsize brass lamps and its bulbous horn that could be heard three streets away, and she didn’t just have maids from the country to work in the house, but also kept a snooty manservant called Leopold, who walked behind Loremarie carrying her satchel when she went to school.

Needless to say, Loremarie was not allowed to play with a ‘kitchen child’ like Annika, so it was easy enough to keep out of her way.

But on Sunday morning after church Annika liked to catch up with what was happening in the city, and she did this by walking carefully round a large red pillar covered in notices and advertisements which stood on the pavement on the other side of the chestnut trees.

On this pillar were notices of the plays being performed and what was showing at the opera. There were notices of military parades, visiting circuses, special matinees at the theatre, and receptions given by the old emperor at whatever palace he was staying at.

And of course there were advertisements for stomach pills and for ointments to cure baldness, and a picture of a man with huge muscles, which he had got by eating a particular kind of liver sausage.

Today there was a new notice; a big one, with a picture of a snow-white horse with golden reins and a gold-and-crimson saddle, sitting back on his haunches with his forelegs tucked under him. A man in a bicorne hat and a brown cutaway coat was riding him — and Annika, like any child in Vienna, knew that it was one of the famous Lipizzaner stallions doing a levade. And not any stallion but Maestoso Fantasia, the oldest and strongest of the horses and a great favourite with the emperor.

The notice said:

GALA PERFORMANCE AT

THE SPANISH RIDING SCHOOL

14 JUNE 1908

in honour of His Majesty King Edward VII

of Great Britain

and in the presence of His Imperial Majesty,

The Emperor Franz Joseph.

The Band of the Austrian Grenadiers will play.

(A limited number of tickets are available to the General Public.)

Annika stared at the poster for a long time. She walked past the Lipizzaners’ stables often, she had even been allowed inside because Stefan’s uncle was the blacksmith who shod the horses, but she had never seen a proper performance in the Spanish Riding School. She would have loved to go, but the tickets would be incredibly expensive; there was no hope that Ellie and Sigrid could afford to take her; she would not even ask.

She was still looking at the notice rather wistfully, when she heard a high and bossy voice behind her.

‘ We’re going to the gala, aren’t we, Miss Smith?’

Loremarie was with her English governess, a tall sad-looking woman. Loremarie had had a lot of governesses — English ones and French ones and German ones. Some of them had been thin and some of them had been fat, some of them had been strict and some of them had been gentle — but all of them, after a few months with Loremarie, had looked sad.

‘We’re going in the front row on the first tier,’ bragged Loremarie.

She was wearing a pleated tartan skirt and a tartan tam-o’-shanter, although the Eggharts were not known for their Scottish blood. Her small dark eyes were set very deep in her pale cheeks and she had a particular way of walking, with her behind thrust out, as though she wanted people to know that her backside, like her front, was important.

‘It costs a lot of money to go,’ said Loremarie, who loved to taunt Annika for being poor — and then the sad governess led her away to her dancing lesson.

Since no one knew exactly when Annika had been born, Ellie and Sigrid did not celebrate her birthday, they celebrated her ‘Found Day’, the day on which they had discovered her on the altar steps at Pettelsdorf.