Eva Ibbotson - The Star of Kazan

‘I won’t go back to Grossenfluss. Not ever.’ In spite of her exhaustion, Annika’s voice was firm.

‘No, no, of course not. It was wrong of me to think that you might be happy there. I thought you needed companionship of your own age, but the school has changed completely in the last few years. I should have taken you there and seen for myself instead of letting you go with Mathilde; I have been guilty there too — dreadfully guilty. You shall never go back there, I swear it.’ She had found another handkerchief and managed to smile through her tears. ‘My poor, pale darling, don’t stand there by the door. Let the sun warm your face, come out on to the balcony.’

Annika let herself be led out of the French window. In front of her was the dazzling water with its gaily painted boats. Tulip trees were in flower along the bank; children splashed in the shallows. The world was still there and it was very beautiful.

‘Look, there’s the steamer just going off to Regensburg.’

Annika nodded. ‘It’s the Princess Stephanie .’

Her mother had put her arm round her and her scent stole into Annika’s nostrils.

‘There’s so much to see, so much to do. Couldn’t we do it together?’

Still Annika was silent. She did not think that she had ever been so tired.

‘I’ve had such an idea,’ said Edeltraut eagerly. ‘We could go back home on the steamer. Go back by river. The boat goes quite a long way into Germany, we’d have days on the water before we had to change to a train. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You like travelling by boat.’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll come then, my darling? You’ll forgive me?’ She stretched out her hands imploringly and looked deep into Annika’s eyes. ‘Because if I don’t have your forgiveness I don’t know… how I shall live.’

Nobody could believe it.

‘You’re not going to do anything about the jewels? You’re going to let her have them and say nothing?’

Everybody was amazed and distressed, but Pauline was furious.

‘You must be completely mad,’ she said.

They had all gathered in the courtyard to find out where Annika had been.

‘Would you give your mother up to the police?’ asked Annika. ‘Would you, Ellie?’ She turned to the professors. ‘Would you?’

For a moment she had silenced them. Ellie remembered her mother, who had once taken a small wilted sprig of parsley hanging down from the side of a market stall because the stallholder was busy serving a queue of customers and she was in a hurry. The following day she had sent Ellie to walk five kilometres in the heat down a dusty road to find the woman and pay her.

‘You see,’ said Annika, ‘you wouldn’t. Not your own mother.’

But what they minded — what was almost impossible to understand — was that Annika was going back of her own free will to Spittal. She wasn’t even going to try and stay in Vienna.

‘She asked me to forgive her; she went down on her knees to me.’

Pauline snorted and the professors frowned at her, but it was true that they too were very much upset. They had given Annika a way out and she had not even tried to take it.

‘It’s just snobbishness,’ said Pauline. ‘You really like being a “von” and having people bow and scrape to you. You must like it or you wouldn’t be so feeble.’

‘No.’ Annika’s wretchedness was beyond tears. ‘I don’t like it.’

The boredom of life at Spittal came back to her. The long empty days, not being allowed to help… and she would go back without Zed, without Rocco’s whinny of greeting when she went down to the farm. Without the farm…

She set her teeth. She had given her word and she could see no other way. Perhaps people who had always had mothers felt differently, but to her, her mother’s arrival after the years of daydreaming about her had been a miracle. She could not now turn her back on the person who had given her life.

‘It’s in the Bible,’ Annika said wearily. ‘It’s where Ruth says, “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”’

But it was not wise to quote things to Pauline, who had always read more than anybody else. ‘Ruth didn’t say it to her mother, she said it to her mother-in-law, and that’s completely different.’

But Annika had fought her battle on the way back from the Riverside; no one could shake her decision. If people did not forgive those closest to them, how could the world go on?

‘It’s in the pictures too, everywhere.’ She turned to Uncle Emil. ‘The whole museum is full of mothers holding their children.’

Emil, however, could see no connection between Frau von Tannenberg and the Holy Mother of God, and said so.

The person who said the least and perhaps understood the most was Ellie — but her hurt was absolute. She knew that Annika was not a snob and that she was unimpressed by riches. Annika was a person who was interested in doing things, not in having them. Only an overwhelming love for her mother could make her behave as she had done.

Up to now Ellie had hoped that her foster child still remembered her old life with affection. Now she faced the truth, but she did not know how she was going to endure a separation for the second time.

‘I think I’ll go back to my people,’ she said to Sigrid. ‘They’ll be glad of some extra help. They’d take you in too.’

Ellie’s cousins ran a little hotel high in the Alps.

‘I’m sure it’ll be better up there,’ she went on. ‘The mountain air’s so thin it makes you see things differently.’

But the air would have to be very thin indeed, thought Sigrid, to make either of them forget the girl they had brought up.

Annika had asked for two days more in Vienna. She wanted to say goodbye to Zed — and she wanted, for the last time, to cook a meal.

‘I shan’t try and help or interfere at Spittal,’ she said to Ellie. ‘They’ve got servants and there would be no point. But I’d like to make one meal for all of you tonight. If the professors don’t mind we could all eat in the dining room. And I’d like to ask Frau Bodek.’

She began the preparations for the farewell meal at once, writing the menu down and assembling the ingredients.

‘Would you like me to help you or do you want to work alone?’ said Ellie.

‘I would like it if you helped me, Ellie. Please. And Sigrid. It’s not a difficult meal, but I’ll need lots of ice… and somehow I’ve got to get hold of molasses.’

‘Molasses?’

‘You’ll see. I want to make those Norrland Nussel — at least I do if you’ve kept the recipe I sent you.’

‘Of course I’ve kept it. It’s on the back of the envelope it came on. I put it in the black book.’

‘You haven’t tried them yet?’

‘No. I wasn’t sure if I could get tansy, but Sigrid says she’s seen some in the market.’

‘Good.’ Annika had finished scribbling. ‘I’m going to start with beef broth with very small dumplings; they’ll be light for Uncle Emil’s stomach. Then roast saddle of venison with peas and celeriac and potato puffs… then a strawberry bombe — and with the coffee, the Norrland Nussel. How does that sound?’

‘It sounds just fine,’ said Ellie. ‘Now you just tell us what you want us to do.’

They cooked together all afternoon. Cooking is hard physical work, and while they were busy pounding and stirring and chopping and sieving, the grief of the parting that was to come could be pushed to the back of their minds, and be endured.

‘Now for the Nussel,’ said Annika. ‘I do hope I can get them right. I can’t see how they can help being heavy with the molasses and the chestnuts… but the ones I had in Bad Haxenfeld were really light. And she was such a nice woman, the one who gave me the recipe.’