Eva Ibbotson - The Star of Kazan

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Eva Ibbotson - The Star of Kazan» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Год выпуска: 2004, ISBN: 2004, Издательство: Pan Macmillan, Жанр: Детская проза, Историческая проза, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

The Star of Kazan: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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In 1896, in a pilgrim church in the Alps, an abandoned baby girl is found by a cook and a housemaid. They take her home, and Annika grows up in the servants’ quarters of a house belonging to three eccentric Viennese professors. She is happy there but dreams of the day when her real mother will come to find her. And sure enough, one day a glamorous stranger arrives at the door. After years of guilt and searching, Annika’s mother has come to claim her daughter, who is in fact a Prussian aristocrat and whose true home is a great castle. But at crumbling, spooky Spittal Annika discovers that all is not as it seems in the lives of her new-found family… Eva Ibbotson’s hugely entertaining story is a timeless classic for readers young and old.

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They did this by leaving Vienna very early and taking the same train into the mountains as they had taken then, to give thanks in the little church and to pray. At first they had walked through the village in fear and trembling, waiting for someone to tell them that an unknown woman had been seen asking questions, but as the years passed and nothing was heard, they relaxed. It really seemed as though the woman who had left her daughter on the altar steps had vanished from the face of the earth. When Annika was a baby they had left her with the Bodeks when they went to the mountains, but as soon as she could walk they took her along. It always seemed to be fine on the twelfth of June. The scent of the pines blew softly from the slopes, the stream sparkled — and the fortunate cows grazed contentedly on salads of clover and primulas and harebells which studded the rich grass.

‘I’d rather have been found here than born in a boring hospital,’ Annika would say.

Inside the church, though, she always felt bewildered and cross. ‘It was me you were giving away,’ she wanted to say to her absent mother. ‘It wasn’t just anybody, it was me.’

And then of course she felt guilty, and that night, when she told herself the story of her mother’s arrival, the love between them knew no bounds.

But the important part of the celebrations came on the Saturday after Found Day, when the professors let her choose a treat, something to which all the household could go. The year before they had gone on a paddle steamer down the Danube to Durnstein, where Richard the Lionheart had been imprisoned, and the year before that they had gone to the opera to see Hansel and Gretel .

This year Annika plucked up courage and asked if they could go to the gala to see the Lipizzaners dance for the English king. She was tired of Loremarie’s taunts.

‘If it’s not too expensive?’ she asked.

It was expensive, very expensive, and the professors were not entirely pleased with her choice because they thought that the emperor spent too much money on his beautiful white horses — money which could be better spent on making the university bigger, especially the parts of it in which they worked. Sigrid too did not really approve of the Lipizzaners.

‘They could build new hospitals all over the city with what those animals cost,’ she said.

But the professors gave in — and bought tickets not only for the household but for Pauline and Stefan, whom Annika always wanted to invite.

Treats which involved the professors always started off with rather a lot of education. Before they went to Durnstein, Professor Julius had told her about the depth of the river at that point, the speed of the current and the kind of sandstone from which the castle had been built, and Professor Gertrude had played on her harp the tune that Richard’s rescuers had played under his castle window.

‘We’ve learned a lot about the horses at school,’ Annika said now, thinking she might get away without too many lectures.

She already knew that the horses were bred in Lipizza, near Trieste, from Arab and Berber strains brought from Spain and that the Archduke Charles had brought the first ones to Vienna 300 years before. She knew that the horses did not start off white but dark brown or black, in the same way as Dalmatian puppies are born without spots, and that each stallion had his own rider who stayed with him all through his life in the riding school.

But Professor Julius was not satisfied. He took Annika up to his room and got out a map of Karst, the plateau on which Lipizza was situated.

‘The soil is sparse and there are rocks close to the surface, so that the horses learn to pick up their feet and this helps to form their high-stepping gait. All the area is limestone, which is very porous…’ And he was off, because he was after all a geologist, and very fond of limestone — and it was an hour before Annika could get away.

Professor Emil took her and Pauline to the art museum. Both girls knew it well, with its marble floors and the pictures of half-dressed ladies with dimpled knees. Now, though, Emil led them to the seventeenth-century Spanish artists who had painted huge battle scenes with rearing horses and dying soldiers and blood dripping from swords.

‘You see the way those forelegs are poised over the enemy soldier,’ he said, pointing to a grey stallion with flaring nostrils and wild eyes, ‘that’s a courbade, and when he brings his hoofs down, he’ll crush the man to pulp. And over there, the Duke of Milan’s horse — the one that seems to be flying — he’s doing a capriole. See how he’s kicking out with his hind legs!’

And he explained that the most famous of the movements that the Lipizzaners performed, the ‘airs above the ground’, were originally developed in battle, where they could help a rider to escape, or kill his foe.

By the time they set off in two hansom cabs, with the professors and Annika in the first, and Sigrid, Ellie, Pauline and Stefan in the second, Annika was almost wishing she had chosen a different treat. As soon as she knew that Loremarie would be at the gala, Sigrid had decided that Annika needed a new dress and had gone out for a roll of sea-green silk. She was a superb needlewoman, the dress was a triumph; Annika’s hair was brushed out and taken back with a band of matching silk. All the same, she felt rather as though she was going to a lecture given by horses instead of people.

But when they went up the stairs and came out in the riding school itself, everything changed.

It was like being in a ballroom: the crystal chandeliers blazing with light, the white walls, the red velvet on the banquettes, the huge portrait of Charles VI on his charger. The band played soft music, and below her, the russet sand was raked into swirls like the sea.

Loremarie was at the other end of the row, wriggling and showing off, but Annika had forgotten her.

The band broke into the national anthem, everyone rose to their feet; the emperor in a blue-and-silver uniform came in, with his guest — the portly English king — and Ellie sighed with pleasure. She dearly loved the emperor, who was so old, so alone and so pig-headedly dutiful. Then everyone sat down again, the band started to play the Radetzky March , the great double doors opened — and two dozen snow-white horses came into the ring.

They came like conquerors, in perfect formation and in perfect time to the music, lifting their legs high, bringing them down exactly on the beat, and as they came level with the place where the emperor sat, they stopped as one and the riders swept off their cockaded hats in homage.

Then they began. They started with the simpler movements: the passage, which is a kind of floating trot, the piaffe, where the horse trots on the spot, the flying changes, the turn on the forelegs… The tall riders in their white buckskin breeches sat silent, guiding the horses with movements so small they could not be noticed — or even just with their thoughts. The understanding between the stallions and the men who rode them had been built up during the long years of training. There was no need any longer for commands.

Now the younger horses left the ring, the band played a Boccherini minuet and three of the most highly trained stallions did a pas de trois: weaving the earlier steps into an intricate and faultless dance.

‘They’re so beautiful,’ whispered Annika. Light poured from their white skins, their manes and tails tossed like silk, they held their heads like princes.

The three stallions disappeared through the huge double doors. The horses which came in now were riderless; their riding masters walked behind them, holding them only on the long rein. These were the most experienced horses, who could do the steps on their own — the one in the lead was the emperor’s favourite, Maestoso Fantasia, the horse Annika had seen on the poster.

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