Authors: Eva Ibbotson
‘Oh, Hermann!’ Frau Edeltraut laid a proud hand on her son’s shoulder. ‘I’m afraid you’re too young to fight a duel and you couldn’t meet Herr Egghart – the family is sure to be completely common – but it’s good to know that you defend your sister. What a master you will be for Spittal! In the meantime, though, these Eggharts will have to be dealt with. Poor Annika must have been very upset?’
‘She was. And puzzled. Gudrun has taken her to the park.’
Uncle Conrad and Zed had just returned to the hotel when Edeltraut and her son entered his sitting room. ‘Conrad, I’m leaving Hermann here with you. I have some important business to attend to.’
The Eggharts were not in their room at the Hydro, nor in any of the public rooms of the hotel. They had had a very busy morning in the treatment rooms, and now, while Loremarie was at the indoor skating rink with her governess, they were sitting on a bench in the orangery behind the hotel and admiring nature.
Actually, nature in the orangery was not very natural. The temperature was kept at twenty-five degrees by underground pipes and the plants were not really the kind that grew wild in northern Europe. Enormous fig trees, climbing bougainvilleas, breadfruit, hibiscus and of course orange and lemon trees hung with fruit. Water dripped into a fountain; the warm air was full of wonderful scents. It was like being in a jungle without the unpleasant things that might have been found there, like jaguars or tribes-people with blowpipes, or snakes – and Frau Egghart was feeling romantic. She put a podgy hand over her husband’s, but he looked so surprised that she took it away again.
‘Perhaps we could go dancing in the pump room tonight?’ she suggested.
‘Dancing?’ said Herr Egghart. It always made him nervous when his wife became romantic. ‘We haven’t been—’
But at that moment the door of the orangery was filled by the tall figure of a grandly dressed woman, carrying a sable muff.
The councillor rose to his feet and bowed as he recognized Frau Edeltraut von Tannenberg. The Eggharts had meant to drive to Spittal when they first came to the spa, and get back their trunk, but there was so much that needed doing, not only to their veins and their sphincters but to other parts of their bodies which the doctors had not been happy about, that they had not yet made the journey.
And here, now, was the woman they had wanted to see.
‘Won’t you sit down,’ said Herr Egghart, pointing to the bench. He had forgotten just how tall and imposing Annika’s mother was.
‘Thank you, I prefer to stand. I have come to inform you that I will NOT have my daughter upset. I will not have her accused of stealing and lying. It is an outrage!’
‘But we haven’t—’ began Herr Egghart.
‘No, but your daughter has. She has accused her in a public place – MY daughter, a von Tannenberg.’
‘We don’t know what Loremarie has said,’ began Frau Egghart, staring at a silver brooch on Frau von Tannenberg’s collar. It seemed to be the family crest. She could make out a mailed fist and the words: ‘Stand Aside, Ye Vermin Who Oppose Us!’
‘If you have lost your luggage it seems to me quite extraordinary that you should allow your daughter—’
‘Please, please!’ Herr Egghart put up a hand. He was still shouting but not so loudly as before. ‘You see, we were told that our great-aunt . . . OUR great-aunt . . . had left her trunk to your daughter in her will. So naturally—’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ interrupted Frau Edeltraut. ‘If Annika has been left anything it would have been sent to Spittal and it has not been. My son, who is devoted to his sister, wishes to fight a duel to avenge the insult. He is of course too young but my brother-in-law, who was the fencing champion of his year at university, would be willing to meet you.’
‘No, no! It’s a mistake. It’s all a mistake. We were obviously misinformed.’ Herr Egghart was sweating. ‘We were told that—’
‘I’m afraid I am not interested in what you were told. I’m concerned like any mother with her daughter’s wounded feelings. Ever since I found Annika again I have made it my business to see that she is spared anything unpleasant or sad.’
Herr Egghart mopped his brow. ‘Yes, yes. Loremarie will be made to apologize.’
‘I would prefer it if you kept your daughter right away from our family. Meanwhile, I am prepared to let the matter drop, but any such insult in the future will have the gravest consequences.’
Left alone again, the Eggharts fell back against the bench.
‘After all, it was probably full of germs anyway,’ said Frau Egghart.
‘What was?’ Her husband’s heart was still racing. Duels were illegal, but people fought them just the same. Frau von Tannenberg’s brother-in-law probably had a duelling scar – a great gash puckering his cheek.
‘The trunk,’ said his wife. ‘The belongings of old people are always infected and unclean. I said so from the start.’
A
lthough Annika had been very upset by Loremarie’s accusations, what she felt most when she returned to Spittal was gratitude to her new family. Hermann had defended her, Gudrun had soothed her – and her mother had attacked the Eggharts like a tigress. It was time to put the past behind her and become a proper von Tannenberg – and this meant not writing so many letters to Vienna and constantly asking for writing paper and stamps, and it meant not making up recipes inside her head. She would send the instructions for making Norrland Nussel to Ellie and then she would put away her pinafores once and for all and really learn to love Spittal.
Not just the farm and Rocco and the frogs – anyone could love horses and frogs – but the house itself and the estate and all the people in it.
It was easier because it had at last stopped raining; patches of dry ground appeared, and the lake now sometimes showed glimmers of blue.
Workmen had been called in – plasterers and carpenters and roofers to repair the leaks, and new servants had been engaged – but what occupied everyone in the house was getting Hermann ready for St Xavier’s. The day when he would go was getting very close, but Hermann did not seem to be nervous in the least. It was rather Gudrun who became sadder and sniffier by the hour.
‘It will be like a tomb without him,’ she said again and again.
It had been decided that both Edeltraut and Uncle Oswald would take Hermann to St Xavier’s, which was some 200 kilometres away, in the direction of Berlin.
‘But of course I shan’t take him into the actual building,’ said Edeltraut. ‘It would shame him to be accompanied by a woman. I will wave goodbye at the gate and Oswald will take him inside.’ She gave a brave smile. ‘A s the mother of a soldier of the Fatherland I must not allow myself the luxury of tears.’
‘But he’ll come home for the holidays, won’t he?’ asked Annika.
‘Only for a few days in the year. To train a youth to become a worthy servant of the emperor takes every minute of every day.’
Annika was silent. If Hermann did not come home he would not ride Rocco. She wanted to ask what would happen to the horse, but she didn’t. If Rocco was to be sent away or sold, she did not know how Zed would bear it.
A few days after the visit to the spa, Annika went down to the stork house to say goodbye to Bertha. As Zed had hoped, her brother had asked her to come and live with him; he was lonely without his wife and he thought they would get along well enough.
She was sitting in the carved chair and stroking Hector, who had managed to climb on to her lap and was hanging down on either side of it.
‘My brother would have him, he likes dogs and he’s got a big enough place, a proper farm,’ she told Annika. ‘He’d have Zed too, he knows he’s a good worker, but Zed’s in a funny mood. I can’t get any sense out of him at the minute. Best to leave things as they are.’
‘I’ll miss you, Bertha,’ said Annika.
Bertha nodded. ‘And I’ll miss you.’
But Annika knew whom Bertha would really miss. She and Zed had been together for four years now. They had nursed the Freiherr; Zed was almost like a son.
Annika had thought of the north Germans as dour and uncommunicative, but Bertha left sobbing. She clung to Wenzel’s hand and when the time came to embrace Zed it seemed as if after all she would refuse to go with her brother.
‘I’ve been here for more than sixty years,’ she said.
But Zed helped her up into the cart, and promised to come on a visit, and, accompanied by howls from Hector, she was driven away down the lane.
‘It’s not far away, my brother’s farm at Rachegg,’ she had said to Annika before she left. ‘You can drive it in a day. You’ll remind Zed that there’s always a place for him when I’ve gone, won’t you?’
‘Yes, I will. But would there be a place for Rocco?’
‘Rocco belongs to Hermann, my dear, never forget that.’
The following week Hermann left for St Xavier’s. Gudrun was so affected by the sight of her cousin in his travelling clothes – the military cape, the peaked cap with the brass insignia of the college, the little swagger stick that cadets were supposed to carry so as to get used to handling them when they were commissioned – that she gave an anguished gulp and disappeared off to her room.
Hermann had asked that the staff could be assembled in the courtyard so that he could make a proper farewell speech. He knew that this was what the master of the house was supposed to do, but the ceremony fell rather flat. Bertha had gone, Zed did not turn up, Wenzel was too deaf to hear a word that Hermann said, and the new maids hadn’t been there long enough to understand what an important occasion it was.
All the same, Hermann did well, asking the staff to give his mother the loyal service they would have given him if he hadn’t been going away. Then Wenzel brought the carriage round, but just before she stepped in after Hermann, Edeltraut turned round and bent down to put her mouth close to Annika’s ear.
‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten your surprise, my darling,’ she whispered tenderly. ‘I would never do that. As soon as Oswald and I get back I shall get to work on it. You deserve no less.’
After they had driven off, Mathilde took her gulping daughter to the hunting lodge to see how the repairs were getting on and Annika made her way to the farm.
She found Zed in the paddock, schooling Rocco – except that ‘schooling’ did not seem to be the right word because Rocco was so obviously enjoying himself. Zed rode with a saddle but without stirrups as he took Rocco through his paces: the extended trot, the half-turn, the square halt . . . When he paused, the horse turned his head as if to say, ‘Come on, what’s next?’
‘What you’re doing, that’s dressage, isn’t it?’ she asked.
‘I suppose so. It’s just making sure he understands me exactly – and I understand him.’
‘Do you make him go over jumps?’
‘No. I could do – he’d do anything you asked – but horses have talents, just like people . . . and his is for this . . . for becoming part of another person. But I don’t teach him tricks.’
‘Don’t the Lipizzaners do tricks?’
Zed shook his head. ‘Everything they do comes from their natural movements. If you watch colts loose in a field they rear up and show off to each other or fight. All those statues in which horses do the levade and the riders look as though they’re going to slide off – in the stud at Zverno I saw them do that again and again. Rearing up is easy enough, but holding the position needs a terrible lot of strength in the back and the legs, and Rocco’s only just stopped growing.’
After this came the daily grooming, which Zed never left out. Annika could have done it on her own by now. Zed trusted her to sponge Rocco’s eyes and nose, to oil his hoofs . . . to comb his mane and tail. She washed the brushes and the cloths; she brought fresh drinking water and plaited new wisps of straw to burnish his bright coat.
Caring for the horse did not depend, for Annika, on being allowed to ride. It was a thing in itself.
Today, when they had finished, Zed went to fetch Hector from his kennel.
‘He’s still missing Bertha,’ he said. ‘We’ll take him for a walk. There’s a bittern’s nest in the reeds near that clump of oaks.’
‘He doesn’t seem exactly heartbroken,’ said Annika as Hector panted and yelped ecstatically along the shore of the lake, disappearing into the reeds and emerging again, soaking wet and covered in mud. This time of year, when the river took its share of meltwater, more and more objects were washed ashore. Hector found egg-boxes and driftwood, torn-off trouser legs, a mouse trap . . .
They had reached the clump of oaks, but the bittern’s nest was empty. The shore at this point curved into a little cove, where the mud was mixed with pebbles and coarse sand. Objects that came up from the lake were stranded here; it was one of Hector’s favourite places. A headless pike interested him – he picked it up in his mouth, but rejected it in favour of a derelict handbag with a strap. The strap pleased him very much; he chewed it, growled at it, and attacked it suddenly without warning.
Now, though, came the awful moment of choice.
He was an intelligent dog. At the beginning he had tried to carry several things in his mouth and take them home, but this had ended badly. Now you could see him thinking, deciding . . .
‘It might be worse,’ said Zed. He had made it clear to Hector that the headless pike was not in the running, and it looked as though the handbag would be the chosen object. ‘It doesn’t smell too bad.’
But Hector had not finished. He dropped the handbag, put his head down and, with his stump vibrating, made his way once more round the edge of the bay. He found a dead freshwater crab, but he did not trust crabs, even dead ones, and a muslin nappy, which he tried out but did not care for. There was no challenge in nappies.
Then, with a yelp of fulfilment, he pounced.
‘That will be it,’ said Zed. ‘Thank goodness it’s not too big.’
They made their way to the water’s edge. Hector had found a smooth leather box about the size of a postcard. It didn’t look as though it had been in the water very long; the embossed edges could still be made out, and a few faded letters in gilt. The box was old, but it was not disgusting, and Hector now swivelled his good eye in their direction, ready to defend his treasure.