Authors: Eva Ibbotson
So now, storming into the principal’s room, she went on the attack at once.
‘Do I understand that my daughter –
my
daughter – whom I entrusted to your care, has run away?’
‘We don’t know if she has run away,’ said the headmistress. ‘She seemed very happy here and she was settling in well.’
‘Well, what do you suggest happened?’ demanded Frau von Tannenberg.
The principal lifted herself higher on her pillow. ‘We think she may have been kidnapped,’ she said. ‘Perhaps by someone who knew of the good fortune that has come to your family of late.’
‘What good fortune?’ said Edeltraut angrily. ‘I hope nobody has been gossiping about the affairs of Spittal. And in any case we would have received a ransom note and we have heard nothing. Nothing at all. We returned from Switzerland to get your letter and that was the first we heard that Annika was not safe and sound.’
She took out her handkerchief and dabbed her eyes.
‘What exactly happened?’ asked Oswald.
‘We would like to know precisely when she disappeared, and how,’ said Edeltraut. ‘Every detail of that tragic day.’
‘Well, it was the day of my accident. I was seriously injured, and needless to say the staff and the girls were very concerned. For a few hours they were running about, fetching doctors, carrying me to my room . . . nobody had time to think of anything else. I was very nearly killed.’
She waited for sympathy, but what came from Edeltraut was more in the nature of a snort.
‘How were you injured?’
‘A harp fell on me from the top of the stairs. A very large harp, a most dangerous instrument.’
‘A harp! How on earth—’
‘A woman came with a harp and said she was sent by the Duchess of Cerise to give a concert to the girls. But I became suspicious – I am always concerned with the safety of the girls – and sure enough she was an impostor. So I ran out to stop her . . .’
She described the horrible events of that day in detail. When she had finished she leaned back on the pillows, overcome by the memory, but both her visitors were unimpressed.
‘What was the harpist like?’
‘A middle-aged woman with a bun of hair. She looked perfectly respectable. So did the boy who was with her, a peasant boy but well spoken. I didn’t suspect until—’
‘Wait,’ interrupted Edeltraut. ‘This peasant boy, what was he like?’
‘He had fair hair and blue eyes. He was just the servant who helped to carry the instrument. I’m afraid you must ask my secretary to come to me – I’m feeling faint.’
But Frau von Tannenberg was already on the way to the door.
Outside she turned to Oswald. ‘Professor Gertrude was a harpist. And the boy fits the description of the washerwoman’s child whom Annika befriended. Could they have had anything to do with this? If Annika wrote a letter to Vienna and said she wasn’t happy?’
‘How would she get the letter out? All the post is read.’
‘She might have got one of the maids to post it for her. You know how she always clung to servants. Unless Gudrun told them where Annika was, but she swears she didn’t.’
‘Gudrun is my daughter; she wouldn’t lie.’
Edeltraut ignored this. ‘There can’t be any other explanation. She’s either in Vienna or running round the countryside and I don’t know which is worse.’
When they returned to Spittal she found a letter from Profesor Julius explaining that they had taken Annika away from Grossenfluss and she was safe with them.
‘How
dare
he?’ raged Edeltraut. ‘Annika is my daughter and I am her legal guardian. These professors are going to be very sorry for this. Very sorry indeed!’
I
t was as though the city knew that Zed was leaving and that everything had to be as beautiful as possible. The sun shone, the lilacs and laburnums were in full bloom, the cafe tables were out on the pavement . . .
Annika behaved as though she had arranged all this for the benefit of her friend. She wanted to show Zed everything and take him everywhere. The professors had given her some pocket money and Zed had saved some of his earnings, so they began by exchanging presents in the marzipan shop in the Karntner Strasse: a spotted ladybird for Annika, a bushy-tailed fox for Zed.
‘We have to eat them at once,’ said Annika, ‘otherwise we won’t have the courage.’
They went to the fruit market, where the stallholders all knew her and made remarks about her handsome friend.
She took him to the cathedral, with its solemn paintings and the pile of skulls in the crypt from the days of the great plague. She led him behind the scenes in the art museum, where Uncle Emil’s friends were cleaning a picture of John the Baptist’s head, and past the statue of St Boniface under which Sigrid’s uncle, the one who had eaten twenty-seven potato dumplings, had hidden on his wedding night.
And as they walked, they talked. Annika still knew nothing of what her mother had done, she never mentioned Spittal. These few days in Vienna had to exist without a future or a past.
They stood on the big State Bridge and watched the Danube, which flowed wide and deep and rather murkily grey, down to Budapest in Hungary, and on through the plains of Eastern Europe.
‘You could put a message in a bottle if you wanted me, and throw it in the river,’ Zed suggested. ‘Then I’d find it when I was out riding and I’d come. Messages in bottles are important; I wouldn’t ignore it.’
‘Yes, I could do that . . . if I was here,’ said Annika, and this was the closest she came to saying how uncertain she felt about the future. ‘Perhaps by that time you’ll be married to Rosina.’
‘Rosina?’ Zed looked at her, puzzled, and she was glad he had forgotten the name of the girl who had tried to give her a kitten. And, ‘No, I won’t,’ he said firmly when she had explained, and he looked at her in a way that made her feel absurdly happy.
‘Still, we might never see each other again,’ she said.
‘Yes, we will,’ said Zed. ‘We will.’ And he put his hand over hers for a moment as it rested on the parapet.
They took the tram back to the Inner City and walked past the arcaded Stallburg, where the Lipizzaners lived, towards the Imperial Palace. When they came to St Michael’s Gate, Annika stopped suddenly and took hold of Zed’s arm.
‘Look, there he is!’
And it really was the Emperor Franz Joseph, driving out in a carriage with golden wheels to inspect the Razumovsky Guards, and putting up a white-gloved hand to wave, even to this one schoolgirl and her friend.
Zed followed the carriage with his eyes. ‘I’m glad I’ve seen him. It’s like seeing a piece of history.’
‘You would stay if you could, wouldn’t you, Zed? Stay in Vienna?’
She had annoyed him. He stopped dead and turned to face her.
‘What do you think?’ he said angrily. ‘There’s everything I’ve ever wanted here: books to read and a chance to learn things, and Ellie and Sigrid treating me as though I was their son . . . and friends. I’ve not had friends before – I was always on my own. You think life with the gypsies is romantic because you saw them one night round the campfire, but it isn’t. It’s hard and rough – and it can be cruel.’ He broke off. ‘Oh, never mind, you wouldn’t understand.’
‘Perhaps I would,’ she said very quietly. ‘Perhaps I do. I’ve had to leave here once and probably—’
‘No.’ He interrupted her, and then remembered that she knew nothing of the suspicions surrounding her mother, or of the plan the professors had made.
In the afternoon, when Pauline and Stefan returned from school, all four of them took Rocco to the deserted garden and let him graze.
Stefan was resigned now to following his father as a groundsman in the Prater.
‘What’s the point of making oneself miserable?’ said Stefan. ‘There’s no money to train as an engineer and that’s the end of it. And at least you’ll have someone to take you round the fair and get you in half-price.’ He turned to Zed. ‘You’ll see tomorrow when we go on the Giant Wheel. It really is something. There isn’t a higher one in Europe.’
Tomorrow was Zed’s last day but one, and they were going to spend it in the Prater. But when the morning came it turned out to be a very different sort of day, because, as soon as they had finished their breakfast, the professors sent for Annika.
‘We have something to tell you,’ they said.
It was not a nice ‘something’; Annika could see that at once. All three professors were looking grim – indeed they had only just stopped arguing about whether what they were about to do was right. Professor Gertrude was against it: ‘There’s no need to tell her, it’ll only make her miserable.’
But both Julius and Emil said she should know. ‘Truth is important,’ they said, ‘even for children. Particularly for children.’
All the same, they did not find it easy to begin.
‘It’s about your mother,’ said Professor Julius.
Annika’s heart began to beat wildly. ‘Is she coming?’
‘Yes, she is coming. She is staying at the Hotel Riverside and she will be here tomorrow afternoon to fetch you. We wrote to tell her that you were safe with us, and that we took you away from Grossenfluss because you were unhappy there, and that we think you should not return. Dr Flass has given you a medical certificate to say it would be bad for your health.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But there is something . . . Perhaps we should explain why Zed came to Vienna. He had found out that the jewels in the trunk which the Eggharts’ great-aunt showed you were real.’
Annika looked at him in amazement. ‘But they can’t have been. She told me all about them . . . how the jeweller in Paris had them copied.’
‘Nevertheless, they are real.’ He told her the story of Fabrice’s deception. ‘He was very fond of the old lady, so he played a trick on her.’
‘A kind trick,’ said Annika. ‘I wish she’d known. Or perhaps it was best as it was.’
‘And it seems,’ the professor went on, ‘that the jewels are worth a fortune – and that they were left to you. Fräulein Egghart left you the trunk and all it contained; the lawyers have confirmed this.’
Annika was bewildered.
‘But where is it then? My mother thought that Zed had taken it and at first . . . But I’m sure he didn’t. I’m absolutely sure.’
‘We are sure too.’
‘But then who did?’ Annika was completely at a loss.
‘When Fräulein Egghart showed you the jewels,’ the professor went on, ‘did you see a brooch shaped like a butterfly?’
‘Yes, I did. Blue sapphires for the wings and filigree gold for the antennae with rubies for the eyes. I suppose I should have known the stones were real, they were so beautiful.’
Professor Julius picked up a letter on his desk. ‘Yes. That is an exact description. We asked a friend in Switzerland to make some enquiries and his letter came this morning. Your butterfly brooch has just been sold by Zwingli and Hammerman for two million Swiss francs.’
‘I don’t understand. How did the brooch—’
Professor Julius put a hand on her shoulder. ‘We think your mother may have taken it. That your mother and your Uncle Oswald took the trunk. The description of the woman who brought the brooch to the jeweller fits your mother perfectly.’
‘NO!’ Annika pulled away from him. ‘It isn’t true. I don’t believe it. My mother wouldn’t steal from me – why should she? Anything that belongs to me I’d have given her. She knows that.’
‘It would have to be proved, and since it is you who have been robbed it is you would have to bring the case against her. If she was convicted and sent to prison we would ask the courts if you could come back to us, at any rate for the length of the sentence. This would mean that you could stay in Vienna and—’
But Annika couldn’t take in another word.
‘NO!’ she said again. ‘It isn’t true. You’re lying!’ And she turned and ran from the room.
F
rau Edeltraut sat at the dressing table of her room at the Riverside Hotel, brushing her hair. Bottles of scent and ointments, her silver combs, her powder puffs were spread out in front of her; sunlight filtered in from her private veranda with its deckchairs and pots of hanging carnations. Oswald was in an adjoining room, gazing at the paddle steamer and the colourful pleasure boats on the river through his binoculars.
Mathilde had been difficult, before they left for Vienna.
‘I don’t see why you should use Oswald all the time to fetch and carry for you,’ she had said, glaring at her sister. ‘Oswald is
my
husband; he doesn’t belong to you.’
‘I never said he did. If it’s of any interest to you, I find Oswald extremely dreary. He has no breadth – no vision,’ said Edeltraut. ‘But I need him for this last journey to Vienna. Once we have Annika back at Spittal I will find a person to be with her at all times and see that there’s no more nonsense. If necessary . . .’ But this was a sentence she did not finish, since Mathilde was weak and dithery and had been fond of Annika. ‘And I have to point out that you were pleased enough to come to Zurich and spend my money.’
‘Your daughter’s money, you mean.’
Edeltraut ignored this. ‘If the truth came out you’d be in quite as much trouble as Oswald and myself.’
‘No, I wouldn’t. I didn’t steal the trunk. And Gudrun knows nothing about it, nothing at all.’
‘Well, of course not. Nor does Hermann. One would hardly bring children into something in which secrecy is essential. But I tell you, if we don’t get Annika away from Vienna, and quickly, and make sure she cannot escape again, everything we have worked for could fall to the ground.’
‘Well, all right,’ said Mathilde sulkily. ‘But this is the last time – and I shall expect you to bring back a present for Gudrun. I suppose you won’t go back to the Hotel Bristol.’
‘You know perfectly well that I can’t go back to the Bristol,’ said Edeltraut, who had left without paying her bill.
‘Well, in that case why don’t you stay near the river instead? There’s a good hotel by the Danube – the Riverside. Oswald thinks we need a new boat for the lake and there’s a boat-builder near there.’