The Star of Kazan (4 page)

All the same, it was Frau Bodek who had come round to the professors’ house on the night that Annika was found, bringing a pile of freshly boiled nappies and some baby clothes for the foundling. Stefan, the middle boy, was exactly the same age as Annika; the two had grown up together, sharing their few toys, learning to crawl in each other’s kitchens. All the Bodek boys were friendly and cheerful, but Stefan was special. Annika would have trusted him with her life.

‘I can’t stay long,’ he said now. ‘The baby’s definitely on the way and they’ll want me to take messages.’

But he put on his cap and together the three children ran down the alleyway beside the church, along a cobbled lane – and paused by a crumbling wall covered with ivy.

Mostly the wall was high and fairly solid, but in one place, if you pushed aside the ivy, you could see a hole. They crawled through it – and then they were in the garden.

Each time they straightened themselves and looked round they felt a shiver of relief – for the garden was doomed; they knew that. It belonged to the city council and they were going to build offices on it. Any day the diggers and shovellers would come and the destruction would begin.

But not yet. Butterflies still hovered over the long grass, thistles and dandelions blew in the breeze, the great cedar spread its branches. At the top of a flight of cracked stone steps, a statue of Venus with missing arms stared quietly out at what had once been a fountain; and in the pond, the water lilies still flowered among the weeds.

The garden belonged to the ruined house of an Austrian nobleman who had come to Vienna more than a hundred years ago to serve the emperor and make his fortune.

And he
had
made it. Unfortunately he was a gambler and soon he lost all the money he had made, and the beautiful house he had built had to be sold, and sold again. Then it stood empty, and a fire had broken out . . . and now the villa was just a heap of fallen pillars and broken stones.

But the garden had survived. The garden was better than ever: wild and tangled and mysterious.

‘We won’t try and tidy anything . . . we won’t even weed the flower beds,’ Annika had decided, and the others agreed.

But there was one place which they did tidy and care for and even scrub. In the middle of a shrubbery, overgrown with lilacs and laburnums, stood a green-painted hut. It had once been a tool shed, and unlike the house, the hut was undamaged. The roof was sound, the windows were unbroken, the door could be properly closed.

The hut was their headquarters; they had borrowed a blanket for the floor, and some mugs, and stuck a candle in a sauce bottle and Stefan had found a padlock for the door.

When they first came to the garden they had kept house in the hut, found nuts and berries for food, pretended it was time to go to bed and get up. But now they were older, the hut had become the springboard from which they planned their games. It might be the barracks in Mafeking besieged by the Boers, or a tomb in the Valley of the Kings threatened by robbers. Last week it had been the tower in which Mary Queen of Scots had been imprisoned.

It was usually Pauline who found the stories in the books she read, and once they had decided on a story they were off, doubling roles, being now soldiers, now the people that the soldiers shot. It was half playing, half acting and while they were doing it they were lost to the world.

Today Pauline told them about the
Medusa
– a slave ship run by a corrupt and incompetent captain who ran her aground on a reef off the coast of Africa.

‘All the rich people saved themselves in lifeboats and left the slaves to look after themselves. So the slaves made a huge raft and kept it afloat for days and days, but gradually they began to die of thirst or get washed overboard or go mad. They even ate the flesh of the people who had died – and when a rescue ship found them, only fifteen people out of more than a hundred were still alive.’

Annika nodded. ‘The hut can be the
Medusa
and we’ll put the blanket in the middle of the lawn; that’ll be the raft, and the grass all around is the sea. Stefan can be eaten and his remains thrown overboard – and then he can be the captain of the rescue ship.’

She frequently altered the story so as to make it more dramatic and fairer, giving each of them a chance to drown or be shot or run into the hut under a hail of arrows.

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.

T
here 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:

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.

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.