The Star of Kazan

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:

GALA PERFORMANCE AT

THE SPANISH RIDING SCHOOL

14 JUNE 1908

in honour of His Majesty King Edward VII

of Great Britain

and in the presence of His Imperial Majesty,

The Emperor Franz Joseph.

The Band of the Austrian Grenadiers will play.

(A limited number of tickets are available to

the General Public.)

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.