The Star of Kazan

Sigrid stood beside her friend, looking at the page Ellie held open: the instructions for cooking the Christmas carp and the words Annika had written underneath: ‘A pinch of nutmeg will improve the flavour of the sauce.’

‘Ellie, she’s going to a different life. She’s going to be a proper lady – a “von”. She won’t get much chance to cook, I’d say.’

‘Well, if they don’t encourage her, they’re wicked,’ said Ellie fiercely. ‘Annika’s got a proper talent. If it was for music or painting they’d see she carried on.’

But she stood looking at the book a little longer and then she put it back on the shelf.

Ellie had managed to pull herself together and was determined not to spoil Annika’s joy. If she cried now, she did it at night under her pillow, and in the morning she washed her face rather longer than usual so that Annika saw nothing wrong. Sigrid too busied herself washing and ironing Annika’s clothes, sewing on buttons, checking hair ribbons . . . Frau von Tannenberg was not going to buy anything for the child till they got home, she said. Spittal was not far from the spa town of Bad Haxenfeld, where the most important people in Europe went to be cured of their diseases, and the shops were splendid.

‘You can imagine how much I shall enjoy dressing my little girl,’ she told Sigrid. ‘It’s what every mother dreams of.’

And Sigrid sighed, for she too would have liked to take Annika into a dress shop and fit her out without worrying about the cost, but she said nothing.

Rather a lot of people were saying nothing, it seemed to Annika. The professors, the Bodeks, Pauline . . . it was as though they didn’t understand the marvellous thing that had happened to her. Only Loremarie’s family seemed impressed. Her father had looked up Spittal and found that it was mentioned in the guidebooks as an interesting fortified house of the seventeenth century. To see Loremarie curtsying when she was introduced to her mother had given Annika a moment of pure pleasure.

Pauline had hardly come out of the bookshop since the day Frau von Tannenberg arrived, and Annika was puzzled. She couldn’t believe that her friends were jealous of her, but why couldn’t they share in her happiness?

Then, on the day before she was due to leave, Stefan and Pauline asked her to come to the deserted garden.

The snow had melted at last, but it was still very cold. They sat inside the hut, wrapped in a blanket; Ellie had prepared a picnic but no one felt much like eating.

Both of Annika’s friends had brought farewell presents. Stefan had carved her a little wooden horse.

‘To remind you of when we went to see the Lipizzaners,’ he said.

‘I won’t need reminding,’ said Annika.

Pauline had copied the best of her scrapbook collection into a special notebook that could be fastened with a ribbon. All her favourite stories were there: the one about the girl with measles swimming the Danube, the one about the champion wrestler with the back-to-front foot – and a new one about a boy who was herding his mother’s cow across a frozen lake when the ice broke and the cow fell into the water.

‘He held the cow by the horns and he just held on and held on till help came and his fingers were so badly frostbitten that one had to be amputated, but the cow was saved.’

Annika took the book and thanked her warmly. It must have taken hours and hours to copy all the stories in.

‘I know you don’t need to be made brave because you are brave, but one never knows,’ said Pauline.

But the real reason they had brought her to the hut was to tell her that whatever happened to her in her new life they would never forsake her.

‘I really hate aristocrats, as you know,’ said Pauline, ‘always grinding the faces of the poor.’

‘My mother wouldn’t grind the faces of the poor,’ said Annika.

All the same, she knew how Pauline felt. Last spring they had acted the story of Marie Antoinette going to the guillotine. Annika had been the doomed queen and she’d been shocked at the glee with which Pauline and Stefan had jeered at her as she bared her throat for the knife.

‘On the other hand it isn’t your fault that you’ve turned out to be a von Tannenberg,’ Pauline went on. ‘So if you need us, just say the word.’

‘Yes,’ said Stefan, nodding his blond head. ‘Just say the word.’

After that the hours rushed by and suddenly her suitcase was packed and it was time for the last goodbyes.

She had said goodbye to Josef in the cafe, and his mother, to Father Anselm in the church, to the lady in the paper shop . . .

Now she went upstairs to say goodbye to the professors, who weren’t professors any more but uncles, and to Aunt Gertrude, who suddenly bent down to kiss her, bumping her nose.

Then came Sigrid and Ellie . . .

They had prayed and they had practised. Now they stood dry-eyed and side by side to give Annika a cheerful send-off.

But as Annika put her arms round Ellie something horrible happened to her. It was as if she was being disembowelled – as though her insides really were being pulled apart.