The Star of Kazan

It was much bigger than Ellie’s kitchen in Vienna, and darker, with its high, barred window, but at once she felt at home. There was a scrubbed table, an iron range, a set of copper dishes on the dresser – and it was warm! An old woman was stirring something on the stove. It was Bertha, who had let them in last night, and now in the daylight Annika could see how old and wrinkled she was, how tired. She must have begged to be allowed to stay at Spittal; there were servants who couldn’t face that they had come to the end of their working life.

‘Good morning,’ said Annika.

Old Bertha swivelled round. ‘Good heavens, miss, you mustn’t come in here. This is the kitchen.’

Her Norrland dialect was hard for Annika to understand.

‘Yes, I know it’s the kitchen. Can I help you to take anything through into the dining room?’

‘No! No! What would Frau Edeltraut say, her daughter helping in the kitchen! Go back down the corridor, and into the hall. The dining room is the second door on the right. Quickly – go, go, or I’ll be in trouble.’

The dining room faced north over the lake. It was huge with a long, dark table, and pictures of a number of von Tannenbergs on the walls, but here too there were spaces where some ancestors were missing and the wallpaper was stained with damp. After the warm kitchen it seemed very cold.

Her mother was sitting at one end of the table, buttering a piece of bread. She was wearing a morning robe of green brocade, and her thick, dark hair was loose down her back. Annika, filled with pride, ran up to her for a good-morning kiss and it was only then that she really took in that there was another person in the room: a large man with red hair, a red beard, and a long scar running down his left cheek. He wore corduroy breeches and a green loden jacket, and a small feather was caught in his beard. A duck feather it seemed to be. This then must be the man she had seen in the punt.

‘This is my brother-in-law, Herr von Seltzer. You may call him Uncle Oswald,’ said Frau Edeltraut, and explained that he was the husband of her sister, Mathilde, who lived near by and that he came over most mornings to shoot. Then she turned to him. ‘Well, this is my Annika, what do you think of her?’

‘She’s pretty,’ he said, ‘but not very much like you.’

Frau Edeltraut frowned. ‘Sit down there, dear. Do you drink coffee?’

‘Yes, I do, thank you.’

Breakfast was simple: black bread cut into thick slices, butter – and a single jar of a kind of jam Annika had not seen before. It was a dark-yellowish colour and tasted like turnips, but of course it couldn’t have been. It had to be a special kind of fruit that grew here in the north. As Annika spread it on her bread she looked across at the fourth place laid at the table.

‘Is that where Hermann sits?’ she asked.

‘Yes. He’ll be here in a minute. Ah, I think I can hear him now.’

Footsteps . . . the door opening . . . and a boy stood on the threshold.

‘This is Hermann, Annika. Your brother.’

The two children stared at each other. The boy did not come forward to shake her hand. Instead, still standing in the doorway, he bowed from the waist, clicked his heels sharply together, and said, ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance.’

He was an amazingly handsome boy, with fair curly hair cut very short, his mother’s dark-blue eyes, and a clear pale skin. He was neatly dressed in a cadet uniform: khaki trousers, a khaki tunic with brass buttons, and highly polished riding boots.

And he was most definitely not the boy on the horse.

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After breakfast, Annika was shown round the house by her mother.

‘You come too, Hermann,’ she said to her son. ‘Annika may be interested in your plans.’ She turned to her daughter. ‘When he is of age, Hermann will of course be the master here. I am just looking after Spittal for him until then.’

The house, with its massive stone walls and windows protected by iron grilles, was ancient. It had survived the Thirty Years War in which Protestants and Catholics had slaughtered each other in various gruesome ways. Even now it seemed to be a house meant for sieges and wars, with its surrounding moats, and the long lake that stretched away to the front and made it impossible to approach it from the north.

They went through the downstairs rooms first. The drawing room, which, like the dining room, faced over the water, was grandly furnished with rich, dark hangings, and gilt-legged tables and claw-footed chairs. The vast floor was bare, which made their footsteps sound very loud, and on the walls were still more portraits of von Tannenberg ancestors, and glass cases housing – not stuffed fish as in the hall but stuffed waterbirds: ducks, geese, teal and pochard all crouching among realistic-looking reeds.

‘My father shot those before he went away,’ said Hermann. ‘He’s the best shot in Germany.’