The Star of Kazan

‘What on earth are you doing?’ he hissed, coming up to her. ‘You know you don’t dance with strangers.’

Annika flushed. ‘This is Herr Doktor Feldkirch,’ she said angrily. ‘Frau Feldkirch suggested that we might like to dance.’

But Zed was in a temper. ‘I’m supposed to fetch you – it’s time to go home. What will your mother say?’

‘That depends on what you tell her.’

They walked back to the hotel in silence.

Then Zed said, ‘It’s not even proper music that they play there.’

Annika stopped and glared at him. ‘What do you mean? It was lovely. It was proper Viennese music.’

Zed shrugged. ‘If you like everything to be sickly and sweet. If you want real music, you should listen to the gypsies.’

‘How am I supposed to do that?’ she snapped. ‘There aren’t any gypsies anywhere near here.’

‘There might be soon. They come through sometimes on the way to the Spring Fair at Stettin. If they do, I’ll take you.’

It was the nearest she would get to an apology.

In the carriage on the way back, Annika was sleepy and content, which was as well since Hermann grumbled all the way home about the men in the shooting gallery.

They drove in twilight, then darkness. As the carriage went over the first bridge, Zed suddenly drew up. In the same moment he extinguished the carriage lamp.

‘I think we should go back,’ he said in a low voice to Frau Edeltraut. ‘There are people there. Look!’

They stared up at the courtyard of the house and saw lamps being carried round the building – then heard hammering at the door.

‘Come on, open up – we know you’re there,’ somebody shouted, and the hammering started again.

Not burglars then, as Annika had feared.

‘They’re from the Land Bureau, I think,’ whispered Zed. ‘They’ve come in two automobiles.’

‘Turn round at once,’ ordered Frau Edeltraut, but Zed had already begun to turn the carriage in the only passing place behind the bridge. ‘Where can we go?’

‘Felsen Woods,’ said Zed over his shoulder. ‘No one will find us there.’

They drove back the way they had come, past the turning to the farm, then down a narrow forest road which led away from Spittal into a dark thicket of spruce.

‘I’ll kill them for this,’ muttered Hermann. ‘When my father comes back, I’ll kill them.’

‘They won’t stay long,’ said Zed. He had jumped down and gone to the horses’ heads.

But they waited in the cold and silent woods for nearly two hours. To Annika the hotel, the music at the spa, now seemed a distant dream. Who were those men who had tried to storm her mother’s house? What was it that ailed Spittal? Would no one tell her the truth?

C

HAPTER

S

EVENTEEN

A S

MELL OF

B

URNING

After Annika went away with her mother, odd things happened in the professors’ house.

For example, the professors would come downstairs to the smell of burning. It might be the breakfast rolls singeing in the oven, or the soup boiling dry on the stove, but it was such an unusual thing to happen that they found it hard to believe their noses. Ellie had not burned anything since she had first gone to work as a kitchen maid twenty years ago, but she burned them now.

Then Sigrid broke a plate. It was not a particularly valuable plate but it was a nice one, with a pattern of golden stars and blue flowers. It lived on the dresser, and when Sigrid picked it up to dust it, it slipped from her hand to the floor.

Just as Ellie had not burned anything since she was fourteen years old, so Sigrid did not let things fall from her hand. The professors trusted her with their mother’s precious crystal glasses and they were right to do so. Her large, square-tipped hands picked up objects as if they were eggshells.

All the same, after Annika went she broke a plate. Sometimes if you don’t let your feelings out, you do odd things instead. Ellie and Sigrid did not think it was right to cry and wail and moan because they had lost what they thought of as their daughter, but their unhappiness came out in other ways.

The professors too were not in the best of spirits. By the time she left them, they realized that Annika had done a lot of work in the house and they decided to take over some of her jobs.

This was not a success.

Professor Julius decided to buy his own flowers from the lady in the square, and to arrange them himself in a vase beneath the portrait of Adele Fischl, his beloved – but when he did so she seemed to be looking at him in a very gloomy way. Arranging flowers is not as easy as it looks, and the lilies of the valley, jammed together like a bundle of leeks, seemed to upset Adele, who had always felt things keenly.

Professor Gertrude had decided to help by choosing her own hansom cabs to take her to her concerts and this too did not end well. Cab horses were just a blur to Professor Gertrude, who was short-sighted and did not care for animals very much, and she and her harp had some very bumpy and unpleasant rides.