The Star of Kazan

Pauline too was reading. She was a thin girl with frizzy black hair and black eyes. Pauline was clever; she seemed to remember everything she came across in the books she devoured and she kept a scrapbook into which she pasted important articles that she had cut out of the newspapers. These were about the courageous deeds that had been done by people even if they only had one leg or couldn’t see or had been dropped on their heads when they were babies.

‘It’s to make me brave,’ she’d explained to Annika, but Annika said it was silly to want to be brave and clever.

‘You’re perfectly all right as you are,’ she’d told Pauline – but Pauline was nervous of the outside world and did not agree. She found it difficult to leave the bookshop on her own; open spaces and strange people frightened her, and she knew she would have to do something about this if she was going to put right the many things she did not approve of, like rich people having everything and poor people having nothing.

Now she closed the book, which was a story about the sinking in the Atlantic of a ship called the Medusa, and followed Annika out into the street. ‘I think we could do it,’ she said. ‘It’s exciting, with all the people crowded on a raft and getting swallowed by the sea.’

Annika nodded. ‘Tell us when we get there so Stefan can hear.’

Stefan’s family, the Bodeks, lived in the bottom half of the smallest house in the square.

They were very poor. Herr Bodek worked as a groundsman in the funfair at the Prater and Frau Bodek took in washing, but with five boys to feed there was never any money to spare.

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.