The Star of Kazan (30 page)

can’t be surprised after what happened last winter.’

Both professors looked up sharply. ‘What did happen?’ ‘Didn’t you know?’ The maid’s kind face was troubled.

‘One of the pupils killed herself. Number 126, they called

her. Climbed over the balustrade at the top of the staircase

and jumped. They tried to say it was an accident, but

everybody knew it wasn’t.’

Professor Julius put down his pipe.

‘Why? Did anyone find out why she’d done it?’

The maid shrugged. ‘She was just unhappy. Homesick,

they said. She was a nice little thing . . . such pretty hair,

she had.’

T
he professors and Ellie had been away for three days. The only telephone in the square was in the Eggharts’ house, and the Eggharts were still on holiday. Sigrid and Gertrude told each other that it was nothing to worry about, and became more and more worried. What could have happened at Spittal? What had kept them away so long?

Zed had his own anxieties, which he tried to keep to himself. He knew he could not stay in Vienna much longer however much he wanted to – yet he felt he could not leave till he knew what was happening to Annika.

Whatever troubles the humans had, Rocco did not share them. Life in Vienna suited him and he was making more and more friends. An old mare between the shafts of one of the cabs in the Keller Strasse seemed to think he was her long-lost son; the man who sold newspapers in the square behind the opera saved sugar lumps for him. Traffic did not trouble Rocco; he trotted serenely past honking motors and swaying trams. Children began to point him out.

‘Look, there’s Rocco,’ they told each other. ‘Rocco and Zed.’

Even the Lipizzaners, stepping proudly out of their princely stable, would often now return Rocco’s greetings, as though they knew that he was beginning to belong.

Then something happened which made Zed realize that he must leave the city and leave it fast. It was his own fault, he told himself. He had grown careless, taking Rocco out by daylight instead of waiting for the cover of night – but he’d been helping Pauline’s grandfather unpack books all morning and longed to be outside. So he shook off a handful of little Bodeks, saddled Rocco – and set off for the Prater.

This was not the funfair part of the Prater but the Royal Park, with its ancient trees and meadows, which had once belonged only to the emperor but which the people of the city were now allowed to use.

And on this fine spring afternoon, the people were certainly using it. Soldiers on leave walked with their girlfriends on their arms; old people whizzed along in bath chairs, propelled by their relatives; groups of pretty girls in their new Easter hats giggled together on the grass – and everywhere there were children. Children in prams, children pulling toys on wheels, children bowling hoops . . .

Two men in sober dark-brown uniforms stood out from the crowd. One was very tall and thin and wore his cap pulled down over his head; the other was small, with a ginger moustache.

There was a stretch where the cinder track for the horses ran beside the turf path on which the people walked. It was permitted to gallop in the Prater, but with so many people about, Zed kept Rocco to a canter.

On the path beside the track, a tired woman pushed her baby in a basketwork pram. With her free hand she pulled along a tiny, plump boy in a sailor suit.

‘Keep hold, Fritzi,’ she said. ‘Hang on to the pram.’

But Fritzi was bored. He let go of the handle and ran forward. Another child came towards him kicking a large red ball. They met head on.

‘My ball,’ said Fritzi, trying to grab it. ‘Mine.’

‘No, mine!’ said the other child – and he kicked the ball hard on to the cinders.

‘Stop, Fritzi,’ screamed his mother. ‘Stop, STOP!’

But Fritzi did not stop.

‘Ball,’ he cried passionately – and trotted on his fat little legs right across Rocco’s path – and fell.

Zed didn’t have time to think. Rocco gave a shrill whinny of fear, and then he reared up . . . and up on his hindquarters with his hoofs pulled under him . . .

The child’s mother screamed again, there were cries from the bystanders, a soldier let go of the girl on his arm and moved forward.

Rocco’s hoofs were poised over the little boy’s body as he lay tumbled in the earth. But they did not come down. Rocco still held his levade and Zed gave no command, only adjusted the weight of his body imperceptibly to help the horse to stay as he was.

A levade can only be held for seconds, even by the strongest and most experienced horse, but these were long seconds. When Rocco came down again, slowly, carefully, the soldier had run out and snatched the little boy to safety.

After that there was pandemonium. People shouted and cheered; there were cries of ‘Did you see that?’ and Fritzi’s mother burst into tears of relief.

But Zed was watching two men only: the tall man in his dark-brown uniform and the man beside him with the ginger moustache. They were staring intently at the horse, but not in an excited way like the people in the crowd. The tall man had taken the other’s arm and they looked serious and businesslike.

‘We’ll have to look into this,’ Zed heard him say, and his companion nodded and took out a notebook and pencil. ‘A bay stallion. It all fits.’

‘I’ve seen him before,’ said the other man.

Zed heard no more. He urged Rocco into a canter – but as he made his way back to the square he realized that time was running very short. The two officers had looked like policemen. Not ordinary ones, they were too smart for that, but officers perhaps in one of the special units which flushed out people who had no right to be in the city: spies for one of the Balkan countries intent on destroying the empire, anarchists wanting to blow up members of parliament . . . and thieves . . . Horse thieves in particular. Frau Edeltraut must have issued a description of Rocco . . . he was distinctive enough with his single white star.

When he had stabled Rocco and rubbed him down, he made his way into the kitchen

‘Sigrid, I have to go soon. Tomorrow . . . I’m sure I saw two men in the park who guessed that Rocco wasn’t really mine. They looked like special police.’

But Sigrid was too preoccupied to worry about Rocco.

‘Professor Gertrude’s had a telegram from her brothers,’ she told Zed. ‘She’s in a dreadful state. Stefan’s up there now trying to calm her down; you go up too while I make some coffee.’

Gertrude was sitting in a chair holding the telegram in her hand. It was a long telegram and obviously very upsetting.

‘They want me to come to this place called Grossenfluss and give a harp recital. On my concert grand – the new one. They say I must come quickly; it’s urgent. There’s something about a child known to us all.’

‘Annika,’ said Zed instantly, and Stefan nodded.

‘Yes, but why do I have to go and play the new harp? It isn’t ready yet. And why do I have to play military music? I never play military music: it isn’t what I play,’ said poor Gertrude. She looked at the telegram again. ‘And there’s something about a man called Ragnar Hairybreeks. It all seems to be in code.’

But Pauline, hurrying in from the bookshop with
The Dictionary of Myths and Legends
under her arm, solved this particular problem.

‘I’ve found it,’ she said. ‘It’s in the Saga of the Nibelungen. Ragnar Hairybreeks was a Viking warrior whose wife was hidden in a harp. There’s a lot more, but that’s the bit that matters.’

The children looked at each other. They were beginning to understand.

But Professor Gertrude was desperate. ‘I can’t go all that way with the instrument. I can’t carry it by myself.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Stefan quietly.

Sigrid came in then with a tray of coffee, and a second telegram, which had just been delivered. Gertrude tore it open eagerly. Perhaps her brothers had seen sense and she did not need to go.

But the message was simple.

‘Bring Emil’s stomach powders,’ it said.

I
t was Olga who found out that there was to be a harp recital in the school on Sunday evening.

Annika lifted her head from the handkerchief she was hemming.

‘A harp? Are you sure?’

For a moment the cloud in which she lived rolled away and a door opened on the past. Professor Gertrude was carrying her harp downstairs; she was wearing the black skirt from which Sigrid was always removing small pieces of food, and both she and the harp smelled overpoweringly of lavender water.

‘She’s French, she’s called Madame La Cruise. A friend of the princess sent her to show us that you can play patriotic things on the harp.’

Annika bent her head again over her sewing. It was strange how hope could die even if you hadn’t
had
any hope. Aunt Gertrude seldom left Vienna and it was impossible to imagine her playing patriotic songs on the harp.

It was the patriotic songs that were particularly worrying Gertrude as she sat in the parlour of the inn going through the plans for Annika’s rescue.

She had transposed a song called ‘Slay and Smite if God Demands It’ and another one about a soldier’s death on the battlefield with a refrain about the red-soaked earth renewed by the warrior’s spilt blood.

‘I can’t do any more,’ she said miserably to her brothers. ‘They’re nasty.’

‘It doesn’t matter. The girls won’t know what you play,’ said Professor Julius. ‘School concerts aren’t about music; they’re about not having to do homework while they’re going on.’

Stefan thought that the songs Gertrude was going to play would be the least of their worries. The plan, which had been explained to him when he arrived, seemed to be full of holes.

He and Gertrude were to unload the harp from the carriage and wheel it into the school. In the hall they would take the harp out of its case, leave the case in the cloakroom and ask for help in carrying the instrument up the stairs.

In the interval of the concert, Annika would say she felt sick and hurry to the toilet in the downstairs cloakroom. Stefan, who was guarding the harp case, would help her into it and, when the concert resumed and everybody was out of the way, he would carry her out to a closed carriage in which Ellie was waiting with a change of clothes. Annika would be let out and driven away to the station, Stefan would take the harp case back to the cloakroom and, at the end of the concert, he and Professor Gertrude would go home with the harp in the usual way.

‘I’ll have to have a reason for taking the case out in the interval,’ said Stefan. He was not a boy who worried easily but he was worried now. ‘In case anyone sees me. Maybe I would need to fix a new wheel on the base.’

‘We’ll just have to improvise,’ said Professor Julius grandly. Since he was to wait for them at the station he could afford to be relaxed. ‘After all it will be dark.’

Both the professors had been determined to return to Vienna and leave Ellie where she was. However much Annika disliked her school, she had been put there by her mother, and they were not the sort of people who planned cloak-and-dagger rescues, and interfered with authority.

But what they had learned from the maid at the inn about pupil 126 would not go out of their minds.

‘Such pretty hair, she had,’ the maid had said . . . and Annika too had pretty hair. The professors began to be haunted by the image of Annika lying on the stone flags in pools of her own blood.

Once they had decided to stay, the professors became very forceful. There was an old encyclopedia in the smoking room of the inn, and when Emil turned to the page about Ragnar Hairybreeks he found that his memory had not been faulty. A beautiful maiden, the daughter of a king, escaping a cruel war, had been carried to safety hidden in a harp.

Professor Julius had already been to the school when he went to enquire about visiting Annika. It was Emil therefore who called late that afternoon and asked to see the principal, Fräulein von Donner.

He wore a black beret pulled down over his forehead and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses and introduced himself as Henri de Malarme, a concert impresario who had been sent by the music master of the Duchess of Cerise.

‘The duchess, as you know, is a close friend of your patron the Princess Mettenburg.’

Fräulein von Donner was impressed. She did not usually see people who came to the door, but a messenger from a duchess, especially one who knew their own princess, had to be listened to.

‘Her Grace’s concert master has a harpist whom he values greatly – a Frenchwoman. She has transposed the patriotic songs of the Fatherland for the harp. There is one song, “Let Our Enemies Tremble”, which has already become famous in aristocratic circles. It is in the key of E flat minor,’ said Professor Emil.

‘And how does this concern us here at Grossenfluss?’ asked Fräulein von Donner, bending forward so that the three keys on her chest – the one for the front door, the one for the isolation room and the one for the cubbyhole, which housed the telephone – all clanked together.

‘Her Grace has suggested that this harpist visits a few specially chosen schools to give a concert. Free of charge, of course – the concert is free. It seems important for the pupils to know that an instrument that is often played by women can also be used to hearten men for heroic deeds. Even for war.’

‘Well, that is true. We are always concerned that the girls in our care are trained to serve the Fatherland in any way – and music of course has often been used as a battle call. Though not,’ she went on, ‘on the harp.’

‘No. And that is what interests the duchess. That is why she is sending Madame La Cruise to give recitals to young people. And it so happens that Madame is going to Schloss Bernstein to play there, and she could stop here on the way. I take it that you have a suitable hall?’

‘Yes, of course. Our round room on the first floor is traditionally used for concerts.’