The Star of Kazan (5 page)

‘They could build new hospitals all over the city with what those animals cost,’ she said.

But the professors gave in – and bought tickets not only for the household but for Pauline and Stefan, whom Annika always wanted to invite.

Treats which involved the professors always started off with rather a lot of education. Before they went to Durnstein, Professor Julius had told her about the depth of the river at that point, the speed of the current and the kind of sandstone from which the castle had been built, and Professor Gertrude had played on her harp the tune that Richard’s rescuers had played under his castle window.

‘We’ve learned a lot about the horses at school,’ Annika said now, thinking she might get away without too many lectures.

She already knew that the horses were bred in Lipizza, near Trieste, from Arab and Berber strains brought from Spain and that the Archduke Charles had brought the first ones to Vienna 300 years before. She knew that the horses did not start off white but dark brown or black, in the same way as Dalmatian puppies are born without spots, and that each stallion had his own rider who stayed with him all through his life in the riding school.

But Professor Julius was not satisfied. He took Annika up to his room and got out a map of Karst, the plateau on which Lipizza was situated.

‘The soil is sparse and there are rocks close to the surface, so that the horses learn to pick up their feet and this helps to form their high-stepping gait. All the area is limestone, which is very porous . . .’ And he was off, because he was after all a geologist, and very fond of limestone – and it was an hour before Annika could get away.

Professor Emil took her and Pauline to the art museum. Both girls knew it well, with its marble floors and the pictures of half-dressed ladies with dimpled knees. Now, though, Emil led them to the seventeenth-century Spanish artists who had painted huge battle scenes with rearing horses and dying soldiers and blood dripping from swords.

‘You see the way those forelegs are poised over the enemy soldier,’ he said, pointing to a grey stallion with flaring nostrils and wild eyes, ‘that’s a courbade, and when he brings his hoofs down, he’ll crush the man to pulp. And over there, the Duke of Milan’s horse – the one that seems to be flying – he’s doing a capriole. See how he’s kicking out with his hind legs!’

And he explained that the most famous of the movements that the Lipizzaners performed, the ‘airs above the ground’, were originally developed in battle, where they could help a rider to escape, or kill his foe.

By the time they set off in two hansom cabs, with the professors and Annika in the first, and Sigrid, Ellie, Pauline and Stefan in the second, Annika was almost wishing she had chosen a different treat. As soon as she knew that Loremarie would be at the gala, Sigrid had decided that Annika needed a new dress and had gone out for a roll of sea-green silk. She was a superb needlewoman, the dress was a triumph; Annika’s hair was brushed out and taken back with a band of matching silk. All the same, she felt rather as though she was going to a lecture given by horses instead of people.

But when they went up the stairs and came out in the riding school itself, everything changed.

It was like being in a ballroom: the crystal chandeliers blazing with light, the white walls, the red velvet on the banquettes, the huge portrait of Charles VI on his charger. The band played soft music, and below her, the russet sand was raked into swirls like the sea.

Loremarie was at the other end of the row, wriggling and showing off, but Annika had forgotten her.

The band broke into the national anthem, everyone rose to their feet; the emperor in a blue-and-silver uniform came in, with his guest – the portly English king – and Ellie sighed with pleasure. She dearly loved the emperor, who was so old, so alone and so pig-headedly dutiful. Then everyone sat down again, the band started to play the
Radetzky March
, the great double doors opened – and two dozen snow-white horses came into the ring.

They came like conquerors, in perfect formation and in perfect time to the music, lifting their legs high, bringing them down exactly on the beat, and as they came level with the place where the emperor sat, they stopped as one and the riders swept off their cockaded hats in homage.

Then they began. They started with the simpler movements: the passage, which is a kind of floating trot, the piaffe, where the horse trots on the spot, the flying changes, the turn on the forelegs . . . The tall riders in their white buckskin breeches sat silent, guiding the horses with movements so small they could not be noticed – or even just with their thoughts. The understanding between the stallions and the men who rode them had been built up during the long years of training. There was no need any longer for commands.

Now the younger horses left the ring, the band played a Boccherini minuet and three of the most highly trained stallions did a pas de trois: weaving the earlier steps into an intricate and faultless dance.

‘They’re so beautiful,’ whispered Annika. Light poured from their white skins, their manes and tails tossed like silk, they held their heads like princes.

The three stallions disappeared through the huge double doors. The horses which came in now were riderless; their riding masters walked behind them, holding them only on the long rein. These were the most experienced horses, who could do the steps on their own – the one in the lead was the emperor’s favourite, Maestoso Fantasia, the horse Annika had seen on the poster.

If Annika had chosen to come to the horses to get even with Loremarie, she had long forgotten it. Beside her Pauline, who was always doubtful about horses – the way they tossed their heads and stamped their feet – was hanging eagerly over the balustrade.

And after the interval, the climax of all those years of training, the famous ‘airs above the ground’, with the riders riding without stirrups as they took their mounts through the levade, known to Vienna’s children because of the many statues where the horses sit back on their haunches and lift their legs into the air . . . and the courbette, where the horses don’t just rear up but jump forward on their hind legs and one can see their muscles bunched and rippling with the effort . . . And the most difficult of all, the dazzling ‘leap of the goat’, the capriole, where the horse really seems to be flying, and Annika, along with most of the spectators, let out her breath in an ‘Oh’ of wonder.

The show ended with the famous quadrille, ‘The ballet of the white stallions’, in which all the horses took part.

Unlike the other children in the audience, Loremarie had found it impossible to sit still. She fidgeted and fussed and dropped her purse and picked it up again . . . Now she stood up and pointed at one horse in the centre of the row of stallions weaving faultlessly between the pillars.

‘That horse is the wrong colour,’ she said loudly. ‘He’s brown; he isn’t white. He shouldn’t be there!’

She was hushed not by her doting parents but by an old gentleman in the row behind who told her to sit down and be quiet.

‘You had better study the traditions of the Imperial Spanish Riding School before you come here again,’ he said sternly.

Loremarie shrugged and sat down, and the dance went on.

Then once more the riders raised their hats to the emperor, the horses’ ears came forward, acknowledging the thunderous applause – and it was over.

‘It makes you proud to be Austrian,’ said Ellie as they stood up to go, and nothing more was said about the money being better spent on new buildings for the university.

The Eggharts hurried Loremarie away without speaking and were driven home in their enormous yellow motor, but the professors now led the way to Sacher’s restaurant, where they had booked a table, for on Found Days they were very democratic and ate with their servants.

And at the end of the meal, they had something important to say to Annika.

‘We have decided that from now on you do not have to call us “Professor”. You may call us “Uncle”,’ said Professor Julius. ‘Not Professor Julius but Uncle Julius.’

‘And not Professor Emil, but Uncle Emil,’ said Professor Emil.

And they smiled and nodded, very pleased with this gesture. Professor Gertrude did not say that she could be called ‘Aunt’ because she had wandered off inside her head, where she was composing a sonata for the harp, but she too nodded and smiled.

So all in all it was a splendid evening and as they got off the tram in the Keller Strasse and turned into the square, the party was in an excellent mood, singing and telling jokes.

Then suddenly they stopped.

In front of the Eggharts’ house a white motorized van with high windows was parked. There was a red cross painted on the side and the words ‘Mission of Mercy’ written above it.

Had there been an accident? No one liked the Eggharts, but that did not mean they wanted them to be hurt.

The door of the van opened, and two nurses in navy-blue uniforms got out. Then they turned back to the van and fetched something – a bundle of shawls and blankets. One nurse took hold of one end of the bundle and the other nurse took hold of the other end and they began to carry it towards the house.

‘What is it?’ whispered Annika – for the bundle seemed to weigh more than one would expect from a pile of blankets.

At this point the bundle twitched and said something. It gave a jerk and a nightcap with a ribbon fell out on to the pavement. Not a bundle then, a person. And a person who was not pleased.

Meanwhile, the driver of the van had got out and rung the Eggharts’ bell. A maid came and seemed to be giving instructions, pointing upwards. There was no sign of the Eggharts, though Annika saw the curtains of the drawing room twitch.

Then the manservant, the snooty Leopold, came out and opened the back of the van and took out a battered-looking trunk, which he carried into the house. When he had done that he returned and pulled out two wooden boxes and these too he carried in.

Presently the door opened once again, and the two nurses got back into the van, the driver returned, and the van drove away.

As the birthday party crossed the square to their own houses, they were very quiet. No one sang now or told jokes.

It had been a strange arrival. Was it really a person who had been delivered so carelessly? And if so, what did it mean?

F
or a few days after the bundle, looking like a pile of unwanted clothes, had been carried into the Eggharts’ house nothing more was heard. The Eggharts didn’t speak to anyone and of course rumours flew round the square. The bundle was a madwoman like Mrs Rochester in
Jane Eyre
, who laughed hideously and would set the place on fire . . . or she had bubonic plague and had to be sealed up and quarantined.

Then Pauline read a book called
The Count of Monte Cristo
about a man who had been wrongfully imprisoned in a dungeon in a castle on an island in the middle of the sea.

‘That’s what she’s like. She’s a Countess of Monte Cristo,’ Pauline said. ‘They’ve walled her up and she can’t get out.’

It was Annika who found out that the ‘countess’ lived not in a dungeon but in an attic. It exactly faced the attic where Annika slept, across the square, and on the third day she saw something carried to the chair beside the window. Then the window was opened, and the old lady was aired – like the washing, thought Annika – before the window was closed again and she was carried back to bed.

It was not until the beginning of the second week that Mitzi, one of the Eggharts’ maids, was able to slip into Ellie’s kitchen for a cup of coffee and tell them what was going on.

The old lady was Herr Egghart’s great-aunt. She was ninety-four years old and sometimes wandered in her mind, and the Eggharts had done everything they could to find a hospital or old people’s home where she could be looked after.

‘They put her in the asylum – the one they’re going to pull down, behind the infirmary,’ said Mitzi, ‘but the man who ran it found she was related to the Eggharts and he said she wasn’t mad and they should take her in. She’s very frail and he said she wouldn’t live long. There was quite a fuss, but the Eggharts were afraid of what people would say so they agreed. She has a nurse in the morning and evening to tidy her up, but she can’t get downstairs and most of the time she just lies in bed. She’ll go soon; old people know when they aren’t wanted.’

‘Poor soul,’ said Ellie, stirring her coffee. ‘It’s hard to be old.’

This annoyed Annika, who was sitting on her stool in the corner, stringing beans. ‘No it isn’t. It won’t be for you because I shall buy a house in the mountains and look after you – and Sigrid too.’

‘Mind you, she can be a handful, the old lady,’ Mitzi went on. ‘She didn’t get on with her family and when she was fifteen she went her own way and the family lost touch with her.’

The Eggharts had been forced to take in their great-aunt but that was all. They never mentioned her to visitors who came to the house, they never took her out. It was as though they were pretending to themselves that she wasn’t there.

What happened next was odd and Annika couldn’t make sense of it. Loremarie stopped to speak to her when she met her in the street – and not to sneer or to show off. She was polite, almost friendly, and though she still stuck out her behind, the black eyes, sunk so deep in her face, did not seem quite so baleful.

The first time Loremarie came up to her was when Annika was wheeling out the new Bodek baby in his ancient, rickety pram. Usually Loremarie walked past all the Bodeks with her nose in the air, but now she forced herself to look under the hood and even asked how old he was.

The second time, Annika was returning from the shops with a basket of new potatoes and this time Loremarie actually crossed the street to speak to her.

But it wasn’t till she found Annika leaning over the rim of the fountain, crumbling bread into the water for the goldfish, that the reason for Loremarie’s friendliness became clear. She wanted something from Annika and it was the last thing that Annika expected.