The Star of Kazan (29 page)

They were sitting at a table in one of Zurich’s most luxurious cafes overlooking the river. A chestnut tree beside them was just coming into blossom; there were flowers in tubs on the pavement; everything sparkled with cleanliness: the streets, the buildings, the people . . .

Getting hold of the trunk had been ridiculously easy. As soon as she received the note from the stationmaster that a trunk addressed to her was waiting at Bad Haxenfeld, Edeltraut had driven in with Oswald.

They had loaded the trunk into the carriage, driven to a remote shed on the Spittal estate and transferred the jewels to Oswald’s locked leather shooting bag. Then they waited till dark, returned to Spittal and threw the trunk into the lake.

That, of course, was only half the battle. They had to find out if the story that the Baron had overheard at Bad Haxenfeld was true and the jewels were real, and to do this they had gone to Zurich.

Zurich is the biggest town in Switzerland and it is a beautiful place, built on either side of a fast green river which flows into a wide lake ringed by mountains. The streets of Zurich are elegant, the shops are sumptuous and the hotels are as comfortable as palaces.

But what makes Zurich important in the eyes of the world is its banking houses. Many of the best-known banks in the world have their headquarters there and they are famous for being discreet and reliable, with underground safes where people can keep their money or their gold bars or their jewels in numbered boxes, and no one asks any questions about what is stored there or for how long.

And along with the banks, the city had the best jewellers and lawyers and accountants in Europe.

It was to the firm of Zwingli and Hammerman, the best-known jewellers in Zurich, that Edeltraut, with Oswald and Mathilde, had taken the jewels from Annika’s trunk, and as they unpacked them and laid them on the green baize table in Herr Zwingli’s strongroom their hearts were beating very fast.

‘I can’t give you an opinion on these straight away,’ he said. ‘I shall have to get my experts to look at them.’

So he gave them a receipt and looked at their documents of entitlement and they waited for two days in their hotel for what the experts would say. They were the longest two days of their lives, but when they returned they knew by Herr Zwingli’s beaming smile that their troubles were over.

‘Yes, all the pieces are genuine, and I have to say I have not seen such a collection for a long time.’

And he suggested it would be wise to sell the pieces one at a time, with intervals in between, and keep the rest in the vaults of the Landesbank, in a strong box.

‘You should have enough to live on for the rest of your life in comfort,’ he had said.

So Edeltraut had arranged for the sale of the Burmese rubies, and it was the money from these that they had spent on the repairs and changes to Spittal, and on Hermann’s fees.

Now, though, they needed more money and they had come back to Zurich to arrange the sale of the butterfly brooch. Herr Zwingli had sent a description of the brooch to a customer in America who was willing to pay a fortune for it.

When they had finished the business, they walked down the main street, stopping again and again at the windows of the shops, each one as beautifully arranged as a room in a museum.

‘Mathilde asked me to look out for a mink coat,’ said Oswald.

‘Oh really?’ said Edeltraut. ‘Might I point out that when I brought Mathilde here last time I allowed her to spend a fortune on clothes for herself and Gudrun – but enough is enough.’

Oswald shrugged. He was completely under Edeltraut’s thumb. But he looked greedily at a pearl-handled pistol in the window of a gun shop and went on looking so long that at last Edeltraut bought it for him. She did not need her sister, but she needed him.

Later, as they sat having dinner in a glamorous restaurant which overlooked the town, Oswald brought up the question of Annika.

‘Do you think Grossenfluss is quite the place for her?’

‘Most certainly I do, otherwise I wouldn’t have sent here there. You know she had to be sent away quickly after that wretched dog found the photograph. She went on asking me about Zed almost every day – wondering if it had to be him who took the trunk. We can’t take that kind of risk.’

‘No, she had to go, but I wondered about Grossenfluss. They say the discipline is—’

‘Oswald, please don’t interfere between me and my daughter. She will get an excellent education there. And, as I have told you, the school is free. I should have thought you would be glad of that, considering how good your wife is at spending my money.’

‘Well, well, I’m sure you know best,’ said Oswald. In spite of his duelling scar and his passion for killing animals, he was a weak man. ‘I think I’ll have another glass of this excellent wine.’

T
wo kilometres from the Palace of Grossenfluss, which housed the Institute for Daughters of the Nobility, stood an inn called the Fox and Feathers.

It was the kind of country inn one could find all over the north German countryside, with carved shutters, heavy wooden tables, big pitchers of beer and ample helpings of roast pork with sauerkraut.

As well as serving food and drink, and stabling horses, the Fox and Feathers had four bedrooms that it let out to travellers, and it was in one of these that Professor Julius woke the morning after the visit to Spittal.

He was not in a good temper. He’d been kept awake by a group of drunken guests singing sad songs about their lost youth, and a cockerel had disturbed him at dawn. His first thought as he woke was that he and Emil must have been raving mad to let their cook drag them to this place, and his second was that the sooner they saw Annika and returned to Vienna, the better.

He got out of bed and went along the corridor to find his brother.

Emil too was in a bad state; he had had a second helping of onions fried in lard at supper and his stomach had not taken it well.

‘I think you’d better go along by yourself and find out when we can see Annika. I don’t feel it would be wise for me to go out just yet,’ he said.

Professor Julius washed and made his way downstairs. There was no sign of Ellie in the dining room, but out of the window he could see her talking to the maid she had made friends with the night before. She was helping her to hang up the washing. He drank a cup of coffee, put on his hat, took up his walking stick, and set off up the long drive that led to the school.

The closer he got the more certain he became that they had been ridiculous to come. The building became larger and grander the nearer he got. The Emperor Franz Joseph’s palace in Vienna did not have half as many statues and pediments and curlicues and towers.

Professor Julius was not in the least overawed but he did feel that he was wasting his time. Grossenfluss was the sort of building that any young girl must long to live in.

He mounted the flight of steps to the front door, stopped for a moment to examine a patch of feldspar on the heel of a statue – and rang the bell.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Emil, who was still in his pyjamas. The maid had brought him a hot-water bottle, which he was resting on his stomach, and Ellie had asked permission from the girl in the kitchen to make him some gruel. ‘You look upset.’

‘I am not so much upset,’ said Julius, laying down his walking stick, ‘as angry. Very, very angry. I told them who I was, I showed them my card – and I was turned away.’

‘Turned away. What do you mean?’

‘I mean what I say,’ said Julius. ‘I was not admitted. I told them that I had come from Vienna with friends to arrange for a time to visit Annika and they said that none of the pupils were allowed visitors in the first month, and then only with written permission from the girl’s mother. And they left me,’ said Professor Julius, beginning to glare again as he remembered, ‘they left me standing outside the door. I was not even taken into the office. I can’t remember ever having been treated with such rudeness. One wonders just who these people think they are.’

‘Well, it looks as though there’s nothing we can do at the moment. We’d better pack up and go home,’ said Emil.

A sound from the doorway made both professors turn. Ellie was standing there with the bowl of gruel and as soon as they saw her face they knew there was going to be trouble.

‘I’m going to see Annika,’ said Ellie. ‘I’m going to see her if I have to stand there all day and all night. The maid says they take the girls for a walk most days; they come out of the side door and go down the avenue and back. I’ll wait, and I’ll see her and when I see her I’ll know.’

So she left them, walking down the dusty village road in her stout shoes, her felt hat pulled over her forehead.

When she got to the junction of the road and the avenue she stopped and she waited.

She did not sit down – there was nowhere to sit. She stood and she waited all morning, and at lunchtime the maid from the inn brought her a bread roll, but she shook her head. If Annika came past she did not want to be eating, she wanted to
see
.

In the early afernoon, it began to rain. Ellie had no umbrella but she did not notice her discomfort. All she thought about was whether they would take the girls out in spite of the weather.

She stood there till dark, but Annika did not come. When there was no hope she went back to the inn and allowed the maid to bring her hot soup. She had expected that the professors would have returned to Vienna but they were still there.

In the morning she took up her vigil again. No one came in the morning, and no one came in the early afternoon and Ellie went on standing there.

Then at three o’clock on the second day of Ellie’s watch, the side door of the palace was opened and a line of girls in black cloaks and black bonnets came slowly down the avenue . . .

Since she had given up hope, Annika had only one aim: not to be noticed. So she shuffled through her day, from the moment the bell shrilled at six in the morning and the girls lined up in the washroom for their turn with the jug of cold water and the cake of slimy soap, to the same bell shrilling them into bed at night.

All the same, she was noticed.

‘Number 127 isn’t settling too well,’ said the matron to Annika’s form mistress. ‘She’s very thin and pale.’

‘Give her some cod liver oil and malt,’ said the form mistress. ‘Force it down her throat if she won’t take it – she’s probably anaemic.’

There was no need to force it down Annika’s throat – she didn’t want to end up like Minna, who still sometimes had last night’s supper served up to her at breakfast and then again at lunch. She obediently gulped the vile stuff down – but it made no difference. Each day she became more listless and quieter.

But it wasn’t till the school went for a walk one afternoon that she became really frightened.

She was walking with a girl called Flosshilde, who hardly ever spoke. Annika’s hands were folded, as were the hands of all the girls; she walked with a straight back.

At the front of the line was Fräulein Heller, who had flat feet; at the back was Fräulein Zeebrugge, who wheezed.

It was a misty day. Yesterday’s rain had passed but the air was moist.

They reached the end of the avenue and prepared to turn to the left. There was a tree by the gate and somebody was standing under it. Standing very still, just looking . . .

Annika stopped dead – and from behind her Fräulein Zeebrugge shouted, ‘What are you doing, girl? Keep moving, you’ve upset the line!’

So Annika moved on, and passed the woman who stood there – and it was then that she realized she was going mad.

Because she had seen Ellie. She was absolutely sure she had. And Ellie was 1,000 kilometres away in a city she herself would probably never see again.

Ellie was in Vienna.

‘She can’t stay there,’ said Ellie. ‘She can’t stay in that place a day longer.’

Professor Julius and Professor Emil looked at each other in dismay. They had packed their suitcases and asked the innkeeper for the bill. The summer term at the university began the following week.

And now Ellie wasn’t just being difficult. She was being impossible.

‘She’s ill,’ said Ellie. ‘She’s ill inside her head.’

‘Ellie, you only saw her for a few moments, muffled up in a cape on a foggy day. You said so yourself. How can you tell that she’s ill?’

‘I can tell,’ said Ellie. ‘If her mother won’t take her away then we’ll have to.’

‘I suppose we could inform her mother and—’

‘There’s no time for that,’ said Ellie, who had never before interrupted her employer. ‘And her mother thinks it’s a fine place; Gudrun said so.’

‘Look, we have to get back to Vienna,’ said Professor Julius. ‘We can return later—’

‘I’m not moving from here without Annika,’ said Ellie.

The professors stared at her, baffled. When your cook turns into a kind of tigress it is not easy to know what to do for the best.

‘I’ll rescue her myself if I have to,’ said Ellie. ‘I’ll get a ladder.’

The professors shook their heads and went into the parlour to discuss what to do.

‘It’s not going to be easy leaving her here,’ said Julius. The thought of Ellie on top of a ladder climbing through a window at Grossenfluss was not a calming one. ‘But I don’t see what else we can do.’

Emil nodded. ‘I imagine she’ll see sense soon. But I think we should definitely write to Frau von Tannenberg and ask her to find out if Annika is happy. This is an

entirely different matter to that of the jewels, which can be

left to the police.’

The maid with whom Ellie had made friends came in to

wipe down the tables and straighten the chairs.

‘Would you want any help with your luggage, sirs?’ she

asked the professors.

‘No, no; we’ve only our overnight things. Will you make

sure that the cab is ordered to take us to the station?’ ‘Yes, sir. Frau Ellie’s staying on, she says.’ ‘Yes. She’s worried about a child at the school.’ The maid pushed another chair straight. ‘Well, you