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.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
PUPIL NUMBER 126
Two 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 s
he 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
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.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
RAGNAR HAIRYBREEKS
The 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 urg
ed 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.’