The Star of Kazan by Eva Ibbotson Read Free Book Online

I’m supposed to do it for half an hour every afternoon. The doctor told my mother that she was lonely – the old woman. But I can’t. I tried once and it was awful. She dribbles and her head wobbles and suddenly she goes to sleep and her mouth falls open.’ Loremarie shuddered. ‘It made me feel sick.’
    ‘Yes, but how could I do it instead of you? Your mother would know.’
    ‘No, she wouldn’t. I go up between tea and supper when she rests. Anyway, even if she did find out she probably wouldn’t mind as long as it keeps the old woman quiet. The doctor is horrid to us. He says we’ll be old one day and we should be kind to her. But we won’t – not like that . . . poor and mad and dribbly . . .’
    Annika was thinking, wringing the water from the ends of her hair. ‘I can’t come till next week when school breaks up and even then I have jobs to do. But I’ll come when I can. Only you must give me twenty-five kreutzers. Twenty isn’t enough.’
    If she could stick it out a few times she’d have enough money to buy a proper birthday present for Ellie.
    ‘All right. I’ll leave the money on the window sill in the scullery, in an envelope. You’ll come in by the back door, of course, being a kitchen child, so you’ll see it.’
    Annika nodded. It was odd how people thought she wanted to come in by the front door instead of straight into the nice, warm, friendly kitchen of whatever house she visited.
    School had finished; exams were over and so was the tidying up, which was almost worse. Pauline had come top in everything except gymnastics, in which she got a very low mark indeed, and this set her worrying about a man called Ferdinand Haytor, who had become wrestling champion of Lower Austria even though he had been born with his left foot the wrong way round.
    ‘I don’t know why I can’t be like him,’ she said.
    Annika was still very busy. Ellie had decided that she was old enough to make a proper apple strudel entirely by herself.
    Making an apple strudel on your own is a bit like climbing Everest without oxygen. Only one very special type of flour will do, the dough has to be teased out to be paper-thin and laid over a tablecloth, and the apple slices and melted butter and nuts and spices have to be poured on without making a single hole, before it is rolled into a dachshund shape and baked.
    Annika managed it, but it was a mixed blessing because Ellie then said it was time she started working with aspic.
    ‘Quails’ eggs in aspic – now there’s a dish!’ she said.
    In the holidays, too, Professor Emil liked to take Annika behind the scenes in the art museum, to the restoration room, where men in baize aprons were at work cleaning old paintings.
    ‘Look at that!’ he would say as the halo of some tortured saint turned from grubby brown to shining gold under the restorer’s hand. ‘Isn’t that splendid? And that idiot Harteisen actually thinks pictures shouldn’t be cleaned! The darker and dirtier they are, the better he is pleased.’
    But on Saturday the children still escaped to their deserted garden. Stefan’s older brother Ernst came too and they acted the whole of The Count of Monte Cristo with the hut as the dungeon on the island and the steps of the ruined house as the palace of the villain who had plotted the count’s downfall.
    In the story the count escaped and vengeance was done. But in the Eggharts’ attic, the other prisoner still lay unvisited and alone.
    The first time Annika went to sit with the Eggharts’ great-aunt, Loremarie was waiting to show her the way. As she tiptoed after her up the stairs, Annika’s feet sank deep into the patterned carpet; Chinese vases stood on pedestals, there was a smell of hothouse lilies.
    After the third flight of stairs they came to a landing with a wooden partition and a door. This led to a last flight of stairs, but these were very different: narrow and bare and airless, and instead of the scent of lilies it was the smell of