The Star of Kazan Read Online Free PDF

gold-and-crimson saddle, sitting back on his haunches with his forelegs tucked under him. A man in a bicorne hat and a brown cutaway coat was riding him – and Annika, like any child in Vienna, knew that it was one of the famous Lipizzaner stallions doing a levade. And not any stallion but Maestoso Fantasia, the oldest and strongest of the horses and a great favourite with the emperor.
    The notice said:
    GALA PERFORMANCE AT
THE SPANISH RIDING SCHOOL
14 JUNE 1908
in honour of His Majesty King Edward VII
of Great Britain
and in the presence of His Imperial Majesty,
The Emperor Franz Joseph.
The Band of the Austrian Grenadiers will play.
(A limited number of tickets are available to
the General Public.)
    Annika stared at the poster for a long time. She walked past the Lipizzaners’ stables often, she had even been allowed inside because Stefan’s uncle was the blacksmith who shod the horses, but she had never seen a proper performance in the Spanish Riding School. She would have loved to go, but the tickets would be incredibly expensive; there was no hope that Ellie and Sigrid could afford to take her; she would not even ask.
    She was still looking at the notice rather wistfully, when she heard a high and bossy voice behind her.
    ‘ We’re going to the gala, aren’t we, Miss Smith?’
    Loremarie was with her English governess, a tall sad-looking woman. Loremarie had had a lot of governesses – English ones and French ones and German ones. Some of them had been thin and some of them had been fat, some of them had been strict and some of them had been gentle – but all of them, after a few months with Loremarie, had looked sad.
    ‘We’re going in the front row on the first tier,’ bragged Loremarie.
    She was wearing a pleated tartan skirt and a tartan tam-o’-shanter, although the Eggharts were not known for their Scottish blood. Her small dark eyes were set very deep in her pale cheeks and she had a particular way of walking, with her behind thrust out, as though she wanted people to know that her backside, like her front, was important.
    ‘It costs a lot of money to go,’ said Loremarie, who loved to taunt Annika for being poor – and then the sad governess led her away to her dancing lesson.
    Since no one knew exactly when Annika had been born, Ellie and Sigrid did not celebrate her birthday, they celebrated her ‘Found Day’, the day on which they had discovered her on the altar steps at Pettelsdorf.
    They did this by leaving Vienna very early and taking the same train into the mountains as they had taken then, to give thanks in the little church and to pray. At first they had walked through the village in fear and trembling, waiting for someone to tell them that an unknown woman had been seen asking questions, but as the years passed and nothing was heard, they relaxed. It really seemed as though the woman who had left her daughter on the altar steps had vanished from the face of the earth. When Annika was a baby they had left her with the Bodeks when they went to the mountains, but as soon as she could walk they took her along. It always seemed to be fine on the twelfth of June. The scent of the pines blew softly from the slopes, the stream sparkled – and the fortunate cows grazed contentedly on salads of clover and primulas and harebells which studded the rich grass.
    ‘I’d rather have been found here than born in a boring hospital,’ Annika would say.
    Inside the church, though, she always felt bewildered and cross. ‘It was me you were giving away,’ she wanted to say to her absent mother. ‘It wasn’t just anybody, it was me.’
    And then of course she felt guilty, and that night, when she told herself the story of her mother’s arrival, the love between them knew no bounds.
    But the important part of the celebrations came on the Saturday after Found Day, when the professors let her choose a treat, something to which all the household could go. The year before they had gone on a paddle steamer