The Star of Kazan by Eva Ibbotson

her in and brought her up.
    ‘Ellie is soft and comfortable like a mother and Sigrid is strong and busy like an aunt – and the professors are good to me. But sometimes . . . I dream about my real mother coming. Often I dream it – that she’s looked and looked for me and at last she’s found me. Do you think it’s wrong to keep dreaming that?’
    ‘How could it be wrong?’
    ‘Well, when Ellie and Sigrid look after me so well.’
    ‘Dreams don’t work like that, Annika.’
    She was still holding the spray of jasmine to her face and her eyes were shut, but Annika didn’t go away. She wanted the rest of the story.
    ‘Last time you said it was the beginning,’ she said. ‘Being on the swing.’
    ‘Yes. I was a success. People called me La Rondine – it means a swallow in Italian – and they put me on to clouds and into hot-air balloons and gondolas, but always high, high over the stage and always I strewed something. Flowers mostly; but sometimes autumn leaves or golden coins or gingerbread hearts . . . And once, in Russia, I strewed snow!’
    ‘Snow! But how . . . ?’
    ‘Well, of course it was tissue-paper snow, but it looked wonderful. We were touring Moscow and St Petersburg and I was the Spirit of Winter. The Russians stamped and shouted and cheered. They love it when it begins to snow – it makes the streets so quiet, the horses’ hoofs are muffled and there are sledges everywhere. A count who lived in a wooden palace in the middle of a forest gave a great banquet for us. He was mad but so generous – he gave me an emerald pendant, which had belonged to his grandmother. The Star of Kazan, it was called.’
    ‘Were there wolves?’
    ‘We didn’t see any, but we heard them – and when we arrived it was dusk and there was a whole line of the count’s servants with lighted flares to lead us up the drive and welcome us.’
    Her eyes closed. She began to snore, and her mouth went slack, but it didn’t matter any more. Annika was looking at a friend.
    Then she woke as suddenly as she had slept.
    ‘The world was so beautiful in those days, Annika. The music, the flowers, the scent of the pines . . .’
    ‘It still is,’ said Annika. ‘Honestly, it still is.’

C HAPTER S IX
T HE S TAR OF K AZAN
    S ummer was now well under way. The geraniums in Ellie’s window boxes had to be watered twice a day, the cats lay in the shade of the cafe awning, and were shooed away, and came back . . .
    At the opera, the season was nearly over, and Annika was sent out to buy the roses that Uncle Emil always sent, at the last performence, to a lady in the chorus called Cornelia Otter, whom he had admired for many years.
    Professor Julius was relabelling the collection of rocks in his study, helped by Sigrid, who stood beside him with a duster looking sour, because it is not at all easy to dust rocks. Professor Gertrude was having trouble with her harp sonata and kept to her room, dabbing lavender water on to her temples to help her think.
    But when she went to visit the Eggharts’ great-aunt in her stuffy attic, Annika was in a different world.
    ‘I was La Rondine for several years. The Little Swallow. There were pictures of me everywhere and people gave me such presents . . . Once a posy of flowers was brought on to the stage for me, and when I took it it seemed to be covered with drops of dew. But they weren’t drops of dew, they were diamonds . . . A banker sent them, just to say thank you. And a marquis gave me a priceless brooch in the shape of a butterfly. People were like that in those days; so generous – and so rich. My jewels were famous. I could have bought horses and carriages and mansions if I’d sold them, but they were friends, I loved them.’ She turned her head. ‘It’s true what I’m telling you,’ she said anxiously.
    ‘Of course it’s true.’
    ‘Anyway I was too busy – with my work . . .’
    ‘With strewing,’ said Annika, who liked that word particularly.
    ‘Yes. Not only, of