Free The Star of Kazan by Eva Ibbotson

the Vienna Woods to collect mushrooms and berries, the drift of blue smoke from garden bonfires . . .
    But this year she saw autumn not just as beautiful but as sad. She missed the old lady and for the first time she wondered about her own future.
    Stefan too seemed less settled. He still carried his younger brothers about, delivered the washing for his mother, ran errands . . . But once, in the hut, he put it into words: ‘I don’t want to end up spearing rubbish with a stick like my father,’ he told Annika and Pauline.
    ‘Yes, but what do you want to do?’
    Stefan blushed. ‘I want to be an engineer. I’d like to build bridges.’
    ‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’
    ‘Everything. Even if I got into the technical school, I couldn’t spend long training. My parents need the money I’ll bring in when I start work.’
    Because she felt restless, Annika’s daydreams about her mother became longer and more detailed. She came now not in a carriage but in one of the new motors like the Eggharts’, except that it wasn’t a garish yellow but a soft and tasteful grey. She wore a hat with a plume and carried a sable muff, and the dog she brought had become grander too: a Russian borzoi, white and brown and black, with a silken tail. But the words with which she entered the house were always the same:
    ‘Where is she, my long-lost daughter? Take me to her, please – take me to my child!’
    But when the first snow fell, Annika cheered up; and in no time, she and Ellie and Sigrid were off to the market to buy the Christmas tree.
    This was a serious business. The tree could not be big; it had to fit into a particular corner of the dining room – but it had to be perfect.
    And it always was.
    As they came out of the market, carrying the tree, they saw Leopold with one of the stallholders, loading an absolutely enormous fir tree on to a cart. Beside him stood Loremarie looking smug.
    ‘It’s the biggest there was,’ she said with a smirk. ‘It’s probably the biggest in the whole of Vienna.’
    Annika stopped for a moment and felt a pang of envy. What would it be like to have a tree that would fill a whole room with its scent and its beauty? She imagined candlelight from the floor to the ceiling, the shimmer of silver and gold . . .
    But that night, Mitzi, the Eggharts’ maid, came round to see them.
    ‘Guess what?’ she said. ‘The tree’s too big! They had to cut the top off and Loremarie’s having a tantrum because there’s nowhere to hang the star!’
    After the tree, Ellie and Annika began to make the gingerbread house. By this time the professors had realized that Christmas was near and started to think about presents. On the grounds that the best presents are those one would like to have oneself, Professor Julius bought Annika the new edition of Kloezberger’s Mesozoic Fossils , and Professor Emil bought her The Encyclopedia of Eighteenth-Century Painting , which they gave to Sigrid to wrap up. Professor Gertrude took the advice of the lady in the shop and bought her a manicure set that included tweezers for removing facial hair.
    Then Sigrid brought down the decorations from the attic. They had been made over the years from scraps of silk, ribbons, fir cones painted silver and gold – but each year they made new things, and each year the sweets had to be wrapped in silver paper and hung on the lower branches so that the younger Bodeks could reach them when the time came.
    In Vienna Christmas is celebrated on the twenty-fourth – on Holy Night. But it is not a goose or a turkey that is roasted on this night of nights. No one on Holy Night would dream of eating meat. What is roasted is a fish – and not any fish but a carp, the largest and most succulent fish in Austria’s rivers.
    And just three days before Christmas, the carp arrived.
    It arrived packed in lumps of ice from the salt mines of Hallstadt and the fishmonger had done them proud.
    ‘It’s the biggest we’ve ever had,’ said Annika,