The Star of Kazan by Eva Ibbotson

the last line write: “A pinch of nutmeg will improve the flavour of the sauce.”’
    The tree did not catch fire. Sigrid had made Annika a brown velvet dress with a wide lace collar, and Ellie gave her a silver charm to add to her bracelet. Later the Bodeks came and Stefan lifted up the smaller ones to get their sugar mice and gingerbread hearts from the tree.
    All in all it had been a wonderful Christmas; ‘the best ever,’ Annika said, as she said each year, and meant it. She had quite forgotten her doubts and sadness. Her future lay clear before her; she would learn to be the best cook in Vienna – perhaps even a famous cook who had dishes named after her. Certainly there was no better place to grow up than here in this familiar square in the most beautiful city in the world.
    She opened her double windows, which she was not supposed to do, and held out a hand to catch a snowflake. Faintly, across the cobbles, there came the noise of a child screaming. Then the Eggharts’ door opened and Loremarie threw her new skating boots out into the street.
    ‘They’re the wrong colour,’ she yelled. ‘I told you, I wanted them to be blue !’
    And Annika, who had prayed only that morning not to think unkind thoughts, felt that this was the perfect end to the day.

C HAPTER N INE
T HE G IANT W HEEL
    A t the end of February the funfair in the Prater, which had been closed in the winter, prepared to open once again. This meant taking the tarpaulins off the roundabouts, reassembling the shooting booths and checking the machinery of the famous Giant Wheel with its large, closed carriages.
    And on the last Saturday before the fair opened officially, the men who worked there, like Stefan’s father and the other groundsmen and mechanics and carpenters, were allowed to invite their family and friends to come to the Prater free.
    Stefan went, but his elder brothers all had Saturday jobs, so Annika went with him. Pauline too was invited, but she knew that the day would mostly be spent on the Giant Wheel, which she found alarming and far too high, and her grandfather was expecting a new delivery of books, so she stayed at home.
    Pauline was right. Annika and Stefan went round on the Giant Wheel three times, but then Stefan caught sight of the engineer who serviced it and went off to talk to him – so that the last time Annika went up, she was alone.
    Perhaps it was because of this that she saw everything so vividly.
    There is a moment when each carriage stops with a little click and just hangs there in space. The music ceases, one can hear the wind – and there beneath one lies the whole city. To the east, the Danube, to the north and west the Vienna Woods . . . and to the south (but one has to look very hard for this) just a glimpse of the white peaks of the Alps, where the snow is everlasting.
    Everything she saw now seemed to be part of her own life. The spire of the cathedral where, on Easter Sunday, Aunt Gertrude had knelt on a dead mouse . . . The roofs of the palace where the emperor slept on his iron bed, and the Spanish Riding School where his Lipizzaners had danced for them . . .
    The copper dome of the art museum where Uncle Emil had told her so many important things about the painting of human flesh, and the opera where he had picked Cornelia Otter out of a chorus of thirty well-covered village maidens and decided to adore her.
    She ran from side to side, looking, looking . . . Here was the park of the Belvedere, where soon now she would go and search for the first violets . . . and the pond in the Volksgarten where they had found an injured duckling and brought it to Ellie to heal. Beyond the marshy islands on the Danube ran the great plain which stretched all the way to Budapest and – nearer again – the graveyard where Sigrid’s uncle was buried after he ate twenty-seven potato dumplings in a row and fell senseless to the ground. And Annika, on a level with the clouds, thought of her friend, the Eggharts’