The Christmas Star: A Festive Story Collection Page 4

  ‘Phone the doctor, the fire brigade. Send for Franz, quickly,’ Gerda ordered. ‘A man – we need a man.’

  The governess ran to the telephone. Bur Graziella, desperate, threw her fur cape over her nightdress and ran out into the street.

  Thus it was that in the space of half a minute the life of Sebastian Haffner underwent a complete and total revolution. One minute he was free as air, easy-going, a young man devoted to his research work at the University – and seconds later he was a committed, passionate fanatic ready to scale mountains, slay dragons and take out a gigantic mortgage on a house. For no other reason than that Graziella, rushing blindly down the steps into the lamplit street, ran straight into his arms.

  Just for a fraction of a second the embrace in which Sebastian held the trembling girl remained protective and fatherly. Then his arms tightened round her and he became not fatherly – not fatherly at all. And Graziella, with snowflakes in her hair, looked up at the stranger’s kind, dark, gentle face and could not – simply could not – look away.

  Then she remembered and struggled free. ‘Oh, please come!’ she gabbled, pulling Sebastian by the hand. ‘Quickly. It’s my father . . . The carp has shot him.’

  Instantly Sebastian rearranged his dreams. He would visit her regularly in the asylum, bring her flowers, read to her. Slowly, through his devotion, she would be cured.

  ‘Hurry, please, please! He was groaning so.’

  ‘The carp?’ suggested Sebastian, running with her up the steps.

  ‘My father. Oh, come!’

  Maids moaned at the foot of the stairs. Tante Gerda sobbed on the landing.

  Sebastian was magnificent. Within seconds he had seized a carved oak chair and begun to batter on the door. Quite quickly, the great door splintered and fell. At Sebastian’s heels they trooped into the bathroom.

  Onkel Ernst sat propped against the side of the bath, now groaning, now swearing, his hand on his shoulder which was caked with blood. Round him were fragments of rose-encrusted china and shattered mirror which the lead shot ricocheting from the sides of the bath and grazing Onkel Ernst’s shoulder, had finally shattered. The carp, lurking beneath the water taps, appeared to be asleep.

  ‘Ernst!’ shrieked Tante Gerda and dropped on her knees beside him.

  ‘Bandages, scissors, lint,’ ordered Sebastian, and Graziella fled like the wind.

  It was only a flesh wound and Sebastian, miracle of miracles, was a doctor, though the kind that worked in a lab. Quite soon Onkel Ernst, indisputably the hero of the hour, was propped on a sofa, courageously swallowing cognac, egg yolk with vanilla, raspberry cordial laced with kirsch. The family doctor arrived, pronounced Sebastian’s work excellent, stayed for cognac too. The fire brigade, trooping into the kitchen, preferred slivovitz.

  And upstairs, forgotten, seeing nothing but each other, stood Graziella and Sebastian.

  This was it, then, thought Graziella, this wanting to sing and dance and shout and yet feeling so humble and so good. This was what she had never felt and so had nearly thrown herself to Franz as one throws a bone to a dog to stop it growling. . . As if in echo to her thoughts, the bell shrilled yet again and Franz von Rittersberg was admitted. His eye was still swollen and his temper not of the best.

  ‘This place is turning into a madhouse,’ he said, running up the stairs. ‘Do you know what time it is?’

  Graziella did not. Time had stopped when she ran into Sebastian’s arms and years were to pass before she quite caught up with it again.

  ‘Well, for heaven’s sake let’s finish off this blasted fish and get back to bed,’ he said, shrugging off his coat and taking out a knife and a glass-stoppered bottle. ‘I’ve brought some chloroform.’

  ‘No!’

  Graziella’s voice startled both men by its intensity. ‘In England,’ she said breathlessly, ‘in England, if you hang someone and it doesn’t work . . . if the rope breaks, you let him live.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Graziella, don’t give us the vapours now,’ snapped Franz. ‘What the devil do you think we’re going to eat tomorrow, anyway?’

  He strode into the bathroom. ‘You can help me,’ he threw over his shoulder to Sebastian, who had been standing quietly on the half-lit landing. ‘I’ll pull the plug out and pour this stuff on him. Then you bang his head on the side of the bath.’

  ‘No,’ Sebastian stepped forward into the light. ‘If Miss . . . if Graziella does not wish this fish to be killed, then this fish will not be killed.’

  Franz put down the bottle. A muscle twitched in his cheek. ‘Why you . . . you . . . Who the blazes do you think you are, barging in here and telling me what to do?’

  Considering that both men came from good families, the fight which followed was an extraordinarily dirty one. The Queensberry rules, though well-known on the Continent, might never have existed. In a sense of course the outcome was inevitable, for Franz was motivated only by hatred and lust for his Christmas dinner, whereas Sebastian fought for love. But though she was almost certain of Sebastian’s victory, Graziella, sprinkling chloroform on to a bath towel, was happily able to make sure.

  Dawn broke. The bells of the Stephan’s Kirche pealed out the challenge and the glory of the birth of Christ.

  In the Mannhaus mansion, Graziella slept and smiled and slept again. Onkel Ernst, propped on seven goose-feather pillows, opened an eye, reflected happily that today nothing could be asked of him – no carving, no wobbling on stepladders, no candle-lighting – and closed it again.

  But in the kitchen Tante Gerda and the cook, returning from Mass, faced disgrace and ruin. Everything was ready – the chopped herbs (bravely, the cook had agreed to mace), the wine, the cream, the lemon . . . and upstairs, swimming strongly, was the centrepiece, the raison d’être for days of planning and contriving, who should have been floating in his marinade for hours already.

  As though that was not enough, as they sat down to breakfast there was a message from Franz. He was still unwell and would not be coming to dine with them. It took a full minute for the implication of this to reach Tante Gerda and when it did, she put down her head and groaned. ‘Thirteen! We shall be thirteen for dinner! Oh, heavens! Gross-Tante Wilhelmina will never stand for that!’

  But fate had not finished with Tante Gerda. The breakfast dishes were scarcely cleared away when the back-door bell rang and the maid returned struggling under a gigantic hamper.

  ‘Oh, no . . . NO!’ shrieked Tante Gerda.

  But it was true. Now, at the eleventh hour, with everything still to do and the shops closing fast, the Pfischingers had ‘sent’.

  And now it was here, the moment for which all these weeks had been the preparation. It was dusk. The little nieces boiled and bubbled in their petticoats, pursued by nursemaids with curling-tongs and ribbons. Inside ‘the room’, Tante Gerda, watched complacently by Onkel Ernst, climbed up and down the step-ladder checking the candles, the fire-bucket, the angle of the silver star. Clucking, murmuring, she ran from pile to pile of the presents spread on the vast white cloth beneath the tree. Graziella’s young doctor, summoned from the laboratory, had agreed to come to dinner so that they wouldn’t be thirteen. He had even somehow contrived presents for the little nieces – three tiny wooden boxes which Tante Gerda now added to their heaps.

  And now all the candles were lit and she rang the sweet toned Swiss cow-bell which was the signal that they could come in.

  Though they had been huddled straining against the door, when it was opened the little nieces came slowly, very slowly into the room, the myriad candles from the tree shining in their eyes. Behind them came Graziella, her head tilted to the glittering star and beside her the young doctor – who had given her only a single rose.

  And suddenly Tante Gerda’s headache lifted, and she cried a little and knew that somehow, once again, the thing she had struggled for was there Christmas.

  You’d think that was the end of the story, wouldn’t you? But my mother, telling it years later, like
d to go on just a bit further. To the moment when the little nieces, having politely unwrapped a mountain of costly irrelevancies, suddenly burst into shrieks of ecstasy and fulfilment. For, opening Sebastian’s wooden boxes, they found, for each of them, a tiny, pink-eyed, living mouse.

  Or further still. To the family at table – white damask, crystal goblets, crimson roses in a bowl. To the little nieces (the youngest wobbling fearfully on her pile of cushions), each pocket of each knicker-leg bulgy with a sleepy, smuggled mouse. To Onkel Ernst magnificent in his bandages, and Graziella and Sebastian glowing like comets . . . To the sudden stiffening, knuckles whitening round the heavy spoons, as Tante Gerda brought in the huge silver serving-dish.

  And the sigh of released breath, the look of awed greed as she set it down. Egg-garnished, gherkin-bedecked, its translucent depths glittering with exotic fishes and tiny jewelled vegetables, the celebrated concoction quivered gently before them. Lampreys in aspic! Truly – most truly, the Pfischingers had ‘sent’.

  The littlest niece, when she grew up and became my mother, liked to end the story there. But I always made her go on just a little further. To the day after Christmas. To the house of the Pfischingers on the other side of Vienna. To Herr Doktor Pfischinger, a small, bald, mild little man ascending the stairs to his bathroom. He is carrying a long-bladed knife, a sledgehammer, a blunderbuss . . .

  About the Author

  Eva Ibbotson was born in Vienna, but when the Nazis came to power her family fled to England and she was sent to boarding school. She became a writer while bringing up her four children, and her bestselling novels have been published around the world. Her books have also won and been shortlisted for many prizes. Journey to the River Sea won the Nestlé Gold Award and was runner-up for the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. The Star of Kazan won the Nestlé Silver Award and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. The Secret of Platform 13 was shortlisted for the Smarties Prize, and Which Witch? was runner-up for the Carnegie Medal. The Ogre of Oglefort was shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and the Roald Dahl Funny Prize. Eva Ibbotson died peacefully in October 2010 at the age of eighty-five.

  About the Illustrator

  Nick Maland studied English and Drama at university and went on to work in the theatre, acting and directing. During this time he also developed an interest in drawing, which soon became a full-time occupation. He has worked as an illustrator for the TES, The Times, the Observer, the Guardian and the Independent, among others, as well as illustrating children’s books.

  He has won many awards, including the V&A Illustration Award in 2003 for You’ve Got Dragons, the Silver Medal in the Society of Illustrators: The Original Art exhibition, the Stockport Children’s Book Award for Snip Snap! and the Booktrust Early Years Award for his work on Oliver Who Travelled Far and Wide by Mara Bergman.

  He lives in Brighton with his wife, son and daughter.

  Books by Eva Ibbotson

  Let Sleeping Sea-Monsters Lie . . . and Other Cautionary Tales

  Dial A Ghost

  Monster Mission

  Not Just a Witch

  The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

  The Great Ghost Rescue

  The Haunting of Hiram

  The Ogre of Oglefort

  The Secret of Platform 13

  Which Witch?

  Journey to the River Sea

  The Dragonfly Pool

  The Star of Kazan

  For older readers

  A Company of Swans

  A Song for Summer

  Magic Flutes

  The Morning Gift

  The Secret Countess

  ‘Vicky and the Christmas Angel’ and ‘The Great Carp Ferdinand’ were previously published in A Glove Shop in Vienna and Other Stories by Century Publishing Company Limited 1984. Reissued by Bello, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, 2014

  This collection first published 2015 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  This electronic edition published 2015 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-5098-2047-4

  Text copyright © Eva Ibbotson 1984, 2015

  Illustrations copyright © Nick Maland 2015

  Cover illustration by Joe Wilson

  The right of Eva Ibbotson and Nick Maland to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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