A Song for Summer by Eva Ibbotson Page A

in five minutes and behave yourself properly, you can come. And if you do, you will please leave Marek alone."
    "What do you mean?"'
    "You know exactly what I mean. Now hurry."
    Ellen had expected Marek to leave them at the door of the church, but to her surprise he followed them in and saw them bestowed in the pew behind Lieselotte's family before taking his place at the end of the row.
    Their arrival caused a considerable stir. Marek was greeted by a surprising number of people, and Ellen's virtues had been proclaimed by Lieselotte, but no one had seen Hallendorf children in church before, and the old woman who had warned Ellen on the steamer could be seen whispering agitatedly to her friends.
    Ellen's thoughts always wandered in church, but they wandered well. Now she allowed herself to admire the blond heads of Lieselotte's little brothers and sisters in the row in front, and to admit that Marek (who did not seem to need his spectacles to read the hymn book) was looking extremely seigniorial in the loden jacket which had replaced his working clothes.
    But mostly her thoughts wandered to Henny, for whose soul she prayed though she had no right to do so, not being a Catholic, and certainly no need, since Henny's soul, if any soul on earth, could look after itself in the hereafter.
    When the service was over, Ellen said she would like to look round the church and this was approved of in every way but it was not apparently a thing that one did alone. Lieselotte's mother, Frau Becker, in particular expected to attend, as did her
    uncle and the old woman who had warned Ellen on the boat. Nor did Marek's suggestion that he wait for them on the terrace of the inn prove to be popular. Herr Tarnowsky, who had helped Lieselotte's mother mend her roof and chopped down the baker's diseased pear tree, was expected to be present at this treat.
    But if there was a claque of villagers, it was Lieselotte who was allowed to be the spokesman, for in Hallendorf church there was a star, a local celebrity, a saint to whom the church was consecrated but of whom they spoke as of any girl who had lived among them and in her own way done extremely well.
    "Her name was Aniella," said
    Lieselotte. "And look; here are the pictures which show you her life."
    She pointed to a row of oil paintings hanging on the chancel wall.
    "This is one of her with her family; she lived up on the alp underneath the Kugelspitze quite close to here.
    You can see all the animals she cared for too."
    The painting contained all the loving detail with which eighteenth-century artists depicted simple things.
    Aniella's house had window boxes of petunias and French marigolds; a morning glory climbed the wall.
    She herself was sitting on a bench and bending down to an injured creature who had placed his head in her lap--not a lamb; there were lambs as in all holy paintings, but further away in the meadow. No, Aniella was tending the broken leg of a St Bernard dog--one could see the keg of brandy around his neck. He was holding his paw up trustingly and beside him, jostling for a place, was a goat with a broken horn.
    Surrounding the girl, with her calm face and long dark hair, was a host of other animals: some were wounded--a cat with a bandaged ear, a calf with a sore on its flank--but there were others who seemed to be there more for company: a salamander walking over her foot; a grass snake curled up around a stone.
    It was a place where Marek's tortoise would have been very much at home.
    "She was a healer," said Lieselotte.
    "She healed everything; she didn't mind what it was. Cripples and grass snakes and people, and she never harmed a creature in her life."
    "Are those her children?"' asked Sophie. "No, she was very young, only eighteen.
    They're her brothers and sisters. They were orphans; their parents died and she looked after them even though she wasn't much older herself."
    The little peasant children in their dirndls and kerchiefs might have been Lieselotte's own