‘How barbaric! What are you going to say to Lydia?’
‘I don’t know. She has been so much better lately.’
‘You cannot allow her to go on hoping if you are sure there is no hope.’
‘No, you are right. She must be told.’
‘She may not believe you. She might think you are trying to keep her from them.’
‘So, what do you suggest?’
‘Perhaps you could invite Baron Simenov and his wife to stay with us for a few days. He could tell her.’
‘That would be a cowardly thing to do, Margaret,’ he said. ‘I will tell her myself, but not about the execution. An accident perhaps. And I will ask the Simenovs to visit. Pyotr might be able to tell me more than he has written in the letter.’
So the baron and baroness and young Alexei came to stay at Upstone Hall for a weekend and Lydia was allowed to join them.
It was two days since Sir Edward had told her that her papa and mama had died on their way to meet her and her brother in Simferopol. An accident, he had said, taking her on his lap to comfort her. ‘They were happy because they were on their way to join you and your brother. Their horse bolted and the carriage turned over. It all happened very suddenly, but at least you know they did not abandon you. They would not want you to be sad for them.’ She had hardly seemed aware of what he was saying, had stared straight ahead at a picture of a wood carpeted in bluebells on her bedroom wall, but it was nothing but a blur of blue and green. It was like losing Andrei and Tonya all over again. Why did she feel betrayed, as if they had all deliberately left her?
But the Simenovs were Russian, they were her link with her past, if only a tenuous one, and though she was shy with them at first, hearing them speak Russian and answering them in the same tongue was lovely. For the first time since coming to England she really came alive, smiling and chattering.
Alexei seemed to have shot up since she had last seen him on the fateful train journey to Yalta. He was dressed in a Norfolk jacket and long trousers and he had a stiff white collar on his shirt. His brown hair was slicked back from a centre parting and his dark intelligent eyes looked at her with something akin to pity, but she did not recognise it as such. ‘I am learning Russian history and European languages,’ he told Sir Edward and Lady Stoneleigh in confident English. ‘Papa says it will be useful in years to come. When the Bolshevik regime collapses, I mean to go back to Russia.’
‘Do you think it will collapse?’ Sir Edward asked, humouring the boy.
‘Oh, it is bound to. The Russian people will not tolerate it when they find it is not the paradise they have been led to believe.’
Edward smiled; the boy was obviously repeating something he had overheard. ‘You think they have been misled?’
‘Oh, without a doubt. It was a way to get them out of the war. They will come to their senses.’
‘Let us hope so,’ Lady Stoneleigh said. The baron’s story of what he had learnt about the Kirilovs had finally convinced her that Edward had been telling the truth all along and she berated herself for ever doubting him. She felt happier than she had for months. ‘The Communists are at the root of all the strikes we have been having. The thought of them taking over this country is terrifying.’
‘It won’t happen in England,’ her husband told her. ‘The English people are not so easily led by the nose.’
‘Neither are the Russians,’ Baron Simenov put in.
Lydia looked from one to the other in bewilderment. She had hardly understood a word, not because her vocabulary was poor, though that was part of it, but because what they were discussing was way above her head. ‘Would you like to go for a walk?’ she asked Alexei in Russian.
Alexei was not keen to be a baby-minder, but the look of appeal he gave his father was ignored.
‘Yes, show the young man round,’ Edward told Lydia, smiling at them both.
They slipped out of the house by the kitchen door, after begging some stale crusts from the kitchen maid, and walked down to the lake. The ducks paddled towards them, expecting the titbits Lydia threw to them.
‘This is a grand place,’ Alexei said, watching the ducks squabbling over the bread. ‘Do you like living here?’
‘Yes, but I miss Papa and Mama and Andrei and Tonya.’ Speaking their names made her gulp back tears.
‘I am sorry about what happened to them,’ he said, remembering what his father had told him when he asked him to be kind to the little girl. ‘But try not to be sad.’
‘I cannot help it.’
‘No, I suppose not. But you are a great deal better off than a lot of Russian émigrés. They are finding life in England hard, not speaking English and needing to work. You have a good home here. Be thankful.’
That was something Claudia said to her every day but she wasn’t quite sure what it meant. ‘I wanted to see them again so much. Now I can’t.’
‘I understand. I would feel the same if I lost my parents.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘With my mother’s cousins in Berkshire, but Papa is looking for a home for us in England. I go to an English boarding school.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘Oh, yes. It’s great fun.’
‘I don’t like school. They laugh at me.’
‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said. ‘But you must hold your head up and pretend you do not care. You are a little countess, remember that.’
‘I will try.’
‘You have to learn, you know, nothing is achieved without learning. When I have finished my education, I intend to go back to Russia.’
‘But Sir Edward said the bad men were everywhere.’
‘You mean the Bolsheviks. They have to be overthrown.’
‘What are Bolsheviks?’
‘Communists. Reds. They believe everyone is equal and there should not be any tsar or counts or barons or anything like that. And no one must be rich or own property. They call each other “comrade” and won’t have anyone addressed as “Excellency”. They killed the tsar and all his family. That was why anyone with a title had to leave. Didn’t you know that?’
‘No.’ She really did not understand but it was nice hearing him speak in Russian.
‘Would you like to go back, one day, when the Reds are defeated?’ he asked.
‘Perhaps,’ she said with a sigh, though if the baron was right, there was no one there to go back to. He had taken her on one side soon after they arrived and gently reiterated what Sir Edward had said. ‘Sir Edward is a good man,’ he had said. ‘And I know he loves you and will look after you.’ She loved Sir Edward without reservation and knew she must try and settle down in England now. If what they said was true, her old home was no more, Russia had changed, nothing would ever be the same, not the village or the dacha or the servants. Without Mama and Papa and Andrei, what was the point of going back? But it made her very sad.
‘We have to grow up first,’ Alexei said.
The crusts were all gone and the ducks, realising there were no more to be had, were swimming away. He took her hand and led her back to the house.
Growing up was sometimes hard, Lydia decided, as the years passed and she moved on from infant school to Upstone High School for Girls. Although she was an apt pupil and did well at her lessons, she always felt a little apart from her fellow pupils and students. It wasn’t that she spoke with a Russian accent – that was soon eradicated – nor that she was unpopular, because she had many friends, though some of that might have been down to her privileged upbringing. No, it was her continuing feeling that she was Russian.