He kissed her, long and hard, and then pandemonium broke out as Bobby and Tatty vied with each other to congratulate them. The excitement was almost too much to bear and Lydia was exhausted long before anyone else and she needed a moment of quiet contemplation. ‘I think I’ll go up to bed, if you don’t mind.’
She kissed all three goodnight and made her way to her room. It was the room she had occupied as a child. Here she had always felt safe and happy, and she felt safe and happy now. She smiled as she took off the pendant and ran her fingers over the Kirilov Star. It was a link to past and present, to history and to the future, infinitely precious, not because if its worth, but because of what it meant. Picking up the album, she sat looking at the pictures, touching Yuri’s face with her forefinger, as if she could feel the flesh. ‘Yurochka,’ she murmured. She let the album drop and looked across at the framed picture of her father and grandmother with the tsar which stood on her bedside table, next to the one of her and Alex at her twenty-first birthday ball. Even on a black and white photograph, the Star seemed to sparkle at her throat.
She put it on her bedside table, while she prepared for bed, then she climbed between the sheets and wriggled down on the pillows. Alex wouldn’t come to her tonight but it didn’t matter. There were lots more nights to come. The rest of their lives.
Acknowledgement
I would like to acknowledge the invaluable help given to me by Sir Rodric Braithwaite, British ambassador in Moscow 1988–1992, author of several books, articles and reviews on Russia and the international scene, who kindly agreed to read the manuscript and set me right on Russian spelling and points of fact. Any errors that remain are mine.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I read many, many books in researching The Kirilov Star. Here are some of them:
Beevor, Antony, Stalingrad (Viking, 1998)
— The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (Penguin Books, 2005)
Braithwaite, Rodric, Moscow: 1941, A City and Its People at War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)
— Across the Moscow River: The World Turned Upside Down (Yale University Press, 2002)
Buber-Neumann, Margarete, Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler (Pimlico, 2008)
Dimbleby, Jonathan,Russia: A Journey to the Heart of a Land and Its People (BBC Books, 2008)
Erickson, Ljubica and Erickson, Mark (eds.), Russia: War, Peace and Diplomacy – Essays in Honour of John Erickson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005)
Figes, Orlando, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution 1917–1921 (Phoenix Press, 2001)
— The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (Allen Lane, 2007)
Hughes, Michael, Inside the Enigma – British Officials in Russia 1900–1939 (Hambledon Press, 1997)
Klier, John and Mingay, Helen, The Quest for Anastasia: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Romanovs (Smith Gryphon, 1995)
Matthews, Owen, Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War (Bloomsbury, 2008)
Pares, Bernard, The Fall of the Russian Monarchy (Phoenix Press, 2001)
Thomas, D.M.Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life (St Martin’s Press, 1998)
Steinberg, Mark D., Voices of Revolution, 1917 (Yale University Press, 2002)
Zinovieff, Sofka, Red Princess: A Revolutionary Life (Granta Books, 2007)
Helen Dunmore, The Siege (Penguin, 2002)
— The Betrayal (Penguin, 2010)
Alexander Mollin, Lara’s Child (Doubleday, 1994)
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, trans. Max Hayward and Manya Harari (Collins & Harvill, 1958)
By Mary Nichols
The Summer House
The Fountain
The Kirilov Star
Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
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Copyright © 2011 by MARY NICHOLS
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
First published in hardback by Allison & Busby Ltd in 2011.
This ebook edition first published in 2011.
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ISBN 978–0–7490–4006–2