The Summer Day is Done
Read The Summer Day is Done Online
Authors: Mary Jane Staples
When young British agent John Kirby is sent to Russia in 1911, he does not expect to fall in love. Then an invitation to a ball arrives from the Tsar and, after an evening of dancing and romance, John and the Tsar’s eldest daughter, Olga, are totally captivated by one another.
Soon John is spending more time with Olga and her family – wonderful, long peaceful summers of tennis parties and picnics. But as love begins to blossom between the pair, a cruel blow is dealt. John is forced to return to England and Olga and her family are caught up in the bitter and bloody war of 1914.
Will John and Olga ever be reunited? Can their love survive the odds? Or will tragedy, pain and longing destroy them both?
THE SUMMER
DAY IS DONE
Mary Jane Staples
TRANQUILLITY
At Livadia, when summer day is done and evening softens the warm shadows, the ghosts of innocents scamper over the green lawns, their laughter caught as whispers in the trees, and every still pool reflects the deep blue eyes of a dreaming girl.
The main station of the Ukrainian seaport Nikolayev was more active than usual that morning. It was the activity of anticipation, a buzz, a bustle, a shouldering of neighbours. It had to do not with catching a train, but with seeing one. The Imperial train, carrying the Tsar and his family, was due to pass through.
Having discovered this, John Kirby detached himself from the bustle and strolled to the farthest point of the station, where he ran less risk of being jostled by the crowd. In addition, it was cooler at the far end. There the breeze from the Black Sea sneaked around the station buildings and relieved the enervating heat.
He was twenty-eight, tall and sinewy, with hair of deep brown and a beard flecked with gold. He wore light brown twill trousers, a white silk shirt open at the neck and a straw boater tipped to shade his grey eyes. He carried a belted jacket under his arm.
He heard the approaching rumble. The bustling people became a spreading mass, their excitement and curiosity infectious. The rumble
increased to a rolling thunder and the iron monster steamed slowly through. The Imperial train, in any case, never travelled fast. It liked to give unfriendly anarchists the impression it was on the lookout
The huge engine pulled gleaming coaches of royal blue, each coach adorned with the double-eagled Imperial crest. The whole was an engineering masterpiece of iron, steel and wood, aptly designated a royal palace on wheels.
They called out, the people of Nikolayev who had crowded into the station, and some threw flowers and others knelt in a gesture of reverence. They did not know if the Tsar would show himself but hoped he would. Suddenly he did, and the day was blessed for them. The curtains of a coach drew aside and there he was, in uniform and standing at the window to acknowledge their greetings. He was bearded, handsome and smiling. He was visible only for the short time it took the train to rumble through, but it was enough to make it an occasion of delight for the people. In their enthusiasm they almost pushed a raptly hypnotized woman under the massively rolling locomotive.
Not until the train was passing the end of the station did Kirby, standing unhampered and alone, see another curtain move.
A young girl looked out.
Startled blue eyes met his. He was aware of a girl soft with colour and enchantment. The warm sunlight danced on the window, was reflected in her eyes and made a shining cloud of her chestnut-blonde hair. He felt the strangest
sense of indefinable communication as in shy, suspended animation she returned his gaze, the train bringing her to him, taking her away. The fleeting seconds stretched. He could not resist smiling. And at the very last moment before she vanished, she gave him the shyest of smiles in response.
He stared after the train until it was no more than a blue smudge.
It was 1911 and he had been in Russia three years. His British passport identified him as an English gentleman of independent means. In three years he had travelled extensively over the country, and it had left him with the impression that no one man could live long enough to discover the full extent of Russia’s immensity or unravel more than one of its complexities. Millions of its people were simple and devout, thousands were sophisticated and cynical. Some Russians were extravagantly passionate, others religiously fatalistic. Thousands made a banquet of every supper. Thousands more starved. There were freezing, bitter winters and hot, cloudless summers. There was incalculable wealth and unendurable poverty. The wealthy used the Tsar and the poor revered him.
Ubiquitous, interested, involved, Kirby had seen the unimpressive, unpaved indifference of Vladivostock in muddy autumn, the white brilliance of Siberia in dry, sub-zero winter. He had experienced the forbidding atmosphere of Moscow in a grey dawn and the fragrance of the Crimea in spring. He had tired of the limitless flatness of the Ukraine, been depressed by the
industrial towns of the Urals and perpetually fascinated by the people in all places. Most recently, he had lived in St Petersburg, the beautiful capital where the arts flourished and the gifted poured out their genius.
But the aristocrats of the capital deserted it en masse during the summer and autumn. They went to the south of France, to Italy and to the Crimea. Kirby himself was on his way to the Crimea. He had been invited there by Count Andrei Mikhailovich Purishkin. Kirby knew the Crimea and loved it. It was the least Russian of all the provinces of the Empire, but uncompromisingly loyal to the Tsar.
He thought again of blue eyes and a shy, enchanting smile.
A hand came to rest languidly on his shoulder. He turned. Count Andrei Mikhailovich Purishkin smiled at him. Nearly thirty, rakishly handsome in a light suit, white hat and sporting a slender malacca cane, Andrei was a good-natured representative of his kind. Amiable and indolent, he owned to a dislike of mental or physical effort. God had bequeathed him a silver spoon and who was he to challenge the whims of the Almighty? He was as he had been born, and Russia was as God and the Tsars had made it. Andrei thought far more of the accident of his noble birth than he did of his wealth, but, Kirby reflected, if he had had only as much as a civil servant to live on he would have perished within a year. He would not have complained, however, he would merely have lapsed into incurable fragility.
‘So you walked,’ he said to Kirby. He spoke
in French, the language of the capital’s nobility, although he could have used Russian, for Kirby was fluent in that language.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it was warm but I needed the exercise. Your delightful aunt never let me out of my chair once in three days.’
‘She does it to every visitor. She dotes on an audience. Gregory saw to your luggage and has it here somewhere.’
Gregory was the count’s secretary, a man of invaluable work capacity.
‘He’s a fine fellow,’ said Kirby. ‘What a good friend you are, Andrei Mikhailovich. Your servants are my servants. As a compulsive traveller I find the occasional use of another man’s servants an excessive boon.’
‘Most of the time,’ observed Andrei, ‘you are disgustingly self-sufficient. What it is to be an Englishman and so sure of oneself. It isn’t a virtue, you know, it’s an intimidation. It can exhaust the weak.’
There was always an air of ease and good fellowship about Kirby which appealed to the languid aristocrat, the suggestion of a man always curious about others, a man always looking for something new in life. They had met at the turn of the year in St Petersburg, at a reception where Andrei had been intensely bored by its respectability and its demands on his feet. They became friends, and Andrei invited Kirby to leave his hotel and stay instead at the Purishkin family house overlooking the Neva. Now they were on their way to spend a month or two on Andrei’s estate in the Crimea.
Many of the people on the platform had dispersed after the Imperial train had passed out of sight, and most of those still there were awaiting the arrival of the Sevastopol connection, late because it had been held up by the stately Imperial progress. A few passengers were milling around the station samovar, drinking tea. Andrei looked and felt limp. He never exuded virility. Nevertheless, women adored him.
He remembered something.
‘Do you mind company to Sevastopol, dear fellow?’ he said.
‘Whose?’ asked Kirby.
‘Not an unreasonable question, but is there something on your mind?’
‘I was thinking.’
‘I do myself occasionally,’ said Andrei. ‘Our company won’t be boring, I assure you, unless she talks politics. Then she’ll be wearing. She’s in her carriage outside and won’t put a foot from it until the train arrives. She dislikes railway stations. Gregory is somewhere seeing to our luggage. I must find him, I suppose, and tell him of our change of coaches. We’ve been invited to share hers. I hope you won’t find it fretful. She is Princess Karinshka, the exquisitely formidable Aleka Petrovna.’
‘Is she more formidable than all the others?’
‘Frequently,’ said Andrei and sighed. ‘She can scratch and draw blood. She has a passion for politics of the wrong kind. She’s one of us but not one of us. It’s despairing. But you will have to make up your own mind. Where the devil is Gregory?’
‘You were going to look,’ said Kirby, who knew Andrei hoped he would make the search. A bell rang, a train whistled. The locomotive began its run in. Andrei wandered limply in search of Gregory.
Suddenly the platform was all babble and confusion. Kirby thought that this, at least, was common to all Russia. Wherever one went, whatever kind of people one was among, a quite ordinary incident could induce an apparent crisis. Even two people boarding a tramcar or two men putting up a poster seemed to crowd each other. It was a national malaise.
But the train would happily wait until everything sorted itself out. Kirby looked around for Andrei. When he saw him, he was with a woman. She was striking. Despite the heat she wore a long black kaftan-style coat with a silky sheen to it and black laced boots that gleamed beneath the coat’s swinging hem. Her hat with its half-veil was also black and she wore it like a crown on her massed auburn hair. She walked in gliding freedom, attended by a retinue of luggage-carrying porters. She stopped at the entrance to a coach and Andrei beckoned to Kirby. The woman looked at him. Her complexion was pale, her mouth only lightly touched with rouge, and her eyes were so dark that they almost matched the smoky black of her veil. Her face was oval, European rather than Russian. She was, thought Kirby, distinctively beautiful.
She was Princess Aleka Petrovna Karinshka. Andrei introduced him. She did not seem all that impressed as Kirby raised his straw hat.
‘You’re English?’ she said. Her voice was cool, low-keyed, slightly husky.
‘And a traveller,’ said Andrei, ‘he’s walking around Russia, dearest.’
She glanced down at Kirby’s brown shoes. They were dusty.
‘Yes, I see,’ she said. She was speaking in Russian. She was opposed to the affectation of Russians speaking French.
Kirby, looking down at the dust on his shoes, said, ‘It’s just something I picked up in Nikolayev, Highness.’
She made a gesture of dissent with her hand. Steam was whistling, people hurrying, porters loading luggage. But Princess Karinshka was not a woman to let a standing train worry her.