THE SECRET COUNTESS BY EVA IBBOTSON

Here's another historical novel I absolutely adore and recommend. The Secret Countess, by Eva Ibbotson. The brilliant story of a young fatherless and impoverished Russian countess turned maid at an estate in the English countryside during the Roaring Twenties. There's a wounded officer with shell shock, a wealthy orphan female tycoon, a lovely disabled little girl, and a Swedish eugeneticist, among many other colourful characters... And of course, constant British humour and fairy-tale-like Lemony narration. Like in Westeros, there are no clear-cut heroes and villains. Recommended if you love Downton Abbey and/or Elemental Masters!

https://es.scribd.com/doc/14665933/A-Countess-Below-Stairs

file:///C:/Users/dermarksandra75/Downloads/14665933-A-Countess-Below-Stairs.pdf 

Here are some excerpts from the story:

"In the fabled, glittering world that was St Petersburg before the First World War there lived, in an ice-blue palace overlooking the river Neva, a family on whom the gods seemed to have lavished their gifts with an almost comical abundance. 
Count and Countess Grazinsky possessed - in addition to the eighty-roomed palace on the Admiralty Quay with its Tintorettos and Titians, its Scythian gold under glass in the library, its ballroom illuminated by a hundred Bohemian chandeliers - an estate in the Crimea, another on the Don, and a hunting lodge in Poland which the countess, who was not of an enquiring turn of mind, had never even seen. 
The count, who was aide de camp to the czar, also owned a paper mill in Finland, a coal mine in the Urals and an oil refinery in Sarkahan. His wife, a reluctant lady of the bedchamber to the tsarina, whom she detested, could count among her jewels the diamond and sapphire pendant which Potemkin had designed for Catherine the Great and had inherited, in her own right, shares in the Trans-Siberian Railway and a block of offices in Kiev. The countess' dresses were made in Paris, her shoes in London and though she could presumably have put on her own stockings, she had never in her life been called upon to do so. 
But the real treasure of the Grazinsky household with its winter garden rampant with hibiscus and passion flowers, its liveried footmen and scurrying maids, was a tiny, darkhaired, bird-thin little girl, their daughter, Anna. On this button-sized countess, with her dusky, duckling-feather hair, her look of being about to devour life in all its glory like a ravenous fledgling, her adoring father showered the diminutives which come so readily to Russian lips: 'Little Soul', of course, 'Doushenka’, loveliest of endearments but, more often, 'Little Candle' or 'Little Star', paying tribute to a strange, incandescent quality in this child who so totally lacked her mother's blonde, voluptuous beauty and her father's traditional good looks. 
Like most members of the St Petersburg nobility, the Grazinskys were cultured, cosmopolitan and multilingual. The count and countess spoke French to each other. Russian was for servants, children and the act of love; English and German they used only when it was unavoidable. By the time she was five years old, Anna had had three governesses: Madame Leblanc, who combined the face of a Nôtre Dame gargoyle with a most beautiful speaking voice, Fräulein Schneider, a devout and placid Lutheran from Hamburg - and Miss Winifred Pinfold from Putney, London. 
It was the last of these, a gaunt and angular spinster with whose nose one could have cut cheese, that Anna inexplicably chose to worship, enduring at the hands of the Englishwoman not only the cold baths and scrubbings with Pears soap and the wrenching open of the sealed bedroom windows, but that ultimate martyrdom, the afternoon walk."

"There was just one more year of picnics in the birch forests round Grazbaya, of skating parties and theatricals with Sergei, now in his last year at the exclusive Corps des Pages, and pretty, frivolous Kira and a host of friends. 
And then the archduke with the face of an ill-tempered bullfrog and the charming wife who had so dearly and unaccountably loved him, were assassinated at Sarajevo. To the Russians, accustomed to losing tsars and grand dukes time and time again in this way, it seemed just another in an endless succession of political murders. But this time the glittering toy that was the talk of war slipped from the hands of the politicians... and a world ended. 
Overnight, meek, devoted Fräulein Schneider became 'the enemy' and had to be escorted to the Warsaw Station under guard. Mademoiselle Leblanc, who had aged parents, also left to return to France. Miss Pinfold stayed. 'God keep you safe, my Little Star,' the count whispered to Anna, holding her close. 'Look after your mother and your brother,' - and rode away down the Nevsky, looking unutterably splendid in his uniform of the Chevalier Guards. Three months later, he lay dead in a swamp-infested Prussian forest, and the flame that had burnt in his daughter since her birth flickered and died.
 *-*-*-*-* 
They carried on. The countess, aged by ten years, organized soup kitchens and equipped a fleet of ambulances at her own expense. Although Anna was too young to enrol officially as a nurse, she spent each day at the Georguievski Hospital, rolling bandages and making dressings. As the shortages and hardship grew worse, Miss Pinfold increasingly took over the housekeeping, organizing the queues for bread, the foraging for fuel. 
When the revolution came and the Bolsheviks seized power from the moderates, the Grazinskys fared badly. They had been too close to the court and, with no one to advise them, they tarried too long in the two rooms of their looted palace which the authorities allowed them to use. It was only when Petya was stoned on the way home from school that they finally acted and joined the stream of refugees fleeing northwards through Finland, east to Vladivostok, south to the Black Sea and Turkey."

"' "Blacking for grates may be prepared by mixing asphaltum with linseed oil and turpentine." ' she quoted now. and looked with pleasure at the rolling parkland, the freshly-sheared sheep cropping the grass, the ancient oaks making pools of foliage in the rich meadows. Even the slight air of neglect, the Queen Anne's lace frothing the once-trim verges, the ivy tumbling from the gatehouse wall, only made the environs of Mersham more beautiful. 'I shall curtsy to the butler,' decided Anna, picking up an earthworm which had set off on a suicidal path across the dryness of the gravel. 'And the housekeeper. Definitely I shall curtsy to the housekeeper!'
The avenue had been curving steadily to the right. Suddenly Anna had come upon the house as abruptly as William Kent, the genius who had landscaped the grounds, intended her to do. Mersham was honey-coloured, graceful, light. There was a central block, pillared and porticoed like a golden temple plucked from some halcyon landscape and set down in a hollow of the Wiltshire hills. Wide steps ran up from either side to the great front door, their balustrades flanked by urns and calm-faced phoenixes. From this centre, two low wings, exquisite and identical, stretched north and south, their long windows giving out on to a terrace upon which fountains played. Built for James Frayne, the first Earl of Westerholme, by some favourite of the gods with that innate sense of balance which characterized the Palladian age, it exuded welcome and an incorrigible sense of lightness. Anna, who had gazed unmoved on Rastrelli's gigantic, ornate palaces, looked on, marvelled and smiled. "

"More than most great houses, Mersham had given its life’s blood to the Kaiser’s war. Upstairs it had taken Lord George, the heir, who fell at Ypres six months after his father, the sixth earl, succumbed to a second heart attack. Below stairs it had drained away almost every able-bodied man and few of those who left were destined to return. A groom had fallen on the Somme, an under-gardener at Jutland; the hall boy, who had lied about his age, was blown up at Verdun a week before his eighteenth birthday.

For the whole hope of the House of Frayne now lay in the one surviving son, Lord George’s younger brother, Rupert. The new earl had spent four years in the Royal Flying Corps, his life so perilous that even his mother had not dared to hope he might be spared. But though his plane had been shot down, though he’d been gravely wounded, Rupert was alive. He was about to be discharged from the hospital. He was coming home.

But for good? Or only long enough to put his home on the market? Remembering the quiet, unassuming boy, so different from his handsome, careless elder brother, the servants could only wonder and wait. Nor were there any clues in the instructions the new earl had sent from his hospital bed: the state rooms were to be re-opened, everything that needed to be done to bring Mersham up to its old standard was to be done - but any new staff engaged to make this possible were to be strictly temporary."


"He came down by car, driving himself in the old black Daimler that had been his father's and as the familiar landmarks appeared, his apprehension increased. 
Rupert had neither wanted nor expected to inherit Mersham or the burdens of the title. It was George who had had all the makings of a landowner and a country gentleman: outgoing, debonair George whose bones now lay deep in the soil of Flanders. Rupert had seen his beautiful home as a place of refuge to which he might occasionally return, buthisambitionshadlainelsewhere: in scholarship, in music - above all in travel. The high, wild and undiscovered places of the world had been the stuff of Rupert's dreams all through his childhood. That being so, it had been no hardship to grow up in his brother's shadow. Shadows are cool and peaceful places for those whose minds are overstocked with treasure. 
Rupert's three years at Cambridge had seemed a glorious preparation for just such a life. He took a First in history and was invited by his tutor, a brilliant madman who specialized in North Asian Immortality Rites, to join him in a field trip to the Karakorum. 
Instead, the autumn of 1914 saw Rupert in the Royal Flying Corps, one of a handful of young pilots who took off in dilapidated BE2s from airfields conjured up in a few hours out of fields of stubble, bivouacked between flights in haystacks and ditches. Two years later, when George was killed at Ypres, Rupert was in command of a squadron flying Camels and Berguets against Immelmann and the aces of the German Reich. The chance that he would survive to inherit Mersham seemed so remote that he scarcely thought of it. 
Then, in the summer of 1918, returning alone from a reconnaissance, he was set upon by a flight of Fokkers, and though he managed to dispatch two of them, his own plane was hit. The resulting crash landed him in hospital, first in St Omer, then in London. Some time in the months of pain that followed they gave him the DFC for bringing his plane back across the lines in spite of his wounds, but his observer, a moon-faced kid called Johnny, died of his burns and the manner of his dying i was to stay with Rupert for the rest of his life. 
And while he lay in hospital, tended by a series of devastating VADs, the war ended and Rupert found himself still alive. Alive, and Seventh Earl of Westerholme, owner of Mersham with its forests and farms, its orchards and stables. Owner, too, of the crippling debts, the appalling running costs, the mortgage on the Home Farm. It was only the memory of George on the last leave they'd spent together, that prevented Rupert from instructing his bailiff to sell then and there. George, his eyes glazed, his uniform unbuttoned after an evening of conventional debauchery at Maxim's, turning suddenly serious. 'If anything happens to me, Rupert, try and hang on to Mersham. Do your damndest.' And as Rupert remained silent, he had added a word he seldom used to his younger brother. 'Please.'
So Rupert had promised. Yet as he pored over the documents they brought to him in hospital he saw no way of bringing the estate, so hopelessly encumbered, back to solvency. And then, suddenly, this miracle ... this undreamt of, unhoped-for chance to make Mersham once again what it had been and see that all the people in his care were safe. 
Thinking with an upsurge of gratitude of the person who had made this possible, his apprehension lifted and, stepping on the accelerator, he turned in past the empty gatehouse, drew up on the wide sweep of gravel and braced himself against the onslaught of the lion-coloured shape now tearing down the steps towards the car. He was home."

"Only Muriel herself, gravitating naturally to the ornate mirrors in the plush Mayfair mansion where she grew up, was not surprised at the lawlessness of the image which greeted her. It was as though she knew from the start that she was not like other children. She hated to be dirty, could not bear mess or torn clothes and once, when a stray kitten brought in by the cook scratched her hands, she shut herself in the nursery and refused to come out until it was removed. 
She had reached a full-breasted and acne-less adolescence when her mother, as though she knew she could do no more for her lovely daughter, contracted pneumonia and died. Five years later, her father collapsed at a board meeting with a perforated ulcer and, at twenty-two, Muriel Hardwicke found herself sole heiress of a group of businesses valued at some three million pounds. She did not let it go to her head. She kept the Mayfair house, engaged a chaperone and - the year was 1916 -herself volunteered as a VAD. Her loathing of illness and her detestation of squalor were put aside in the interests of her grand design. For now was the chance to cross the great barrier between the nouveau riche and the aristocracy. In the war hospital, with a steady stream of wounded officers passing through her hands, she would - she was quite certain - find a worthy mate. 
In the event, it had taken two years; but when the Earl of Westerholme was wheeled in she had known her quest was ended. The title was an excellent one, the young man was undeniably attractive and his wounds, though severe, were not disfiguring. Nor did the fact that Mersham was impoverished displease her: it would make her own position more secure for his family would welcome a bride who was going to restore their home. 
Muriel's own taste would have been for a fashionable wedding in a London church, but she had been quite happy to agree to Rupert's offer of Mersham and a village wedding.
But first she would go and say goodbye to the man who had clarified all her aspirations, the man whose ideas had come to her as though all her life had been leading towards such a goal. 
Dr Lightbody was giving a lecture tonight at the Conway Hall. She would go to it as a perfect preparation, a kind of blessing on her new life. And tomorrow, Mersham. 
*-*-*-*-* 
Slipping into her seat, Muriel noticed with irritation that the hall was half-empty. It was truly appalling what this gifted, handsome man had had to endure in the way of calumny and indifference. Dr Lightbody had a Swedish grandmother from whom he had inherited his fair hair and pale blue, visionary eyes. A devoted grandson, the doctor had most naturally decided to visit the old lady on her farm near Lund. The fact that his departure for Sweden happened to take place just two days before the outbreak of war was obviously a complete coincidence, yet there were people vile enough to accuse him of cowardice. The Swedes themselves had been so unreceptive to the implications of his 'New Eugenics' that the poor man had had to uproot himself immediately after the armistice and return to England."
"Dr Lightbody went through into the tiny kitchen. How had it happened that he, with his vision of what the human body could be, had been trapped into this appalling marriage? Why had he been so weak as to listen to his parents when they insisted he marry the girl and why, having done so, had he not left her two months later, when she miscarried? It wasn't just that she was socially completely his inferior - a lowly clerk's daughter in whose house he had lodged in his last year at college - it was that all along Doreen had been antagonistic to his ideas. First, she had not wanted to accompany him to Sweden and had produced some nonsense about sharing the fate of her countrymen. Then, when in the purity of the Swedish air and the freedom from conscription he had at last been able to formulate his ideas, Doreen had mutely and obstinately misunderstood everything he was trying to do. And when they returned to England and his teaching had at last begun to gain ground, had she been behind him, helping him, building up his image?"

"This was true. Fetching Muriel downstairs, Rupert had indeed been dazzled. He had seldom seen Muriel out of uniform - to him she had been a calming presence dressed in white, ready with a merciful injection when the pain grew too great. Now it occurred to him how little he really knew of his bride's thoughts and hopes and fears."

"The Lady Lavinia Nettleford was a different matter. The eldest of five daughters, whose mother's attempts to marry them off had passed into folklore, she was an equine looking girl with blue eyes set close together, an expression of incorrigible hauteur and that misfortune known as the Nettleford nose. Lady Lavinia scarcely knew Muriel, with whom she'd nursed during the war, and what she did know she thoroughly disliked. Along with the other debutantes at the hospital, she'd felt nothing but chagrin and contempt for Muriel's campaign to entice the Earl of Westerholme, severely wounded and in a state of shock, into an engagement. She herself was made of sterner stuff than Larissa Ponsonby and Zoe van Meek, who had cried their eyes out when the engagement was announced, but her annoyance was no less."

"Ollie Byrne was just on eight years old and anyone speaking ill of her within fifty miles of Heslop or of Mersham would have found themselves lying flat in a gutter with a bloodied nose. The Byrnes had already had three lusty, red-headed sons: Tom, the eldest, Geoffrey and Hugh, when Lady Byrne, though in failing health, found herself pregnant once again. She only lived long enough to give birth to a premature and hopelessly delicate daughter before she died. The baby, hastily christened Olive Jane, spent the first year of her life in the prison-like wards of a famous teaching hospital, more as an aid to medical research than because the pathetic, screwed-up bundle seemed to have any chance of life. As for Ollie's father. Viscount Byrne, presented with three sons to bring up and an infant daughter in distant London, he sought for a new wife with a frenzy he made no effort to conceal.
So when, at the age of five, she contracted tuberculosis of the hip, the blow was shattering. Once again, Ollie went away from home to be immured for two interminable years in a Scottish sanatorium where she lay, her little pinched face peering above the blankets, on freezing verandas, immobilized in a series of diabolical contrivances. It was in that sanatorium that the nurses, seeing how the child bravely coped with the recurring, debilitating fever and the agony of secondary osteomyelitis. turned the meaningless prefix, The Honourable*, into a badge of office - and the Honourable Olive she was destined to remain. 
Once again, laying the ghosts of all the wicked stepmothers since time began, Minna travelled to and fro, read to the child, sang to her, went back to Heslop to entertain the American troops stationed nearby, saw Tom and the second son, Geoffrey, off to war. When Geoffrey was killed at Paschendale, Minna lost her look of youth for ever. But the gods were appeased. Ollie was cured and returned to Heslop. The fact that one leg was shortened and in callipers was a small price to pay. She was alive. Lifting her out of the Crossley and setting her down on the gravel, Rupert gathered that Muriel, in response to his call last night, had been in touch with her already. 
For Ollie, her big blue eyes glinting behind their round spectacles, was clearly in a state of ecstasy. 'Rupert, she rang my mother. Muriel did. She rang Mummy and she said you wanted me for a bridesmaid and she wanted me too. It's true, isn't it? I'm going to be a bridesmaid, aren't I? It's really true?' 
'Yes, Moppet, it is,' said Rupert, taking her hand but making no other attempt to help her up the steps to the front door. Helping the Honourable Olive with the simpler tasks of life was not a thing one did twice.
'I've never been a bridesmaid before. Never,' said Ollie. ‘There are going to be two others. Mother says, grown-up ones and me. And you know what I'm going to wear?' 
'I don't, Ollie. But I should dearly like to know. Or is it a secret?' 
Ollie sighed in ecstasy. 'Muriel told me. Rose-coloured satin. It's true. That's pink, you know,' she added obligingly. 'And a matching rose-coloured velvet muff stitched with pearls.' She stopped for a moment. quite overcome. 'And in my hair - honestly, Rupert - a wreath of roses and steph. . . something with "steph" in it that's white and smells lovely. And to go to the church, a white cloak lined with the same pink and trimmed with swansdown.' 
Rupert looked down at the little upturned face with its mass of freckles and marigold curls and a wave of tenderness for Muriel engulfed him. She could so easily have wanted to choose someone of her own. 
'I think you're going to be absolutely beautiful,' he said."

"'Anna, I forbid it,' said the earl. 'I'm all right now. I'm fine.' But as she made as if to go he said pleadingly, like a child, 'Stay a little longer. Tell me about your father.'
She smiled, her face tender in the lamplight.
'I wish you had known him. He could make just being alive seem like an act of triumph. People used to smile when they saw him coming ... he made everything all right.' She swallowed. 'He was in the Chevalier Guards,' she went on, letting pride overcome caution. 'It was one of the tsar's crack regiments. When the revolution came the men mutinied and killed their own officers, so we tried to be glad that... he died when he did.'
'What was his name?'
 'Peter Grazinsky. He was a good man and he hated war.' She jumped up. 'And now I'll make you a hot drink and then—' '
No, please. I don't want a drink. Just stay a little longer.'
One of her thick braids had come unplaited at the ends and he was reminded, foolishly, of the fronded bracken he had uncurled with his fingers as a boy.
'Tell me about yourself. Where were you bom?'
Relieved by the impersonality of the question, she said, 'In St Petersburg. I can never think of it as Petrograd.'"

"It is always a mistake to go back - and to go back to a place where one has been wholly happy is foolishness indeed. 
Knowing this, Rupert was nevertheless badly shaken by the intensity of the memories which gripped him. He had survived well enough at Eton, but it was at Cambridge that he entered his heritage. It was here that he had discovered his passion for scholarship, here that he learnt to excel at the solitary sports he so greatly preferred to the endless team games of his adolescence: here, above all, that he had learnt the meaning of friendship. 
Now, crossing Trinity Great Court, passing the shabby rooms on Q staircase with the carved motto on the mantelpiece ('Truth thee shalt deliver: it is no drede') which had been his own, he walked through a gallery of ghosts. On the rim of this fountain. Con Grainger, deeply drunk and wearing striped pyjamas had declaimed, verbatim, Demosthenes' Second Philippic, before falling senseless into the water. Over that ridge of roof, now bathed in sunshine, Naismith, besotted with love for an Amazonian physicist from Girton, had climbed at night to hold hopeless court beneath her red-brick tower. Naismith had been killed outright within a month of reaching France - luckier than Con, perhaps, who still lay, shell-shocked and three-quarters blind in a Sussex hospital. And Potts, the brilliant biochemist who had kept a lonely beetroot respiring in a tank. . . Potts who was a 'conchie' and had been handed a white feather by an old lady in Piccadilly the week before he'd taken his stretcher across the lines to fetch back one of the wounded and been blown to pieces by a mine. . . Rupert walked on through the arch on the far side and made his way down to the river, only to be led by its lazy, muddy, unforgettable smell into another bygone world: of punts moored behind willows, of picnics at Byron's pool - and girls. 
But this, too, was forbidden country now and turning, Rupert made his way back to the master's lodge, where he had been bidden to take sherry before luncheon at high table.
Later in hall, among the napery and fine glass, the ghosts crept quietly away. Here time really had stood still. Kerry and Warburger were still splenetically dismembering a colleague's ill-considered views on Kant; Battersley was still laughing uproariously at his own appalling puns; the fish pie was still the best in England. 
'Coming back to us, then?' enquired Sir Henry Forster, regarded by most people, himself included, as England's foremost classicist. 'Quite a good chance of a fellowship, I should -think. I remember your paper for the Aristotelian Society. An interesting point you made there, about the morale factor in Horatius' victory over the Curiatii.' 
'Keeping up your fencing, I hope?' said the bursar, who had won ten pounds from his opposite number at Christchurch when Rupert and his team had taken the cup from Oxford. Rupert answered politely, but his mind was already on his interview with the man he'd come to see. Professor Marcus Fitzroy was not in hall, because he despised food as he despised sleep and undergraduates and anything else which prevented him from getting on with the real business of life, namely the total understanding and expert disinterment of those distant and long-dead peoples whose burial customs so powerfully possessed his soul.
As soon as politeness permitted, Rupert made his way to the professor's rooms in Neville Court. He found them marvellously unchanged. A shrunken head on the mantelpiece supported an invitation to a musical evening; jade leg ornaments, axes and awls, and Rupert's own favourite, the skeleton of a prisoner immolated in the Yangtse Gorge, lay in their former jumble. Among the debris, a more recent strata of half-packed boxes, rolls of canvas and coils of rope indicated signs of imminent departure. The crumbling, highly archaeological-looking substance on a saucer seemed, however, to be the professor's lunch. 
'You're off tomorrow, then, sir?' asked Rupert when greetings had been exchanged. 
Professor Fitzroy nodded. He was a tall man, sepulchrally thin, with a tuft of grey hair which accentuated his resemblance to a demented heron. 'Pity you couldn't come,' he said. 'I've got to take that ass, Johnson.' The professor's contempt for students had not extended to Rupert who, on a couple of undergraduate expeditions had shown himself to possess not only physical endurance and the investigative acumen one might expect of Trinity's top history scholar, but also something rarer - a kind of silent empathy with the tribesmen and mountain people they had encountered. That a man like this should be wasted on an earldom and a rich marriage seemed to the professor to be an appalling shame. '
You're making straight for the Turkish border?' enquired Rupert, holding down the lid of a crate for the professor to hammer in. 
'Yes, it's only a quick trip,' said Fitzroy disgustedly, for his real passion was for the wastes of Northern Asia -and the Black Sea, professionally speaking, did not rank much above Ealing Broadway. 
'I've been landed with a field course back here in September; these damned ex-servicemen are so keen.' 
'You said in your letter you hoped to go up to the cave monastery above Akhalsitske?' 
'That's right. It's an extraordinary place - everyone seems to have been there. Alexander, of course, and then Famavazi when he set up court at Mtskhet. . .And then there's the Byzantine stuff plonked down on top of it all,' said the professor, waving a dismissive hand at the modern upstart that was early Christendom. 
'I'm going to look at the rock frieze in one of the inner caves. I've been corresponding with Himmelmann in Munich and he's convinced there's a link there with the Phrygian tomb monuments at Karahisor.' 
'But surely, sir, that'll take you across the Russian border? Isn't there some fighting still going on there?' The professor shrugged. 'I don't suppose it'll bother me.' Rupert thought this possible. Professor Fitzroy, who had carried a mummified goat across the Kurrum valley in Afghanistan while being shot at by both sides during the Ghilzai's rebellion, would probably not be greatly troubled by the remnants of a Russian civil war. In addition to a total indifference to hardship and danger, the professor possessed a brother who was something very high up in the Foreign Office and of whom he unashamedly took advantage to get his archaeological finds back through customs including - so rumour had it - a beautiful Circassian wrapped in a camel blanket whom he was said to have installed in his house at Trumpington. For a while they talked of what interested them both. 
Then Rupert, aware that he was holding the professor up, came to the point. 
'I was wondering, sir, if you'd do me a favour? A very considerable one, I'm afraid.' 
Professor Fitzroy straightened from the bedroll he had been tying and looked at the Earl of Westerhome. Most of his archaeological colleagues had been German and he had hated and despised the war. Yet when they'd heard that Rupert Frayne, with exactly ten hours solo flying to his credit, had won the MC for coming to the rescue of a wounded fellow pilot, Fitzroy had surprised himself by treating his whole staircase to champagne. Now he answered Rupert's query with a single word: 'Yes.' 
*-*-*-*-* 
An hour later, while making his way down King's Parade, Rupert heard his name called and turned. Beckoning him from beneath a muslin parasol was an enchantingly pretty girl with blonde curls and huge, blue eyes, dazzlingly arrayed in pleated white linen. 
'Zoe!'
Delightedly, Rupert went over and took the hand she offered in both his own. Zoe van Meek had been the nicest, the most sensitive, of the VADs who'd nursed him, and he remembered with admiration the efforts she had made to overcome her tender heart and achieve the degree of efficiency the job required. 
'My goodness you look devastating! Going on the river?'
Zoe nodded. 'I'm just on my way to Cats.' 
'Unchaperoned?' said Rupert, pretending to be shocked. 
'Well, not quite; I'm going with a party,' she said smiling up at him, 'my aunt and uncle live here; it comes in very handy for May Balls and things.'
Her voice was a little breathless, for suddenly seeing Rupert like that had stirred up something she'd believed safely buried. The tendresse which so many of his young nurses had felt for the Earl of Westerhokne had gone rather deeper with Zoe van Meek - so much so that she had been almost relieved when she was transferred from the officers' quarters down to the men's wards on the floor below. But after her move she had seen almost as much of Rupert as before, for as soon as he was even partially ambulant, Rupert had insisted on going down to talk to the men. The only time she'd seen Rupert lose his temper was when the bossy ward sister, obsessed by rank and protocol, had attempted to turn him back. She could see him now, sitting still as stone by Corporal Railton's bed until he died - and Railton hadn't even been one of his own men, just a lad he'd met on the hospital ship coming home. 
'You're not married yet?' asked Zoe. 
'At the end of this month,' said Rupert, his voice expressionless."


"Dr Lightbody, on the other hand, was one of the favoured ones who, at Muriel's request, had been invited for all the festivities and therefore faced the problem not only of morning clothes for the wedding, but of acquiring a suitable costume for the ball. A hot afternoon just a week before his departure for Mersham accordingly found him standing in front of the long, fly-stained mirror in the dim, dusty shop of Nathaniel and Gumsbody, the theatrical costumiers in Drury Lane. An enormous tricorne hat with a cockade lurched over his left eye, he wore a blue military coat heavily braided in gold and his arm was folded in a characteristic gesture across his chest. Unmistakably, he was the Emperor Napoleon as immortalized in the famous portrait by David. 
'What do you think?' he asked the pale young man in charge of rentals. 
'It suits you, sir. It suits you very well.' 
'I don't like it,' pronounced Dr Lightbody. 'It's the hat, I think.' He removed it to reveal his high and intellectual forehead. 
'What about Admiral Nelson, sir? We do a very nice line in him. He comes in three sizes and the eyepatch is free.' 
The doctor shook his head. To go as a person in any way injured or defiled, even in battle, was against his principles. 
He allowed the young man to divest him of his uniform and, clad only in trousers and braces, began to walk along the rows of ermine-lined mantles and sumptuous velvet cloaks. 
'You don't fancy a nice cavalier, sir? Those hats with the big feathers always go down very well with the ladies.' 
Dr Lightbody shook his head. Though the ringleted Jacobean wigs were very flattering one never knew what went on underneath.

'These are nice, we always think,' said the assistant, holding up a Viking helmet and breastplate. 'With a red beard, perhaps - and thongs?' 

Again Dr Lightbody shook his head. He wanted something which would suggest what he saw as his threefold role: of teacher, of healer, of leader of men. Something in white and gold, possibly? A High Priest? A Zoroastrian? 

Suddenly he had an idea. 'What about the Egyptians? Akhnaton, the Sun King - do you have him?' 

'I don't know if we have him specifically, sir, but our Egyptian section is very well stocked. If you'd just come through here . . .' 

Ten minutes later, in the many-layered, pleated linen skirts, the curved sandals and golden, cap-shaped crown, Dr Lightbody stood before the mirror again. It was closer, much closer — but there was something a little bit effeminate about the whole ensemble. Not surprising, really - when all was said and done there was a touch of the tarbrush about the Egyptians. 

Then, with the inner certainty of all visions, inspiration came. 

Why go as a mere Sun King? Why not a Sun God?’ 

'I've changed my mind,' he said to the weary assistant. 'I'd like to see the Greek costumes, please.' 

It was obvious, really. He would go as Apollo."

"To this waltz, born in a distant, snowbound country out of longing for just such a flower-scented summer night as this, Rupert and Anna dance. They were under no illusions. The glittering chandeliers, the gold mirrors with their draped acanthus leaves, the plangent violins might be the stuff of romance, but this was no romance. It was a moment in a lifeboat before it sank beneath the waves; a walk across the sunlit courtyard towards the firing squad. This waltz was all they had.
So they danced and neither of them spoke. As the music began and his arms closed round her, he had felt her shiver. Then the melody caught her and she moved with him, so light, so completely one with him that he could guide her with a finger. Yet as he held her he had no thought of thistledown or snowflake. Here, beneath his hands, was tempered steel, was flame. . .
He checked, reversed, and she followed him perfectly. It seemed to him that she could fold her very bones to lie against his own. And tightening his arms, drinking in the smell of green soap, of cleanliness personified, which emanated from this changeling countess, he allowed his mind, soaring with the music, to encompass their imagined life together. 
He had not wanted Mersham - had returned to it reluctantly as to a burden he must face. In the few weeks she had been there, Anna had changed all this. Her feeling for his home was unerring, as inborn as perfect pitch in music. Bending to arrange a bowl of roses, standing rapt, with her feather duster, before the Titian in the morning room, bringing in the mare at daybreak, each time she seemed to be making him a gift of his inheritance. Like those dark Madonnas on the icons whose patient hands curve up towards their infants' heads, Anna's every gesture said: 'Behold!' 
Anna, in his arms, was without thoughts, without dreams. Rupert had imagined her folding her bones to shape them against his. She had done more. She had folded her very soul, given it into his keeping - and danced."

"And the Lady Lavinia sighed. For Sergei was rather more than a foreigner ... To have the fur rug tucked round one's knees by him, to have him hold open the car door and see him smile that devastating yet protective smile, to catch the warmth in those dark, longlashed, gold-flecked eyes was to feel so cherished, so curiously excited, that it was best not to think of it. Not that she made an idiot of herself like her four sisters did, liking him to Rudolf Valentino, carrying on like kitchen maids. Sergei was, in fact, a great deal better-looking than Valentino - taller, stronger, in every way more manly -but that was neither here nor there. Whatever he had been in his native land, a chauffeur was a chauffeur. It was a good job she had given him the afternoon off. With Mama and the younger girls still in Northumberland, Hermione and Priscilla were quite capable of ordering him to take them on joyrides round the park. 
But Tom Byrne was waiting — and with Cynthia docilely in attendance, Lavinia swept off to the powder room to prepare for the luncheon which she hoped would seal her fate."

"Sergei, from his great height, looked down on Ollie. He clicked his heels and bowed. Then he reached for Ollie's hand, turned it over and kissed the palm. ´
'Enchanté, mademoiselle,' he said gravely. 'Permit me to say that all my life I have wanted to meet a girl with hair the colour of a sunset over the steppes.' 
Ollie tilted her head at him. Sergei's gold-flecked eyes were warm and tender, the smile that lit his lean, tanned face and showed his dazzling teeth was unforced, caressing and perfectly sincere. 
She stared down at her kissed palm and up again."

"Lord Byrne looked at his wife. He'd married her blind, knowing nothing about her except that she had a quiet voice, a sensible manner and some spare cash. Now, eight years later, he would have died for her without a second's hesitation. To dress up as a hussar in Wellington's army would be harder, but he would do it. 
'What about Tom?' he asked. 'Does he know about all this dressing up?' 
Minna nodded. 'I'm relying on Ollie to bring him round. Hugh's the one who's made most fuss. He actually got the headmaster to let him ring from Craigston to complain. The friend he's bringing down doesn't have anything to dress up in. So I said their cadet uniform would be all right.'"

"Minna went upstairs, smiling as she passed her husband's dressing room and heard the choleric expletives which attended the efforts of his lordship's valet to button him into the dress uniform of an eighteenth century hussar, and hurrying quickly past the suite she had allocated to the Nettlefords, she entered Ollie's. 
'Look, Mummy, look at Hugh and Peter, aren't they smart!’ Ollie's eyes shone with pride as she pointed to her brother and the schoolfriend he had brought down from Craigston - and indeed the two boys sitting side by side on the window-sill in their cadet uniforms were quite spectacularly scrubbed and brushed. 'Peter says he'll stay up in the minstrel's gallery with me at the beginning to watch the guests arrive and afterwards he's going to creep up and bring me things to eat. I can stay up long enough for that, can't I?'
Minna nodded and smiled affectionately at Hugh's new friend who, in the space of two days, had become the object of Ollie's hero worship. Not only the boy's nationality but his temperament had been a surprise and delight to Minna. Peter was a first class boxer, Hugh said, and had won the Junior Fencing Cup within a few weeks of arriving at school. And yesterday, when, the boys had gone out riding, Tom, with whom horses were almost a religion, had offered Peter his own hunter to ride whenever he wished. Yet he was interested in matters which most English boys would have considered effete or embarrassing: textures and fabrics, even flowers. It was to Peter that Ollie, slowly recovering from the wound that Muriel had inflicted, showed her bridesmaid's dress and his unfeigned interest, his support during the wedding rehearsal on the previous day, had enabled Ollie to hold her head high and to aquit herself with distinction. If Ollie was once again looking forward to Muriel's wedding, it was largely due to the Russian boy." 

"And Anna spoke. In the wonderful, damnable language that separated yet joined them, with its caressing rhythm, its wildness and searing tenderness. He was never to know what she said, but it seemed to him that the great love speeches of the world: Dido's lament at Carthage, Juliet's awakening passion on the balcony, Heloise's paean to Abelard must pale before the ardour, the strange, solemn integrity of Anna's words. And allowing himself only to fold and unfold her pliant fingers as she spoke, he saw before him her whole life: the small child, shining like a candle in the rich darkness of her father's palace, the awakening girl, wide-eyed at the horrors of war. . .He saw her as a bride, faltering at the church door, dazzled by joy, and as a mother, cupping her slender, votive hands round the head of her newborn child. . .He saw her greying and rueful at the passing of youth and steadfast in old age, her eyes, her fine bones triumphant over the complaining flesh. And he understood that she was offering him this, her life, for all eternity and understood, too, where she belonged because her sisters are everywhere in Russian literature: Natasha who left her ballroom and shining youth to nurse her mortally wounded prince. . . Sonia, the street girl who followed Raskolnikov into exile in Siberia and gave that poor, tormented devil the only peace he ever knew."

"Tom turned to his friend. Everything in him longed to blurt out what Muriel had done. Longed to show him Ollie as he had left her, lying white and despairing in her bed because there was nothing, now, to get up for and nowhere, now, to go. Ollie who had seen so totally and searingly through Muriel's concern for her health, her unctuous bribery. . . who had told the nursemaid coming to brush her marigold curls that there was no point because cripples didn't need to be tidy, and now lay with her face to the wall beyond reach of comfort or of hope. 
But Muriel, shocked at a voice raised in church whispered, 'Hush, dear. Ollie isn't well, it seems,' - and Mr Morland bent his head and began to repeat what are surely the best loved words in the world."

"The wedding of Anna and Rupert the following June was not a quiet wedding. For one thing, absolutely everybody cried. Miss Frensham, preparing to thump her way lustily through 'Lohengrin' cried, as did Miss Tonks and Miss Mortimer who had framed the altar steps in an entrancing riot of delphiniums, larkspur and phlox. The Ballets Russes cried, the dowager soaked three handkerchiefs before the bride even set foot in the church, Kira, who had come from Paris with her banker fiance, wept elegantly into her muff. Susie Byrne did not actually cry, but she seemed to find it necessary to polish her spectacles a great many times and Hannah Rabihovitch, sitting beside her daughter, was quite simply awash. 
Nor were the servants at the back of the church any more restrained. Mrs Park, next to her devoted Win, was already blotched and swollen; Peggy and Pearl, Louise and Florence and the two pretty housemaids engaged with an eye on Uncle Sebastien had completely ruined, with their sniffs and gulps, the effect of their morning ablutions in the new attic bathrooms. Mrs Proom, in her wheelchair, had howled herself into hiccups and outside, Baskerville, shut into the gigantic limousine which had been the Baroness Rakov's engagement present to Sergei, enduring both social exclusion and the company of the dachshund Pupsik, threw back his head and bayed in agony. 
To this outburst of emotion there was one notable exception: Heslop's formidable butler, Hawkins, sitting with disgust beside Old Niannka and listening with loathing to the raucous blubbering of this malodorous foreigner who was now permanently installed at Heslop, trying to set up icons in the billiard room and driving him insane. For it was Niannka who had cut through the gentle persuasions and medical advice which had followed Ollie's despairing collapse on the night of the ball. What exactly had happened when Anna took her ancient nurse to visit Ollie no one knew. But the old woman had banished everyone from the nursery, wax had been asked for, and pins, and in the silence that followed, Ollie's voice had been heard gleefully joining in the utterance of unspeakable Russian curses. Minna, returning to find a silver-wigged and unmistakable effigy of Muriel Hardwicke spreadeagled on the floor, had been shocked and angry - until she saw Ollie's bright face; since when Old Niannka could do no wrong. 
But now the bridal car drew up and, on the arms of Petya, almost as tall now as she was herself, Anna walked towards the porch. Her dress was simple and unadorned, she carried only a bouquet of the roses that Mr Cameron had so cunningly named for her, but Countess Grazinsky, waiting to adjust her daughter's veil, had to turn her head away, so overcome was she by what she saw in Anna's face. 
'Here are your gloves, dear,' said Pinny, trying-and failing - to achieve some kind of briskness. And then, 'It's time. . .' 
But as Anna stepped inside the church, saw the sea of faces, heard the pounding music, she faltered and stopped. It was too much. . .the gods would not permit such joy. 
'I'm afraid,' she whispered, the colour draining from her face. 'I'm terribly afraid.' A small voice, brisk and marvellously motherly, came from behind her. 
‘That's silly, Anna,' said the Honourable Olive. 'Being afraid is silly, you know it is.' 
Anna turned and met the shining blue eyes of her chief and only bridesmaid. The Honourable Olive's dress, like Anna's, had been made by Mrs Bunford. The child had been given free reign for she was all of nine years old now, her natural taste beginning to form, and the white wreath and muslin dress were as simple as Anna's own. But if ever there was a bridesmaid suffused with th sheer joy of living on such a splendid and dazzling day, that bridesmaid was Ollie Byrne. 
And Anna smiled and laid her hand lightly on the bright curls, and turned to walk steadily to where Rupert waited: a man who had passed beyond all doubt and uncertainty - a man who had come home."