The Summer Day is Done Read online

  About the Book

  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?

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Book I: Tranquillity

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Book II: The Four Horsemen

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  About the Author

  Also by Mary Jane Staples

  Copyright

  THE SUMMER

  DAY IS DONE

  Mary Jane Staples

  BOOK I

  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.

  Chapter One

  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.

  ‘Mr Kirby,’ she said in English, ‘there are more princesses in Russia than churches even. They mean nothing. It’s Grand Duchesses you should beware of. I don’t wish to be called “Highness”. Will you share my coach to Sevastopol?’

  ‘With delight,’ he said.

  Andrei gave her his hand. She took it with some affection, smiling sleepily at him from behind her half-veil as she climbed aboard. Even Princess Karinshka, a known society tigress, liked the lazy, agreeable count. His ennui was a challenge to women.

  The interior of the coach was all gilt and pearwood, the adjoining coupé fitted with luxurious sleeping berths. The whole was reserved for the Princess Karinshka, although the train was destined to reach Sevastopol before nightfall. Porters and officials were aboard, seeing to the stowing of luggage for the princess and her two companions. She ignored it all. She took her seat and became immersed in conversation with Andrei, who, lounging contentedly, assured her that for the last nine months life had been empty without her. She obviously did not believe him but at least it amused her.

  ‘What a dreadful liar you are, darling,’ she said.

  ‘My dear,’ said Andrei, ‘it’s true. Ask my good friend John if I have been myself this year.’

  ‘John?’ Her pronunciation of the English name was like a husky cough. ‘Who is John?’

  ‘Come, darling, you can do better than that,’ said Andrei. ‘You two have just met and will, I hope, be friends for life. It would be intolerable,’ he added in a murmur, ‘if you became more than that. I should have to think about ending it all. My life, I mean.’

  ‘You ridiculous man,’ said Princess Karinshka, ‘you could not even make the effort to load the pistol, let alone fire it.’

  ‘He could lean from a window and let himself fall,’ said Kirby.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, lifting the veil and turning her dark eyes on Kirby, ‘that’s a brilliant summing-up of all that Andrei Mikhailovich is capable of.’

  She stood up and removed her coat but not her hat. She wore a dress of dove-grey silk, collared and cuffed with lace, its high neck of almost Victorian modesty if one discounted the curving swell of the bodice.

  As she sat down again the train jerked, jolted and pulled away, the tender piled high with the timber logs that fed the engine. Slowly, erratically, it began to move out of the station.

  Andrei settled into luxurious inertia.

  ‘We’ll have champagne with our lunch,’ he said.

  ‘You have a brain like a drawn cork,’ said the princess.

  With her veil turned up over her hat, she was regarding Kirby dispassionately now. Then suddenly she said to him, ‘Is it your opinion that England is a democracy?’

  ‘Be careful how you answer that, dear man,’ said Andrei, ‘for you are facing the hammer of Russian socialism.’

  ‘Well,’ said Kirby.

  ‘Well what?’ she said.

  ‘The principles are democratic,’ he said.

  ‘Is that an implication that it isn’t democratic in practice?’

  ‘Dearest one,’ said Andrei, ‘this is all very pleasant and comfortable. Must we have politics? Tell me where you have been these last nine months. Had you been naughty again?’ He took out a gold cigar case. Princess Aleka accepted a long thin cigar, so did Kirby. They smoked. ‘Well, Aleka Petrovna?’ Andrei was faintly insistent. Aleka blew smoke rings. Kirby watched her. She was catlike, her posture a silken grace. She would not be silent for long. Through the blue haze her eyes looked smoky black.

  ‘If you must know,’ she said, ‘I’ve been in France and England.’

  ‘Ah, so you were caught distributing socialist pamphlets again,’ said Andrei. ‘She’s always doing it,’ he said
to Kirby, ‘and I expect the secret police suggested to her father that if he didn’t send her somewhere far away for a while, they would send her even farther for even longer. So he sent her to France and England.’

  ‘It was very educational,’ said Aleka. She smiled reminiscently. ‘In France democracy is corrupt, in England it doesn’t really exist. England’s political system, whatever it is, is no better than Tsarism because there are only rich people and poor people. I made many friends among the poor, but how strange some of them were. They would keep asking me why the Tsar let so many Russians starve, and so I said it was because he was probably like their King, who let so many of them starve. They seemed quite astonished at that, especially as I was always so amused. It would have been useless to tell them I was a socialist, they would not have believed any princess could be.’

  ‘Socialism,’ said Kirby, extremely relaxed, ‘is for idealists, surely.’

  ‘Socialism is equality,’ she said, ‘and is for everyone.’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ said Kirby, ‘it presupposes that people are equal to equality. They’re not. People are human beings. There are always those who are better, more adaptable, more inventive and harder-working. I am for the basic rights of the individual, for the right of equal opportunities, the right to be free, the right of the labourer to be worthy of his hire, the right of all to say what we like about anything we like. I am against exploitation, oppression, armed police, female soldiers and censorship of the press. Socialism implies that poverty is a virtue. It isn’t. It’s a regrettable condition and a matter—’

  ‘Oh, damn it,’ she fumed, ‘are you reading me a speech? It sounds like it and it’s all rubbish. You aren’t talking about socialism—’

  ‘I know I’m not,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, you are damnably English, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, of course he is, my love,’ said Andrei placatingly, ‘and it would be so nice for all of us if you’d remember there are two things completely incompatible. Politics and peace. You can have one, you can’t have both. I’d rather have peace. Darling, life is so infernally brief. You don’t really want a revolution, do you?’