Mary Nichols - The Kirilov Star

‘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.

Finding himself having to field questions about her origins more and more often as she grew older and went about more, and thinking her statelessness might be a barrier in later life, Sir Edward decided to adopt her formerly and changed her name from Lydia Kirillova to Lydia Stoneleigh. He told her that he and Margaret were to be her new mama and papa. It was then he had confessed to bending the truth about her parents’ deaths. ‘They did not die in an accident,’ he said, taking her hand and speaking softly. ‘They were executed by the Bolsheviks. I didn’t tell you before because you were upset enough about losing them without the added distress of the manner of their death. And I was not at all sure you would understand at that age. But you are entitled to know the truth. I hope you can forgive me.’

She was shocked and angry at first, not so much about her parents’ death, which she had come to accept, but because he had taken away her birthright, her very Russian-ness, the person she believed herself to be, but what he had done was done out of love. She kissed his cheek. ‘Of course, I forgive you.’

‘I have been given this for you,’ he said, handing her an old sepia photograph of a very aristocratic-looking lady in a long evening dress. She was wearing a heavy necklace and long earrings, and on her head a tiara, on the front of which sparkled the Kirilov Star. ‘I believe the lady is your grandmother, the dowager Countess Kirillova.’

Lydia studied it carefully. She did not remember the lady, but she did remember the jewel. ‘May I keep it?’ she asked.

‘Of course. It is yours. Would you like me to have it framed, then you can keep it in your bedroom?’

‘Yes, please.’ It was something tangible from her old life, something she could look at and touch to remind her of her roots.

Gradually Margaret’s attitude towards the little waif changed, possibly because she knew she could never have a child of her own, and they became close. They went horse riding together and shopping for clothes. Margaret loved buying clothes and embraced all the latest fashions, and she loved dressing Lydia. They talked about her life at school, especially after she left the village school and went to the high school. They discussed what she would like to do when she grew up. The world, so Sir Edward said, was changing and women were no longer restricted in what they could do. She could be a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, even stand for Parliament, if she so chose. Of course, she need not do anything; she could have a Season, be presented at court and wait for the right man to come along.

But she was still only fourteen and marriage was a long way from her mind. She was intent on going to college and studying the Russian language and Russian history. She needed to understand what had happened to her.

‘I want to talk to you about this,’ her tutor said, tapping the essay Lydia had been asked to write about the causes of the Russian Revolution and why the Kerensky Government failed to halt the rise of the Bolsheviks in 1917, which led to the execution of the Romanovs and the Civil War. Lydia had spent an inordinate amount of time on it, drawing from stories she had heard from Sir Edward and Alexei, who frequently visited Upstone Hall, and her own very clouded memories of Kirilhor and the privations her family suffered there. Sir Edward’s accounts were factual, couched in the words of a diplomat, but Alexei’s were fiery and one-sided, which was hardly surprising since his father had returned to Russia once too often and been arrested and executed for spying after Stalin came to power in 1927. His mother had become frail because of it. ‘We got out safely in 1920, why did he have to keep going back?’ she had lamented on a visit to Upstone Hall.

The tutor was in his mid-thirties, a handsome man, a good teacher. ‘This is very interesting,’ he said. ‘How did you come to be so passionate about it? Have you ever been to Russia?’

‘I was born there. My name was Lydia Mikhailovna Kirillova then. My father was Count Mikhail Kirilov. He and my mother were executed by the Bolsheviks. I have every reason to be passionate.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know that. Is that why you decided to read Russian history?’

‘Yes. I want to understand how it could have happened.’

‘You will not understand if you only study one side of the argument. There is a lot to be said for Communism, you know.’

‘I can’t think what it can be. They take people’s belongings without compensation and murder for no reason except fear of losing control. If they are so sure they are right, why do they have to execute people? My parents never did anyone any harm. In fact, they did a lot of good, employing people who would otherwise be out of work, making sure they were fed and housed and educating the children. When their assets were taken from them, they could no longer do that.’

‘A lot of that is Western propaganda, you know. The freeing of the serfs did not change much; the rich still exploited the poor, which is neither fair nor just. The peasant is as much of a human being as the tsar and deserves better than that. Now the Communist state employs and feeds everyone.’ He held up his hand to stop her interrupting. ‘Oh, I know it is not the Utopia the purists want and there is a lot of putting right of old wrongs before that can happen, but it will come, you’ll see.’

‘And you think murder by the State is justified?’ It was not only her parents’ death in 1920 she was thinking of, but the arrests, trials and executions which had been taking place in Russia since Stalin came to power.

‘In some cases, yes. We execute murderers and traitors in this country, don’t we?’

‘It’s not the same. We do not kill innocent people.’

‘In an ideal world no one would, but with so much evil to sweep away, there is bound to be a degree of injustice. It cannot be helped.’

She was becoming increasingly angry. ‘My brother and nurse were killed by soldiers in front of my eyes. You call that sweeping away evil? It was horrible and senseless and I shall never forget it.’

‘I am sorry for that, but do you know for sure who perpetrated the deed? They might have been bandits, there were a lot of those about. The Red Army was being blamed for everything, whether guilty or not. How much do you actually remember?’

‘Very little, I was too shocked.’

‘So you relied on what other people told you.’

‘But I saw them die. Andrei fell across me, his blood was all over me.’ She shuddered at the memory. ‘It doesn’t matter who did it.’

‘If you want to separate what is true from what is false, you need to study both sides,’ he said. ‘I advise you to set aside your prejudice and be more even-handed, so that you can offer a reasoned and balanced treatise. You have exams coming up and I should not like you to fail.’

Lydia took the sheaf of papers and left the room, seething. It seemed she was not to have an opinion of her own. For two pins she would abandon the whole course. After all, as a woman she was not going to be given a degree, even though her studies were on a par with the men’s. They wouldn’t have women in their colleges, and Girton had been built so far out of town, the ladies felt cut off from university life. A certificate to say she had done the study and passed the exams was all she could hope for. But she knew Papa would be disappointed if she walked out, so she had better grit her teeth and rewrite the essay. The result was a cold, dispassionate dissertation which made her feel a coward.

Lydia went home to Upstone Hall for the traditional Christmas, though it was both the same and somehow different. There was still much hardship after the severe depression earlier in the decade and the village did not seem to be the happy place it had once been. Or was it that now she was grown up, she saw things the child had missed? On the surface Sir Edward appeared to be his usual urbane self and Alexei, who joined them with his mother as usual, was charming and teasing – a kind of big brother, to whom she found it easy to confide – but underneath there seemed to be a heaviness about their conversation. The situation in Russia was worrying, though Lydia did not think it was that. It was as if Alexei had something on his mind he could not speak about, which had never happened before and puzzled her. When she asked him what was wrong he laughed and said, ‘Nothing. What could possibly be wrong, here at Upstone?’