The Kirilov Star by Mary Nichols

feel unsettled, as if there was something missing, something she ought to be searching for? Not her parents; they were long gone. Not Andrei and Tonya, whose deaths still haunted her dreams.
    Was she twenty-one? The only evidence they had for that was her own declaration that she was four when she met Sir Edward in Yalta. How had she known that? Had she just turned four or was she nearer five? It felt strange not knowing when her birthday was. She supposed somewhere in Russia there was a record of it. Or had all the records been destroyed? She gave up musing and left her seat to go and run a bath. It was time to start getting ready.
    Claudia, who had stayed on making herself useful in a dozen different ways for no other reason than she had nowhere else to go and Edward would not dismiss her, helped her dress. The gown, which had cost Edward a fortune, was of heavy cream silk embroidered with seed pearls. Without a distinguishable waist, it was cleverly cut to emphasise the slimness of her figure. Its back was very low and had a train which she could loop up on a catch at her wrist for dancing. Claudia helped her with her hair which was swept up in a chignon and fastened with two glittering combs, a present from Mama. She put a pearl necklace about her throat, slipped into her shoes and went down to the small parlour where Edward and Margaret waited.
    Margaret was in a soft dove-grey crêpe dress and Edward in immaculate tie and tails. She entered the room demurely, smiling. ‘Will I do?’
    ‘Beautiful,’ her father said, coming forward to take both her hands. ‘Absolutely stunning – isn’t that what the young bloods would say?’
    She laughed. ‘I’m very nervous.’
    ‘No need to be, you will be the belle of the ball, as is only right and proper.’ He turned from her to reach for a jewellery box from the mantelpiece. ‘This is already yours,’ he said. ‘I have kept it safely for you, but now I have had it made so that you can wear it.’ He opened the box and took out the Kirilov Star, adapted and hung on a silver chain so that she could wear it as a necklace. The central diamond sparkled in the light from the electric chandelier above her head and all the smaller diamonds in its points glistened like drops of water.
    Another of her fleeting memories came to her of her mother sitting at a table in tears, sewing it into her petticoat, and her father taking her on his knee and gruffly telling her she was the star of the Kirilovs. She thrust the recollection from her and turned dutifully at Edward’s command so that he could take the pearls from her throat and replace it with the necklace. ‘There!’ he said as she turned back to him. ‘All yours now. Wear it with pride for what you were and what you have become.’
    ‘It’s lovely,’ she said, fingering it. ‘I didn’t know you still had it.’
    ‘I could never part with the Kirilov Star,’ he said. ‘Neither the jewel, nor the child.’
    ‘Oh, Papa,’ she said, throwing her arms about him. ‘I do love you.’ She turned to Margaret and embraced her too.‘You are so good to me. I sometimes wonder what I have done to deserve it.’
    ‘Just been yourself,’ Edward said, embarrassed. ‘Go on being that. Now, I think we had better go into the hall to receive our guests.’
    There were more than a hundred of them: distant relations of Sir Edward and Margaret, family friends from far and wide, Lydia’s school friends and others she had met in Cambridge, people from the diplomatic corps, a few displaced Russians with whom Edward had kept in touch, the vicar and the doctor and Alexei, all dressed in their finest, come to wish her well, all bringing gifts. It was exciting and slightly out of this world, a dream from which she might wake and find herself … where? Back in a droshky in a snowy forest or crammed into a freight wagon with hundreds of others? Watching her weeping mother sew? It was strange how those visions kept coming back to her now,