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  She sighed before she added,

  “But I suppose that I must remain in ignorance until tomorrow morning.”

  Ivor laughed and kissed her.

  “Goodnight, Weena. It is more important for you to look really beautiful than to fill your head with a lot of rubbish. I will tell you the truth tomorrow when I hope we will be out to sea. In fact, according to the man who has been helping me, we leave at dawn and that will be very soon.”

  Weena thought if this was true then he was right in saying that they should have plenty of sleep before the ship set out to sea.

  Wherever they were going, it did not really matter as long as they were not left behind to be treated as her poor father had been.

  ‘How could they do that to my Papa?’ she asked herself over and over again.

  Somehow she thought that, however bad the feeling was against the authorities in St. Petersburg, no one would care what happened in the Caucasus.

  Yet now as she thought about it she knew that there had been many fiery speeches locally from those who had declared themselves against the Government.

  There had also been a great deal of discontent even amongst those who worked for her father and it was as if, for the last few years, everyone in the whole country was dissatisfied with Russia as it was.

  Although they did not come so far South, she knew that there were people who already had a big following trying to change the laws and attacking the autocratic Czar.

  Yet whatever they said, however intimidating, they avoided any punishment.

  She had not really followed events very closely as she had been so busy at home.

  It was only when her brother was there to translate what was being said into plain language, so that she could understand it, that she had been worried that it might affect the quietness of their own village and their own people.

  ‘Surely the rest of the country is fairly prosperous,’ she reflected. ‘Why should they always be railing against those in authority?’

  There was no one to answer her questions and in time she ceased to ask them.

  She had busied herself in caring for her sick father who saw innumerable doctors and specialists without there being any improvement in his health.

  She did her best to keep the garden as beautiful as her mother had always wanted it to be, and every week she had taken some of the flowers down to the little churchyard where her mother was buried and put them on her tomb.

  Then she had gone into the Church to pray that her mother would look after her and make her father better.

  She thought that if she lost him she would be losing almost her whole family.

  Then to her great relief Ivor had come back home and everything had changed.

  She was not alone, he was with her.

  He explained to her all the problems she had had no answer to in the past.

  Now, when she least expected it, the revolutionaries had attacked her father and he was no longer there.

  She and Ivor were setting off on some wild strange adventure and she had no idea what the end would be.

  ‘It is all very frightening,’ she thought. ‘So please Papa and Mama, if you are together think of us and please help us.’

  It was a prayer that came from her heart which she felt flew up to Heaven.

  ‘I know that they will be thinking of us,’ she told herself before she fell sleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  When Weena woke in the morning, it was because there was a noise coming from the cabin next door.

  Listening very closely, she could hear her brother’s voice ringing out and she was certain that he was giving orders.

  It seemed very strange that he was doing so on the ship, but still there was this noise in the cabin next to hers.

  Obviously the walls between her cabin and the next one were not very thick.

  Because she had no idea of the time, except that it was daylight and the sun was shining, she wondered if she should get up now or wait for her brother to tell her what was happening.

  Suddenly the noise ceased.

  Then there was the sound of more voices, but she could not understand what they were saying.

  Finally, at the moment when she felt that she must at last get out of bed, the door opened and Ivor put his head round.

  “Are you awake?” he asked.

  “I was woken by all that noise next door,” Weena replied, “and I could not think what it was.”

  He gave a laugh and came into her cabin, closing the door behind him.

  “Actually the noise was everything we possess and we have to make it last for a long time.”

  Weena did not know what he was talking about.

  She sat up in bed and stared at him before she said,

  “I don’t know what you mean, but I am extremely curious.”

  “When you are dressed,” Ivor replied, sitting down on the bed, “you will find that the next cabin is filled with trunks and cases all containing, as I have already told you, everything we now possess.”

  Weena stared at him.

  The sun, streaming through the porthole, turned her hair to gold.

  She looked as if she was an angel with the light of Heaven behind her.

  “You are very pretty,” Ivor said unexpectedly, as if he was speaking to himself. “That will be tremendously helpful to us both in London.”

  Weena drew in her breath.

  “Is that really where we are going?”

  “We are travelling to England,” Ivor replied, “and we are now going to forget what happened last night and actually, for the moment, Russia as a whole.”

  Weena did not try to ask him why, although she did not understand.

  She only sat looking at him wide-eyed.

  “Let me start at the beginning,” Ivor said, “and tell you that I have realised for quite a long time that this was about to happen. So I have taken every possible precaution I could to see that you and I don’t starve to death.”

  “Thank goodness!” she exclaimed. “But then you have always been very clever and I feel sure that you will prevent us both from dying of anything quite as horrible as starvation.”

  “That is exactly what I intend to do,” Ivor replied. “So you will find next door that there are not only your clothes and mine but everything I could manage to take out of the house without anyone being suspicious.”

  Weena gave a little gasp.

  “Out of the house?” she quizzed.

  “When I guessed that this was about to happen, as I told you, I made a friend of one of the girls in the village who was pretty and rather better bred than most of them. Because she loved me, she told me all the secrets that were being whispered at that time behind closed doors.”

  “Secrets about what?”

  “About taking over Father’s estate for one thing,” Ivor replied, “and also about the beginning of a Revolution in almost every part of our country.”

  “Can that really be true?” Weena asked him in a frightened voice.

  “I am afraid it is. When the revolutionaries finally get their own way, they will dispose of the Czar and run the country as they think it ought to be run and that will be definitely not be as it is now.”

  “How could they do anything so wicked?” Weena asked. “Besides Russia is so enormous, they could never have revolutionaries all over such a great area.”

  “That unfortunately is what many people at the top think, but then I have studied this very carefully and I can promise you, my dear Weena, that these revolutionaries are creeping in everywhere. Sooner or later they will gain the control they are determined to acquire by any means.”

  There was silence for a moment.

  Then Weena asked in a trembling voice,

  “What will happen to us?”

  “That is exactly what I am going to tell you,” Ivor said. “I am only so thankful and very grateful to Fate that I realised in time how serious the situation had become in our country.”

  “
But you could not save Papa – ” she whispered.

  “As you well know, Papa has been suffering from the stroke that the doctors had no cure for. As they told me frankly, he was bound to die sooner rather than later.”

  Ivor stopped for a moment as if he found it difficult to say more and then he added very quietly,

  “I think, rather than realise that he was a prisoner and his lands were being taken away from him, he would have wanted to die. As it is, he will not have suffered in any way.”

  “Now we are suffering,” Weena murmured. “We have lost Papa, our home, our land, in fact everything we loved and which meant so much to Mama.”

  There was silence.

  Then Ivor said,

  “You may think it imagination, but I felt last night, as I have felt before, that Mama is guiding us. The one thing that she wanted more than anything else was that you should be taken to safety.”

  Weena wiped away the tears that had come into her eyes and then she asked again,

  “How are we going to live? There is nowhere for us to go.”

  She was thinking that there were no relations they could turn to for help.

  Their grandfather had broken away from his family to build a house in the Caucasus and become a large and respected landowner.

  When their father had inherited the estate, he had carried on his father’s work of buying and developing more and more land.

  He was not ambitious socially in any way. He was quite content with the rural life in the beautiful Caucasus.

  But he could have gained a number of honours and doubtless if he had tried hard he could have found, as most Russians had found, that there was a title somewhere in his extensive family.

  “Papa always claimed that he had no wish to be a Socialite,” Weena said when her brother told her this.

  “I well remember him saying it,” Ivor replied. “But things are very different where we are concerned.”

  She wondered what he meant.

  Then he expanded,

  “When I knew how difficult it was going to be for us in the future if anything happened to Papa and I learnt from my friend in the village what those subversives were planning, I started to move objects of value from the house which we will now be very thankful to take with us.”

  “Is that what you were busy moving into the next cabin?” she enquired.

  “Exactly,” her brother answered. “You will be very surprised to see how clever I have been.”

  “I don’t understand what we are taking with us,” Weena said.

  “Well, first of all I have brought quite a number of Papa’s best pictures. I know they are valuable and that I will be able to sell them in London for quite a considerable sum.”

  “The pictures!” Weena cried. “But they are huge!”

  Her brother laughed.

  “I have taken them out of their frames and rolled up the canvases and they are packed, securely I would hope. But I am not at all surprised when they carried them into next door that they woke you up.”

  “Pictures!” she exclaimed again. “I certainly did not think of you taking away the pictures.”

  “I took Papa’s valuable collection of miniatures and his snuff boxes as well,” Ivor told her.

  Weena gave a little cry of delight.

  “Oh, I am so glad you saved those. I love them and I could not bear them to have been burnt to ashes in that terrible fire.”

  “Which they would have been with everything else we possessed.”

  There was a harsh note in Ivor’s voice.

  She knew by the way he spoke that he was minding as much as she did that the house, which had been their home and made so glorious by their mother and father, was now burnt to the ground.

  “You said,” Weena reiterated after a long silence, “that you could get a good price for the pictures in London. So that is where we are definitely going?”

  “Yes, that is where we are going,” Ivor answered. “But we have to be sensible and realise that what we have brought with us, even though it may fetch a certain amount of money, will not be enough to keep us for the rest of our lives.”

  “No, of course not,” Weena agreed, “but perhaps we can find some paid work to do.”

  As she spoke, she was wondering just what sort of work she was capable of doing and whether it would be available to her even if she could find it.

  She had been brought up, now she thought about it, to enjoy herself and to ride her father’s excellent horses and to help her mother grow the flowers in the garden that meant so much to them both and to read the books in the library that she loved so intensely.

  She was wise enough to realise that none of these activities of hers were saleable.

  And, although she was sure that Ivor would be able to find something interesting he could exert himself in, she could think of nothing that anyone would pay her to do.

  As if he knew exactly what she was thinking, Ivor suggested,

  “Forget that nonsense. If you think I am going to have you obeying the orders of other people or even being a companion to some elderly person so that you could have your board and lodging free, you are mistaken.”

  “I was actually thinking how helpless I am and how little I am able to do,” Weena replied forlornly.

  “You are very beautiful, very intelligent and I am quite certain that there are a great number of men who will find you irresistible.”

  Weena stared at him.

  “Are you saying that I must get married?”

  “Of course you must,” Ivor replied, “and to the first important, distinguished and rich gentleman who loses his heart to you.”

  Weena drew in her breath.

  “But we don’t know anyone like that in England.”

  She paused for a moment before she went on,

  “Even if we did, I would not want to marry anyone unless I loved him like Papa and Mama loved each other.”

  “That is what we all want,” Ivor said harshly. “But we have to be practical and to keep alive you have to find a rich husband and I have to find a rich wife.”

  “Do you really mean that?” Weena asked him.

  “Of course I mean it. Anyway, as you are so pretty, you will undoubtedly have quite a number of men wanting to marry you.”

  “But how will I meet them? You know as well as I do that we know no one in England. Mama often said that everyone she knew well had died and she had no wish to go back to England because she would be a stranger in her own country.”

  “Mama would have found quite a number of people who would have welcomed her with open arms,” Ivor told her. “And she would have found that she still had a few relations left even if they did live in the North of England rather than in London.”

  “I am sure they are all dead by now,” Weena said.

  “I expect they are,” Ivor agreed. “But we are not looking for relatives. We will be going as ourselves and as ourselves we will be a success.”

  He spoke so positively that Weena could only say hesitatingly,

  “How can you be sure – of that?”

  “Because the English are snobs,” he answered her. “We will both have what they expect of every important Russian – a title.”

  “A title!” Weena exclaimed. “And just how can we possibly acquire one?”

  Her brother smiled.

  “I rather fancy myself as Prince Ivor Kerlensky and you, my dear, will be a Princess.”

  “You must be joking,” Weena said incredulously. “How could we possibly be that when you know as well as I do that there were very few titles in the Caucasus and any Russians, if we meet them, would know at once that we are imposters.”

  “That is where you are wrong, dear sister. I have gone into this matter most carefully and I have discovered that there are hundreds and hundreds of Princes in Russia because, as you know, every member of a major family has a title.”

  He smiled at her before he continued,

  “If one’s father an
d mother are Prince and Princess, each child is also a Prince or Princess and the same applies to any children that they may have and so on.”

  Weena did not speak and he went on,

  “In England it is different. They have one big title, like a Duke or an Earl, and only the eldest son inherits it. His son has to wait with an inferior title, if one at all, until his father surrenders his by death.”

  “I know all that because Mama told me about it,” Weena replied. “One of her many relations, an uncle, was a politician and he became a Lord and went to the House of Lords. But unfortunately he had no son.”

  “I remember Mama talking about him,” Ivor said. “She was very proud of her family. But, as I have already discovered, there are more or less none of them left. If there was, they would take little notice of us, as they would feel we were expecting them to help us out of our poverty and then undoubtedly become an encumbrance.”

  Weena was silent and after a moment he went on,

  “But as far as I know there is no family in Russia called Kerlensky and, if there was, they are not likely to come to London to see if we are or are not their relatives.”

  “Do you really think that we can pretend to be – a Prince and – a Princess?”

  Weena spoke in a way that told him without words, that she thought it was not only impossible but something that they should not do as it was morally wrong.

  “Now listen to me, Weena,” he said. “We have just seen our home burnt before our very eyes. We know that the land will now be taken over by revolutionaries and we have no possible way of making them give it back to us. We, therefore, have to make a new life for ourselves in a new country and be very brave about it.”

  He turned towards her as he added,

  “But, Weena, we are not so stupid as to arrive as two unimportant youngsters who, in Social London, would undoubtedly be ignored by everyone of any standing.”

  “And you really think that – if we arrive as Prince and Princess they will then at least invite us to one meal?”

  “I hope they will do a great deal more than that,” Ivor replied. “I am not as foolish as you obviously think I am.”

  “No, no, that’s not true, I have always thought you wonderful, Ivor and, of course, very handsome. I am sure, if they really believe that you are a Prince, you will look exactly as a Prince should do.”