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party, but along with all the drinking and eating, the toasts, the jokes and the old customs was the realisation that they had all done their best to make this young, foreign bride happy and were accepting her into what was a close community. Perhaps I should now say something about the background of the Russian family. All that I was told during my impressionable years when I listened, enthralled, to the tales of a bygone age.

CHAPTER
FIVE
    When Tsar Peter the Grealt, that mighty and pitiless reformer, arrived in Archangel in 1693, he began to build a shipyard on the island of Solombala. To assist him in this enterprise, Peter imported from Holland designers, craftsmen and shipbuilders. Among them was a Dutchman named Rutger Van Brienen. In spite of the harsh climate and the backward conditions of the town, Van Brienen settled down in Archangel and never went back to his native land. A little more than a century later his descendant, Margaretha Caroline, was born and in 1818, at the tender age of seventeen, married a merchant, Ivan Gernet. They were my great-great-grandparents.
    Margaretha Van Brienen was a proud woman. Proud of her name and distant associations with Peter the Great. As in St Petersburg, so in Archangel, Peter was fond of holding his famous “assemblies”. On one occasion he was supposed to have asked the wife of Van Brienen to dance with him, but she being large with child was forced to refuse this great honour and begged to be excused. Having read a great deal about Peter and his habits, I find it difficult to believe that a mere pregnancy would have deterred him from having a canter around the ballroom had he wished to do so. This story, however, has persisted throughout the generations. Ivan and his wife Margaretha had several children, but I am only concerned with two of them.
    Their son Evgeny, or Eugene, and their daughter Amelia.
    Like many mothers, Margaretha was ambitious for her family and especially for her son Eugene. Some time during the summer of 1842, Eugene was commissioned by his father to go to the district of Kaluga, a thousand miles away, to buy merchandise required for their business. Every year an important fair took place and merchants from many parts of Russia gathered to buy or sell the produce of that rich and prosperous country. When he arrived in Kaluga, he put up in the house of the local landowner who was a business associate and friend of the family.
    The landowner was a widower. The whole running of the house lay in the hands of an able housekeeper named Feodosiya who was assisted by her young daughter Anna.
    Somehow from the very first day Eugene became aware of this girl. He saw her busily engaged in her various tasks, bringing the steaming samovar and the food to the table or hurrying across the courtyard on her way to the village. He heard her talking and laughing or singing to herself like some happy bird on a spring morning. There was no contact of any kind. She remained in the background, for she was only the servant and he the guest.
    One evening in the village there was a “goolyanie”, meaning a stroll or a “walkabout”. Joining the younger members of the family, Eugene went along to the village. It was a warm summer evening. The girls in their fresh cotton dresses and bright sarafans were strolling arm in arm up and down the street. The youths in their clean embroidered shirts and hair plastered close to their heads, strutted like cockerels in groups meeting and passing the girls. Someone produced an accordion, another strummed on a balalaika. There was dancing and singing to be followed by the Khorovod Ч the great circle when everyone joined hands and chanted as they circled faster and faster round a figure in the centre. Eugene and his friends were drawn into the ring and joined hands. In the centre, dancing with great style and abandon, was Anna. She was gliding around in that inimitable manner in which the flick of the hand, the shrug of the shoulder,