I opened the front door expecting to be greeted by warmth and a maid rushing to take my coat and bag. Instead I stood in a completely deserted hallway and felt a cold draft swirling around my legs. It was reminiscent of my first arrival at Kensington Palace, when it had been equally cold and unwelcoming. A strange feeling came over me, a sense of unreality, that perhaps the last weeks had never happened except in my dreams or imagination. Any minute now a ghostly white figure would waft past me down that hallway, just as it had when I first visited, and I would be back where I started. I stared at the dark hallway and my heart jumped when I really did see a figure coming down the stairs toward me. But she was not white and ethereal. In fact she was all too solid and she didn’t float. She clomped.

“You have returned?” the figure demanded as she came toward me. I sighed. Marina might have left but her cousin, the dreaded Countess Irmtraut von Dinkelfingen-Hackensack, was still in residence. The last person I wanted to see at this moment.

She was regarding me with that critical, haughty stare. “They tell me you have already departed.”

“I only went away for a little while. Not for good,” I said.

She frowned. “What was not good about it? Was it for bad, then? Why would you go away for something bad?”

The countess’s English was annoyingly literal.

“No, I meant I only intended to be away for a couple of days, but unfortunately the road north was closed by a blizzard and I had to return.”

“A blizzard? What is this?”

“A snowstorm.”

She made a disparaging hmmph noise. “I do not think in England you know what a blizzard is. In Russia we have blizzards. In Germany we have blizzards. Real blizzards. Powerful blizzards.”

“It was enough of a blizzard to close a major road,” I said. I tried to think of a way to change the subject. “So how long will you be staying?”

“I had intended to remain a few more days in England to visit places of culture before I departed for my parents’ Schloss outside Berlin. But now a military man comes and tells me the apartment is to be closed up and I must leave. He is even more unpleasant than the first military man. He talks as if he is giving orders to me. And I am a countess, related to royal families. This is not right, is it?”

“Absolutely not,” I agreed. I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. “So when do we have to move out?”

“Tomorrow. He tells me he sends away the last of the servants and closes this apartment in the morning.”