BooksBarbecue
Back The Summer Queen
Chapters (54)
  1. Cover
  2. The Summer Queen
  3. Dedication Page
  4. Family Tree of King George III
  5. Family Tree of Queen Victoria
  6. PART ONE
  7. Chapter One
  8. Chapter Two
  9. Chapter Three
  10. Chapter Four
  11. Chapter Five
  12. Chapter Six
  13. Chapter Seven
  14. Chapter Eight
  15. Chapter Nine
  16. Chapter Ten
  17. Chapter Eleven
  18. Chapter Twelve
  19. Chapter Thirteen
  20. PART TWO
  21. Chapter Fourteen
  22. Chapter Fifteen
  23. Chapter Sixteen
  24. Chapter Seventeen
  25. Chapter Eighteen
  26. Chapter Nineteen
  27. Chapter Twenty
  28. Chapter Twenty-One
  29. Chapter Twenty-Two
  30. Chapter Twenty-Three
  31. Chapter Twenty-Four
  32. PART THREE
  33. Chapter Twenty-Five
  34. Chapter Twenty-Six
  35. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  36. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  37. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  38. Chapter Thirty
  39. Chapter Thirty-One
  40. Chapter Thirty-Two
  41. PART FOUR
  42. Chapter Thirty-Three
  43. Chapter Thirty-Four
  44. Chapter Thirty-Five
  45. Chapter Thirty-Six
  46. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  47. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  48. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  49. Chapter Forty
  50. Chapter Forty-One
  51. Acknowledgements
  52. Select Bibliography
  53. The Summer Queen
  54. By Margaret Pemberton

Wishing her own thoughts hadn’t veered onto a subject so dark, May turned them to something lighter: the St Petersburg wedding list. Uncle Wales and Aunt Alix would be among the wedding guests; Uncle Wales because he would be there representing Aunt Queen, and Aunt Alix because her sister was both the Tsarina and Sergei’s sister-in-law.

Although Uncle Wales hadn’t allowed Eddy and Georgie to attend Vicky and Louis’s wedding, she was fairly sure he would want them to attend Ella and Sergei’s. He wouldn’t want to waste an opportunity for them to get to know their Romanov cousins better, especially as Cousin Nicky, who was only four years older than Eddy, would, on his father’s death, be Tsar of all the Russias at probably the same kind of time as Eddy would be King of the United Kingdom and Emperor of India.

She wondered who else would be there and realized that, at such a big wedding, everyone she could possibly think of would be there. As their mother was the groom’s sister, Missy and Ducky would be there. Toria, Looloo and Maudie would be there. Aunt Lenchen, Uncle Christian and all four of their children, Christle, Albert, Thora and Marie-Louise, would be there, as would her Hohenzollern cousins – with the likely exception of Willy, who certainly wouldn’t want to see another man marrying Ella. Relatives from nearly every country in Europe would be in St Petersburg. The only family members not there would be her parents and herself.

With the letter she was in the middle of writing now almost forgotten, May wondered how she felt about being so excluded. The answer was immediate, for she didn’t feel bad about it at all, and that was because she was enjoying her life in Italy so much. It was a way of life she had never previously experienced; a way of life 100 per cent preferable to the rigid formality the wedding guests would soon be enduring at the Winter Palace in St Petersburg.

She stared thoughtfully into the middle distance at the broad, glittering surface of the Arno, realizing for the first time that it was even preferable to her former life in England. In England, her social life had revolved around the occasional visit with her mother to Aunt Queen at Windsor; to the Edinburgh family at Clarence House; and, with far greater frequency, to the Waleses at Marlborough House. At no time had she socialized with anyone other than family and extended family. Everyone had been royal or, as she herself was, semi-royal.