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cramped berths where the sailors slept and had not even a porthole to help them keep their
perspectives righted. When she had opened her door last night to set her tray of barely touched food
into the hall, she had seen Rayley pacing. He’d reported that Davy was suffering the most and that
Tom and Trevor had dragged him up on deck for a bit of light and fresh air. Staring at the horizon,
Rayley said. It’s the only known cure for seasickness.
Before leaving London, Emma had bought a white blouse and slim white skirt specifically for
the nautical part of the trip, the outfit purchased under the romantic impression that everyone at sea
wore white, even the passengers. She now saw that – like undoubtedly many more to come – her
assumption had been almost laughably faulty. Ships were dirty places, spewers of coal dust. The
chairs on deck had been covered with soot when she had ventured out this afternoon, but an obliging
sailor had stepped forward with a woolen blanket and draped it over the chair so that she could now
sit without danger of smearing her virginal clothing, staring off in the direction of the dim coastline
what was rumored to be Denmark.
Although the hour for supper was fast approaching, the intensity of the sun was enough to fool
someone into thinking it was still midafternoon. They were high on the globe – certainly higher than
Emma had ever traveled – and nearing the summer solstice, when the sun would be visible for a
remarkable twenty hours a day, fading only to a dusklike glow during the middle of the night. One of
Emma’s favorite childhood books had been about a girl from a Viking village titled “Land of the
Midnight Sun,” but no amount of reading could have prepared her for the complete disorientation of a
day which refused to end. She wondered what it would feel like in winter, when the opposite trick of
light took hold. Endless night. A pale and watery daylight breaking through for a only few hours at
noon. No wonder people went mad in such sustained darkness – drinking, weeping, killing each
other, killing themselves. The fabled Russian temperament with its wild extremes of behavior, Emma
thought. Perhaps much of it is the result of mere geography.
Emma glanced around, but there was no one else on deck and finally she opened the files in her
lap and began to skim, once again, the notes she had been studying since Trevor had announced they
would be accompanying the Queen to St. Petersburg. Their first collective meal was scheduled to
begin in the dining room within the hour and if she was going to play schoolmistress to Her Majesty
the Queen, she had better be prepared. The implications were terrifying. But Trevor had insisted she
was the only one fit for the task and, even while she recognized he was using flattery in a clumsy
attempt to win her cooperation, she also realized he was probably right.
The lecture Emma would be required to give had two parts: a brief summation of the last few
years of the history of Russia and an even briefer summation of the Russian imperial protocol. The