—

Victoria Ormorod had been prepared for Moscow to be cold, but nothing, nothing, in her previous existence had prepared her for the November outside air of this, her first Russian winter.

Since she and Tankredi had stepped down from the train with their few possessions, the days had passed in a whirl of activity. Breathing in deeply, she relished the burning sensation to her bronchia in the same way that she relished the slight pangs of hunger and the alien, deep, deep dry white snow that enveloped the surrounding countryside, and the male-sounding language of which she already had a fair understanding.

She had not felt so alive, so necessary, so involved in anything for ten years. She had not been so totally committed to a cause since the intoxicating and powerful years when she had toured England speaking to huge audiences. Now, conscious of her bulky clothes, of her thick, coarse mittens and shapeless fur-lined boots, she smiled at the image of her younger self, dressed in a sway-enhancing cream skirt, straw hat with a ribbon band, and close-fitting white blouse, as she dramatically removed her calf-skin gloves whilst holding those same audiences in thrilling anticipation.

Nor, until Tankredi’s dramatic reappearance into her life, had she realized how physically dull she had become. The men and women who had come into and gone from her life over those years were transient lovers. Only with Tankredi had she ever experienced authentic, wholehearted passion. And passion was not to do only with the body, it was to do also with the soul and the intellect, and it was only when all three were uninhibited that life was worth living.

Now, she had everything.

She was useful.

She had a cause into which she could pour her enthusiasm, the cause that would result in peasants and workers taking control of their own lives in the way that she had once hoped that English women would.

And, one day at a time, often living on the knife-edge of danger, she and Tankredi were back together, living the exciting, passionate lives that fulfilled them.