“Little Irina must be a woman grown by now. A beauty, I have heard, surely?′ It was more mockery: he had heard nothing of the sort, of course. I had traveled with my father; the court and his advisers knew I was nothing out of the ordinary, and hardly a girl to turn a young tsar’s head – if he had been in any danger of turning his head at all, except perhaps all the way round like an owl.”
