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  Advance praise for Susana Aikin and

  We Shall See the Sky Sparkling

  “Vivid and compelling—an exceptional

  woman on an extraordinary journey.”

  —Livi Michael, author of Accession

  “We Shall See the Sky Sparkling is a vivid, thoroughly absorbing account of one woman’s struggle to break from the rigid roles her social class and time period impose on her. Drawing from her family’s history and a series of fascinating letters, Susana Aikin crafts a marvelous tale of adventure, rebellion, and romance, taking readers on a captivating journey from the theaters of Edwardian London to tumultuous St. Petersburg and beyond. She weaves the character of actress Lily Throop Cable with a deft hand. Lily shines as a heroine of uncommon strength, determination, and passion. Her struggle to protect and foster her independence, even as she navigates through great loves and treacherous times, is one to be relished and remembered. It’s a pleasure and privilege to read this sparkling debut.”

  —Suzanne Nelson, author of Serendipity’s Footsteps

  “Susana Aikin’s directorial eye is much in evidence in this sweeping saga. Her attention to period detail transports the reader on a filmic journey that is both astonishing and tragic. We Shall See the Sky Sparkling is a powerful meditation on the sacrifices women have made in pursuit of their dreams—sadly, as relevant in the early 21st century as a hundred years ago.”

  —Helen Steadman, author of Widdershins and Sunwise

  “Against the dramatic backdrops of a Russia on the brink of revolution and the colorful lives backstage of the London theatre circuit, Susana Aikin has created a feisty Edwardian protagonist whose trajectory still resonates with the predicament of women working in the arts today.”

  —Sara Alexander, author of

  Four Hundred and Forty Steps to the Sea

  WE SHALL SEE THE SKY SPARKLING

  SUSANA AIKIN

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Advance praise for Susana Aikin and We Shall See the Sky Sparkling

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2019 by Susana Aikin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-1765-8

  Kensington Electronic Edition: February 2019

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-1765-8

  ISBN-10: 1-4967-1765-1

  For Margaret

  PROLOGUE

  My mother kept an old sepia photo in an oval frame of faded coral velvet on top of her writing desk in her upstairs sitting room. In it stood a beautiful, slender woman richly dressed in a long, elegant coat with a fur stole that reached below her knees, and an elaborate hat adorned with ostrich plumes, or some other exotic bird’s feathers. On the back was a name and address printed in Cyrillic letters that likely belonged to a photographic studio in St. Petersburg, with the date 1902 written below.

  Her name was Lily Alexandra Throop, a great-grandaunt on my father’s side, an actress who fled her family in Manchester as a young girl to work in London’s West End theaters, at a time when actresses were considered no better than sluts. For this, her memory had been handed down the generations clouded in a mixture of glitter and dark legend. She was beautiful and talented, but she had left home against her father’s will and was disinherited. She had shamed the family. The mention of her name in family gatherings always created tension; there were those who were riveted by her story, and those who deplored it. My cousin Margaret and I formed the core of the faction who idolized Lily, with other females in the family, including my mother, who flaunted Lily’s picture as a prized heirloom depicting a magnificent ancestress dame. Whenever the Throop women came together, it was only a matter of time before speculation about Lily’s adventurous life would begin to bubble up.

  But my father and his brothers were not thrilled with Lily’s story. Having a “bad girl” in the family disquieted them. “She was no lady,” they said. My father’s younger brother, Uncle Tim, had been the main weaver of Lily’s ominous myth. He was a passionate genealogist who’d worked for years to reconstruct our family history, and in that process had come across certain photographs, official documents, and reluctant testimonies from older family members, all of which provided key pieces to the puzzle of Lily’s life.

  We knew she had been born in 1880 in Stockport, Manchester, and lost her mother very young. Her father had remarried one of his cousins, a cruel woman called Betty, who mistreated Lily and her brother, Harry, but mostly Lily. At age seventeen, Lily left the family house amid disrepute and scandal. A cutting from the The Era’s theater-review paper listed her as playing Gretchen in a play called Soldiers of the Queen, produced at London’s Imperial Theatre in October 1897. A note Lily sent to Harry in June 1900 requesting a birth certificate needed for a passport application was found among my grandmother’s papers. Two of my great-aunts, Minnie and Bella, had talked about Lily leaving the country to travel in foreign lands, and how at some point, rumors had reached the family that she had borne an illegitimate child. A few years later she allegedly returned to England, alone, penniless and sick, and died shortly after, in disgrace.

  Her death certificate, according to Uncle Tim, declared her to be a “spinster” and a “theatrical dancer,” and said she died of “pulmonary phthisis” at age twenty-four. “Unfortunately, that’s the sort of thing that happened to women who forgot their good breeding,” he concluded as we sat around the table, while Margaret and I glared at him in fury, suspecting that part of the story had been contrived to create a perfect cautionary tale.

  Lily’s tragic tale and disappeared child remained sources of endless conjecture among the family’s female faction, particularly the fate of her baby. Had she really had a child? And if so, what had happened to it? Would she or he still be alive? But for us, Lily’s charisma outshone all else; to have an ancestress who had defied all conventions
to pursue an artistic career bestowed a very particular badge on the women of our clan.

  There was another photograph of Lily in our house: another sepia picture of her as a young girl, probably around the age when she left for London. She’s clad in Victorian fashion, the collar of her dress closely fitted up the length of her neck and fastened with a dainty brooch of miniature pearls. Her face is a smooth oval with delicate cheekbones and a straight, elegant nose; her lips are thin and determined; her eyes stare ahead, radiant and brimming with life.

  “You have those same eyes,” my father would say, half in jest. “Watch that you don’t follow in her steps.” He wasn’t the only one in the family who believed that I resembled Lily, not just in the face and eyes, but also in obstinacy and unruliness.

  They say there are some children who grow in the shadow of a dead family member and unwittingly follow their fate. I think I was one of those children. There was always a secret thrill mixed with a certain dread in my affinity with Lily. I too was an artist, awkward and misunderstood, and felt the need to leave home and find a place where I could develop my creative drive. In my case, that place was New York, where I settled in 1997 to become a filmmaker and a writer. As I struggled on the path of my artistic career, I often thought about Lily and her journey all the way to Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. After all, plowing through the hardship of growing into an artist in a competitive world dominated by convention, and by men, is an eternally tough predicament for a woman, at any time in history, in any place.

  But Lily’s journey always felt immensely more far-fetched, braver and riskier than mine. And whenever I fell upon hard times, met insurmountable obstacles, or got close to the end of my rope, I thought of her, wondering if she had encountered similar troubles and how she might have worked her way through. Lily was always in the back of my mind as the ghostly role model of the artist I strove to become. Maybe that’s why I became obsessed for years with the discovery of her real tale.

  Sadly, I had to lose my father to come into possession of further clues to Lily’s life. When I returned to Manchester after his death to gather his personal effects, I was surprised and overjoyed to find a few of the letters Lily wrote to Harry and his wife, Alice. They had been kept in a box in the attic of the old house in Chorlton-cum-Hardy that had belonged to my grandmother, where my father had lived the last years of his life. This was fresh material that no one of my generation, or my parents’, seemed to have examined before.

  There were thirteen letters in all, tied in a little stack with a string. I took them home and laid them out by tentative order of date and place across my writing desk.

  Manchester, November 5th, 1897

  My dearest Harry and Alice,

  It’s close to eight in the morning and the carriage will be here any moment. I don’t have the heart to disturb you this early, so I’m writing this farewell note while I wait to have a last word with Father.

  Oh, loves, if you knew how thrilled and how anxious I feel right now! My hand trembles as I write these lines. I can’t wait to be sitting in the train, I can’t wait to arrive in London and see the most wonderful city in the whole world. If only I could have both of you come with me, if only the three of us could be together in this adventure, I should be the happiest girl alive. But I will trust that soon you will join me, and the life we’ve dreamed of will come true.

  So, get well, my dearest, dearest brother, and you, my sweet sister-in-law, bless you for all your love and kindness.

  Much love and a thousand kisses,

  Lily

  CHAPTER 1

  Lily stood leaning against the mantelpiece folding the note into a little envelope. The room was cold. The fire had not been lit. Neither had the cinders from last night been removed or the hearth swept. Outside loomed a dreary, wet November morning with rain-darkened trees silhouetted against skies threaded in scales of gray. The grandfather clock’s gloomy ticking filled the room. At the other side of the double-paneled door, she heard the muffled whimpering of her little sister, Annie, amid the swishing of dresses moving quickly along the hall and landing, followed by her father’s heavy footsteps coming down the stairs. “Everyone leave the hall at once,” Lily heard him say, in a loud, composed voice. “I want to talk to her alone.” All stood still for a moment.

  Lily held her breath as the door opened. Her father walked in and sat in his armchair by the window. He was fully dressed in his Sunday brown suit and immaculately groomed despite the early hour. Even the chain of his pocket watch was perfectly looped through its customary buttonhole. He sat upright and looked across the room, ignoring her. Then he fumbled in his waist pocket and brought out his monocle. His right eye first widened, as if surprised, and then squinted as he placed the round glass in between his cheek and upper eyelid. He picked up his cane again and leaned on it with both hands.

  “Father, I will be leaving any minute now. . . .” Lily started.

  “You will go nowhere. You will stay at the house and do what I tell you. If you dare disobey me . . .” her father said, straining to sound severe but ending on a deflated note. He cleared his throat and huffed. “You’ll be the disgrace of us all.”

  Lily felt a sob cramping her throat while tears shot up into her eyes. Her father gave her a sidelong glance, while shifting his weight uncomfortably in the chair. “There’s still time to call this ridiculous idea off. Should you do that, I will forgive everything.” He paused for a moment. “So will Mr. Duff, I’m sure.”

  At the mention of Mr. Duff, Lily’s cheeks flushed with anger. “I thought we already talked about Mr. Duff, Father, that I shall never marry him.” The image of the clergyman’s beady little eyes flashed through her mind. She shuddered, recalling the proximity of his scrawny, buttoned-up body as he had whispered, “My dear, you need to think of putting your talents in God’s service at the church.”

  Her refusal to marry him had thrown the household into calamity only a few weeks ago. Her father had stopped talking to her, while her stepmother, Betty, had sneered to no end. “Only dishonest girls lead a man up the garden path like that. Besides, I don’t know how many other offers someone like you will get.” And she had hounded Lily with images of drab spinsterhood.

  But all of this was now far away in the past in Lily’s mind.

  “Father, please, let’s not quarrel anymore. You know how much I love you. And I do appreciate your thinking of my future. It’s just that I am so drawn to acting, and so feel I must follow my heart.”

  Her father shot her a furious glance. “I will never give you permission to leave the house.”

  Lily rushed toward him, kneeled by his chair, took his hand, and put it to her lips. “Father, please, give me your blessing. I promise one day you’ll be proud of me.”

  Her father pulled his hand away from hers and stiffened in the chair. She knew how hard this must be for him. He was a bland man and found it difficult to discipline his favorite daughter. But he was also bland in the presence of Betty, a strong, unwavering personality who had always sought to dominate him, and made every effort to crush Lily’s spark.

  As if summoned by Lily’s thoughts, Betty entered the room. “I see you’re already getting the best of your father with your theatrical ways,” she said, closing the door. “What you’re about to do is not just indecent but also ungrateful, after everything he’s done for you.” She was stout, with a large head and compact body. Her hands had been quick to smack Lily’s head and ears in the past, but now it was her tongue she used to wound. “But you’re not concerned, are you? You’ll always do as you please. Well, let me just say this: I can’t help but see you a fallen woman in a few years, fit only for the workhouse. Every girl I know who went in for the theater ended up in the gutter.”

  Lily scrambled to her feet, trembling. “You never knew anyone who went in for the theater!” She stood facing Betty with rage pounding in her ears, struggling to control herself, for she knew restraint was the only viable strategy in the pre
sence of her old enemy.

  “Oh, yes!” Betty continued. “Stupid girls who could sing and dance! They thought they would do anything they fancied, but never knew how fast they could get shot down.”

  Her father stood up. “That’s enough! We won’t say another word about this. You are only seventeen and under my tutelage. You will not leave this house! Send the carriage away and go to your room.”

  Lily kneeled again before her father and searched his eyes. “I only ask for your blessing, Father.” The clip-clopping of horse hooves and the clatter of wheels filled the street before they came to a halt outside the house. “If you won’t stand behind me,” Lily added, her voice shaking, “I can only hope one day you will forgive me. ”

  “Forgive you! I will not lay eyes on you again as long as I live. I will disinherit you properly and forget you were ever my daughter!”

  Lily stood up. “All right, Father, I will just say good-bye then.” She turned toward the door where Betty was barring the threshold. “Let me through,” she said, but Betty was unmoved. “You shall have to step over me,” she said.

  A string of coughing sounds was heard approaching the hall. Then came a weak, insistent knock on the door. “Father, open up.”

  Betty stepped aside as her husband fumbled with the knob. “Harry! Son! Why have you left your bed?”

  Harry leaned against the threshold, a gaunt figure, wrapped in a heavy gown. Behind him stood Alice, with her pretty, freckled face pulled into a frown as she struggled to place a blanket around his sloped shoulders. “Darling, please,” she said. “Let’s go back. It’s cold out here.”