A girl returns from boarding school to her sleepy Merseyside hometown and waits
to be reunited with her childhood friend, Harriet, chief architect of all their
past mischief. She roams listlessly along the shoreline and the woods still pitt
ed with wartime trenches, and encounters 'the Tsar' - almost old, unhappily marr
ied, both dangerously fascinating and repulsive. Pretty, malevolent Harriet fina
lly arrives - and over the course of the long holidays draws her friend into a s
cheme to beguile then humiliate the Tsar, with disastrous, shocking consequences
.
