The Year of December — Lucy Cores

RUNNING AWAY from Europe to the furthest point possible -- Russia -- following a tumultuous love affair with Lord Byron, Claire Claremont must keep her identity as Byron's mistress secret in order to obtain employment as a governess, the only way a woman of 1825 had of making a living...

ONE LOOK magnetically draws Claire into a passion-filled relationship with an eighteen-year-old Prince, Grisha Volyniski. Claire's emotions, bottled up since the death of her daughter, Byron's love child, came pouring out. But is her attraction to the Prince for himself alone -- or for the memories of Byron he rekindles in her?

SWEPT UP in the politics of the first Russian Revolution, the tragic, abortive, Decembrist Uprising, Claire and Grisha move from an idyllic country estate to the Moscow salons where the conspirators rendezvous, to the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg and the dark dungeons of a Czarist fortress, where Claire asks herself again and again:

DOES SHE LOVE THE MAN -- OR THE MEMORY?