The initial plan was for them to be exiled to Britain, but arrangements were complicated by the war in Europe, and King George V dragged his heels. As Russia lurched toward civil war during the summer of 1917, the Romanovs were transported to Tobolsk, Siberia, in a move that was said to be for their own safety. Attitudes toward them hardened after Lenin seized power in the October Revolution, and in April 1918, Maria and her parents were escorted to the smaller, more heavily guarded Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, which is where The Lost Daughter begins.

Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna of Russia. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C., Bain Collection

My depiction of the character of Maria is based on facts we know about her. She did not feel secure in her parents’ affections, and once wrote to her mother saying she considered herself unloved. She was plump as a child, earning her the nickname “fat little bow-wow,” but many considered her the most beautiful of the four girls, with her huge eyes “like saucers.” She was physically the strongest of the four, able to lift and carry thirteen-year-old Alexei on her own. And although she was not academically gifted, she was artistic, enjoying drawing, painting, and photography.

Around men, Maria appears to have been naturally but innocently flirtatious. One guard, Alexander Stretokin, wrote that she was “a girl who loved to have fun.” Commandant Yurovsky wrote that she had a “sincere, modest character” that made her very popular with his men. He said that she “spent most time with the sentries” and he remembered her showing them her photograph albums.

It is well documented that a guard called Ivan Skorokhodov smuggled a cake into the house on Maria’s birthday in June 1918, then the pair of them disappeared together and were caught in what were described as “compromising circumstances.” No one knows exactly what happened, but Ivan was jailed for three months and thereafter disappears from the history books.

Maria was clearly a friendly, outgoing kind of girl with a healthy interest in the opposite sex. If the guards were going to save any one of the girls in the house, surely it would have been her? And if she did escape, her physical strength would have helped her to survive. That was my thinking when I began to shape the story of The Lost Daughter.

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