There is no evidence that he wrote to Olga once the family were under house arrest but she got word of him in April 1918, writing in her diary, “Kupov wrote a letter. He saw Mitya in Petrograd. He sent us regards.” We can only imagine her dejection that he only sent “regards”! It doesn’t sound very loving. Olga suffered from depression during the family’s sixteen months in captivity and perhaps his coldness was one cause.

We are not sure what happened to Mitya after 1918: he may have fought with the White Army who were trying to overthrow the Bolsheviks; he may have ended up in a Soviet labor camp; or he could have escaped into exile. But I bet he never expected to be remembered a hundred years later for his romance with a Romanov grand duchess.

Tatiana also had a favorite among the officers at the hospital—Dmitri Malama. In the first week of the war he was wounded in the leg while rescuing a fellow officer under fire and was awarded for gallantry. She soon became very attached to him, writing in her diary, “After dinner Malama came over . . . I was terribly glad to see him, he was very sweet.” He clearly liked her too, because he bought her a gift of a French bulldog, whom she called Ortipo, the same name as his cavalry horse. Alexandra invited him to lunch at the palace in 1915 and later wrote to Nicholas, “I have to admit, he would make an excellent son-in-law. Why are foreign princes not like him?”

Malama, who is the subject of my novel The Secret Wife (spoiler alert if you haven’t read it), did his best to save his country from the Bolsheviks, fighting valiantly with the White Army. He died at the battle of Tsaritsyn in June 1919, by which time he probably suspected that his sweetheart, Tatiana, might be dead, although he could not have known for sure.

Maria, who was fifteen at the outbreak of war, had a crush on an officer in the Guards Equipage called Nikolai Demenkov, known to all as Kolya. He was slightly chubby, as was she, and her sisters teased her by calling him “Fat Kolya.” In her diary she referred to herself as “Mrs. Demenkov” so she clearly had strong feelings for him, but she was not to see him again after a meeting in March 1916. We know that she corresponded with him while the family was under house arrest. In one postcard sent from Tobolsk on November 22, 1917, she writes, “May you have all the best in life. So sad that we have not heard from you in so long . . . We reminisce about the happy times, the games . . . May God keep you.” Demenkov managed to escape from Soviet Russia in 1920, going first to Constantinople and then to Paris, where he lived until 1950 and was of great help to Romanov family historians.