May, who was so physically uncomfortable she felt as if it was a baby elephant that she was pregnant with, eased herself into what she hoped would be a more comfortable position. It wasn’t.

‘And we had ten blissful, beautiful days before Nicky had to return to St Petersburg,’ Alicky continued, ‘and as I had already arranged to stay with Granny Queen for three months, I came to England. And Granny then invited Nicky to Windsor, so that she could get to know him a little better, and he is going to be with me for nearly the whole time I am here. I’m so happy, May! I never knew people could be this happy. Truly I didn’t.’

May was sincerely glad Alicky was so passionately in love with Nicky, but she had some reservations.

Putting her foreboding into words, she said, ‘Once you marry Nicky, you will constantly be the centre of attention. Have you thought of how you will cope with that? I know how much you have hated being a bridesmaid at family weddings, but family weddings are nothing in comparison to the great state occasions that are part and parcel of Nicky’s life, and are now going to be part and parcel of your life also.’

Alicky had been reassuringly dismissive. ‘There’s no need to worry about me on that score, May. Uncle Sasha is only in his forties and is an enormously big, strong man. Do you know that he can bend an iron poker with his bare hands? It’s going to be twenty or thirty years before Nicky succeeds him as Tsar, and until then Nicky and I are going to live in the same kind of quiet domesticity that you and Georgie so happily live in here, at York Cottage.’

May didn’t flinch at the word ‘happily’, but it took a lot of her willpower not to do so. With fierce determination, she put all thoughts of her and Georgie’s tortuous shyness and embarrassment in the bedroom – and their total incompatibility out of it, as well as in it – to the back of her mind. ‘Quiet domesticity may be achievable in England, Alicky,’ she said wryly, ‘but I doubt it’s a phrase much used in Russia. You and Nicky will be trailblazers!’

Their time together as an engaged couple in England was idyllic, but by September the idyll was over, and Nicky was back in St Petersburg and Alicky was in Darmstadt. As the fiancée of the Tsesarevich, she would be joining him for good in the New Year when, in preparation for a spring wedding, she would be accepted into the Russian Orthodox Church.

It was a day that couldn’t come soon enough, for the harmonious atmosphere in the New Palace that had existed before Ernie and Ducky’s marriage was harmonious no longer.