Other questions came thick and fast. How would Nicky cope with so suddenly becoming the autocratic ruler of a great empire? How would she cope with the public display that came with being Tsarina? As question after question flooded her brain, Alicky struggled to think of an alternative scenario. Perhaps Ella was exaggerating. Perhaps the doctors had made the wrong diagnosis and were being unnecessarily fatalistic. Perhaps, even at this very moment, Nicky’s father was beginning to regain strength, rather than continuing to lose it. Another thought came to her and she said, ‘Who is in control of things at the palace, Ella?’

‘No one. It’s complete chaos. We all knew Uncle Sasha hadn’t been well for some time, but no one imagined he was ill with something that would prove fatal. Nicky is in complete pieces, as is Aunt Minny.’

At Simferopol, Nicky was waiting to greet her, flanked only by a couple of equerries. Hugging her tightly, his voice breaking with emotion, he said, ‘Oh, thank heavens you are here, Alicky. I couldn’t have survived another day without you. And apologies that there is no reception party, and that no imperial train was waiting for you when you reached the border, but the minister whose job it is to arrange such things forgot all about doing so, in his anxiety about my father.’

‘Reception parties and imperial trains are of no importance at a time like this.’ Alicky slid her hand into the crook of his arm and squeezed it, in loving reassurance. ‘How is your papa? Has there been any change in his condition?’

‘A little, but none that gives hope.’ Nicky looked towards Ella, who, together with Sergei and his father’s other three brothers, had been at Livadia for more than a week. ‘He now only speaks when he absolutely has to, Ella,’ he said to her as they stepped into a waiting carriage. ‘I just hope and pray he is still able do so by the time Alicky arrives.’

Simferopol was a mountain town, and their carriage ride to Livadia took them through a high pass before heading down through heavily wooded hillsides towards the Black Sea. Beautiful as the scenery was, none of them were capable of appreciating it, their thoughts taken up with what they would find when they arrived at their destination.

What they found was the chaos that Ella had warned Alicky about – and it was chaos laced with panic. Government ministers and court officials ran like headless chickens up and down stairs and along crimson-carpeted corridors. Aunt Minny, usually so vivacious and dazzling, was white-faced and dazed with anxiety.

‘Your father has insisted on being dressed, so that he can greet Alicky in the way the Tsar of Russia has always greeted a future Russian empress,’ she said to Nicky, after she had given Alicky two hasty kisses on both cheeks. ‘I tried to dissuade him, but he was adamant. Absolutely adamant.’