How blessed you are that, after only two and three-quarters years of marriage, you and dear Georgie have two sons! Nicky and I do not mind in the slightest that our firstborn is a darling little girl, but everyone else in the family seems to think it a great failing on our part not to have produced a son first time around. God willing, our next child will be a boy, and the heir everyone is so eager for.

I am writing this in my mauve boudoir at the Alexander Palace, Tsarskoe Selo. Tsarskoe Selo is an imperial village fifteen miles from St Petersburg (and so is a welcome distance from St Petersburg society, which, try as I might, I cannot feel comfortable in), and the Alexander Palace is where Nicky was born and is the palace we are happiest in. Although it is just as grand as all the other Romanov palaces, I have done as Granny Queen has always done and made our private rooms snug and comfy, doing so in the English style that I grew up with at Darmstadt. If you could see my boudoir, you would think yourself at Osborne House or Balmoral, especially as there is a large portrait of Granny Queen hanging on the wall above the fireplace.

My mother-in-law thinks me dreadfully bourgeois, but I don’t care. I care only about giving Nicky surroundings that he can relax in, and that come as a welcome relief from acres and acres of gold leaf and marble.

Minny has asked that I call her ‘Motherdear’, which I obediently do, but privately I find it impossible to think of her as ‘Motherdear’, as she has made life difficult for me since the wedding. For months she refused to hand over certain pieces of the imperial jewels that it is traditional for a dowager to pass on to her successor, and it was only because of the uproar it would cause if I wasn’t seen to be wearing them at my coronation that she finally parted with them. She would never have behaved so, if Nicky had married someone else; but for some reason I don’t understand, she never wanted Nicky to marry me, and it was only because of his insistence that if he wasn’t given permission to marry me, he would never marry at all, that she finally accepted me as her daughter-in-law. So there you have it. She doesn’t approve of me and, sad to say, has no genuine affection for me. I wish it were otherwise, but it isn’t.