‘No. People had been allowed to gather there all through the night, and by dawn there were apparently more than a hundred thousand of them in the field, all wanting to be early and first in line for the beer and souvenir coronation mugs that were to be given out. Some fool said there wasn’t going to be enough beer and mugs to go round, and a stampede started to be first in line for them.’

‘Yes, but even so . . .’

‘Being an old army training field, Khodynka is full of trenches and troughs. In the dark, people fell into them and then more people fell on top of them. Is there coffee in that pot? I’m glad it’s all down to Sergei to sort out, not me.’

Fifteen minutes later the telephone rang. Nicky answered it and Vladimir heard him say, ‘More than two hundred, Sergei? Two hundred?’

‘Holy Mother of God!’ Vladimir blanched. ‘You had better break the news to Alicky. Your visit to the field this afternoon is going to have to be called off.’

When Alicky was told of the disaster, her horrified reaction was that if more than two hundred people had been crushed to death in the dark, hundreds more must have been injured.

‘What arrangements have been made for the injured to be taken to hospital?’ she asked Vladimir, feeling sick at the horror of it all. ‘Are the fire services helping?’

‘Yes. No. Probably.’

‘Probably?’ The criminal enormity of his indifference to her question robbed her of breath. Knowing that she would never want anything to do with him ever again, she turned to Nicky. ‘We must go down to the hospitals immediately. We must comfort the wounded.’

Nicky nodded in instant agreement.

Vladimir stared at them as if they had lost their minds.

A footman entered with a message on a silver salver, and Nicky snatched it and tore open the envelope.

Sergei had written only one sentence: Death toll now over a thousand.

Nicky sank down on the nearest chair. ‘Dear God in heaven,’ he whispered, showing the message to Alicky, his face ashen.

She laid her hand on his shoulder and said urgently, ‘We can do nothing now for the dead, but we must waste no more time in visiting the wounded. They have to know how deeply we care. Everyone has to know how deeply we care!’

Nicky nodded, rose to his feet and swiftly they left the room, a mutual support group of two.

Vladimir stared after them in disbelief. The first action of any other tsar would have been to issue orders making sure the bodies were shunted into a mass grave. Then communicate that only a modest number were acknowledged as having been crushed to death, and that the day’s celebrations would go ahead as planned. Instead, and thanks to Alicky, Nicky was on his way to visit the hospitals, bringing the most public attention possible to what had happened.