She remembered the breaking of the blood-pact. Was that the reason she only gave birth to girl after girl? That other people had boys and she couldn’t? May now had four of them. Willy had six. At the thought of Willy, Alicky gritted her teeth. His badgering of Nicky was giving her husband migraines. No matter what the situation, international or domestic, Willy constantly showered Nicky with unwanted advice. Russia had been an ally of France for more than ten years, and the fact that she was an ally was a perpetual bee in Willy’s bonnet. ‘A monarchy allied with a republic?’ he would thunder down the telephone line from Berlin. ‘Stuff and nonsense, Nicky! We emperors must stick together. Germany and Russia, not Russia and France!’

Eight-year-old Olga ran out onto the veranda, saying as she ran over to her mother, ‘Aunt Ella and Uncle Sergei have arrived, Mama. They are here to have lunch with us, and Papa says we are to dine al fresco.’

‘Then you must be sure to wear a wide-brimmed sunhat – and so must your sisters. Will you tell them so for me?’

‘Naturellement.’ French was the language of the Russian court and Olga spoke it as easily as she did English and Russian. Throwing her arms around Alicky’s neck, she gave her mother a kiss on the cheek and then scampered off to do what had been asked of her.

Although terrified of having a fifth daughter, Alicky loved the daughters she had, with all her heart, and counted her blessings that they were all healthy. Her eight-year-old niece Elisabeth – Ernie and Ducky’s only child – had died of typhoid fever a little less than two years ago, shortly after Ducky had so shamefully insisted on divorcing Ernie. What had made her death doubly horrific had been that it happened when Ernie and Elisabeth had been on holiday with her, Nicky and their children at their Polish hunting lodge, and that Elisabeth had died before Ducky could reach her.

Irène, too, had lost a child. Her and Louis’s little boy, Henry, had died from the family bleeding disease six months ago after falling and bumping his head.

As hard as she prayed that the child she was carrying was a boy, she prayed that if it was a boy, he would be free of the bleeding disease. Although Irène, the sister next to her in age, was a carrier of it – Henry’s older brother, Waldemar, suffered from it, too – Vicky had two boys, George, who was eleven, and four-year-old Louis, and neither of them had inherited it, which indicated that Vicky wasn’t a carrier. Whether Ella was, it was impossible to know, for she and Sergei had no children, but as Vicky was quite clearly not a carrier, then it was quite possible that Alicky was not a carrier, either.