Never again were her beautiful, classical features to be untouched by strain and anxiety. At thirty-two years old, Alicky began living with a tension that was palpable and, because people were unaware of its cause, unpleasantly disconcerting.

Her public appearances had always been rare, but now they became rarer still and, when she did appear in public, her lips were always set in a tight line and her complexion, once so flawless, was often stained with ugly red blotches. Her saving graces were the heavy, lustrous glory of her hair, and her figure, which, despite her many pregnancies and with the help of French corsetry, was still enviably slender.

Not until a couple of weeks into the new year of 1905 did she write to May. Sitting in her mauve boudoir at a walnut-inlaid escritoire that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette, she wrote:

Dearest May,

After six months we now know, without any shadow of doubt, that Baby has the family bleeding disease. Ella and Sergei know. Vicky and Irène know – how could I possibly keep it from Irène, when she has already lost a child to the disease and another child is a semi-invalid through suffering from it?

Sergei has said – and in this I agree with him, as does my poor, darling Nicky – that no one else must know. Not his mother or his brothers, or, other than Sergei, his uncles. With the war in Japan going so disastrously wrong and dissatisfaction in the country so rampant, if it became public knowledge that the Tsesarevich had a disease that could mean him not living long enough to inherit the crown, the country might well turn into full-scale revolution. As it is, the threat is so real we have to be guarded in a way inconceivable to you and Georgie in nice, cosy England. Only recently a government minister was assassinated, and in Moscow Sergei receives death threats on a daily basis.

She laid her pen down. There had always been civil unrest in Russia. It was why the country could only be governed by a strong, autocratic tsar. Sergei said it was the speech Nicky had given to the leaders of local governments, shortly after his father’s death, when he had said he regarded their hope of representative government as being a ‘senseless dream’, that had given birth to the Social Revolutionary Party. Another, smaller organization, going by the name of the Bolsheviks, was run by a man called Lenin, who was living in exile in Geneva.

It was the Social Revolutionary Party and the Bolsheviks who were demanding an end to autocracy – and not only an end to autocracy, but to the monarchy as well – and who were behind all the bombings, the government minister’s assassination and the death threats that Sergei was receiving. With a heavy sigh, Alicky picked up her pen again: