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Chapters (54)
  1. Cover
  2. The Summer Queen
  3. Dedication Page
  4. Family Tree of King George III
  5. Family Tree of Queen Victoria
  6. PART ONE
  7. Chapter One
  8. Chapter Two
  9. Chapter Three
  10. Chapter Four
  11. Chapter Five
  12. Chapter Six
  13. Chapter Seven
  14. Chapter Eight
  15. Chapter Nine
  16. Chapter Ten
  17. Chapter Eleven
  18. Chapter Twelve
  19. Chapter Thirteen
  20. PART TWO
  21. Chapter Fourteen
  22. Chapter Fifteen
  23. Chapter Sixteen
  24. Chapter Seventeen
  25. Chapter Eighteen
  26. Chapter Nineteen
  27. Chapter Twenty
  28. Chapter Twenty-One
  29. Chapter Twenty-Two
  30. Chapter Twenty-Three
  31. Chapter Twenty-Four
  32. PART THREE
  33. Chapter Twenty-Five
  34. Chapter Twenty-Six
  35. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  36. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  37. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  38. Chapter Thirty
  39. Chapter Thirty-One
  40. Chapter Thirty-Two
  41. PART FOUR
  42. Chapter Thirty-Three
  43. Chapter Thirty-Four
  44. Chapter Thirty-Five
  45. Chapter Thirty-Six
  46. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  47. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  48. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  49. Chapter Forty
  50. Chapter Forty-One
  51. Acknowledgements
  52. Select Bibliography
  53. The Summer Queen
  54. By Margaret Pemberton

She would have none of it. With the strength of a madwoman she fended them off, racing towards the smoking remains of what had been Sergei’s carriage.

And then she came to a sudden, rocking halt, unable to take in what it was that she was faced with. There was no injured Sergei. There wasn’t even Sergei’s body. Scattered far and wide across the bloodied snow were simply bit and pieces of him. A leg here. An arm there. His boots had been blown clear off his legs, his feet still in them. There was no trace of his head, or his shoulders. She stumbled over a severed hand.

His rings. She must take his rings. Sergei would want her to do so. She was on her knees amongst bones and cartilage, retrieving from pulverized flesh the icon that Sergei had always worn around his neck. ‘A stretcher,’ she said, time after time, like a mantra. ‘A stretcher. We must have a stretcher. We must take his remains to the monastery and lay them before the high altar.’

A stretcher was brought. Other hands beside hers gathered up bloodied body parts and placed them on it. A blanket was brought to cover them.

Still wearing her blood-soaked dress, still clutching his rings and the icon that Sergei had never been without, Ella stumbled behind the stretcher as it was carried into the Kremlin’s Chudov Monastery. And there, this time in prayer, she fell on her knees again to cry.

Chapter Thirty-Four

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NOVEMBER 1906, NEUES PALAIS, POTSDAM

It was mid-morning and Willy was on the ground floor of the Neues Palais, standing legs astride in the little-used Grotto Hall. Encrusted with shells and with a marble floor decorated with sea-urchins and marine plants, the Grotto Hall reminded him of his grandmother’s sketching alcove at Osborne and was where he always came when, as now, he didn’t want to be disturbed.

Nothing at the moment was going his way, and that it wasn’t was not his fault. It was all the fault of that arch-Satan: his Uncle Bertie, King Edward VII, King of England and Emperor of India.

He breathed in hard, his nostrils flaring, the upward tips of his moustache quivering. Who would have ever thought that womanizing, pleasure-loving, surely-not-very-bright Uncle Bertie would have turned into such a competent, hands-on king? He was a constitutional monarch, for God’s sake. He was supposed to leave political conniving and real government to his ministers, not jaunt behind their back, forming alliances with other nations as easily as if he was playing bridge. Queen Victoria had never done so! When he thought of his much-missed grandmother – and of how different European politics were without her – Willy felt so emotional he had to ball his good hand into a fist to stop himself from weeping.