Although a ball given by Minny was the very last thing she wanted to attend, Alicky gritted her teeth and, for Olga and Tatiana’s sakes, accepted the invitation. The girls were ecstatic at the prospect of it, and between his concerns for Rasputin and looking forward to seeing his two eldest daughters knock St Petersburg society for six, the present upheaval in the Balkans barely entered Nicky’s head.

Georgie, too, had more pressing matters on his mind than how Emperor Franz Josef was, or was not, handling the aftermath of the assassinations of his nephew and his wife. Whereas Nicky’s chief concern was Rasputin’s long battle for life in far-off Siberia, Georgie’s was the threat of civil war in Ireland.

‘Ireland,’ he said to his private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, ‘is a bugger. How many more hundreds of years are we to go on being plagued by it?’

‘This time it is a question of the geographical limits that Ulster is to be given, sir,’ Stamfordham said, trying to sound soothing. ‘Not least in relation to Fermanagh and Tyrone.’

If Stamfordham hadn’t been present, George would have torn his hair out. He hadn’t the slightest desire to begin struggling with the political issues of Ireland. All he wanted to do was retreat to his stamp room and slam the door behind him.

‘Tell me again,’ he said, feeling a much-persecuted man, ‘the specific details as regards to Tyrone.’

On 23 July, almost a month after the assassinations, Austria–Hungary sent an ultimatum to Serbia and the focus shifted once again to the Balkans, and did so sharply.

‘An ultimatum? What kind of an ultimatum?’ Willy demanded, once again aboard the Hohenzollern and realizing too late that if it was a war ultimatum, it was one that he would have to disassociate himself from fast, for Russia would come to Serbia’s aid and might be more braced for war than he had previously given her credit for.

‘The ultimatum states that the assassination plot was one that had been hatched in Belgrade,’ his private secretary said, reading the long cable with great care, ‘and that Serbian officials had been actively involved in it.’

Relief swept through Willy. Those facts had been obvious right from the beginning, and if it had taken the Austrians just shy of a month to set them down on paper, then he was panicking over nothing. The four weeks since Franz Ferdinand and Sophie’s deaths had taken the edge off his initial reaction to them and, volatile as ever, his instinct now was to disassociate himself from the situation.

With that decision made, he waved his private secretary away. He had heard enough, and this time he wasn’t going to hare back to Berlin. He was going to continue with his cruise up the coastline of Norway.