‘Pistol shots were heard coming from the Moika Palace the night Rasputin was there,’ he said, privately hoping that at least one of the shots had found its mark and that the biggest troublemaker in Russia was now as dead as a door-nail, ‘and there are blood stains leading out of the palace and across the courtyard. According to Prince Yusupov, it was a small party, the only other guests being Grand Duke Dmitri, an army officer named Sukhotin and Purishkevich, a member of the Duma. Prince Yusupov says there was a lot of heavy drinking and the party got a little out of hand, when Sukhotin shot a dog that was making a nuisance of itself. He showed me the body of the dog, which was in a corner of the courtyard, awaiting removal. Prince Yusupov says that the last he saw of Rasputin, he was weaving drunkenly in the direction of Gorokhovaya Street, swigging from the neck of a bottle of brandy and bawling lewd songs.’

Even though she was exceedingly fond of Dmitri, and even though Felix was now part of her extended family, Alicky gave orders that both of them were immediately to be placed under house arrest.

Then she fired off a telegram to Nicky updating him on the situation.

After that there was nothing she could do but wait, and she did so with a rising fear, as her four bewildered and distressed daughters huddled around her.

Three days after he was last seen, Rasputin’s frozen body was found in the ice below a bridge in the northern part of the city. With its discovery, Felix coolly admitted that he and Dmitri were responsible for, as he said, ‘having saved the dynasty’. That Felix was capable of such an action was no great surprise, but Dmitri having been a party to it was something none of the family could quite believe.

Paul was as glad as anyone that Rasputin was dead, but his son having taken part in the murder plot horrified him.

‘And Nicky is punishing him for the crime by sending him to Qazvin on the Persian front! Where the hell is that?’ he said despairingly to Miechen. ‘And the dire way this war is progressing under Nicky’s leadership, what is the likelihood of my ever seeing him again?’ To Miechen’s distress, he covered his face with his hands, tears streaming through his fingers.

‘And I,’ Felix said unconcernedly to Misha, ‘am to be banished eight hundred miles distant to my estate in Kursk. All in all, it’s not too severe a sentence for having freed an empire from the rule of an insane moujik.’

‘Is it true that, until the very end, you couldn’t kill Rasputin, no matter what you did to him?’