Even Nicky’s mother begged him to rescind the Army order sending Dmitri to Persia. ‘The climate alone will be enough to kill him,’ Minny said passionately. ‘And you must be aware of how detrimental to you the monk was. All the fifteen months you have been at the Stavka, it has been Rasputin who has been ruling Russia through Alicky – not Alicky who has been ruling it. When Nikolai tells you that Rasputin’s death has saved the monarchy, he is telling you the truth. Whatever Dmitri did, he did out of love for you. You cannot send him to what is sure to be his death.’

Nicky had been immovable.

Ella, her face as white as the wimple that covered her head and bound her chin and neck, pleaded with him as well, but to just as little effect.

Nicky merely said time and again, ‘A murder is always a murder. There has to be punishment.’

A week later Alicky left her boudoir and the palace in order to bury her beloved friend in a quiet corner of the Alexandra Park.

Dressed in boots and an ankle-length black fur, looking years older than her forty-four years and carrying seven hothouse roses, she had become wraith-thin. The burning certainty she had lived with – the certainty that, because of Grishka, haemophilia wouldn’t kill Alexei and that he would survive to inherit the throne of the Russian Empire and rule it as an autocrat, as Russia had always been ruled – had been savagely and cruelly annihilated. From now on, fear and tension would again be her constant companions, for how, without Grishka, could it be any different?

As she walked through deep snow with Nicky and Alexei and the girls towards the freshly dug grave, more snow was falling. Ever since she had first come to Russia it had always been the same. At all the major moments in her life there, it had been winter. It had been winter and Russia had been covered in snow when Nicky’s father had been dying, and when Nicky had urgently telegrammed to Hesse-Darmstadt that he needed her by his side.

And when Nicky’s father had died and Nicky had become Tsar, and when it was imperative that they marry as soon as possible, it had still been the middle of an Arctic winter. Snow had been falling as she had entered the chapel of the aptly named Winter Palace; and it had been falling when, as her darling’s wife, she had left it to shouts from vast crowds that she was their Winter Bride.

And now it was winter again and this time there was no springtime of hope awaiting her. Before Grishka’s coffin had been closed she had written him a letter: