Sergei was tall and, although narrow-shouldered, imposing, dark-eyed, dark-haired and with a well-trimmed pointed beard. Few people were comfortable with him, for his manner, other than when he was with children, was too cold and austere for casual friendship. Only on his visits to his mother’s relatives in Hesse-Darmstadt did he relax, turning into a man that few of his fellow countrymen would have recognized.

‘I know that Cousin Willy’s relationship with his mother isn’t all it should be,’ Alicky said, stroking the pet rabbit that was asleep on her lap, ‘but that’s to do with his poor arm and all he was put through because of it, when he was a child. I didn’t know he didn’t get on with his father, either.’

‘He doesn’t get on with his father because they have very different opinions as to how a country should be ruled. When his father becomes Germany’s emperor, he intends to rule as a constitutional monarch.’

That Ella’s husband-to-be treated her as if she was an adult – as she felt May did, in her regular letters to her, and as Willy did in his sporadic letters to her – was one of the reasons Alicky liked her brother-in-law-to-be, but there were times when his conversation went above her head.

She stopped stroking the rabbit. ‘What,’ she asked, ‘does “constitutional” mean?’

They were sitting on one of the broad stone steps that led from the palace to the tree-studded park in which it was set. Making himself more comfortable, Sergei pulled a knee up to his chest, hooked an arm around it and stretched his other leg straight out.

‘A constitutional monarch is King or Queen of a country that has an elected parliament, and the parliament makes and passes laws, not the King or Queen. Your granny, Queen Victoria, is a constitutional monarch – and although that may be all right for Britain and its empire, Willy doesn’t think the newly united Germany should be governed in the same way; and as that is the way his father intends ruling, it is the reason the two of them do not see eye-to-eye.’

Alicky thought this over for a few moments and then said, ‘I like Cousin Willy. I’m a Kindred Spirit with him and Cousin May, but I don’t think he can be right on this. My governess says that Granny Queen is the most powerful monarch in the whole wide world – and so her way of being a queen and an empress must be the right one.’

Eleven-year-old Alicky was soon to be Sergei’s sister-in-law, for immediately after Vicky and Louis’s wedding, his own and Ella’s engagement was to be announced. It was important to him that Alicky, as well as Ella, understood the gigantic differences between the way Queen Victoria ruled, the way the newly united Germany was presently ruled and the way Russia had always been ruled.