Alicky shook her head and, not for the first time, he was aware of her formidable inner strength. ‘No, Paul. I’m going nowhere until my poor, darling Nicky arrives. And then, when the children are fit enough to travel, we will leave for wherever it is Nicky wants to go.’

‘If you can by then,’ Paul said tautly. ‘If you are still able to.’

Later that night a fleet of army vehicles swept up to the palace.

Minutes later, an ashen Count Benckendorff informed Alicky that a general by the name of Kornilov wished to speak to her.

Alicky clasped her hands together tightly. It was eleven o’clock at night – the kind of time when arrests were made.

‘I’ll speak to him in the Audience Room,’ she said, knowing that she had to fight down her fear; that she couldn’t allow it to show.

Minutes later she was facing Kornilov, still dressed in her Red Cross nurse’s uniform.

The first thing she noticed was that he was very young to be a general. The second was that his Imperial Army badge had been replaced by a badge showing a red star with a crossed hammer and sickle in the centre of it.

For the first time in her life, a minion did not respectfully address her by her proper title.

‘Alexandra Feodorovna Romanov,’ he said, without preliminaries. ‘I am here to place you under house arrest. Your husband is also under arrest and will be returning to Tsarskoe Selo tomorrow. I am also here to tell you that as soon as your children’s health permits, the Provisional Government’s intention is for you and your family to be escorted to Murmansk, from where a British cruiser will take you to England.’

Relief flooded through her so intensely that she thought she was going to faint. She wasn’t going to be taken away and incarcerated in the prison of the Peter and Paul Fortress, whose very walls were steeped with the blood of those who had been tortured and had died there. Nicky would be with her sometime tomorrow, and she now knew what their future as a family was to be. England was a land that was as much a part of her childhood as Hesse-Darmstadt had been. A land over which Georgie and Kindred Spirit May were constitutional rulers. A land of green fields and bluebell woods, calm common sense and sweet reason. One world had come to an end, but another world was waiting.

In the seconds before the general left the room, and to his great amazement and discomfiture, she took both his hands in hers and thanked him.

‘What was the German bitch like?’ was the first question his aides asked, when he walked out to his car.

‘She was dignified,’ he said, trying not to show how much she had impressed him. ‘Unafraid and very dignified.’