This, together with three members of their household, they had done. There had been no chairs in the room and, at Nicky’s request, two chairs had been brought in, one for Alicky and one for Alexei, who was recovering from a bleed in his knee and couldn’t stand. Then, under the orders of Yakov Yurovsky, the man in charge of the family’s captivity, eleven men had entered the room armed with revolvers. Yurovsky had told Nicky that he and his family were about to be shot. Nicky had said a bewildered, ‘What? What?’ and then the executioner had shot him between the eyes. Then the men had opened fire on Alicky, Alexei, Olga, Tatiana, Marie, Anastasia and the three members of the household. The room was small, the shooting chaotic, the smoke thick, and the men resorted to bayonets. The jewels sewn into the girls’ clothing acted as armour, and as they screamed and ran, they were bayoneted time and again. The floor became slippery with blood and what should have taken five minutes had taken twenty.

The account was so graphic May knew she would never forget a word of it; that the words – and the unspeakable images they conjured up – would be her private nightmare for as long as she lived.

On the day she, George and other members of their family attended a memorial service for Nicky, Alicky and their children, news arrived that Ella, too, had been murdered by the Bolsheviks.

‘They threw her down a mine shaft,’ George said, his voice cracking and breaking, tears rolling down a face that the war had lined with deep grooves. ‘She was still alive, May, and the fiends threw her down a mine shaft and left her to die. The local peasants say that for days they could hear her singing hymns and that her singing grew fainter and fainter and then – nothing.’

It was a long time before May could trust herself to speak and, when she did, she said unsteadily, ‘Do you think Willy knows? Ella was the only woman he ever truly loved and I don’t believe he ever stopped loving her. He offered her sanctuary many times, but she always said that her heart belonged to Russia and that she would never leave it. Her death – and for her to have died in such a cruel, hideous manner – is going to break his heart.’

On 11 November 1918, in a stationary railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne, an armistice was ratified by six signatories. The news was formally announced in London a little before eleven o’clock, and immediately great crowds began descending on Buckingham Palace from every direction, choking every inch of The Mall, from the palace gates all the way back to Trafalgar Square and the Strand.