The nerves started with the dress rehearsal for the wedding. The white kid slippers she was to wear with her bridesmaid dress were too tight, and she was terrified she wouldn’t be able to walk down the aisle without limping and that, if she did limp, it would look as if she was making fun of Vicky, who had jumped over a coal scuttle for good luck and had injured her leg so badly that she thought she would have to use a stick to get her down the aisle.

It didn’t help that her father had completely abandoned playing host to his scores of guests and had shut himself away in his study, in order, he said, to memorize his Father-of-the-Bride speech; that Granny Queen was still furiously angry at his even contemplating marrying a non-royal divorcee; and that Russian Aunt Marie was causing pandemonium by declaring that the pearl-and-diamond tiara she had been going to wear to the service had been stolen – only for it to be found where she had left it, underneath a shower cap in her bathroom.

‘Let’s hope everything runs like clockwork tomorrow,’ Marie-Louise’s mother said fervently to anyone who would listen. ‘I don’t think I could survive another day like today. Truly I don’t.’

Much to everyone’s relief, she didn’t have to. The next morning Alicky swapped slippers with Marie-Louise, who had been given a pair of slippers a size too big, and which fitted Alicky as perfectly as Alicky’s slippers fitted Marie-Louise. Vicky announced that her leg was no longer painful and she would be walking down the aisle without the aid of a stick. And Alicky’s father emerged from his study full of nervous bonhomie.

Alicky was nervous, too, but in a way that was full of sickly dread – dread that grew as her pretty, satin-sashed bridesmaid dress was slipped over her head and her red-gold hair was crowned with a coronet of lilies-of-the-valley.

‘Hold hands prettily with Marie-Louise,’ she heard her Aunt Lenchen say, as the time came for them to walk in procession towards the east wing and the chapel. ‘As the youngest two bridesmaids, you are going to receive far more attention than the older ones.’

That was the very last thing Alicky wanted to hear. Her fingers tightened on the posy of flowers she was carrying. Somehow she had to get through the agony of being stared at by more than a hundred pairs of eyes, but how?