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Chapters (54)
  1. Cover
  2. The Summer Queen
  3. Dedication Page
  4. Family Tree of King George III
  5. Family Tree of Queen Victoria
  6. PART ONE
  7. Chapter One
  8. Chapter Two
  9. Chapter Three
  10. Chapter Four
  11. Chapter Five
  12. Chapter Six
  13. Chapter Seven
  14. Chapter Eight
  15. Chapter Nine
  16. Chapter Ten
  17. Chapter Eleven
  18. Chapter Twelve
  19. Chapter Thirteen
  20. PART TWO
  21. Chapter Fourteen
  22. Chapter Fifteen
  23. Chapter Sixteen
  24. Chapter Seventeen
  25. Chapter Eighteen
  26. Chapter Nineteen
  27. Chapter Twenty
  28. Chapter Twenty-One
  29. Chapter Twenty-Two
  30. Chapter Twenty-Three
  31. Chapter Twenty-Four
  32. PART THREE
  33. Chapter Twenty-Five
  34. Chapter Twenty-Six
  35. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  36. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  37. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  38. Chapter Thirty
  39. Chapter Thirty-One
  40. Chapter Thirty-Two
  41. PART FOUR
  42. Chapter Thirty-Three
  43. Chapter Thirty-Four
  44. Chapter Thirty-Five
  45. Chapter Thirty-Six
  46. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  47. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  48. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  49. Chapter Forty
  50. Chapter Forty-One
  51. Acknowledgements
  52. Select Bibliography
  53. The Summer Queen
  54. By Margaret Pemberton

As they approached the chapel, and in a moment she was never to forget, the solution occurred to her. She would simply pretend that the vast clan of extended family was not there; that there wasn’t a member of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, of Hohenzollern, of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, of Romanov (apart from Sergei) in sight. That there was no aged German Emperor, no German Crown Prince and Princess; no Uncle Wales and Aunt Alix; no Uncle Affie – a brother of whom her mother had not been fond – and Aunt Marie; no Uncle Christian and Aunt Lenchen, who had been her mother’s favourite sister; no spinster Aunt Beatrice; none of the groom’s Battenberg relations; none of the army of cousins who were not part of the bridal party. The only two guests she would mentally acknowledge as being there were Granny Queen and Sergei and, in that way, glacially composed and not allowing a flicker of expression to cross her face, she would survive the experience of being on public show. It was a trick she learned that – with disastrous consequences – she would depend on for the rest of her life.

Chapter Six

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APRIL 1884, NEW PALACE, DARMSTADT

Once the wedding breakfast was under way, some of Alicky’s tension began to ebb. Conversation and laughter – bellows of it, where Uncle Wales was concerned – filled the vast room, and Alicky was able to do what she liked doing best: sitting as unobtrusively out of sight as possible and watching what was going on around her, without the torment of being an active part of it.

The palace where the wedding breakfast was taking place had been built only a few years before her birth and was known as the New Palace. Her mother had had a very large say in its design and, like Osborne, it was elegantly Italianate. The rooms were large and airy, with high ceilings and French doors opening onto delicately arched loggias. In every room were reminders that her mother had been very much an English princess: a daughter of Queen Victoria. A portrait of Granny Queen with Grandpa Albert dominated the main drawing room, while on other walls there were individual portraits of all her mother’s eight siblings, from Vicky, now Crown Princess of Prussia and Willy’s mother, all the way down to Princess Beatrice, the only one of Granny Queen’s children still unmarried.

In the ballroom where the wedding breakfast was taking place was a full-size portrait of her great-great-grandfather, King George III, resplendent in his coronation robes and painted at a time when he was still young and rosy-cheeked.