Her writing came to yet another halt. Certainly her parents knew of the St Petersburg wedding, for her mother had brought up the subject of how extraordinary it was that the Romanovs were uncaring of the possibility that Ella might bring her branch of the family’s bleeding disease into their bloodline. No one, of course, knew when, or if, the bleeding disease might strike, and in lots and lots of cases it never struck at all, which was presumably why Louis of Battenberg, with so much to gain from his marriage to Vicky, had thought marriage to her well worth the risk. Another reason was that neither he nor Vicky was in direct line of succession to Aunt Queen’s throne, and so if a child of theirs did inherit the disease, the tragedy would be a personal one, not a major dynastic one.

It was different, however, for Sergei, who was the Tsar’s next brother in age and who, although not in immediate line of succession to the Romanov throne, was certainly high up in line.

May raised her face to the blissful heat of the Umbrian sun and continued thinking about the hereditary sickness that ran like an ancient curse through the lives of Aunt Queen’s children and grandchildren, and which – as she wasn’t a direct descendant of Aunt Queen – mercifully hadn’t affected her and her brothers. Its medical name was haemophilia, but ‘the bleeding disease’ was how it was always referred to within the family. The first person to suffer from it had been her Uncle Leopold, Aunt Queen’s eighth child, whose blood ever since babyhood had refused to clot in the normal manner.

‘When your poor dear Aunt Queen was told Leopold was a haemophiliac, she was utterly bewildered,’ her mother had said when explaining it to her. ‘Why would a disease, which Aunt Queen’s doctors have told her is only passed down in the female line and only affects male offspring, have suddenly showed itself in her lineage? There is absolutely no explanation for it. Even worse for Aunt Queen is the knowledge that although her daughters and granddaughters will never suffer from the disease, they are carriers of it, and any sons they have are at risk of being born with it.’

After a life of pain when every bump and knock caused excruciating bleeding into his joints, her nice, kind Uncle Leopold had died of a brain haemorrhage. It was the same way that, after a fall, Alicky’s haemophiliac little brother Frittie had died. In the extended family descended directly from Aunt Queen, ‘haemophilia’ was a word that was never spoken, but was never far from their thoughts.