Nothing over the next couple of days made Alicky change her opinion. Sergei had told her that the Winter Palace was magnificent beyond description, but as he was a Romanov speaking of the most famous of all Romanov palaces, she had thought his description nothing but natural pride and exaggeration. It wasn’t. Buckingham Palace was splendid, its grandeur impressive, but elegantly restrained. There was nothing restrained about the interior of the Winter Palace.

They had stepped from their coach into the palace’s central courtyard and, with Cossacks lining every foot of the way, and walking just behind Ella and Sergei, they had been escorted through a grandiose entrance into a room colonnaded with gilded columns. At the far end of the room, bathed in light from a cathedral-high bank of windows and walls of glittering mirrors, rose a staircase of breathtaking splendour. A vision of white marble and gold, it rose in two separate curving wings to meet on a balconied landing. There, framed by gold-topped jasper pillars, the Tsar and Tsarina of all the Russias were waiting to greet them.

Alicky sucked in her breath and slid her hand into Irène’s. Irène gave it a reassuring squeeze. ‘I know you haven’t met Uncle Sasha since you were too young to remember, and that you haven’t met Aunt Minny for ages,’ she whispered, ‘but they are your godparents. There is absolutely no reason at all to be shy.’

Her Uncle Sasha was a bear of a man, six-and-a-half feet tall, his shoulders massive, his face heavily bearded. With flushed cheeks, Alicky sank into a curtsey. Jovially he put out a hand and raised her to her feet. ‘The last time I saw you, little squirrel, you were small enough for me to throw into the air and catch!’ His voice was deep and booming, not at all like Sergei’s, but he was looking at her with the same kind of family interest that Sergei always looked at her with, and remembering that he was Sergei’s brother enabled her to fight down her shyness.

There was no need for shyness in the presence of her thirty-six-year-old aunt, for she was Aunt Alix Wales’s sister and she was so like Aunt Alix, and her manner so reassuringly similar, that Alicky’s nervous tension soon evaporated.

When they had gathered in a formal reception room that linked the state rooms to the private rooms, her aunt said, ‘Nicky and the children are on their way from Peterhof and are very much looking forward to meeting you.’

For a second, Alicky had no idea to whom her aunt was referring, and then she remembered that Nicky was Uncle Sasha’s son and heir, the sixteen-year-old Tsesarevich, and that the children she had spoken of must be his younger siblings.