We had such good times, May. I do wish you had been with us. Nicky has two brothers and two sisters. Georgy is thirteen. Xenia is nine. Misha is five and Olga is two. They are all terrifically nice and I played with them every day I was there. Nicky doesn’t call me Alicky; he calls me by my second baptismal name, Alix. My first name is Victoria, after Granny Queen, and I expect your first name is, too. Because of Aunt Alix, my being called Alix makes me feel very grown-up, but I don’t want everyone calling me Alix. Only Nicky.

Before we left Peterhof we scratched our names into a pane of glass in a little summerhouse so that our names will be there forever and ever. Don’t you think that is romantic? And please, please, please don’t say that we are too young to be romantic. Kindred Spirit Willy’s mama was only fourteen when his papa offered for her, and in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is only thirteen. And when everything in your head and your heart tells you that someone is the right person for you, then it doesn’t matter how old you are when it happens. I’m back home in Darmstadt now, but Ella says she will invite me to stay with her and Sergei, and I can’t wait to be in St Petersburg again. It’s the most magical place you can imagine.

Filled with an unpleasant feeling of unease, May stopped reading. Of all the people for Alicky to have developed a crush on, Nicholas Romanov, who, on his father’s death, would be Tsar Nicholas, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias, was about the most unsuitable – and the most unlikely. Unsuitable because there was no way Aunt Queen’s deep Russophobia would tolerate a second Hesse-Darmstadt granddaughter marrying a Romanov, especially when she would one day be Russia’s Tsarina, and when Russia’s tsars – although not the present one – had a long history of treating their wives extremely badly. And unlikely because she knew Alicky’s shyness was so intense that she became physically ill when she was the centre of attention. A future life with Nicky – which was surely what Alicky was now dreaming of – would mean a life spent constantly in the public eye.

A butterfly flew into the loggia and, as May watched it, she reflected that Alicky was only twelve and that in another few months she would most likely have a crush on someone else. The butterfly landed on the loggia’s balustrade, its wings a brilliant azure in the strong sunlight. Still watching it, she reminded herself that she had only been twelve when she had developed a crush on Eddy, a crush she had still not entirely recovered from, although common sense had long since ensured that she no longer allowed herself romantic daydreams that couldn’t possibly come true.