On a train steaming towards the Russian border, Alicky was almost faint with excited anticipation. She would soon be in St Petersburg. Would Nicky be as pleased to see her as he had been four and a half years ago, the last time she had been there? Four and a half years was a long time. She had been twelve then, little more than a child. Now, nearly seventeen, she was a child no longer. Would he still like her now as much as he had then? And when she saw him again, would he still be her soulmate or would he have become a stranger? She remembered how the two of them had scratched their names within a heart on the windowpane of a little summerhouse. Would Nicky still remember doing so? Would he recall how they had felt about each other?

As the train ate up the miles, its engine blowing clouds of smoke past the carriage windows, she stared into the white billows, her gloved hands clasped so hard that her knuckles hurt.

‘Please God, let Nicky like me as much now as he once did,’ she whispered beneath her breath, when her father and Ernie left the carriage in order to enjoy cigars in the corridor. And then, with the fevered intensity that was so much a part of her nature: ‘Please God, let him more than like me. Let him love, love, love me!’

As they stepped off the train at St Petersburg station, not only were Tsar Uncle Sasha and Ella and Sergei on the platform waiting to greet them, but so were Sergei’s brothers, a brass band and, best of all, Nicky. The last time she had seen him he had been sixteen and, being slightly built and nowhere near as tall as his father and his uncles, had been a young-looking sixteen. Now he was twenty and, wearing a splendid white and gold-braided military uniform and sporting a neat Van Dyke beard, he suddenly seemed to be someone she was meeting for the first time.

As she made her curtsey to Uncle Sasha, Alicky felt her head spin and her stomach churn. Had she been living in a fantasy world for the last four and a half years? Was Nicky only at the station to meet her, and her father and Ernie, because Romanov etiquette dictated he should do so? And then, as her father exchanged pleasantries with Uncle Sasha, Nicky stepped towards her.

With her heart hammering and the blood beating in her ears, knowing that every atom of her future happiness depended on the next few moments, Alicky raised her eyes to his.

In their blue depths was everything that she had hoped to see. The kindness and gentleness that marked him out as a rare and very special kind of man, and as well as the kindness and gentleness – qualities that were of vital importance to her – there was blatant, undisguised pleasure at seeing her again.