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from the butlers to the janitors, was
suspected of being a secret revolutionary. Furthermore, the servants were themselves in a constant state of dread, for they firmly believed that the ghost of the murdered Emperor Paul I walked the
corridors of Gatchina, and many of them swore they had seen it. 4
    Immured in the gloomy, low-ceilinged rooms of medieval Gatchina, troubled by an unspoken dread of his dynastic future, Nicky took his pleasures where he could find them. He liked walking with
his father in the palace grounds in the summer, wading into muddy ponds to look for tadpoles or wandering into orchards and picking apples off the trees. It amused him when his father, who had a
vehement dislike of foreign royalty, once turned the hose on the king of Sweden. Nicky enjoyed watching his cleverer brother Georgy, with whom he had his lessons, embarrass their tutors with his
pointed questions. (Once Georgy cornered the pompous geography tutor and demanded to know whether he had personally seen the lands and seas he described to them; the poor man had to admit that he
had not.) When Georgy’s green parrot Popka imitated their hated English tutor Mr Heath, jumping up and down on hisperch and speaking with an exaggerated British
accent, Nicky could not stop laughing. 5
    Indifferent to the workings of government, and left largely in ignorance of them by his father, Nicky was happiest when outdoors, occupied in building snow houses in winter, or chopping wood or
planting trees. He was often preoccupied, his cousin Alexander (‘Sandro’) thought, his mind wandering to far-off things, his clear blue eyes fixed on some distant reverie. 6
    Whether, and how frequently, Nicky thought about his young cousin Alicky in Darmstadt during his moments of reverie is difficult to say, but certainly she thought of him very often. By the time
she was thirteen, she knew that she loved him, and confided her feelings to her best friend Toni Becker when the latter came to the palace for gymnastic and dancing lessons. 7 Toni’s father, who had once been private secretary to Queen Victoria and Albert, had come to Darmstadt as private secretary to Alicky’s mother; he stayed
on after Alice’s death and his daughter was at the palace nearly every day. 8 Reserved as she was with others, Alicky told her secrets to
Toni: that she loved her cousin Nicky, that she would soon be a bridesmaid for the first time, at the wedding of her Aunt Beatrice who was to marry Henry of Battenberg, that she did not like her
cousin Eddy at all, though her grandmother wanted her to marry him.
    Eddy, Uncle Bertie’s oldest son, was among the least appealing of Alicky’s cousins. Despite being tall and good-looking, he seemed both backwards and clinging; unlike his younger
brother George he never seemed to leave his mother’s side, and followed her, often with one arm draped around her neck, wherever she went. Lazy and listless, with little intelligence and much
evident sensuality, Eddy was a disappointment to his father, and even his stoutly loyal grandmother Queen Victoria could not help speculating that he might soon be lost to a life of vice. Of
course, marriage to a strong, patient woman would be an antidote to this, and as Alicky grew older her inner strength and patience seemed more and more in evidence. The queen continued to hope that
Alicky would in time accept the obvious honour of becoming Eddy’s wife and future queen.
    Alicky – now more and more known as Alix, as she reached her mid-teens – continued to nurture her infatuation with her Russian cousin Nicky, and continued to
hear about him in her sister Ella’s letters. 9 But they did not meet, and meanwhile her social world widened to include a variety of other
young men. There were the officers of the Hesse regiments, there were her brother Ernie’s friends from the university, there were the young men who attended the tea dances given at Darmstadt
for her sister Irene, who at twenty