May’s knees gave way in relief and she sank down onto the nearest chair. An armistice. A truce. An end to the hostilities while a peace was negotiated. Never had any news been so welcome. ‘Oh, thank God,’ she said weakly, from the bottom of her heart. ‘Thank God!’
Willy wasn’t thanking God. He was struggling with all his might to understand the disaster happening all around him.
‘The war,’ Prince Max of Baden, his newly appointed Chancellor, said to him grimly over the telephone on 8 November, ‘is not as good as lost. It has been lost – and if civil war in Germany is to be avoided, there is no other alternative but for you to abdicate.’
Max was in Berlin. Willy was at Military Headquarters, hundreds of miles away at Spa.
‘Abdicate?’ Willy roared, hardly able to believe his ears. ‘I’m not a lily-livered ninny like Nicky Romanov! I’m a successor of Frederick the Great, and a successor to Frederick the Great does not abdicate.’ And, with great fury, he slammed the receiver back on its rest.
He swung round to view himself in the nearest mirror. He was fifty-nine and, unlike a lot of the men his age, was still a fine figure of a man. His figure had thickened over the years, but he didn’t have a paunch. His strong-boned facial features had held up well. His jawline was still arrogantly firm; his nose, unmarked by red veins, was just as jutting as ever; the cleft in his chin still gave him a look of great panache.
Rather than abdicate, he would go to the Front and lead his army himself. In his mind’s eye he could see himself doing it. He could see himself, like a legendary hero in a romantic saga, dying a glorious death at the head of his troops.
Unfortunately, no one else could. With capitulation staring them in the face, all his generals were unanimous that the war was lost; and they, like Max, insisted that his abdication was the only thing that could save Germany from disintegration.
‘Then I shall abdicate as German Emperor but remain King of Prussia,’ he announced grandly, when faced with the inevitable, only to discover, with overwhelming disbelief, that no one was listening to him any longer.
Two days later, without even having had another conversation with Willy, Max announced his abdication, and the abdication of his eldest son and heir.
‘Impossible!’ Willy bellowed when the news was brought to him. ‘Preposterous! No one can abdicate a throne except the person sitting on it.’
‘But they have,’ he was told bluntly by his generals. ‘Germany is now a republic, you are no longer Kaiser – and you cannot,’ they added, even more bluntly, ‘remain in Germany, not unless you want to meet the same fate as the Tsar did. You must go into exile.’
Exile. His first thought was England, but having waged war against it for four years, even he realized that England was an impossibility. One of his generals suggested Holland.
‘Queen Wilhelmina is a cousin of yours, isn’t she?’ the general in question said. ‘I’m sure she will grant you asylum.’
Within hours, news came back from The Hague that Willy would be welcome in Holland as a guest of a Count Bentinck at the count’s castle at Amerongen. He was to leave for Holland immediately. Dona, and other members of his family who wished, would follow afterwards.
On the imperial train and in a private carriage in which, ironically, hung a photograph of his grandmother taken at Osborne House, Willy left Germany behind for good. He was no longer the Kaiser. He was no longer Germany’s All-Highest. And all he felt was the most incredible, overwhelming relief. Never again would he have to pretend to be someone he wasn’t, in order to fulfil his position as an emperor. Never again would he have to play-act. From now on he could simply be himself. An entire new world of freedom was opening up before him. And he knew how he was going to celebrate it.
Looking out at the flat fields of Holland, he rang the bell that summoned his aide-de-camp. ‘I would like,’ he said to him in great good humour, ‘a cup of very good, extra-strong English tea.’
In England things were moving with such speed it was hard for May to keep up. From Germany had come news of Willy’s abdication and exile in Holland.
‘And at any moment we will be receiving news that the armistice has been signed,’ George said to her. ‘When news of it is given, the British people are going to descend on the palace in cheering hordes. We are going to have to make appearance after appearance on the balcony.’
‘Yes, George.’ She knew what it was that he was really telling her. He was telling her it was imperative there were no dark thoughts on their minds when, from Buckingham Palace’s balcony, they faced the jubilant crowds. He was telling her that, for a short while at least, they must somehow shut out the memories of July.
When he had hurried away to meet Prime Minister David Lloyd George, she walked into her private sitting room. It wasn’t much different from how Queen Victoria’s sitting room had been. If it was one thing her Aunt Queen’s descendants had in common, it was the need to surround themselves with family photographs and memorabilia.
Central on her desk was a photograph of Nicky and Alicky and all five of their children. It was a carefree, happy photograph that had been taken at Cowes when they had last visited England.
Slowly she took off her hat and removed her gloves, thinking back to July. Remembering.
The news had come totally out of the blue. They had known, of course, that ever since Nicky’s abdication eighteen months earlier, he and Alicky and the children had been living under house arrest. They had received news via the British Ambassador in Petrograd when the family had been moved – for what had been described as their own safety – to Tobolsk, in Siberia. Later they had received the information that they had been moved again, this time to Ekaterinburg, a town three hundred miles to the west.
She and George had been at Windsor, enjoying a Sunday lunch with Marie-Louise and her parents, when George had been called away from the table to take an urgent telephone call.
When he re-entered the room, the man she had always known had vanished forever. In his place was a man suffering mental agony; a man who had aged two decades.
‘Nicky,’ he had said dazedly. ‘Those damned bloody Bolsheviks have murdered Nicky.’
There had been no news of Alicky and the children. Even after the atrocity of Nicky’s murder, it hadn’t occurred to anyone to wonder if they, too, had suffered a similar fate. That such a thing might have happened to them had been beyond imagination.
Twenty-four hours later they had been faced with the ultimate horror.
‘How,’ George had said to her, struggling for speech, ‘was I to know that because I had refused them asylum, they would be killed in such a ghastly manner? Who could possibly believe that such a thing could happen?’
Hunched and ashen in the seventh circle of hell, he had locked himself into his stamp room, tears streaming down his face.
May looked at the photograph now. Nicky had his arm around Alicky’s shoulders. Alicky was staring straight at the camera, not smiling, but then Alicky never smiled in photographs. Her eyes, though, were smiling. She had been happy that day; happy to be back in England where she had spent so much time as a young girl; happy with her family around her. Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia were all wearing straw boaters decorated with wild flowers. Alexei’s arms were around the neck of his little pet dog. How, when that photograph had been taken, could anyone possibly have imagined the horror lying in wait for them?
With an unsteady hand she poured herself a stiff brandy.
Details of what had happened had reached them a week later, when White Russian forces loyal to Nicky had taken Ekaterinburg and one of the executioners had been captured and interrogated. According to his statement, on the night of 16 July the family had been told that, as White Russian forces were advancing on Ekaterinburg, they were to be moved to yet another destination and were to go into one of the basement rooms to await the arrival of their transport.
This, together with three members of their household, they had done. There had been n
o chairs in the room and, at Nicky’s request, two chairs had been brought in, one for Alicky and one for Alexei, who was recovering from a bleed in his knee and couldn’t stand. Then, under the orders of Yakov Yurovsky, the man in charge of the family’s captivity, eleven men had entered the room armed with revolvers. Yurovsky had told Nicky that he and his family were about to be shot. Nicky had said a bewildered, ‘What? What?’ and then the executioner had shot him between the eyes. Then the men had opened fire on Alicky, Alexei, Olga, Tatiana, Marie, Anastasia and the three members of the household. The room was small, the shooting chaotic, the smoke thick, and the men resorted to bayonets. The jewels sewn into the girls’ clothing acted as armour, and as they screamed and ran, they were bayoneted time and again. The floor became slippery with blood and what should have taken five minutes had taken twenty.
The account was so graphic May knew she would never forget a word of it; that the words – and the unspeakable images they conjured up – would be her private nightmare for as long as she lived.
On the day she, George and other members of their family attended a memorial service for Nicky, Alicky and their children, news arrived that Ella, too, had been murdered by the Bolsheviks.
‘They threw her down a mine shaft,’ George said, his voice cracking and breaking, tears rolling down a face that the war had lined with deep grooves. ‘She was still alive, May, and the fiends threw her down a mine shaft and left her to die. The local peasants say that for days they could hear her singing hymns and that her singing grew fainter and fainter and then – nothing.’
It was a long time before May could trust herself to speak and, when she did, she said unsteadily, ‘Do you think Willy knows? Ella was the only woman he ever truly loved and I don’t believe he ever stopped loving her. He offered her sanctuary many times, but she always said that her heart belonged to Russia and that she would never leave it. Her death – and for her to have died in such a cruel, hideous manner – is going to break his heart.’
On 11 November 1918, in a stationary railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne, an armistice was ratified by six signatories. The news was formally announced in London a little before eleven o’clock, and immediately great crowds began descending on Buckingham Palace from every direction, choking every inch of The Mall, from the palace gates all the way back to Trafalgar Square and the Strand.
Inside the palace, George had dressed in his admiral’s uniform. ‘Has Mary arrived?’ he asked May anxiously. ‘I so want Mary to share in this moment with us, even though the boys can’t.’
‘Mary is here, and so is Uncle Arthur.’
Uncle Arthur was Daisy Connaught’s father.
She, too, would have liked the boys to have been able to step out onto the red and gold-draped balcony with them, but in the end the Armistice had been so sudden that none of them had been able to reach London in time. David was with his regiment. Bertie, who had transferred from the Royal Navy to the Royal Air Force, was completing pilot training at St Leonards-on-Sea. George was at naval college, Henry was at Eton and their disabled youngest son, John, was with his nurse at Sandringham.
From beyond the open windows came the deafening roar: ‘We want the King! We want the King! We want the King!’
‘What a day,’ George’s Uncle Arthur said emotionally, dabbing at his eyes with a huge purple handkerchief. ‘There’s never been one like it in history! Never!’
Shouts of ‘We want Queen Mary!’ had now joined the shouts of ‘We want the King!’
‘I think it’s time, darling,’ George said.
‘Yes.’ She was bare-headed and had slipped a fur coat around her shoulders. ‘I’m ready, George.’
With Arthur and their daughter behind them, they stepped out onto the balcony and, amidst a sea of waving Union Jacks and streamers, the world erupted into a maelstrom of deafening cheers and whistles and the singing of the national anthem.
They had survived, and so – no longer Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, but Windsor – had their dynasty.
‘I think,’ George said, under cover of the tumult and for the first time in their long married life, ‘that I love you with all my heart, May Teck.’
‘Yes, George.’ Her face was radiant. ‘I know.’
Acknowledgements
Huge thanks are due to my life-enhancing publisher, Wayne Brookes, and to my editor, Alex Saunders. Without Alex’s constant support The Summer Queen might never have been finished and certainly wouldn’t have been as much fun to write. Thanks are also due to copy editor Mandy Greenfield, desk editor Sam Sharman, my eagle-eyed proofreader, Marian Reid, and to my agent at Curtis Brown, Sheila Crowley, and her assistant, Abbie Greaves.
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The Summer Queen
Margaret Pemberton is the bestselling author of over thirty novels in many different genres, some of which are contemporary in setting and some historical.
She has served as Chairman of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and has three times served as a committee member of the Crime Writers’ Association. Born in Bradford, she is married to a Londoner, has five children and two dogs, and lives in Whitstable, Kent. Apart from writing, her passions are tango, travel, English history and the English countryside.
By Margaret Pemberton
Rendezvous with Danger The Mystery of Saligo Bay
Vengeance in the Sun The Guilty Secret
Tapestry of Fear
African Enchantment Flight to Verechenko
A Many-Splendoured Thing Moonflower Madness
Forget-Me-Not Bride Party in Peking
Devil’s Palace Lion of Languedoc
The Far Morning Forever
Yorkshire Rose The Flower Garden
Silver Shadows, Golden Dreams Never Leave Me
A Multitude of Sins White Christmas in Saigon
An Embarrassment of Riches Zadruga
The Four of Us The Londoners
Magnolia Square Coronation Summer
A Season of Secrets Beneath the Cypress Tree
The Summer Queen
Writing as Rebecca Dean
Enemies of the Heart Palace Circle
The Golden Prince Wal
lis
Writing as Maggie Hudson
Fast Women Tell Me No Secrets
Nowhere to Run Looking for Mr Big
First published 2019 by Pan Books
This electronic edition first published 2019 by Pan Books
An imprint of Pan Macmillan
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ISBN 978-1-5098-4179-0
Copyright © Margaret Pemberton 2019
Cover Images: woman © Richard Jenkins, background © Steve Vidler/Alamy
The right of Margaret Pemberton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
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