Alexandra Page 3

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  Officers in the imperial army told a story about the tsar’s son Nicholas. When he was born, so the story went, he was such a tiny, puny baby that his father Alexander III, who was six feet, six inches tall, muscular, tall and strong was certain that there was something terribly wrong with him. He summoned a doctor, who examined the child and confirmed the tsar’s fears. ‘Your son’s no use,’ the physician said. ‘You must have him shot.’ Instead the doctor was shot, and the baby’s physical shortcomings were never again discussed.1

  Many people, not only army officers, looked askance at the heir to the imperial throne for, having been a puny baby, he grew to be an undersized boy and then, at sixteen, a short, thin young man. When he stood near his father and his uncles, all of whom towered over him, there seemed to be something wrong; how could such a small person, with such slender shoulders, one day carry the burden of the entire Russian empire?

  Had Nicky possessed a more forceful personality, a loud voice, a domineering manner, his physical slightness might have seemed less significant. But his manner was gentle, simple, and direct; in contrast to his blustering father and dignified uncles there was nothing authoritative about him, nothing that inspired fear. He did not carry himself with the air of command to be expected in a young man who would one day inherit a vast empire. Indeed, far from possessing an air of command, he had what one astute contemporary called ‘an almost feminine delicacy’ about him, a sensitivity to the moods and feelings of others that was as remarkable as it was, from a political point of view, unfortunate; Nicky’s sensitivity was seen as weakness, and weakness in a future sovereign, everyone agreed, was certain to prove a dangerous liability.

  Of course, it was precisely Nicky’s sensitivity, along with his sandy-haired, boyish good looks, that attracted Alicky to him. Above all, it was the look in his eyes.

  ‘Of the most delicate shade of blue, they looked you straight in the face with the kindest, tenderest, the most loving expression,’ wrote Sydney Gibbes, who was to know Nicky well later in life. ‘His eyes were so clear that it seemed as if he opened the whole of his soul to your gaze, a soul that was so simple and pure that it did not fear your scrutiny.’2

  If Nicky was subdued, it was in part because he had had a great shock. Only three years earlier, one afternoon at the Winter Palace, he had heard two enormous explosions, and had at once turned white with fear, for a terrorist bomb had gone off in the palace not long before, blowing up the dining room and killing forty soldiers. Shortly after hearing the explosions Nicky saw his grandfather the emperor, his beloved Anpapa, carried into the palace more dead than alive, and laid on a sofa in his study. He had been attacked by a bomb on a St Petersburg street. Twelve-year-old Nicky, in his blue sailor suit, watched with his weeping father and hysterical grandmother as the emperor, his legs mangled and bleeding, lay dying. The ghastly vigil lasted well over an hour, as thousands of Petersburgers gathered in front of the palace, shouting and crying out.

  Only those present in the study ever knew the ghoulishness of that final hour. The dying tsar, shivering, white-faced and in terrible pain, tried to speak, tried to make the sign of the cross. Frantic physicians worked over his broken body but there was no hope, he had lost far too much blood. Everyone in the room, an eyewitness remembered later, was numb with shock and terror. ‘The horror showed in their faces, they sobbed like little children.’ Finally the tsar gasped out his last breaths.

  The event marked young Nicky. Every year thereafter on the anniversary of his grandfather’s assassination, March 1, he paused to remember Anpapa’s ‘excruciating death’. The memory of the two terrible explosions, and their fatal aftermath, never left him.3

  In an effort to protect his family from further harm the new tsar, Alexander III, had moved them to the huge, fortress-like suburban palace of Gatchina, whose nine hundred rooms surrounded two immense courtyards and whose many acres of park, wood and water gave ample space for recreation. Moats and watch towers offered protection against assault, and soldiers surrounding the palace compound were on guard night and day. Nicky and his sisters and brothers had been virtually sequestered at Gatchina ever since their grandfather’s murder, yet even there they could not feel safe. Rumours of revolutionaries carrying mines and bombs intended to destroy the imperial family continued to reach Gatchina, and trenches had to be dug all around the palace to prevent sabotage from underground. Even within the palace itself there was menace, for no one could be certain that all of the thousands of servants were trustworthy; everyone, 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 his perch 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 was still unmarried. When Alix went with her father and sister to London to join in the celebrations surrounding Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1887, she was reunited once again with most of her many cousins, although she was still too young to attend the balls and parties given for the sixty-eight-year-old queen.

  By the time Alix turned sixteen, in the year following her grandmother’s Jubilee, she had grown into a complex young woman with austere tastes, romantic aspirations and a unique nature that was too challenging for most of those who knew her to fathom. Her cousin and childhood friend Marie-Louise, Aunt Helena’s daughter, described her as ‘a most wonderful person’ with ‘a curious atmosphere of fatality’ about her. ‘I once said in the way that cousins can be very rude and outspoken to each other: “Alix, you always play at being sorrowful; one day the Almighty will send you some real crushing sorrows, and then what are you going to do?”’10 The response was not recorded.

  Sir George Buchanan, who knew Alix well in her youth, wrote of her as ‘a beautiful girl, though shy and reserved’, and took note of the ‘sad and pathetic expression’ her face took on at times.11

  But her shyness, reserve and melancholy were counterbalanced by a strong strain of impetuousness and passion, a capacity for stony anger and iron resolve, and at the same time a gift for levity, even frivolity. With a close friend, or with her brother Ernie, she could be bright and cheerful, full of light conversation. One girlhood friend, Minnie Cochrane, remembered that Alix liked to play the banjo, and that the two girls sang duets by the hour.12 Sunshine and shadow seemed to alternate in Alix’s ardent nature, and she withheld herself warily from anyone she did not know well, repressing the more vulnerable and appealing side of her personality and becoming ill at ease. Signs of this discomfort were evident; a flush spread across her face and down her neck, and her cheeks became blotched with red.

  Alix’s sixteenth birthday arrived, in May of 1888, and with its advent she crossed an important threshold. Once a girl reached sixteen she underwent a series of rituals marking her formal entrance into adulthood. For the first time, she pinned up her hair; she abandoned her girlish clothing for low-necked full-skirted gowns; she became confirmed in the church; and, if she was of high birth or wealth, she was formally presented to society at a ball or party. It was understood that at sixteen a girl was ready to become engaged, preferably as quickly as possible so that she did not risk appearing undesirable.

  With Orchie’s help, Alix began pinning up her long, thick reddish–gold hair each day and wore the new gowns her dressmakers provided. Coached by Dr Sell, she prepared successfully for her confirmation in the Lutheran church and by Ella, who came from Russia for the occasion, and by her new lady-in-waiting Gretchen von Fabrice, she prepared for her coming-out ball.

  Perhaps because the many guests at the ball were all familiar to Alix, she was at ease on that evening – or, if she was not at ease, no one recorded her anxiety. Dressed in a simple gown of white tulle, with a string of pearls around her neck and fresh orange blossoms arranged like a crown in her hair and scattered on her gown, she made her entrance into the ballroom and was much admired, presiding alongside her father at the banquet and dancing to the music of the seventy-piece Darmstadt theatre orchestra.

  No one who saw Alix that night could have been in any doubt that she would soon become engaged, for she had beauty, breeding, taste and accomplishments, chief among which was her musical ability. Over the following months, from autumn 1888 to spring 1889, Darmstadt society waited for the expected announcement that the grand duke’s daughter Alexandra had agreed to become the wife of some fortunate man.

  But no announcement was made, and by summer it was beginning to appear as though, against all odds, Alix might actually have to enter her second social season unattached, bearing the stigma of looming spinsterhood.

  Queen Victoria now stepped in in an effort to prevent that disaster. It was the queen’s habit, when she intended to promote a match, to invite both members of the potential couple to one of her residences for a visit at the same time; during the course of their stay, with the queen as chaperone, they were expected to fall in love (or at least acquire a liking for one another) and come to an understanding about their future.

  She invited Alix and Eddy to Balmoral in hope that, under the influence of the wild and romantic Scottish countryside and the almost equally potent influence of their determined grandmother, they would at last do what had long been expected of them by many in their families, including Eddy’s parents. (Many – but not all. Ella had strong reservations about Eddy as a husband for Alix; he was physically feeble and of only mediocre intelligence, and the fact that he would one day be king of England and emperor of India made him no more attractive.)

  For Alix the time at Balmoral must have been awkward at best, and at worst extremely uncomfortable. She listened to Eddy’s protestations of love, she endured her grandmother’s scrutiny and, most likely, her pointed lectures on what a fine husband Eddy would make, how few eligible men there were of appropriate social rank for her to choose from, how her chances of marriage were certain to diminish even further if she waited until she was any older (she was then seventeen) to make up her mind.13 In the end, Alix refused Eddy’s proposal – but neither he nor Queen Victoria quite gave up hope that she would change her mind. ‘We have just a faint lingering hope,’ the queen wrote to her granddaughter Victoria; as for Eddy, he was to be sent abroad to recover from his disappointment.14

  What neither the queen nor Eddy knew was that Alix had acquired a Russian language exercise book, and was applying herself to learning Russian in preparation for her forthcoming visit to Ella – a visit during which, she was certain, she would see a great deal of her cousin Nicky.

  Thick ice crusted the Neva in January of 1890, and deep snowdrifts lined the long, straight boulevard of Nevsky Prospekt where Ella and Serge’s massive red palace stood, squat and four-square, opposite the far grander Anitchkov Palace where the tsar and his family were in residence for the season. The city was in darkness most of the time; a feeble sun rose just above the horizon for a few hours at midday, but its pale wintry light, glowing on the snow, was almost spectral, and in order to provide enough light along the canals and walkways, lanterns had to be kept lit even at noon.

  Horses slipped on the icy streets, the jingling of their harness bells a constant noise from morning until late into the night. For St Petersburg in winter came alive in the evening, when the city’s elite, elegantly gowned and jewelled, drove to one another’s mansions to attend grand soirées. Lines of carriages filled Nevsky Prospekt every night, jostling as they clogged the broad avenue, the drivers in their thick greatcoats shouting and swearing and urging the horses forwards, the thick reins clutched in gloved hands.

  Foreign observers noted a carnival atmosphere among the crowds at St Petersburg dances and receptions, a spirited gaiety that distinguished the highborn Russians from the decorous, ponderous Germans or the homely albeit ceremonious British. The Russians had style, bravado, dash; their mansions, their clothing, their banquets, the very livery of their servants had a splendour that was almost gaudy by comparison with the high society of Western capitals. It was, in part, a lavishness of scale; everything in Russia was large, in keeping with the vast land itself – the fortunes, the aristocratic estates, the style of living. Extravagance and profligacy, among the aristocratic class, were all but taken for granted, an exception being the eccentric tsar himself, who lived quite modestly in his grand palaces and had raised his children on plain food and amid simple furnishings.

  When Alix, her brother and father arrived in the imperial capital the social season was under way, and Ella, an eager hostess who particularly enjoyed giving balls, entertained often. Taking her younger sister under her wing, she showed Alix off in the best drawing rooms and ballrooms of the city
, and often took her to the dances given by the tsarina, Maria Feodorovna (‘Minnie’) at the Anitchkov Palace.

  Alix was content to follow her sister’s lead, despite her dislike of crowds and her wariness among strangers. She was aware that she was being studied and judged, especially by Minnie and the tsar himself, and their scrutiny must have made her self-conscious; she knew that she did not truly fit in, that her manners were considered provincial and her inexpensive clothes almost shabby beside the elaborate gowns of the Russian court ladies. To an extent she lost her self-consciousness when sitting in the theatre, enjoying the delights of the ballet and especially the opera, where she was swept away by the grandeur of the music. But every time she was introduced to new people or stood in a long reception line, her unease was apparent to those around her. They took note of her clumsy curtsy, her inability to make light conversation, her stiffness and uncontrollable blushing. They called her a haughty German, and dismissed her from their thoughts.

  If the reception of the Petersburgers caused Alix strain, the continued pressure she felt to agree to marry her cousin Eddy was an equal source of stress. Throughout the winter of 1890 Queen Victoria kept up her campaign to bring about the match, writing letters to Alix herself and to other family members. Far away though she was, the queen maintained a nervous watch on Alix in Russia, aided by letters from Minnie to her sister the Princess of Wales, Bertie’s wife Alexandra. (Minnie and Alexandra were Danish princesses, daughters of King Christian IX.)

  What Minnie told Alexandra was uncompromising and rather harsh. A wife would soon have to be found for Nicky, Minnie told her sister in England, but it would not be Alix. For one thing, it would never do for the youngest daughter of an undistinguished grand duke to marry the heir to the Russian throne. Besides, Alix was not personally suited to be tsarina. She was too hard, she lacked grace and tact, she did not have the gift of making people like her.