Alexandra Page 4

  Alexandra passed on to her mother-in-law Queen Victoria all that Minnie told her, adding that Minnie was ‘very annoyed’ that an attachment had been allowed to develop between Alix and Nicky. She had in mind another young woman to be Nicky’s wife: Hélène, daughter of the Count of Paris, who was the pretender to the French throne. Hélène would be preferable in every way, and a Franco-Russian union would reinforce prevailing diplomatic currents.

  While their elders worried and schemed, Alix and Nicky met frequently, often when Ella brought them together at social gatherings. For if the Russian sovereigns and Queen Victoria were vehemently opposed to any thought of marriage between the two young people, Ella and Serge were enthusiastically in favour of it.15 Nicky and Alix skated together, sometimes battling winds so forceful that they could hardly move. They met at tea parties, they attended church services together. They played badminton, built snow fortresses, and slid down immense ice hills on sledges. Ella staged a performance of Eugene Onegin at her private theatre and persuaded Nicky to play a small part; whether Alix had a part is unknown, but doubtless she watched the rehearsals and chatted with Nicky during them.16

  Alix and Nicky were falling in love. For Alix it was a deepening of the feeling she had cherished for five years, while Nicky’s desire for his beautiful cousin grew ‘stronger and more tender’, he afterwards wrote, during their winter in St Petersburg. The fact that both were being strongly influenced to choose other marriage partners must have intensified their bond, and made it more romantic.

  On the last Sunday of the carnival season, a small end-of-season party was held at Tsarskoe Selo, the imperial estate some thirteen miles south of St Petersburg, for Nicky’s family and close friends. The dancing began in the afternoon, followed by a dinner of blinis with fresh caviar, then a cotillion, with gifts for all the guests and more dancing until late into the evening. Most likely Alix was not able to dance all evening, her legs were not strong enough, and knowing that she would soon be leaving Russia may have saddened her.

  Carnival was in its last waning hours and Lent, the long season of austerity, was about to begin. At midnight a signal was given and immediately the musicians stopped playing and the dance floor cleared. The mood in the ballroom turned solemn. The dancers sat down to a Fasting Meal of mushrooms, cabbage and potatoes, their minds adjusting to the swift change of atmosphere.

  For Alix and Nicky, who had spent so many intense hours in each other’s company, it was almost their last evening together. A long season of deprivation had begun.

  4

  Shortly after she returned home to Darmstadt, in April or May of 1890, Alix sat down to write a letter to her cousin Eddy. She knew that she had to give him a final, definitive answer. In her own mind, there was nothing but certainty that Nicky was the one she wanted to marry – though after her disapproving reception by his parents during her stay in St Petersburg, she must have wondered if her hopes were futile.

  Alix told Eddy, in kind but firm language, that although it ‘pained her to pain him’, she had to say once and for all that she could not marry him. She was sure that they would not be happy together. She urged him to put her out of his mind, assured him of her cousinly affection, and closed her letter.1

  To her grandmother she put her case somewhat differently, saying that if she were ‘forced’ by the family to go against her inclinations and her better judgment, she would do her duty and marry Eddy, but that if she did, in the end both of them would be miserable.

  The queen, who was after all humane and reasonable, was apparently convinced that Alix was right, or at least that she was unshakable in her feelings and opinions, and gave in, though her disappointment and that of Eddy’s parents was considerable, and Eddy himself was crushed. She decided that Alix had shown ‘great strength of character’ in holding firm against so much family persuasion, though she thought it a shame that her stubborn granddaughter was refusing what she considered ‘the greatest position there is’.2

  Alix was headstrong, Ella was very eager for her to marry in Russia, Nicky was lovesick: it was all but inevitable that Alix would return to Russia, and soon.

  As for Alix’s father Louis, although Queen Victoria admonished him to be ‘strong and firm’ in directing his daughter’s future, he was at best passive; he had become an unhappy man, and was unwell. After his disastrous marriage to Alexandrine von Kolemine (a marriage quickly annulled, with Madame von Kolemine given a large cheque and sent away), Louis was scorned by all his in-laws and lonely in Darmstadt. He took refuge with Queen Victoria in England for a while, but even there he was harassed by his former mistress, and could find no peace.3 Russia was one of the few places where he was beyond the reach of the vengeful Alexandrine von Kolemine, and was not made to feel a pariah. Thus when Ella invited him to return there, to stay with her and Serge at their country estate of Illinsky near Moscow, he was only too glad to accept her invitation.

  When Alix, her brother and father arrived once again in Russia in the summer of 1890 the snow had melted and, in the immense expanses of agricultural land around Moscow, fields of green flax and golden wheat stretched away towards the horizon. The vast stretches of meadow and plain were broken here and there by groves of birch and deep pine forests, and as the travellers made their way along the rutted roads, they passed through dozens of small villages. Each village, it seemed, had its own blue-domed church, its own pond or stream; the small wooden houses, many of them intricately carved with patterns of stars and flowers, garlands and arches, clustered along a single narrow unpaved refuse-clogged street. Here and there along the road, planks were laid down to cover deep mudholes. In some places the wooden bridges crossing streams had been swept away by swollen waters, and the travellers had to take long detours.

  The quiet of the countryside, the long stretches of road between villages and the expansive forest glades, where the white trunks of the birches rose out of clumps of blooming forget-me-nots, moss and thick grass, were soothing to the spirit; Alix, who craved quiet and solitude, must have felt refreshed by her surroundings, despite her nervousness at the prospect of seeing Nicky again.

  Ella and Serge’s summer house at Illinsky was a rambling, rustic structure with wide balconies skirting the large inner rooms. Light, flowery English prints covered the furniture and curtained the windows, and fresh flowers brightened the wood-panelled rooms. They kept open house; friends came and went, sometimes staying for weeks at a time. The atmosphere was informal, and on fine days everyone stayed outside as much as possible, taking a picnic lunch into the forest, hunting for mushrooms, swimming in the cool ponds or simply reading in the shade of a large tree. The long hours of daylight encouraged wakefulness. Sometimes, on warm starry nights, gypsy choruses came to serenade in the garden, and all the neighbours gathered to listen, afterwards waiting up together to watch for the break of dawn.

  Always in the background of Alix’s thoughts was what Ella had told her, that Nicky would probably come to Illinsky to join the rest of the family in celebrating Ella’s name day, September 18. She daydreamed about him, longing for September to come. Yet in her soberer moments she ‘thought she would never get him’, and must have confided her anxieties to Ella.4

  Meanwhile Nicky had told his father that he was in love with Alix and wanted to marry her, and was fighting an urge to go to Illinsky even earlier than Ella’s name day celebration. He was prevented from going, for the time being, by having to be present for army manoeuvres, but he confided to his diary that if he didn’t go, he would miss his chance to see her and would have to ‘wait a whole year, and that’s hard!!!’5

  As heir to the throne Nicky was not free to go where he liked, when he liked. His parents guarded his movements, as they kept close watch on whom he saw and where he went. They were still pressuring him to marry the French princess Hélène, and he was still resisting. And there was a new complication in his emotional life. His father, thinking that it was time his twenty-two-year-old son had a mistress, arranged for
Nicky to meet the eighteen-year-old Matilda Kchessinsky, the newest star graduate of the Imperial Ballet School. The dark, lithe Matilda, vibrant and charming, immediately appealed to Nicky, who fell ‘passionately in love’ with her while at the military camp in the summer of 1890. They were not yet lovers – that would come in time – but, much to Nicky’s surprise, he now cherished two loves at once.

  ‘The heart is a surprising thing!’ Nicky wrote in his diary. He never stopped thinking about Alix, yet he yearned for Matilda as well. ‘Should I conclude from all this that I am exceptionally amorous? To a certain extent, yes.’6

  Amorous Nicky was – partly because of his age, partly because of his emotional, sensitive nature, and partly, one suspects, because he was given too little to do. All but prevented by his father from preparing for his future role as tsar – Alexander III had little respect for Nicky, and preferred his son Michael – Nicky lived the feckless life of a young officer with very light military duties, staying out too late at night, drinking too much, whiling away his days socializing and his nights in dining, gambling and flirting. He often felt lethargic; his mind was perpetually underoccupied and although he occasionally attended a session of the imperial council, he was inattentive and emerged unenlightened.

  His education had been poor – a smattering of science, a whiff of law and economics, a heavy concentration on the basics of military strategy and command – artillery training, surveying and topography, the art of fortification. He had an interest in history, but hardly pursued it, beyond leafing through a historical journal on occasion. He was bored, understimulated, often on the verge of falling asleep. At times, reduced to complete inactivity, he gazed out through the railings of the palace grounds ‘for something to do’.7

  In his idleness he daydreamed about Alix, about Matilda Kchessinsky – and, before many months had passed, he acquired a new love, Olga Dolgoruky.8

  Unaware of the course Nicky’s emotional life was taking, caught up in her own infatuation for him, Alix counted the days until September 18, while in the fields around Illinsky the grain ripened and in the orchards the branches of the trees drooped low, heavy with apples, pears and plums. Ella took Alix and Ernie to Moscow – their first sight of the wondrous city of the golden domes and clanging bells – and led them on expeditions through country markets, where old toothless women sold green, yellow and pink mushrooms in homemade birchbark baskets and choruses of red-shirted peasant boys sang and danced to the accompaniment of accordions and tambourines. The rich exuberance of peasant life, the abundance and variety of the crops, the warm late-summer evenings lit with coloured lanterns and enlivened with dancing bears and twirling gypsies, all delighted her. This was Russia, Nicky’s inheritance. This was where she hoped to make her home, as Ella had.

  But Ella, she was forced to acknowledge, had made a flawed bargain. Serge, who on his visits to Darmstadt had always seemed to be a benign, avuncular presence, was turning out to be someone else entirely. Now that he was Ella’s husband, Serge had become her jailer. He controlled where she went, whom she saw, how she spent her time. His jealousy of her companions made him hateful, even cruel. Ella could not write a letter or read a book without running the gauntlet of his suspicions. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, with its Russian background and theme of adulterous love, was forbidden to Ella because, according to Serge, it might arouse ‘unhealthy curiosity and violent emotion’.9

  Even more troubling was the way Serge criticized Ella, sometimes in front of others, calling her ‘my child’ in a scathing voice. Strained in each other’s presence, Ella and Serge appeared to avoid spending time together, especially when Serge was in one of his surly moods. Alix watched her tall, gaunt brother-in-law, his eyes cold and his lips pressed tightly together, nervously turning a jewelled ring he wore on his little finger, and was thoughtful. This too was a part of Nicky’s inheritance: haughty, scornful Serge, and the others in Nicky’s very large extended family. What would it be like to live among these people?10

  Although Ella professed to be content with her life, and Serge’s fearsome, domineering side was not always in evidence, what Alix could observe of the troubled relationship between her sister and her husband must have given her pause. Ella, walking out with Alix on fine days, her complexion shaded by a green-lined parasol, appeared lovelier than ever, her grey-blue eyes unclouded. She occupied herself with her religious devotions – she had become a communicant of the Orthodox church – and in designing and sewing her own gowns and making her own face-lotions from cucumber juice and sour cream. After six years of marriage she and Serge still had no children, but she did not appear at all distressed by her childless state. Her one aim seemed to be to make things so that Alix too could live in Russia, as the wife of the heir to the throne.

  September 18 came, and, greatly to Alix’s disappointment, Nicky did not arrive at Illinsky. Quite possibly he was prevented from going there by his parents, for there was a great deal of gossip that summer about Nicky and Alix, and the tsar and tsarina had decided to send their son on a long trip abroad to broaden his mind and experience and ensure that he didn’t see his cousin Alix for a long time.

  With his sickly brother Georgy, his cousin George of Greece and a travelling party of young officer friends under the supervision of Prince Bariatinsky, Nicky went aboard the frigate Memory of Azov in Trieste in November of 1890 and embarked upon a round-theworld journey.

  During his prolonged odyssey the tsarevich rode donkeys along the Nile, steamed down the Suez Canal, went on crocodile hunts in Java and attended balls, banquets and receptions held in his honour by local dignitaries throughout the tropics. Apart from the bazaars, Nicky found most of the local culture tiresome; his diary entries reveal that he and his young companions were much more interested in the Egyptian dancing girls, who ‘undressed and got up to all sorts of tricks’, and performing geishas (with whom they had ‘a very jolly time’) than they were in visiting museums or temples.11 They drank heavily, caroused at night and generally behaved like the fun-loving, immature young men they were. In Japan, however, something went wrong. Gossip afterwards said that, in their pursuit of uninhibited pleasures, the Russians visited male brothels; according to the rumour, George of Greece, who was homosexual, had made offensive advances to a Japanese boy.12 The result was swift and unexpected.

  Nicky was in a rickshaw in the town of Otsu, travelling from a temple back to his hotel, when suddenly a burly policeman attacked him with a sabre, striking two blows which, had they been slightly better aimed and had Nicky not been wearing a thick felt hat, might have killed him. Nicky leaped nimbly out of the rickshaw, calling out, ‘What are you about?’ while George, who was riding in another rickshaw immediately behind Nicky’s, knocked the assailant down with several swift blows of his cane. The rickshaw drivers subdued the policeman, bound his wrists and legs, and dragged him to a nearby house where they left him while they ran for help.

  The wounds Nicky received penetrated to the bone, and blood poured down his face. He was rushed to the governor’s house, his frightened companions terrified that he would die. Fortunately his wounds, though serious, were not fatal. He had a long red gash on the top of his head, and would suffer permanently from chronic severe headaches.

  ‘I was very touched by the Japanese,’ Nicky wrote in a letter to his mother, ‘who knelt in the street as we passed and looked terribly sad.’ The peaceable, law-abiding Japanese were shocked that such a violent assault against the heir to the Russian throne could occur in their country – though in fact this was not the first attack on Europeans. Recuperating in Kyoto, Nicky received hundreds of telegrams from all over Japan expressing polite regret. Emperor Meiji himself came to visit, with his entourage of princes. ‘I felt sorry for them,’ Nicky wrote, ‘so stricken were they.’13

  While Nicky was seeing the world, Alix too was travelling. She wintered at Malta, where her sister Victoria had leased a house. Her sister, and her grandmother in England, hoped that Alix might find a husband am
ong her brother-in-law Louis of Battenberg’s fellow naval officers. But though Alix flirted, danced and sipped tea with the eligible young men, and even singled out one of them, a handsome Scot, for special friendship, she was not swayed from her bond to Nicky, and went back to Darmstadt unattached.

  There were other trips: to Kiel, to visit her sister Irene, who had married Henry of Prussia, brother of Emperor William, and to Italy, where she joined Queen Victoria and toured the museums of Florence and Venice.

  Most of the time, however, Alix stayed in Darmstadt and served as her father’s hostess and as the ‘Landesmütter’ of Hesse – a role she apparently relished. It is worthy of remark that in all the socializing Alix did at this time, whether welcoming guests at banquets, or making speeches to open charity events, or visiting hospitals or delivering largesse from the court to poor families, no one recorded that she was shy or ill at ease. Meeting new people, being highly visible, suited her – particularly if the event had an altruistic purpose. In reaching towards the larger goal of helping others, including helping her father socially, she lost her self-consciousness.

  In the spring of 1891, Alix was nineteen. Three social seasons had come and gone and she was still without a fiancé. She was rapidly becoming an old maid, and her grandmother, concerned that she had ‘so few choices’, and worried that before long Ella would arrange a match for her sister in Russia, once again decided to intervene in an effort to direct Alix’s future.

  Among Alix’s few choices, Queen Victoria thought, was Prince Max of Baden, an ill-favoured, charmless but otherwise suitable prospective husband. She wrote to Louis, emphasizing the urgency of the situation and asking him to invite Max to Darmstadt as soon as possible.