Alexandra Page 5
Max duly arrived in Darmstadt, and a startled Alix was informed that he intended to propose to her. ‘I vividly remember the torments I suffered,’ Alix told an informant many years later. ‘I did not know him at all and I shall never forget what I suffered when I met him for the first time.’14 Threatened with the danger of marrying without love or even affection, she recoiled inwardly. She had already refused Eddy. Nicky was being kept from her. Now she was being asked to accept this unappealing stranger, who might very well be her last hope.
It was an awkward and painful situation. Max, it appears, had been led to believe that he would be accepted. With the aid of her sister Victoria, Alix managed to convince him otherwise, and grandmother Victoria was appeased. But Alix knew that it was only a matter of time before another stranger was sent to Darmstadt, or was invited to Balmoral when she was there, or was placed in her path during some other visit to relatives. The matchmaking would not cease, she knew, until everyone in the family was convinced that it was too late for her to marry at all.
Meanwhile life in Darmstadt was quite pleasant, if uneventful. Alix sat beside her bearded, balding father at stiff formal dinners and travelled with her beloved brother Ernie, handsome, dapper and devil-may-care, whose cheerful companionship she enjoyed. Like Alix herself, Ernie had artistic tastes, and his nature also included a strong vein of whimsy. She spent time with her effervescent new friend Julia Rantzau, whom she met through her sister Irene at Kiel. She played her banjo and piano, danced at the winter balls, kept up her large correspondence – and thought, sadly, of Nicky, occasionally exchanging letters with him and receiving the small gifts he sent.15
Nicky, back in Russia after his global wanderings and suffering severe headaches from his slowly healing head wound, was confiding to his diary that marriage to Alix had become ‘the dream and the hope by which I live from day to day’. He was quite bewitched by Matilda Kchessinsky, who had become his mistress, but his feelings for Alix were of another order entirely. ‘I resisted my feelings for a long time,’ he wrote in December 1891, ‘trying to deceive myself into believing that my cherished dream could not be realized.’ But the more he thought about her, the more he began to believe that his cherished dream was not impossible. She had not become engaged to anyone else. He was ‘almost convinced’ that she felt as strongly about him as he did about her. ‘The only obstacle or gulf between her and me is the question of religion,’ he wrote, and while his parents never ceased to emphasize that obstacle, it had never been a problem in the past; whenever a Protestant had married the tsarevich, she had always converted to Orthodoxy.
‘Everything is in the will of God,’ Nicky wrote. ‘Trusting in His mercy, I look to the future calmly and resignedly.’16
Alix was becoming concerned about her father. As winter closed in on Darmstadt in January 1892, and the snow began to pile high in the palace park, Louis was often short of breath, his face pale and his gait unsteady. The cold seemed to bother him more than usual, and many days he did not leave his room. He had always been physically strong, though far from fit; his uniforms had had to be made larger year by year, as his paunch expanded, but he still wore them proudly, with his array of medals and ribbons gleaming across his broad chest.
On a March afternoon as he sat eating lunch with his family, he collapsed. Alix, anxious and tense, sat by his bedside for the next nine days, sleeping very little, keeping vigil along with Ernie. Telegrams were sent to Irene and Victoria, who arrived quickly. Only Ella was missing.
No one expected Louis to die. It seemed impossible that so robust a man could succumb so suddenly. ‘Death is dreadful without preparation,’ Alix recalled long afterwards, ‘and without the body gradually loosening all earthly ties.’ She watched in vain for some flicker of recognition on her father’s wan face, but he did not regain consciousness. On the tenth day after his attack, his pulse ceased. Alix, haggard from her long vigil and inconsolably grief-stricken, was now an orphan.
5
A small, carefully wrapped package arrived from Windsor, from Grandmama Victoria, for Alix’s twentieth birthday in June 1892. It was a decorative enamel, with a whiskery portrait of the late Grand Duke Louis – a sad memento.
Pale and thin, and in pain from her sore legs, Alix had suffered a good deal in the aftermath of her father’s death. The strain on her nerves was considerable, and she was not resilient; for months she had been tearful and slept badly, while her hardier sisters Victoria and Irene, sombre in their black mourning gowns, had hovered around her and her brother Ernie, who now assumed the title Grand Duke of Hesse, made vain efforts to comfort and cheer her.
Orchie too hovered around Alix, muttering that she ought to get married as soon as possible, indeed that she ought to have married Max of Baden while she had the chance, and Baroness Grancy, spry and elderly, counselled Alix to pull herself together and think only of doing her duty, not of her grief. Only Gretchen von Fabrice struck the right note; she was sympathetic, warm and retiring.
But Alix, gazing at the enamel likeness of her father and confined to bed, was slow to recover despite the ministrations of those around her. She had lost her ‘precious one’, the father she had loved and clung to, the dear papa whose handsome face and solid bulk were in her earliest memories.1 She had lost him before confiding in him fully about her great desire to marry Nicky and her qualms about adopting his Orthodox faith – qualms that had recently begun to grow stronger. She could no longer turn to her father for advice, indeed there was no one she could turn to who could speak to her in a genuinely disinterested way, and this, combined with her sorrow over being apart from Nicky for so long, deepened her grief.
Like it or not, she was ensnared in the dynastic politics of the Russian court, where Alexander III hated Queen Victoria and all her German relations and Alexander’s wife Minnie sought a princess of the blood royal for her son.
The tension between the Russian and British courts played itself out, not only in the real world but in Alix’s lively imagination. One night she dreamed of being in a hospital surrounded by dying men, among them her brother-in-law Louis of Battenberg. Her sister Victoria stood by. All of a sudden Queen Victoria entered the room and a shot was fired at her. The shooter, Alix discovered in her dream, was a Russian, someone she had met in St Petersburg. With a smile and a bow the would-be assassin walked away.2
To distract Alix and speed her healing Ernie took her to a health resort to ‘take a cure’ and then to England in August, where they visited cousins, aunts and uncles and drank tea every afternoon with grandmama, a shrunken, ageing figure but still mentally agile and protective of her family’s and England’s interests. After Ernie left for Darmstadt, Alix stayed on with her grandmother, who took her to Wales, to visit the mining districts. There, amid the grime, in a landscape marred by huge black slag-heaps and towering smokestacks, Alix was drawn out of her melancholy. Her curiosity was aroused. She took notice of the miners and their families, of the hardships in the mining towns and the ragged children, the many men crippled by accidents in the mines, the worn sunken-cheeked women in shabby dresses who lined the roadways to welcome the queen. Alix insisted on going down into one of the mines, descending in a metal cage into the dark and emerging, blinking, her dress coated with flecks of earth and coal-dust, an hour later.
In the autumn Queen Victoria took Alix to Balmoral, where she could breathe what the queen firmly regarded as ‘the finest air in the world’ and benefit from long walks and carriage rides. But in the queen’s view the air proved ‘rather too bracing’ for her granddaughter, and Alix did not flourish. Nor was her health improved or her spirits raised when, journeying to Berlin for a family wedding (her cousin Frederick Charles of Hesse married Margarethe, her brother-in-law Henry’s sister), she saw Nicky, had a family tea and dinner with him, but did not spend time with him alone.3
Back in Darmstadt, the short days were windy, grey and exceptionally cold. Deep snowdrifts accumulated around the palace and in the park, the branch
es of the leafless trees drooped with their burden of snow. Alix, listless and despondent, developed an ear inflammation and had to stay in bed.
Alone of all her friends, she was still unmarried at twenty-one. While they were having babies, she was adrift, in love with a man she felt she could not marry, yet unwilling to consider any other. She knew that her relatives gossiped about her, for she stuck out awkwardly in the family. All of her cousins were married, even the unattractive ones; she alone remained single, without a home and husband of her own, given a temporary home by her brother.
And she was uncomfortably aware that even this arrangement was bound to end before long. Ernie, as Grand Duke of Hesse, would soon have to bow to the pressure of his relatives and courtiers and get married himself. And when he did, Alix would no longer be needed as his hostess. She would be in the way.
The prospective change in Ernie’s status must have made Alix very ill at ease, not only for her own sake, but for his. For Ernie, handsome, blithe, whimsical Ernie, was homosexual, and Alix must have known, or strongly suspected, that he was.4 Ernie had never had a girlfriend; he spent his time with a circle of artistic male friends. Thwarted in his desire to become a painter, he was forced to content himself with designing stage sets for the palace theatre and redecorating the halls and salons in Art Nouveau style. His effervescent, rather brittle cheeriness endeared Ernie to his sister, and their bond, strong since childhood, deepened in adulthood. Still, the knowledge that before long there would be a grand duchess, an official Landesmütter, in the palace must have worried Alix for Ernie’s sake and her own, and made her situation seem even more tenuous.
On the advice of the court physician, who was concerned about Alix’s ear inflammation, in January of 1893 Ernie and Alix left the darkness and cold of Darmstadt for Florence, where their grandmother had rented a grand house, the Villa Palmieri. The queen’s villa was full of other relatives escaping the harsh winter, and each day they went out in groups to visit museums and churches and to tour the lovely countryside. For Alix, who had never before been to the warm south, Italy was, as she wrote to her old governess Madgie, ‘a dream of beauty’. The views delighted her, the paintings and sculpture overawed her, and the thought that she could walk, in January, in green fields and along cobble-stoned streets free of snow seemed both startling and wondrous.
‘We have been favoured with the finest weather,’ Alix wrote, ‘so that you can imagine how enjoyable it all has been. It is like a dream, so different to anything one has ever seen.’5
Venice Alix found to be even more enchanting. She wrote of ‘the delightful sensation of being rowed in a gondola and the peace and quiet.’ The magnificent, weathered palazzos lining the canals, the old churches and bridges bathed in pearly aqueous light, the twisting, malodorous streets with their quaint shops, all captivated Alix. ‘Now we have once been here,’ she wrote to Madgie, ‘I fear that we shall always long to come again.’
Though Alix did not yet know it, there had been a significant change in the attitude of Nicky’s parents toward his marriage. Possibly because Alexander III had been ill, and his illness reminded him of his mortality, he had decided to drop his objections to Alix as a prospective bride for his son. Minnie too acquiesced. Early in January, 1894, Nicky was given permission to make enquiries about Alix with a view to proposing to her. He was stunned. ‘I never expected such a suggestion, especially not from Mama,’ he wrote in his diary. He began his enquiries immediately – and, over the following few months, said his goodbyes to his mistress Matilda Kchessinsky, though not without some sentimental regrets. (‘I am completely under her spell,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘The pen is trembling in my hand!’6)
With Ella, in Russia, as an encouraging go-between, Nicky approached Alix and an exchange of letters began. What he soon discovered, much to his chagrin, was that Alix now clung to her Lutheran faith with the tenacious fervour of a martyr in Roman times being sent into the arena to face the lions. The thought of having to abjure the confession in which she had been raised in order to embrace Orthodoxy stung her conscience, and she had not been able to bring herself to see the merits of Nicky’s church. In 1890, Serge had sent her a book about Russian Orthodox belief, and for three years she had kept it, and no doubt studied it. It was not ignorance about the Orthodox creed that led to her attitude, rather it was a very deep loyalty to Lutheranism. Leaving the Lutheran church felt, to Alix, like abandoning a dearly loved childhood companion, like ‘a wrongful thing’, as she told Nicky in a letter.
‘I thought [about] everything for a long time,’ she said, ‘and I only beg you not to think that I take it lightly for it grieves me terribly and makes me very unhappy. I have tried to look at it in every light that is possible, but I always return to one thing. I cannot do it against my conscience.’ She told Nicky she thought it was a sin to change her belief, and that if she were to renounce her Lutheranism, she would be miserable for the rest of her life.
‘I am certain that you would not wish me to change against my conviction,’ she went on. ‘What happiness can come from a marriage which begins without the real blessing of God?. . .I should never find my peace of mind again.’7
Alix’s letter was heartfelt, and full of sadness, but very firm. She could not ‘act a lie’, she could not go against her conscience. She would never abjure her faith and adopt his. ‘I am certain that you will understand this clearly and see as I do, that we are only torturing ourselves, about something impossible and it would not be a kindness to let you go on having vain hopes, which will never be realized.’8
Nicky received Alix’s letter on a raw November day when a storm was beginning to blow. He walked out into the storm, his hands in his pockets, leaning in against the wind, his thoughts in such turmoil that he was hardly aware of the violent weather. ‘I walked about all day in a daze,’ he wrote later in his diary. ‘It’s so hard to appear calm and happy when an issue affecting the whole rest of your life is suddenly decided in this way!’9 To numb his shattered feelings, he drank himself into a stupor, and continued to drink heavily for four days.10
He knew, for Ella had told him, that behind Alix’s carefully phrased, discouragingly adamant letters was a wounded, grieving heart. She loved him, with a love, Ella assured him, that was ‘deep and pure’. She was ‘utterly miserable’, indeed she had confided to Ella, when Ella was visiting in Darmstadt, that she would ‘die for her love’.11 Nicky wanted to meet with Alix, certain that he could sway her if only they could talk about the thorny issue of religion together. But if they were to meet – and this Alix dreaded – word would be sure to leak out to the press, and for some time there had been speculation in the newspapers about a possible engagement. The last thing she wanted was to endure what was certain to be a painful personal interview with Nicky, made more tense by persistent reporters stalking them, waiting for news.
Shortly before Christmas Nicky wrote to Alix from Gatchina, asking her to forgive his long delay in responding. ‘I could not write to you all these days on account of the sad state of mind I was in,’ he said. ‘Now that my restlessness has passed I feel more calm and am able to answer your letter quietly.’ He had been, he admitted, ‘lonely and beaten down’, but was not without hope.
He felt certain that if only she could learn, from an Orthodox believer, the richness and depth of his faith, her objections to entering his church would fall away. He trusted in God’s mercy to make it so.
‘Oh! do not say “no” directly, my dearest Alix, do not ruin my life already!’ was his closing plea. ‘Do you think there can exist any happiness in the whole world without you! After having INVOLUNTARILY! kept me waiting and hoping, can this end in such a way?’12
So the issue rested as the new year of 1894 began.
The transition in the grand ducal household at Darmstadt for which Alix had been preparing herself was well under way. Ernie had yielded to family and social pressure and agreed to marry his cousin Victoria Melita, daughter of Uncle Alfred and Aunt Marie,
known in the family as ‘Ducky’. She was seventeen, he twenty-five; they had a common interest in art, and were reasonably companionable. Ernie was handsome, outgoing and flamboyant, Ducky spirited and strong-willed. Both were highly intelligent. The engagement was a compromise, and each partner knew it. Ernie would have much preferred to remain a bachelor, while Ducky, young as she was, had already met the love of her life – her Russian cousin Cyril, son of Nicky’s uncle Vladimir – only to discover that she could not marry him because the Orthodox church forbade marriage between first cousins.
Doing their best to lay aside their inner misgivings, Ernie and Ducky were proceeding with the wedding arrangements, with Alix’s help. She busied herself overseeing the preparation of their suites at the palace and at the summer residence at Wolfsgarten, and she corresponded with Ducky in order to find out her tastes and also to cement their friendship. She met with members of the staff and arranged the hiring of new servants. She conferred, rather wistfully, with Ernie, who, she wrote, was ‘always running into her room at every hour of the day’, as the wedding day approached.
Though she did her best to remain cheerful, presiding as usual as Ernie’s hostess and looking after his household, she was overcome at times by sadness. She missed her father. She knew that she would soon miss her brother, for after he married their relationship would not be the same. She even found herself thinking about the little sister she had lost so many years earlier, little May, who had she lived would have turned twenty in this year of 1894.13
She wrote to Queen Victoria asking if she could come to England for a few months after the wedding, for she did not want to be in the newlyweds’ way. She was beginning to withdraw, tactfully, from the world of married couples, to enter that limbo occupied by spinsters. Accustomed to keeping busy – attending her brother’s formal audiences, seeing to the comfort of visiting dignitaries, entertaining friends, even on occasion picking flowers and arranging them in the palace chapel when a wedding was to be held there – she expected to become idle once Ducky took her place and assumed all her responsibilities.