Alexandra Page 6

  As the new year 1894 opened, Alix was apprehensive. ‘I cannot help always dreading the coming of the New Year,’ she wrote to her grandmother, ‘as one never knows what is in store for one.’

  In fact Alix could foresee only too clearly what was likely to be in store for her. Not marriage, for she could not imagine marrying anyone but Nicky, and that was impossible. And besides, Nicky would no doubt marry someone else before long. Not a home of her own, for without a husband there could be no real home, only temporary stays with her sisters Victoria and Irene (not Ella, it would be too painful to go to Russia again) and, if she and Ducky got along well enough, a marginal role in Ernie’s household. Before long her grandmother would die, possibly quite soon, and then she could no longer count on long stays at Windsor or sojourns at Balmoral.

  She was already the subject of much gossip. She was known as the grand duke’s beautiful sister who had turned down two glorious thrones, rejecting first the heir to the British imperial title (poor Eddy, who had died in 1891) and then the heir to the Russian Empire. She was something of a mysterious figure, her attitudes hard to fathom. In time, as her beauty faded, she would be labelled an eccentric. She would float from one relative to another, watching her nieces and nephews grow up, treated (she hoped) with kindness touched with pity. She would fill her time with charitable works, reading and embroidery. She would play the piano and make polite conversation, while bearing the painful burden of a constant sense of emptiness and waste.

  Such was the constrained and narrow life Alix foresaw for herself as she spent yet another bleak winter in Darmstadt, nursing her wounded heart and expecting, before long, to have a great deal of time on her hands.

  6

  Military bands played and a guard of honour stood smartly to attention beside the track as Nicky, in uniform, stepped out of the imperial train onto the platform at Coburg, flanked by his Uncles Paul, Serge and Vladimir. He smiled affably as Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, came forwards to embrace him and the others on the platform greeted him in their turn. Ernie and Ducky, whose wedding day was only three days away, were also on the platform to greet Nicky, and Alfred’s sister Vicky and brother Bertie, Ducky’s sister Missy and her husband, Crown Prince Ferdinand of Rumania, and a score of others. But the only one Nicky wanted to see was Alix, and he greeted her warmly, all but ignoring the others, intent on her response.

  He had almost decided not to come to Coburg, for his sister Xenia had told him that Alix remained fixed in her opposition to any thought of marriage to him. Xenia had recently written to Alix to say that she was ‘ruining Nicky’s life’ by her refusal; Alix had written back to say that Xenia’s accusation was cruel, and that, no matter what, ‘it NEVER can be’.1 For emphasis, Alix had sent a telegram saying the same thing, and when he heard about it, Nicky had been very upset. But his mother had convinced him not to give up so quickly, and by the time the train arrived he had regained his courage. He would speak to Alix, alone, and all would be well.

  He was so convinced that all would be well, in fact, that he had brought along a chaplain, Father Yanishev, to instruct Alix in the Orthodox faith, and a tutor, Fräulein Schneider, to teach her Russian.

  But when on the following day Nicky had his first private conversation with Alix, he found her to be resolute, though emotional. He too was keyed up, his emotions in turmoil; this was the crucial talk which for months he had longed to have with her, his chance to sway her with the force of his love and his reasoned arguments. For two hours he tried to persuade her to give in, to drop her objections and agree to marry him, alternately arguing and pleading, while she wept and repeatedly whispered, ‘No, I cannot.’

  Deeply moved, part of her wanting nothing more than to yield to his pleas, still Alix resisted. She could not forgo her loyalty to the Lutheran church, she could not be false to it. Fidelity to her church loomed in her mind as the ultimate test of her character, the defining core of her personal honour. Again and again she shook her head, tears rolling down her cheeks, and whispered, ‘No, I cannot.’2

  Finally Nicky gave up, and went out into the rainy afternoon and took a drive with Ella and Serge, then a long walk with Uncle Vladimir to the old Coburg castle on the hill.

  No record remains of what Alix did that afternoon, but inwardly she had clearly come to a crossroads. Ella, Serge and now even Ernie were bringing pressure to bear on her to accept Nicky, probing her attitudes and feelings, looking for a way around her adamant objections. Tsar Alexander and Minnie were inviting her into the family, and would be affronted if she refused their invitation. She was about to lose the only home she had, and enter the featureless land of spinsterhood. Her will was strong, but her heart was breaking under the strain, with the man she loved holding out his arms to her, offering her all his sweetness and warmth – if only she would take one hallowed step, across the threshold of Orthodox Christianity.

  Alix’s firm and independent stance on the marriage issue was, if not unheard-of, very rare. Women in 1894 were not masters of their own destinies; they did not assert their desires in opposition to the strong urgings of their suitors and relatives. To do so was considered unfeminine, even unnatural. Deference to others was the expected norm for a woman of any age in that era, especially where marriage and family were concerned, and the force of convention was exceedingly strong.

  So Alix, standing at her crossroads, showed remarkable power of will, assailed as she was by prevailing social expectations, by the threat of lifelong loneliness, by her family, by her adored Nicky.

  Thus assailed, she did not capitulate – but she began, tentatively, to search for a way out of her dilemma.

  In conversations with Ella and Serge and Ernie it slowly began to be apparent to Alix that what troubled her conscience so deeply was not the prospect of being baptized into the Orthodox church: it was forswearing Lutheranism. She had always assumed that the two things would have to go hand in hand. But perhaps they need not. Ella, when voluntarily adopting the Orthodox faith, had not been required to abjure her Lutheranism. And other German princesses, facing the same difficulty Alix faced, had, it now appeared, arrived at compromises that allowed them to continue their loyalty to the Lutheran creed while entering into their new church.

  One such princess was Aunt Marie, Maria Pavlovna, born a Princess of Mecklenberg-Strelitz – known in the Romanov family as ‘Auntie Miechen’ – the wife of Uncle Vladimir. (Not to be confused with Aunt Marie, the sister of the late Tsar Alexander II and wife of Duke Alfred of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.) Alix went to visit Auntie Miechen, at her brother’s urging, presumably to talk about her conversion. To Nicky, Ernie gave an encouraging message – that ‘there was hope of a happy outcome’.3

  Two days now remained before Ernie and Ducky’s wedding, and more and more family members were arriving at the Coburg station. There were excited greetings, tearful hugs. When passing one another in carriages, the affectionate members of Queen Victoria’s large family sometimes got out and ‘started kissing in the middle of the road’, much to the amusement of the visiting Russians. The official topic of conversation within the family was the forthcoming marriage, what a handsome couple Ernie and Ducky made, how enviably tiny Ducky’s waist was, where the newlyweds would go on their honeymoon, what a cheery, ebullient fellow the grand duke was, so debonair and artistic. How surprising it was that he had never married until now.

  But at the same time, much attention was focused on the drama between Nicky and Alix. Would they become engaged? Why was she hesitating? Had Queen Victoria said or done something to prevent the two from marrying?

  In the evenings, after the theatre, when champagne was served in the billiard room and the men gathered to smoke and drink and talk, Nicky was asked about Alix. How did things stand? What could be done? His cousin Willy, German Emperor, was especially solicitous. He would talk to cousin Alix, Willy said. He would take command of the situation. Alix could not hold out against him. All would be well. The champagne flowed freely, and Nicky, who
confided to his diary that he was suffering ‘great fears and doubts’, did not go to bed until the early hours of the morning.4

  The arrival of Queen Victoria provided a temporary respite from these preoccupations. Clutching a thick black cloak around her, she drove in her carriage from the train station through the town, shivering in the northern chill – she had just come from warm Florence – and smiling her endearing shy smile at the cheering Coburgers. The elderly queen felt a strong nostalgic attachment to the duchy of Coburg, for her beloved late consort Prince Albert had been raised there and she viewed everything associated with Albert through a haze of sentiment and regret. She had taken to wearing a miniature of Albert around her neck, and speaking to it on occasion. One imagines that she had much to say to his image on this April afternoon, as her carriage, escorted by an entire battalion of guardsmen, clattered along the cobble-stoned streets. Handfuls of flowers were flung in front of her carriage wheels as they rolled under an enormous triumphal arch of welcome. In the palace square, in front of Schloss Ehrenburg, she paused to receive her official welcome.

  All the relatives had assembled to greet the family matriarch, the women in formal afternoon attire, the men in freshly pressed uniforms. They took tea with her, but could not all dine together as there were far too many to fit around the long dining table. The queen, white-haired and benign, her lumpy figure (Nicky unkindly referred to her as ‘belly-woman’ and ‘a round ball on shaky legs’) encased in an old-fashioned dress of black bombazine, her Indian servant at her side, presided comfortably over all, content that her matchmaking had succeeded in bringing Ernie and Ducky together. Alone of those present, the queen was unaware of the gossip about Nicky and Alix; she was under the impression that, having done her best to prevent any engagement between them, the possibility of their union no longer existed.5

  The wedding day came, and in the royal chapel of the palace, amid masses of flowers and garlands of fir branches, Ernie and Ducky stood to repeat their vows. The ceremony had hardly concluded before a violent thunderstorm broke, drenching the newlyweds as they drove off in their carriage and forcing the mayor to cancel the evening fireworks display.

  The rain continued all that night, and Alix, her head by now spinning with excitement, cannot have slept well. The ray of hope she had begun to glimpse two days earlier had broadened into a beacon. There was a way, it seemed, to square the demands of her conscience with her heartfelt desire, she could enter the Orthodox church without formally abjuring the Lutheran faith. She could be true to herself – and marry Nicky.

  On the following morning two more hasty conversations were held – the first between Alix and cousin Willy, the second another discussion with Auntie Miechen. She was no longer in any doubt. No obstacles remained in her path. She was ready to accept Nicky.

  ‘[She] came into the room where I was sitting with the Uncles,’ Nicky wrote, describing the scene in a letter to his mother. ‘They left us alone and . . . the first thing she said was . . . that she agreed! Oh God, what happened to me then! I started to cry like a child, and so did she, only her expression immediately changed: her face brightened and took on an aura of peace.’6

  Later Alix would castigate herself for being so stubborn for so long. She asked Nicky to forgive her. She had not been able to see clearly, she had imagined barriers where none existed. Now all restraint fell away, and the lovers embraced, their fervour all the greater for the long season of frustration that had kept them apart. ‘I went about all day dazed,’ Nicky wrote in his diary. ‘I could not believe that all this had happened to me.’ Alix wrote her friend Toni Becker that she was ‘endlessly happy,’ and when she and Nicky burst into the adjoining room to announce to Willy and the aunts and uncles that they had agreed to marry, she was radiant.

  Queen Victoria was the next to be told – and great must have been her astonishment! – then Aunt Marie and Uncle Alfred and the hosts of other relatives who indulged, Nicky wrote, in ‘an orgy of kissing’.7 Telegrams were sent to Russia and elsewhere, and by evening many more telegrams had begun to pour in, congratulating Alix and Nicky and wishing them happiness.

  ‘Please tell your dear fiancée from me,’ Tsar Alexander telegraphed to Nicky, ‘how much I thank her for at last consenting, and how I wish her to flourish for the joy, comfort and peace she has given us by deciding to agree to be your wife!’ Xenia too sent her congratulations, and Alix wrote her an ecstatic note. ‘I cannot describe my happiness – it is too great . . . And what an angel the dear boy is.’8 Alix and Xenia had long been on the most affectionate terms. Now they would be sisters-in-law – and would be brides together, as Xenia was soon to marry her cousin Sandro.

  Over the following few days the engaged pair were together most of the time, eating their meals together, driving out in a pony carriage, having photographs taken, sitting together at the opera and afterwards, late into the night, staying up together in the privacy of Alix’s sitting room with only Gretchen von Fabrice as chaperone. As one by one the wedding guests departed, Alix and Nicky seemed to have Coburg to themselves, the lilac-scented gardens, the crooked narrow streets and quaint houses, the small opera house and wooded environs. The intensity of those romantic days, the joy each of them felt in the presence of the other, were beyond description. ‘I am more happy than words can express,’ Alix wrote to her old governess Madgie. ‘At last, after these five sad years!’9 ‘My soul was brimming with joy and light,’ Nicky wrote, referring to those ‘golden days’ following his engagement.10

  It was as if every detail of their rapturous days stood out with special significance: an operatic aria they both loved (‘Once again, once again, once again, O nightingale!’), the pink flowers Alix habitually wore, and Nicky came to love, the house on the road from Coburg to Ketchendorf where they shared an erotic interlude. Time hung suspended, or so it seemed – though on rainy afternoons they both managed to attend to their correspondence and to answer each of the more than two hundred telegrams that came for them.

  Plans for the future had to be made, but there would be time for this in the summer. Nicky was to return to Russia, then come to visit Alix in England. While they were apart they agreed to communicate by telegram, in a special code. After a last day spent in Darmstadt, where they visited Ernie and Ducky, they said their reluctant goodbyes, and Alix left for Windsor.

  She arrived looking happy but tired, and with pain in her legs. Over the course of only a few short weeks an immense change had been wrought in Alix’s life, and the strain of it was apparent. After a visit with family and a conference with the Bishop of Ripon – no doubt a discussion of her conversion – she went to Harrogate to treat her pain with a course of sulphur baths and rest.

  Hoping to avoid attracting the attention of journalists and the curious, she adopted the incognito ‘Baroness Starckenburg’, and settled into a routine of immersing herself in the waters and studying Russian with her teacher Catherine Schneider, the Baltic Russian Nicky had engaged to instruct her. (‘It is amusing, but certainly not easy!’ Alix wrote to Madgie, describing her Russian lessons.11) She made progress, but soon lost all her privacy. Her true identity was discovered. People crowded around her lodgings, bothering her very pregnant landlady, trying to peer in at the windows, observing her every coming and going.

  The British were enthralled by the story of this beautiful granddaughter of Queen Victoria who, having waited so long to marry, had at last become engaged to the future tsar of Russia. They were curious about every detail of her future. What would her wedding gown be like? Her trousseau? When was the wedding to be? Just how rich would she be, as the wife of the Russian tsar? Was it true she had rooms full of diamonds?

  ‘Of course it is in all the papers that I am here,’ Alix wrote to Nicky, ‘and all the tradespeople send epistles and beg of one to order things, even a piano and tea were offered. The rude people stand at the corner and stare; I shall stick my tongue out at them another time.’12

  The speculation mounted, the crowds
grew. People stared through their windows at her lodging, opera glasses in hand. Every time Alix drove out they congregated and got in the way, forcing her to go in and out through a back entrance; once they discovered the back entrance they clogged it too, and some ran behind her carriage when it went out. It became impossible for her to enter a shop without drawing a group of onlookers, who gawked quite rudely and called out, ‘That’s her.’

  When Alix’s landlady gave birth to twins, and asked her celebrated guest to be godmother to the babies, the church was full of noisy strangers attending the christening service, watching as the infants were given the names Nicholas and Alexandra, their attention fixed on the godmother and not on the babies or their parents.

  ‘If I were not in the bathchair I should not mind,’ Alix told Nicky, and tried to make light of the annoyance. She was vulnerable, however, for the wheeled chair was unwieldy and, had she ever felt herself in danger she could not have run away, not on her sore legs.

  There was one woman in the crowd who stood out. She was always there, wherever Alix went. She came closer than the others, peering at Alix, her manner suggesting mania or mental imbalance. Alix wondered whether it might be the same woman who had annoyed Nicky earlier in the year, stalking him and writing him letters.13 Watching out for the woman kept her nerves on edge, and the atmosphere of constant surveillance made rest and healing impossible. The sulphur baths failed to ease her pain, and seemed to increase her fatigue. Her attitude was fatalistic. ‘It does not matter so, suffering pain,’ she told Nicky. ‘I daresay it is even good to have to bear pain.’14