Alexandra Page 7

  Towards the end of June Nicky arrived from Russia, and Alix left Harrogate with its beleaguering crowds and travelled to Walton, to her sister Victoria’s house, to meet him. They grew closer than ever during Nicky’s month-long visit, picnicking, going for long drives together in the hot summer afternoons, breakfasting at Frogmore with Queen Victoria, paying calls on Uncle Bertie and Aunt Beatrice and all the numerous English cousins.

  From Walton Alix and Nicky went on to Windsor, where Nicky good-humouredly adapted to the formalities and protocols of the old palace, putting on old-fashioned knee breeches, tight shoes and the Windsor coat with red collar and wristbands to please ‘Granny’. He also helped to commemorate an important family event – the birth of a son to Bertie’s son and heir George (brother of the late Eddy); this child, who would grow up to be King Edward VIII, ensured the continuity of the dynasty into the next generation, and Nicky was asked to be his godfather.

  In the intervals between garden parties, family luncheons, visits to the theatre and opera, Alix and Nicky were often alone together. During their private hours Nicky wrote in his diary, and Alix interrupted him to write in her own notes and loving thoughts. ‘God bless you my angel,’ she wrote in the margin. ‘All’s well that ends well.’ She drew a heart, and within it wrote ‘You you you’ in French. ‘I dreamed that I was loved, I woke and found it true,’ went another of her interpolations, ‘and thanked God on my knees for it. True love is the gift which God has given – daily stronger, deeper, fuller, purer.’15

  Nicky’s confession to Alix of his long affair with Matilda Kchessinsky drew from her a longer passage in the diary.

  ‘My own boysy dear,’ she wrote, ‘never changing, always true. Have confidence and faith in your girlie dear, who loves you more deeply and devotedly, than she ever can say.’ She assured him that ‘what is past, is past, and will never return and we can look back on it with calm. We are all tempted in this world and when we are young we cannot always fight and hold our own against temptation, but as long as we repent and come back to the good and on to the straight path, God forgives us.

  ‘I love you even more since you told me that little story,’ she added, ‘your confidence in me touched me, oh, so deeply, and I pray to God that I may always show myself worthy of it.’16

  Thunderclouds gathered in the hot, humid air and sudden squalls drove everyone indoors during the long afternoons. ‘We were dying from the heat,’ Nicky noted in his diary. Week after week of incessant, crowded social events left both Alix and Nicky longing for privacy. Her leg pains continued to bother her, though she did not complain. As for Nicky, he had had enough of ‘the fat aunts and their husbands’, and was becoming irritated with Beatrice’s naughty children, his patience frayed by constantly having to ‘sit with hands folded and always to wait without end’ while Granny took her time getting ready for the next tea party or special exhibition.17 Nicky was energetic; if he didn’t get his daily walk he chafed and grew restless. He distracted himself buying jewels for Alix from the jewellers who, he complained, ‘camped in his room’.

  He had already given her a beautiful pink diamond engagement ring, along with a necklace of jewels so dazzling that she ‘nearly fainted’ when presented with it. Now he added other engagement gifts: a pink pearl necklace and ring, a bracelet with an enormous emerald, a sapphire and diamond brooch. Some of the jewellery sent to Alix from the tsar’s court was very costly, and the queen, when she saw the fabulous display, was quick to chide her granddaughter. ‘Now do not get too proud, Alix,’ Victoria said, perhaps unaware that her own humility and lack of material greed or pretension had made a far more lasting impression than any words she could say.

  To judge from her letters and other written comments, Alix in fact gave little thought to the high state she would one day occupy as Nicky’s wife. Exalted status and position were not important to her; love was. And love she certainly had, and gave – a love that seemed to grow daily, and to flower into a rich, perfectly satisfying compatibility. She and her fiancé were of one mind, one outlook. Being together was enough to make them rapturously happy.

  They were tender with each other, they were teasing, they laughed and joked and, none too kindly, made fun of other people. They laughed together over an English phrase book Nicky was studying, compiled by Russians, ‘English as She Is Spoke.’ (‘At what o’clock dine him?’ ‘It must never to laugh of the unhappiest.’ ‘Dress your hairs!’)

  Alix told Nicky that her ‘most earnest desire and prayer’ was to make him happy, and he, equally devoted, made it clear to her that her happiness was his prime object. ‘I love you, my own darling, as few persons can only love!’ Nicky had written shortly after their engagement. ‘I love you too deeply and too strongly for me to show it; it is such a sacred feeling, I don’t want to let it out in words, that seem meek and poor and vain!’18

  When towards the end of July the day came for him to go aboard the yacht Polar Star to return to Russia, he was mournful and depressed. Parting, even for a little while, was painful. ‘The sadness and longing have made me feel faint,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Was exhausted from sadness and longing.’19

  The separation would not be long, Alix assured him. They would meet in two months, at the end of September, at Wolfsgarten. Meanwhile Alix would go on with her religious instruction, training for her formal ceremony of acceptance into the Orthodox church, and with her Russian lessons. She had ordered her trousseau from Madame Flotov, a fashionable designer, and there would be many boxes of gowns, hats, undergarments and nightgowns to try on and approve.

  ‘Ever true and ever loving, faithful pure and strong as death,’ Alix wrote in Nicky’s diary on the night before he left. Nothing could separate them now, not the cold of the North Sea, not the passing of time, not accident or fate. ‘Once again, once again, once again, O nightingale!’ Alix sang to herself after watching the departure of the Polar Star. She limped back down the landing stage towards the shore, turning her engagement ring on her finger. Her legs hurt, but what was a little pain, when such happiness lay just beyond the horizon?

  7

  Tsar Alexander, that giant of a man with a look as cold as steel, that much admired ruler whom his subjects called Alexander Mirotworetz, Creator of Peace, had collapsed suddenly, and his doctors insisted that he be taken to his estate at Livadia, on the Black Sea, and given a complete rest.

  It was the end of September, 1894, and Nicky, having agreed to meet Alix at Wolfsgarten, was just preparing to leave to join her there. Startled by his father’s sharp decline, and made uneasy by the firmness of the imperial physicians’ directives, he felt he had to accompany the family to Livadia rather than go to Hesse, and cancelled his plans.

  The tsar had not been well for some months. His huge, cumbersome body swayed ominously when he walked, his immensely broad shoulders had become somewhat stooped and the skin of his round, black-bearded face had taken on an unhealthy pallor. At times he had difficulty breathing. He was only forty-nine, and until this year his health had always been exceptionally good, his physical strength phenomenal. But some said he would not survive this abrupt collapse, and there were murmurs of concern about the succession, for it was generally assumed that Nicky, with his clear, kind eyes and gentle manner, his slight frame and sensitive mien, would be shoved roughly aside by his domineering uncles once the tsar was dead, and there would be a struggle for power.

  Frightened and ill-equipped to cope with the crisis, Nicky asked for permission to bring Alix to Livadia, and his parents agreed. He missed her: he needed her support to steady him. Though the doctors did not say that his father was dying, Nicky had only to look at him to sense that, if he did not die, he would at least be incapacitated, and for a long time; already the government papers sent in a steady stream to Livadia from Petersburg were being given to Nicky to read and sign, and he was finding this work a great strain.

  He had always feared and dreaded the day when he would become tsar, and taken comfort from his
father’s relatively young age and robust health.1 To be sure, there was the ever-present danger that Alexander might be assassinated, as his father had been, and attempts on his life had been made. But Nicky, ever the fatalist, was not overly concerned about that, and had always made the assumption that he would not have to take on the burden of the throne himself for a very long time to come.

  Now, though, watching his dearly loved father, that Hercules who had once been able to tie an iron poker into knots, who could bend a solid silver rouble with his thumb, slip daily more and more into enfeeblement, Nicky was forced to confront the probability that the terrifying task of rulership would soon become his.

  If Alexander III were to die before he was fifty, he would indeed be an anomaly, but then he had always been an anomaly, not only in the strength and girth of his outsize body but in his manner of living. He looked, many thought, like a very large Russian peasant, and within his palaces he lived in peasant style, simply and without formality, wearing whenever possible the baggy trousers, soft bloused shirt and sheepskin jacket of a Russian villager. He wore his clothes, in fact, until they tore at the seams, and then he asked his valet to patch them.

  All his life Nicky had watched his father working at his big desk, his dog at his feet, tall stacks of papers before him. He had worked doggedly, frequently angrily, scribbling insults to his ministers (‘Fools! Idiots!’) in the margins of the documents he signed, muttering to himself about the perfidy of the European states and condemning Queen Victoria in particular as a ‘nasty, interfering old woman’.2 He had made the task of rulership seem gruelling and distasteful – not an honour and a privilege to be cherished but a cross of martyrdom, to be carried while in a mood of constant irritation. And Nicky was well aware that his father would have preferred to pass on that cross, that obligation, to his favourite son Michael, and not to Nicky himself, who had the misfortune to be the firstborn. Michael was still an adolescent, but in the tsar’s opinion he alone, of the three imperial brothers, displayed the self-confident, frank manner of one born to rule; Nicky was too soft and self-effacing, too easily swayed by others, and the third son Georgy, clever but shallow, lacked the seriousness to take on the imperial authority.

  Alix received Nicky’s telegram at Wolfsgarten, telling her of the tsar’s grave illness and asking her to come to the Crimea, and immediately she made plans to join her fiancé. She knew he would be in anguish, worrying about his father and grieving at his suffering and at the same time dreading the looming probability of having to step into his shoes. He was bound to need her comfort, reassurance and strength, and she had to be with him.

  She had worries of her own just then, for she had discovered, once she returned to Hesse from England, that a rift had developed between Ernie and his wife. Ducky was pregnant, miserable and full of grievances. She poured out those grievances to Alix – ‘in her open way she speaks about everything’, Alix told Nicky in a letter, implying that Ducky’s revelations concerned her intimate life with Ernie. Alix took pride in her own sophistication, in her knowing things ‘others don’t till they are grown up and married’.3 She could listen without being shocked, and she could understand. But the rift, though not entirely unexpected, was upsetting. Ernie had tried, against his nature, to make a conventional marriage, and the effort was failing. There would be an heir to inherit his grand ducal throne, but if Ducky continued to be outspoken, there would also be a scandal.

  Alix set out from Wolfsgarten, accompanied by Gretchen von Fabrice, Baroness Grancy, and her sister Victoria, who travelled with her party as far as Warsaw. From there the others went on alone, across the Ukraine, the air growing warmer as they made their way southwards.4 Frosty mornings gave way to mists and fog as their train carried them past rain-soaked fields from which the grain had been harvested, only the pale stubble remaining. For days they journeyed on through the flat plains, with longer and longer stretches of track between towns and villages. Cut off from word of what was happening in Livadia, Alix must have worried over what she would find when she arrived.

  At Warsaw Ella joined Alix and her party, and brought news. The tsar was still alive, but his condition was worsening. Bertie had been sent for from England, and would make the journey as soon as he could. Meanwhile, no one was in charge at Livadia, and all was in disorder.

  When Nicky came to meet Alix, Ella and the others at the mountain town of Simferopol he looked stricken. It was all too much for him, having to fend off his father’s ministers with their contradictory advice and suggestions and to struggle to keep his equilibrium while the loud-voiced Uncle Vladimir and the strong-willed, sinister Uncle Serge tried to influence, if not control, his every move. His mother was beside herself with anxiety. The doctors, all but helpless, offered neither comfort nor hope. And Nicky himself, torn between attending to his father’s governmental affairs and sitting by his bedside, listening to his increasingly shallow breathing, watching his vitality ebb, was tense and miserable.

  The long slow drive from Simferopol to the southern coast of the Crimea wound through mountain passes, along swift rivers and in among green hills. Thick oak forests led to a high, twisting, boulder-strewn pass, then to a plateau beyond which the land sloped away towards the broad bay. On high cliffs overlooking the brilliant expanse of dark blue sea were perched an array of handsome large whitewashed villas set in gardens blooming with oleander, wisteria and abundant roses. Flowering vines covered the walls, even in October, and the warm sun shone down on green lawns and groves of cypress, and left a golden wake across the deep blue of the water. The air was full of the scent of grapes and there were vineyards and orchards set in among the mansions, giving the entire panorama a lush Mediterranean atmosphere.

  When Alix and Nicky drove up to the imperial mansion, they were given a formal welcome. With old-fashioned politeness Tsar Alexander had insisted on dressing up in uniform to meet his future daughter-in-law, though the effort left him prostrate afterwards. It was all he could do to recline on a sofa brought out onto a balcony, his huge bulk swathed in a blanket despite the balmy weather, his oxygen tank by his side. He was sleeping much of the time during the day, waking fitfully at night and suffering severe nosebleeds and attacks of nausea. Every new attack brought his children, Minnie, and all the doctors to his bedside, while the other relatives, ministers and servants congregated nearby, listening and waiting for the latest medical pronouncement. In the intervals between crises the family went into the chapel to pray, while the court officials huddled in panic-ridden clusters and the servants, sorrowful and lost, wandered aimlessly from room to room, many with tears running down their cheeks.

  Nicky took refuge from all the strain and chaos in Alix’s room, where she sat, outwardly composed, and embroidered a chalice cover to be used in the rite when she joined the Orthodox church. They prayed together, and he told her of his difficulties. They went for walks and drives together, though with each passing day the tsar’s crises seemed to come more often and Nicky could not afford to be away for long.

  ‘A sad and painful day!’ Nicky wrote in his diary a week after Alix’s arrival. ‘Dear Papa did not sleep at all and felt so bad in the morning that they woke us and called us upstairs. What an ordeal it is.’5 No one was in charge, not the doctors, not Nicky, not even Uncle Vladimir, whose bluster added to all the agitation.

  ‘Darling boysy,’ Alix wrote in Nicky’s diary, ‘me loves you, oh so very tenderly and deeply. Be firm and make the doctors, Leyden or the others, come alone to you everyday and tell you how they find him. Don’t let others be put first and you left out.’ She urged him to ‘show his own mind’ and not let others forget who he was – the heir to the throne.6

  It was now clear that Nicky was only days, perhaps hours, away from succeeding his father. Yet the closer he came to entering his inheritance, the weaker and less assertive he grew. Only in Alix’s presence could he find relief from the emotional turmoil that ate away at him, and that was apparent to all who saw him. The tsar was dying, t
he tsarevich was sinking under the weight of his fear and suffering. The entire edifice of settled life seemed to be tottering, and chaos loomed.

  Finally, on November 1, the long ordeal ended. ‘My God, my God, what a day,’ Nicky recorded. ‘The Lord has summoned our adored, dear, deeply beloved Papa to Him. My head is spinning, I don’t want to believe it – the awful reality seems so unjust.’ After a traumatic morning during which the exhausted patient was continually given oxygen, he mustered the energy to take communion, then repeated a short prayer and kissed his wife. Soon afterwards, with a priest holding his head and his sons and daughter nearby, he went into convulsions and died.

  ‘It was the death of a saint!’ Nicky wrote. ‘Lord, help us in these terrible days!’ Now the full weight of all he faced seemed to fall on Nicky, as he wept for his father, for himself, for the unknown future. According to his brother-in-law Sandro, Nicky ‘could not collect his thoughts’. He took Sandro to his room and collapsed in grief, his raw suffering painful to see.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ he cried out. ‘What is going to happen to me, to you, to Xenia, to Alix, to mother, to all of Russia? I am not prepared to be a tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling. I have no idea of even how to talk to the ministers. Will you help me, Sandro?’7

  Help was needed, and immediately, for the funeral arrangements had to be made, the world had to be told of the passing of the tsar, the ministers reassured and guided. Nicky’s first actions as tsar would set the tone for his reign. He had to make decisions, delegate responsibilities, oversee arrangements, all the while assuming the role of patriarch of the large and unruly Romanov family.

  He did none of this. Hours passed, and the chaos in the house mounted. Frightened servants cowered in dread, or ran from room to room, unable to carry out their duties. No one was in charge. Throughout the huge sprawling mansion there was a feeling of emptiness and loss, of a world coming to an end. By his death Alexander Mirotworetz, Creator of Peace, had become the destroyer of order and calm, the sower of desolation. Suddenly there was no order, no solid ground, all was unravelling.