Alexandra Read online

  As if to underscore the emotional devastation the weather abruptly changed. The air turned cold, and a gale blew up from the sea, churning the bay into frothy waves and blowing fiercely along the flower-covered balconies and whitewashed terraces of the imperial mansion. The wind tore at the gardens, lashed the branches of the trees and moaned under the eaves, its sonorous, eerie voice an echo of the bewildered sadness and disorientation felt by the entire household.

  It was all Nicky could do, late that night, to drag himself through the Prayers for the Dead, held in the death-room by the clergy. ‘I felt as if I were dead also,’ he recorded.8 It was all he could do to hold himself together, buoyed up by Alix, whose constant reassurances and promises of help made the terrible pain he felt bearable – but only just. He could not comfort his mother, whose grief all but incapacitated her, or reach out to his sisters and brothers in their sorrow. Save for Alix’s nurture, he was alone. And he was now Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia.

  He was now the tsar – yet his uncles, feuding with the agitated imperial ministers, ignored him in the days after Alexander III’s death. Vladimir and Serge bullied and commanded, trying to organize the funeral cortege. A temporary casket had to be made, the imperial train ordered. Officials in Petersburg had to be given detailed instructions about the funeral so that they could make preparations. The body could not be transported over the mountains, it would have to go by sea to Sebastopol. The Black Sea Fleet had to be contacted, with orders to despatch a vessel to Livadia at once. So much had to be done, and so quickly.

  Meanwhile the imperatives of nature had begun to assert themselves. The corpse stank horribly and had to be carried by Nicky and his uncles out of the house and into ‘a little corner’ where it could be embalmed. As if making a grotesque comment on the dark absurdity of all that was occurring, the face of the dead tsar, which was turning black with corruption, appeared to be smiling, as if it were about to laugh.9

  On the second day after the tsar’s death Bertie arrived from England, and under the influence of his imposing yet warm and fatherly presence, things began to right themselves. The blustering uncles backed off, the ministers, ashamed to reveal their confusion and incompetence before the heir to the English throne, began to find their focus again. Gradually the household began to return to normal; meals were served, beds made, horses fed and watered, provisions bought. Quickly perceiving that Nicky was unable to make the necessary arrangements for his father’s transport and burial, Bertie himself undertook to organize the funeral, and to lead the family on their long sad trek to Petersburg where their patriarch would be laid to rest.

  Alix, meanwhile, observed all that was going on and tried her best to remain tactfully uninvolved, while lending her sympathy and strength to her fiancé. Everything was happening too fast, there was no time to adjust to the sudden changes. Nicky was urging her to marry him immediately, in a quiet private ceremony in the Livadia mansion, with only the immediate family present. Uncle Vladimir and Uncle Serge objected: such a wedding was not suitable for a tsar of Russia, they said, the tsar had to be married in Petersburg, with appropriate grandeur and solemnity, and in the presence of the entire court.

  The argument went back and forth, with the weak, anguished Minnie supporting Nicky and Alix attempting to avoid taking sides. To marry in a season of mourning, with a sombre trousseau and with the wedding guests wearing black, was far from what she had been expecting only a few weeks earlier. To have her wedding be the occasion of family conflict was equally unforeseen – and dismaying. She had to feel her way through the labyrinth of conflicting loyalties, trying not to give offence, aware that sharp criticism, even ostracism, by other family members was the risk she ran.

  She observed that Sandro, Xenia’s husband, was treated with coldness by the rest of the family. Minnie in particular disliked him, and had done so ever since his wedding to Xenia a few months earlier. He had given offence by making demands, making himself and his needs conspicuous. He had not been able to ease himself gracefully, self-effacingly, into the family community. He was being punished, silently but unmistakably. The feeling against him was strong and unpleasant.10

  The last thing Alix wanted was to trigger the same reaction among those who were about to become her in-laws. She made an effort to hold herself aloof from the struggles and conflicts – only to be criticized, behind her back, for her hauteur.11

  The effort to be both helpful and self-effacing cost Alix a good deal, for her leg pains had returned and she was suffering. Another young woman, in pain and surrounded by turmoil, suddenly finding herself on the threshold of marriage to a weak, hesitant ruler who seemed incapable of fulfilling his responsibilities might have had second thoughts and fled. But Alix stood firm. Nicky’s weakness, which she saw only too clearly, made her strength all the more necessary. Or, rather, she would be his strength. Where he faltered, she would step into the breach. She had given him her pledge. To love him, to help him was her sacred duty. She would follow him into the maw of hell itself.

  If Alix pondered, as the funeral journey got under way, what the future was likely to hold for her as wife of the new tsar, she seems to have kept her thoughts to herself. To voice misgivings would after all have been disloyal. But she must have perceived, in that November of 1894, the depths of her fiancé’s ineffectuality, and she must have wondered how, if he was unable even to manage the arrangements for his father’s funeral, he would be able to govern Russia.

  The imperial train carrying the late tsar’s body made the journey from Sebastopol to Petersburg in slow stages, stopping often so that prayers could be repeated and services held. In Moscow, the emperor’s remains were on view for three days, while his mourning subjects came to pay their respects. Then it was on to Petersburg for the final lying in state in the cathedral in the Peter and Paul Fortress.

  There in the dim interior of the vast cathedral, amid the thousands of glowing candles, Alix knelt in her black crepe veil to repeat the service for the dead. Her legs were stiff and sore, her hands and face cold – for there was no heat in the draughty church, apart from that given off by the candles. The services went on for hours, and more than one worshipper, including Alix’s waiting lady Gretchen von Fabrice, fainted. But Alix held on, moved by the dramatic rise and fall of voices in the choir, by the chanted prayers and the overpowering scent of incense.

  She was a daughter of the Orthodox church now, she had made her formal profession of faith. She was one with Nicky in faith, as she would soon be one with him in marriage. In a week she would become his bride – the ‘funeral bride’, they were calling her in the streets of Petersburg.

  The choir began the singing of the funeral dirge, ‘Eternal Memory’, and the imperial grenadiers took their places around the coffin. One by one, each member of the family filed past, bending over to kiss the black, wizened face of the dead tsar with its hint of a smile. Wincing, Alix limped along, placing her reverent kiss on the stinking, shrivelled cheek.

  It was an unpleasant duty, kissing the corpse, but Russian custom required it of her. She was after all about to become tsarina, and she had to follow the traditions of her adopted country. Solemnly, dutifully, and with only a slight feeling of chill and pain, Alix stood holding Nicky’s unsteady arm as the grenadiers slowly lowered the heavy coffin into its final resting place.

  8

  A soft blanket of new snow had cleansed Petersburg, covering every dirty cornice and grimy windowsill, every roof, turret and chimney with a thick layer of gleaming whiteness. Above the city the skies were dull grey, threatening more snow, and the air was very cold, but along the streets, and especially along Nevsky Prospekt, thousands of black-clad Petersburgers waited eagerly. For this was the new tsar’s wedding day, and they looked forward to the spectacle that always accompanied such imperial occasions. By eleven o’clock the streets were choked with onlookers, and as each golden coach carrying wedding guests passed, making its slow way to the Winter Palace, the dark throng had to part to
allow the horses to proceed.

  All Petersburg was still in mourning for the late tsar, and many in the crowd, wanting a memento of his passing, had purchased a cheap reproduction of a painting commemorating his death. It showed the tall, broad-shouldered tsar, in uniform, ascending into heaven, borne aloft by four winged angels, his arm raised as if in a final salute to his people. Another angel bore his crown. His weeping widow clung to his ascending figure. The painting captured the prevailing mood, which was one of sorrow and desolation. Yet on this day the public grief was dispelled somewhat by the excitement of the wedding, and the gossip about the ‘Funeral Bride’, Tsarina Alexandra, the German princess who was rumoured to be beautiful and suspected, because of the known weakness of Tsar Nicholas, of being ambitious for power.

  The grand salons of the Winter Palace too were abuzz with rumour, for most of the thousands of aristocrats and dignitaries gathering there had never seen the new tsarina and knew of her only through the bits of gossip they had heard. In the huge Hall of the Armorial Bearings, the women of Petersburg society had assembled, wearing traditional Russian caftans of heavy embroidered cloth and tall velvet headdresses with pearls and long white veils; they stood, uncomfortable in their finery, waiting for the bride and groom to pass through on their way to the wedding chamber. The Hall of the Field Marshals too was crowded with guests, Tartar merchants in long silk jackets vivid with colour, mayors and town councillors, journalists representing not only the Petersburg papers but the major papers of foreign capitals. The largest of the immense halls, the Hall of Nicholas I, was full of military officers, while the Concert Hall contained the leading officials of the imperial household, the Dames de Portrait or bedchamber women of the empress, and the maids of honour and ladies-in-waiting of the Dowager Empress and Empress Alexandra.

  The new empress’s Russian ladies were especially curious about her, and the chief waiting maid, Martha Mouchanow, wrote down her initial view of her new mistress.

  ‘My first impression was that of a tall, slight girl, with straight long features, a classical profile, and a lovely figure,’ she wrote. ‘She had fair hair that shone like gold in the sun, whilst at times it appeared quite dark, according to the light which played upon it.’

  ‘I remember thinking that I had never yet seen anyone more beautiful than this girl,’ Mouchanow went on. ‘The general impression she produced was that of a superb woman.’ But the lovely face of the empress was flawed, Mouchanow thought, by the ‘determined expression’ of her mouth, set in a hard unpleasant line.1

  The grim set of Alix’s small mouth on her wedding day was a symptom of the strain she was under. She had kept her familiar German maids around her for as long as she could, but on her wedding day the Germans withdrew and were replaced by an entirely new staff of Russian personal servants, chosen by Minnie, and a new and very large household staff. The eight Russian waiting maids, themselves nervous, no doubt curious, and unaccustomed to the formality their German predecessors had observed, must have made Alix uncomfortable as they went about the task of helping her dress and prepare herself for her wedding.

  ‘It was very difficult for the servants to attend to the many details accompanying a complicated toilette,’ Mouchanow wrote, ‘and to make decisions for an utter stranger.’2 To Alix, of course, everything was strange: the enormous palace with its hundreds of outsize rooms, gilded walls and costly furnishings; the elaborate protocol of the imperial court; the lavishness of everything, from her extensive trousseau to the wedding gifts that filled several large rooms; even the Russian language, which she was learning but which was still largely foreign to her. She was nervous, isolated, in dread of committing some fatal faux pas that would put her forever at odds with her new household.

  Alix had come to the palace by coach early in the morning from Serge’s mansion, and had been escorted to the room set aside for the dressing of imperial brides. Awaiting her there were her new Russian maids and all of her mother-in-law’s waiting ladies, a keen-eyed, chilling reception line, all of the women outwardly deferential but inwardly full of sharp scrutiny. Under their exceptionally watchful eyes the tsarina had to make her complicated toilette, putting on her lacy undergarments, her court dress of silver tissue with its ermine-trimmed, eight-foot-long train, her long diamond earrings and splendid necklace, finally her shining mantle of cloth of gold.

  Every garment, every jewel was handed to her with great solemnity on a tray or a red velvet cushion, a ceremonious silence prevailing. Around her was displayed the venerable gold toilette service that had belonged to the Empress Anna, and that had been used by every subsequent empress and grand duchess. It was as if her every gesture, her every movement was charged with symbolic significance.

  One of the imperial dressers approached Minnie with the dazzling, diamond-studded crown on its velvet cushion. By custom the dowager empress placed the crown on the new empress’s head at the climax of the garbing ceremony, then the hairdresser arranged the coiffure and fixed the bridal veil in place.

  But when it was time for the hairdresser to come forward, he could not be found. The waiting maids sent the imperial footmen and valets to look for him. After a delay they reported that he was nowhere in the palace. Now a susurration arose in the garbing room, a treble murmuring. The bride could not go to her wedding without her crown and veil, and no one but the hairdresser could fasten them on properly. What would happen? Would there be no wedding?

  The women began circling Alix, who was seated before the huge gold-framed mirror, waiting for the final touches to be added to her coiffure. She said little, she maintained an almost unnatural calm. More tense minutes passed. The wedding was to begin at eleven-thirty, but the time came and was gone. No one seemed to know what to do, or how to find the one man without whom the bride could not be wedded to her groom.

  Out in the grand salons, the guests and dignitaries began to fidget and to wonder what was happening. Watches were consulted, eyebrows raised. Had there been a sudden change of plan? Was it the new empress who was keeping so many thousands waiting, and all because of some whim?

  Mouchanow watched her new mistress during the tense hour that ensued. Alix continued to sit unmoving before her mirror, ‘saying hardly a word, but with tears in her eyes which, however, she bravely tried to conceal’. Mortified, increasingly irritated, on edge, she waited in the greatest uneasiness for the impasse to resolve itself. The others, trying and failing to attract her attention, interpreted her marmoreal calm as hauteur, and felt themselves silently chastised. The gulf between mistress and servants widened, and began to be corroded by resentment.

  Minnie, well-meaning but ineffectual, fluttered anxiously about with the others, unable to offer Alix any reassurance. There was no bond between the two women, though Alix found her future mother-in-law to be ‘sweet and patient’. ‘She touches one with her gentleness,’ Alix wrote in a letter to one of her sisters.3 But Minnie was still struggling with her great grief at the loss of her husband, and was despondent at losing two of her children, first Xenia and now Nicky, to marriage within a few months of one another. After years of opposition, Minnie had reconciled herself to having Alix as a daughter-in-law. But her long opposition would never be forgotten by either woman, and the most that could be hoped for between them was civility and a wary affection. Minnie was no help to Alix now.

  At last, to Alix’s enormous relief, the door of the room opened and the hairdresser, overheated and excited, rushed in. He had been refused entrance to the palace by the police, as it turned out, and it had taken him an hour to straighten out the confusion. Swiftly he pinned Alix’s diadem in place, and her long lace wedding veil. Now the wedding procession could begin.

  At twelve-thirty, the doors of the Concert Hall were thrown open and the first of a long line of servants in scarlet livery made their slow way through the first of the grand salons, traversing a narrow pathway marked out by guards of honour with sabres drawn. At the same moment the great guns of the Peter and Paul Fortre
ss across the river began firing, each renewed burst so loud that it seemed as if the windows of the hall would shatter. One hundred and fifty gentlemen of the chamber marched past the assembled notables, then came Prince Trubetskoy, marshal of the court, with his gold staff seven feet high.

  Behind the marshal walked Minnie, her pale face nearly as white as her dress, on the arm of her father the king of Denmark. Behind them came Nicky, in the crimson tunic and fur-lined cloak of a colonel in the Life Guard Hussar regiment. On his arm walked Alix, moving, an observer thought, ‘quite simply and with great dignity’, a magnificent vision in her silver gown and glittering diamonds, her shimmering mantle, held by four chamberlains, flowing out behind her like a river of gold.

  ‘She looked the perfection of what one would imagine an Empress of Russia . . . would be,’ the English visitor Lord Carrington thought.4 As the imperials passed all the men bowed low, the women dipped in a curtsy, silks and satins rustling, ceremonial swords rattling. All the thousands of eyes were on the bride – and Alix felt the force of their gaze – but after appraising her, all eyes seemed to turn to Minnie.

  For it was the Dowager Empress, not the bride, who was the true centre of attention that day. Everyone at court knew that it was her birthday – a very sad birthday because of her bereavement. All their sympathies were directed towards Minnie, for she had made herself beloved and the affections of the courtiers, built up over many years, were intensified by recent events. She was given the first position in the procession, ahead of her son and his wife-to-be, she was deferred to, admired – for she was still, at forty-seven, in her prime, and was very pretty – and accorded a great degree of sympathy. It was clear to all that she was suffering that day; Nicky’s relative Constantine, his father’s cousin, known in the family as ‘K.R.’, wrote in his diary that Minnie looked frailer than usual, ‘like a victim being led to the slaughter’.5