Alexandra (29 page)

I
n autumn 1907, soon after the accident aboard the
Standart
, the empress once again fell ill, and took to her bed, this time staying there
for months.

Her legs and back gave her so much pain that even the smallest movement hurt her, and the doctors came daily to give her injections in alternate legs. With the pain came weakness, fatigue, fever
and headache. Week after week she lay all but immobile, insisting on getting fully dressed each day as if to go out – she disliked dressing gowns, with their air of idleness and languor
– and waiting impatiently to improve.

She occupied herself with her everpresent embroidery and other handcrafts, wrote letters (often at night when pain kept her from sleeping), read, prayed, fretted over her inactivity. She was
accustomed to being busy, indeed to feeling hurried, there was so much to do.
¹
It was not in her nature to lie back and rest, even though her
weary body demanded it. ‘She was convinced,’ Martha Mouchanow wrote, ‘that every single hour of any man’s or woman’s existence ought to be consecrated to duty or
occupation of some kind.’
²
Obsessive occupation had always been her hallmark, and without it she felt useless.

She not only felt useless, she felt burdensome. The doctors, observing that any exertion made her tired, diagnosed heart trouble, and warned Nicky that his wife showed signs of becoming
seriously ill, and this greatly increased the concern shown for her by everyone around her.
³
To her sciatic pain and migraines was now added the
strain and worry of a weak heart and, although Alix never
complained, and rarely admitted to suffering, it was evident to her family and even to her ladies-in-waiting that
she was struggling as never before with physical illness. It vexed her that others made what she called a ‘fuss’ over her, that her sisters were worried about her and Irene was
contemplating making a special trip to Russia to visit her.

Christmas 1907 came, and Alix was still very ill, too weak to stand beside her husband when he received the diplomatic corps, too enervated to allow a performance of KR’s new play,
The
Bride of Messina
, to be put on in the palace grounds.
⁴
She was ‘being careful’, he said, avoiding fatigue by resting. She made
an effort to read, and tried, no doubt, to read the intellectually stimulating, challenging books she had always preferred, books on astronomy, natural history and mathematics. (History she
disdained as boring, having to do with ‘the sayings and doings of people long dead’.
⁵
) She may have tried to reread
The Origin of
Species
, a book she had long admired, a copy of which she kept in her room, much to the horror of her Father Confessor who considered it dangerous. But reading made her head ache, even the
light reading she normally disapproved of as frivolous; novels did not distract her or lift her spirits, and she soon wearied of the trivialities of the plots.

It did distract her, or at least it satisfied her need for orderliness, to keep a careful chronology of her days of illness, just as she kept careful track of her lace and of the garments in her
own and her children’s wardrobes. ‘Today it is the forty-ninth day that I am ill,’ she wrote to her daughter Tatiana in January of 1908. ‘Tomorrow begins the eighth
week.’ On that forty-ninth day, she lay in the dark a long time, her head pounding, her legs aching.

Her spirits were very low. ‘When one feels ill, all seems harder to bear,’ she once wrote to Nicky. With illness, with weakness came a greater difficulty in ‘mastering
herself’, she admitted. What had looked bright and hopeful now looked dim, and she became over emotional, too quick to give in to tears.
⁶

She could no longer master herself. Mentally as well as physically, Alix now stood on uncertain ground.

She was depressed, ‘despairing’, as she wrote to her sister Victoria, about her life. Though she talked endlessly, especially to her daughters, about the
power of prayer and the inevitability of miracles, about how nothing was impossible for God, her anxieties were not quieted by her faith.
⁷
Instead, as she approached her late thirties, Alix entered a murky cognitive realm in which reason often tottered and balance was all but lost. She had veered off the path of common sense and sound
judgment, and in an effort to regain clarity and peace of mind she clung to the religious certainties impressed on her in childhood and reinforced by men such as Philippe and Father Gregory. The
more she struggled for understanding, the more she insisted that God ruled all; her constant need to reiterate the primacy of her faith underscored its insecurity. The inner conflict, the tension
between trust and fearful doubt, preyed on the empress’s mind and increased what others perceived as her ‘air of suffering’.

Alix’s suffering was in fact more hidden from view than ever in 1908 and 1909, years when she spent more and more time in seclusion. She was very seldom to be seen on public occasions. She
did go aboard the
Standart
– repaired and restored after the accident in Finnish waters – and made journeys to Livadia and Peterhof and even went as faraway as Stockholm and
Cowes for vacations and family visits. But moving from place to place was painful, so much of the time she lay on her sofa in the mauve boudoir at Tsarskoe Selo, or on the terrace at Livadia, or
even on a mattress placed on the ground in the open air of the garden, wincing every time she shifted her position and gritting her teeth when the pain in her back and legs was especially
severe.

The imperial doctors suggested that she go to a spa, not only to ease her physical pain but to calm her overwrought nerves, but she resisted the idea. She tried to cultivate an attitude of
acceptance. ‘Don’t think my ill health depresses me personally,’ she wrote to her sister Victoria somewhat disingenuously. ‘I don’t care, except to see my dear ones
suffer on my account, and that I cannot fulfil my duties. But once God sends such a cross, it must be borne. Darling Mama also lost her health at an early age.’
⁸

That she had, once and for all, ‘lost her health’ seemed clear. She did not expect to regain her full vigour. Yet there were times when she rose
energetically from her bed or mattress and strode across the room or, if out of doors, climbed a hill, leaving those who watched her puzzled, and giving rise to whispers among the servants that she
had never been truly incapacitated or in pain at all. Certainly she had appeared robust when giving orders and taking charge during the
Standart
disaster, and when nursing Anastasia
through diphtheria, when she stayed by her daughter’s bedside through most of five long nights until her fever broke. In truth Alix could nearly always be counted on to get up out of her
sickbed in response to the strong pull of others’ needs. All her rescuing impulses were triggered, and she responded, without hesitation, to whatever crisis arose.

But between crises, fatigue overcame her, and she succumbed to chronic pain and to the shortness of breath that indicated a weakened heart.

‘My darling Mama!’ Tatiana wrote to Alix early in 1909, ‘I hope you won’t be today very tired and that you can get up to dinner. I am always so awfully sorry when you are
tired and when you can’t get up. I will pray for you my darling mama in church . . . Please sleep well and don’t get tired.’
⁹

With Alix in seclusion, resting on her couch or bed, and the children in the nursery wing of the Alexander Palace with their governess Sophie Tioutchev or their principal nurse Mary (about whom
Olga complained, claiming that Mary got angry ‘without reason’), notes passed back and forth between mother and children during the day. Alix often sent them instructions and
exhortations, reprimanding Olga (‘don’t be so wild and kick about and show your legs, it is not pretty’), telling them all to be obedient to Mary and Sophie, cautioning them
against becoming overly fond of clothes or jewellery (as Tatiana was inclined to do), gently but firmly reprimanding Olga for her temper and Marie for her stubbornness. She was anxious about their
delicate health, and very concerned about the formation of their moral character, repeatedly reminding them
of their duty to help those in want and making every effort to
keep all the children from becoming arrogant or haughty.
¹⁰

All five of the children had an abundance of animal spirits. When their Aunt Olga took them out walking in the palace park, she had trouble controlling them. Freed from their nurse’s
oversight they ran off in different directions, ‘lively and full of energy’.
¹¹
Alexei in particular was not only high-spirited and
energetic, but undisciplined. Fearing that to curb his behaviour might cause him to have tantrums, during which he might bang his head or kick furniture, and knowing that any such violence could
bring on an attack of bleeding, his parents chose to let him do as he liked, and told the household staff to do the same. As a result he was recalcitrant and ill-mannered, disruptive and thoroughly
spoiled – in contrast to his sisters, who when others were present sat with their hands folded, or busy with needlework, spoke in measured tones and always remembered their table manners.

Both Alix and Nicky wanted to raise their children simply – or as simply as possible amid surroundings of great magnificence. At birth each child inherited a very large fortune, but this
endowment was never brought to their attention. Instead, the girls in particular were encouraged to be thrifty, not to waste anything, never to squander the small sum given to them each month for
pocket money. The girls’ fine clothes, made by the Moscow couturier Lamanov, were worn for many years, Olga and Tatiana’s outgrown dresses handed down to Marie and
Anastasia.
¹²
The small silver ornaments, books and diaries they spent their money on were modest in cost and they were encouraged to save some
of their monthly allowance to give to charity.
¹³

With Alexei, as heir to the throne, always given pre-eminence and absorbing the majority of his parents’ care and attention, a situation his illness intensified, the imperial daughters had
to be emotionally self-sufficient. They looked to one another for support, and seem to have formed a bond strong enough to overcome whatever personal conflicts arose among them. Like their mother,
who had learned from the stouthearted, iron-willed Baroness Grancy ‘never to give in, either physically or morally’, they were taught self-discipline from an early
age. But they did not all respond well to this harsh tutelage, which called for a great degree of self-sacrifice. And when Alix’s illness removed her for long stretches of time,
at least two of the girls reacted emotionally. Tatiana wilted. In her notes to her mother there is a plangent tone, an underlying sadness. And Marie, whom her sisters called by the unkind nickname
‘Fat Little Bow-Wow’, became ‘wild and naughty’ and lashed out verbally, saying that nobody loved her, that she was only in the way, and keeping company with Xenia’s
daughter Irina instead of her sisters.
¹⁴

Alix noted all this, brooded over it, and did her best to guide and comfort her children while coping with her own physical wretchedness and low spirits. ‘Motherliness lay at the root of
her character,’ Sophie Buxhoeveden wrote of Alix.
¹⁵
But the empress’s idea of motherliness was idiosyncratic; it reflected,
naturally enough, her own priorities. She saw herself in her motherly role as guide and protector, leading her children away from all that she condemned as ‘frivolity’ and towards a
high-minded vision of self-improvement and duty, within the framework of a self-denying morality. She was suspicious of pleasure, mistaking it for self-indulgence.

Fortunately for the girls, Nicky’s sister Olga, who spent a good deal of time with the family during the years of Alix’s illness, offered her nieces a respite from their
mother’s well-intentioned strictures. When the family was in residence at Tsarskoe Selo, once a week the imperial daughters spent an entire day in Petersburg with their cheerful, somewhat
unconventional young aunt, lunching at the Anitchkov Palace with their grandmother Minnie (an ‘irksomely formal’ event, Olga recalled), then going on to Olga’s townhouse for a tea
dance with other young people, at which they ‘all enjoyed themselves immensely’. There was much laughter and music, games and conversation, and the light-hearted presence of Olga, who
seemed, in her spontaneity and jokiness, almost as young as the girls themselves.
¹⁶
‘These Sunday afternoons were great events in the
girls’ lives,’ Sophie Buxhoeveden thought. It was always with regret that they heard a footman announce the arrival, at ten in the evening, of a carriage from the palace, waiting to
take them home.

How well Alix bore her poor health and unwelcome seclusion is impossible to say. To her children she showed a stoic fortitude. ‘When God thinks the time comes to
make me better, He will, and not before,’ she wrote to daughter Olga. ‘He knows why He sent the illness, and we must be quite sure it’s for some good.’
¹⁷
One thing was certain: she took great comfort from Father Gregory, whose visits to Tsarskoe Selo became more frequent in these difficult years 1908 and
1909.

Unlike Philippe Vachot, who had been the teacher and master for an entire group of devotees, Father Gregory came to offer his spiritual gifts to the imperial family alone. He was their
‘dear friend’; Nicky and Alix were his ‘Little Father’ and ‘Little Mother’. With the children he was on the most affectionate terms, Alexei trusting him and
turning to him when in pain and Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia always happy to see him in the nursery and admitting him eagerly to their bedrooms – sometimes secretly, for they knew the
governess Sophie Tioutchev did not approve. He sat on their beds, talking familiarly with them as a close relative might, exuding, no doubt, the gentleness and warmth Nicky’s sister Olga had
been aware of in him, putting the girls completely at ease. With his shaggy long hair and childlike genuineness, his simplicity and constant talk of divine love and the sweetness of the natural
world, he must have seemed to the children like a creature out of a fairy tale, real yet touched with the surreal, and no doubt they were much in awe of his often demonstrated power to heal.