Alexandra (6 page)

‘The heart is a surprising thing!’ Nicky wrote in his diary. He never stopped thinking about Alix, yet he yearned for Matilda as well. ‘Should I conclude from all this that I
am exceptionally amorous? To a certain extent, yes.’
⁶

Amorous Nicky was – partly because of his age, partly because of his emotional, sensitive nature, and partly, one suspects, because he was given too little to do. All but prevented by his
father from preparing for his future role as tsar – Alexander III had little respect for Nicky, and preferred his son Michael – Nicky lived the feckless life of a young officer with
very light military duties, staying out too late at night, drinking too much, whiling away his days socializing and his nights in dining, gambling and flirting. He often felt lethargic; his mind
was perpetually underoccupied and although he occasionally attended a session of the imperial council, he was inattentive and emerged unenlightened.

His education had been poor – a smattering of science, a whiff of law and economics, a heavy concentration on the basics of military strategy and command – artillery training,
surveying and topography, the art of fortification. He had an interest in history, but hardly pursued it, beyond leafing through a historical journal on occasion. He was bored, understimulated,
often on the verge of falling asleep. At times, reduced to complete inactivity, he gazed out through the railings of the palace grounds ‘for something to do’.
⁷

In his idleness he daydreamed about Alix, about Matilda Kchessinsky – and, before many months had passed, he acquired a new love, Olga Dolgoruky.
⁸

Unaware of the course Nicky’s emotional life was taking, caught up in her own infatuation for him, Alix counted the days until September 18, while in the fields around Illinsky the grain
ripened
and in the orchards the branches of the trees drooped low, heavy with apples, pears and plums. Ella took Alix and Ernie to Moscow – their first sight of the
wondrous city of the golden domes and clanging bells – and led them on expeditions through country markets, where old toothless women sold green, yellow and pink mushrooms in homemade
birchbark baskets and choruses of red-shirted peasant boys sang and danced to the accompaniment of accordions and tambourines. The rich exuberance of peasant life, the abundance and variety of the
crops, the warm late-summer evenings lit with coloured lanterns and enlivened with dancing bears and twirling gypsies, all delighted her. This was Russia, Nicky’s inheritance. This was where
she hoped to make her home, as Ella had.

But Ella, she was forced to acknowledge, had made a flawed bargain. Serge, who on his visits to Darmstadt had always seemed to be a benign, avuncular presence, was turning out to be someone else
entirely. Now that he was Ella’s husband, Serge had become her jailer. He controlled where she went, whom she saw, how she spent her time. His jealousy of her companions made him hateful,
even cruel. Ella could not write a letter or read a book without running the gauntlet of his suspicions. Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
, with its Russian background and theme of adulterous
love, was forbidden to Ella because, according to Serge, it might arouse ‘unhealthy curiosity and violent emotion’.
⁹

Even more troubling was the way Serge criticized Ella, sometimes in front of others, calling her ‘my child’ in a scathing voice. Strained in each other’s presence, Ella and
Serge appeared to avoid spending time together, especially when Serge was in one of his surly moods. Alix watched her tall, gaunt brother-in-law, his eyes cold and his lips pressed tightly
together, nervously turning a jewelled ring he wore on his little finger, and was thoughtful. This too was a part of Nicky’s inheritance: haughty, scornful Serge, and the others in
Nicky’s very large extended family. What would it be like to live among these people?
¹⁰

Although Ella professed to be content with her life, and Serge’s fearsome, domineering side was not always in evidence, what Alix
could observe of the troubled
relationship between her sister and her husband must have given her pause. Ella, walking out with Alix on fine days, her complexion shaded by a green-lined parasol, appeared lovelier than ever, her
grey-blue eyes unclouded. She occupied herself with her religious devotions – she had become a communicant of the Orthodox church – and in designing and sewing her own gowns and making
her own face-lotions from cucumber juice and sour cream. After six years of marriage she and Serge still had no children, but she did not appear at all distressed by her childless state. Her one
aim seemed to be to make things so that Alix too could live in Russia, as the wife of the heir to the throne.

September 18 came, and, greatly to Alix’s disappointment, Nicky did not arrive at Illinsky. Quite possibly he was prevented from going there by his parents, for there was a great deal of
gossip that summer about Nicky and Alix, and the tsar and tsarina had decided to send their son on a long trip abroad to broaden his mind and experience and ensure that he didn’t see his
cousin Alix for a long time.

With his sickly brother Georgy, his cousin George of Greece and a travelling party of young officer friends under the supervision of Prince Bariatinsky, Nicky went aboard the frigate
Memory
of Azov
in Trieste in November of 1890 and embarked upon a round-theworld journey.

During his prolonged odyssey the tsarevich rode donkeys along the Nile, steamed down the Suez Canal, went on crocodile hunts in Java and attended balls, banquets and receptions held in his
honour by local dignitaries throughout the tropics. Apart from the bazaars, Nicky found most of the local culture tiresome; his diary entries reveal that he and his young companions were much more
interested in the Egyptian dancing girls, who ‘undressed and got up to all sorts of tricks’, and performing geishas (with whom they had ‘a very jolly time’) than they were
in visiting museums or temples.
¹¹
They drank heavily, caroused at night and generally behaved like the fun-loving, immature young men they were.
In Japan, however, something went wrong. Gossip afterwards said that, in their pursuit of uninhibited pleasures, the Russians visited male brothels; according to the
rumour, George of Greece, who was homosexual, had made offensive advances to a Japanese boy.
¹²
The result was swift and
unexpected.

Nicky was in a rickshaw in the town of Otsu, travelling from a temple back to his hotel, when suddenly a burly policeman attacked him with a sabre, striking two blows which, had they been
slightly better aimed and had Nicky not been wearing a thick felt hat, might have killed him. Nicky leaped nimbly out of the rickshaw, calling out, ‘What are you about?’ while George,
who was riding in another rickshaw immediately behind Nicky’s, knocked the assailant down with several swift blows of his cane. The rickshaw drivers subdued the policeman, bound his wrists
and legs, and dragged him to a nearby house where they left him while they ran for help.

The wounds Nicky received penetrated to the bone, and blood poured down his face. He was rushed to the governor’s house, his frightened companions terrified that he would die. Fortunately
his wounds, though serious, were not fatal. He had a long red gash on the top of his head, and would suffer permanently from chronic severe headaches.

‘I was very touched by the Japanese,’ Nicky wrote in a letter to his mother, ‘who knelt in the street as we passed and looked terribly sad.’ The peaceable, law-abiding
Japanese were shocked that such a violent assault against the heir to the Russian throne could occur in their country – though in fact this was not the first attack on Europeans. Recuperating
in Kyoto, Nicky received hundreds of telegrams from all over Japan expressing polite regret. Emperor Meiji himself came to visit, with his entourage of princes. ‘I felt sorry for them,’
Nicky wrote, ‘so stricken were they.’
¹³

While Nicky was seeing the world, Alix too was travelling. She wintered at Malta, where her sister Victoria had leased a house. Her sister, and her grandmother in England, hoped that Alix might
find a husband among her brother-in-law Louis of Battenberg’s fellow naval officers. But though Alix flirted, danced and sipped tea with the eligible young men, and even singled out one of
them, a handsome Scot, for special friendship, she was not swayed from her bond to Nicky, and went back to Darmstadt unattached.

There were other trips: to Kiel, to visit her sister Irene, who had married Henry of Prussia, brother of Emperor William, and to Italy, where she joined Queen Victoria
and toured the museums of Florence and Venice.

Most of the time, however, Alix stayed in Darmstadt and served as her father’s hostess and as the ‘Landesmütter’ of Hesse – a role she apparently relished. It is
worthy of remark that in all the socializing Alix did at this time, whether welcoming guests at banquets, or making speeches to open charity events, or visiting hospitals or delivering largesse
from the court to poor families, no one recorded that she was shy or ill at ease. Meeting new people, being highly visible, suited her – particularly if the event had an altruistic purpose.
In reaching towards the larger goal of helping others, including helping her father socially, she lost her self-consciousness.

In the spring of 1891, Alix was nineteen. Three social seasons had come and gone and she was still without a fiancé. She was rapidly becoming an old maid, and her grandmother, concerned
that she had ‘so few choices’, and worried that before long Ella would arrange a match for her sister in Russia, once again decided to intervene in an effort to direct Alix’s
future.

Among Alix’s few choices, Queen Victoria thought, was Prince Max of Baden, an ill-favoured, charmless but otherwise suitable prospective husband. She wrote to Louis, emphasizing the
urgency of the situation and asking him to invite Max to Darmstadt as soon as possible.

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.