The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra(12)

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Russia at the time – with whom Günst had recently attended the birth of Nicholas’s sister Xenia’s first child.17 Meanwhile Alexandra was thinking about a nurse for the baby. Like Xenia, she wanted her to be English: ‘If I can only find a good one – they mostly dread going so far away, and have extraordinary ideas about the wild Russians and I don’t know what other nonsense – the nursery maid will of course be a Russian.’18

Nicholas and Alexandra were both convinced their baby would arrive around the middle of October but it still had not been born when Ella arrived from Moscow at the end of the month. She found Alix looking ‘remarkably well thank God so much plumper in the face such a healthy complexion better than I had seen for years’, she reported to Queen Victoria. She was concerned that the baby was ‘probably immense’, but Alix was transformed – ‘full of fun quite like as a child & that dreadfully sad look which Papa’s death had printed on her disappears in her constant smiles’.19

Nicholas was keeping careful watch over his wife: ‘the “babe”

has sunk lower and makes her very uncomfortable, the poor dear!’

he told his mother.20 So preoccupied was he with its imminent arrival, that he hoped his ministers would not ‘swamp’ him with work when the time came. Anticipating a son he and Alexandra had already decided on the name Paul. Maria Feodorovna, however, was not at all keen on it, because of its associations with Paul I, who had been murdered, but she was anxious to be there when labour began. ‘It is understood, isn’t it, that you will let me know as soon as the first symptoms appear? I shall fly to you, my dear children, and shall not be a nuisance, except perhaps by acting as policeman, to keep everybody else well away.’21

The baby’s size and position were causing Alexandra such terrible pain in her back and legs that she was now forced to lie in bed or on the sofa for much of the time. ‘Baby won’t come – it is at the door but has not yet wished to appear & I do so terribly long for it’, she told Ernie.22 Dr Ott was now staying overnight and Madame Günst had been there for the past two weeks. With no news emanating from official sources about the progress of the Empress of Russia’s pregnancy, rumour abroad was rife, just as it had been in the run-up to her marriage. The gossip prompted a firm rebuttal 31

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in the British press, based on ‘well-informed quarters in Darmstadt and Berlin’:

With reference to certain disquieting rumours which have been circulated respecting the health of the Empress of Russia, and the statement that some other physicians will be called in, a St Petersburg correspondent says that Her Imperial Majesty,

according to the declaration of her medical adviser, is going on as well as possible, and that she neither needs nor desires any extraneous assistance.23

At around 1 o’clock in the morning of 3 November, Alexandra finally went into labour. Ella was joined by Maria Feodorovna, and together, as Ella reported to Queen Victoria, they ‘gently rubbed her back & legs which relieved her’.24 Alexandra was grateful for their presence and that of her husband too, for her labour lasted twenty hours, during which Nicholas was frequently in tears and his mother often on her knees in prayer.25 Finally, at 9 p.m. ‘we heard a child’s squeal, and all heaved a sigh of relief’, as Nicholas recalled.26

It was not, however, the longed-for boy, but a girl, and Ella’s apprehensions had been correct: ‘The Baby was colossal but she was so brave & patient & Minny [Maria Feodorovna] a great comfort encouraging her.’27 The baby girl weighed 10 pounds (4.5 kg); it had required the combined skill of Ott and Günst to deliver her, an episiotomy and forceps having been necessary, with the help of chloroform.28 It was, Nicholas wrote in his diary, ‘A day I will remember for ever’, but he had ‘suffered a very great deal’ at the sight of his wife in the agonies of labour. His baby daughter, whom he and Alexandra named Olga, seemed so robust that he remarked that she didn’t look like a newborn at all.29

Queen Victoria was enormously relieved to hear the news: ‘At Carlisle got a telegram from Nicky saying: “Darling Alix has just given birth to a lovely enormous little daughter, Olga. My joy is beyond words. Mother & child doing well.” Am so thankful.’30 She was even more relieved to hear from Ella that ‘The joy of having their baby has never one moment let them regret little Olga being a girl’.31 Indeed Nicholas was quick to emphasize his and Alexandra’s 32

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joy, in a story later widely circulated in the press. Upon being congratulated by the court chamberlain he is said to have remarked, ‘I am glad that our child is a girl. Had it been a boy he would have belonged to the people, being a girl she belongs to us.’32 They were, quite simply, besotted. ‘They are so proud of themselves & each other & the baby that they think nothing could be more perfect’, wrote the wife of a British diplomat.33 ‘For us there is no question of sex,’ Alexandra asserted, ‘our child is simply a gift from God.’34

She and Nicholas were quick to reward the skills of Dr Ott and Madame Günst in the safe delivery of their daughter: Ott was appointed leib-akusher* to the imperial court and presented with a jewelled snuffbox of gold and diamonds and an honorarium of 10,000