The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra(18)

President Faure was not the only person to be smitten with the two little sisters: everyone found them the most sweet and winning children. ‘Our little daughters are growing, and turning into delightful happy little girls’, Nicholas told his mother that November.

‘Olga talks the same in Russian and in English and adores her little sister. Tatiana seems to us, understandably, a very beautiful child, her eyes have become dark and large. She is always happy and only cries once a day without fail, after her bath when they feed her.’11

Many were already beginning to note Olga’s precocious and friendly manner, among them Princess Mariya Baryatinskaya who was invited to Tsarskoe Selo to meet the tsaritsa by her niece and namesake, who was a lady-in-waiting:

She had her little Olga by her side, who, when she saw me, said, ‘What are you?’ in English, and I said, ‘I am Princess Baryatinsky!’

‘Oh but you can’t be,’ she replied, ‘we’ve got one already!’ The little lady regarded me with an air of great astonishment, then, pressing close to her mother’s side, she adjusted her shoes, which I could see were new ones. ‘New shoes,’ she said. ‘You like them?’

– this in English.12

Everyone remarked on Alexandra’s relaxed manner in the privacy of their home with her children, but by November she was feeling very sick again, could not eat and was losing weight. Maria Feodorovna was swift to offer her own homespun medical advice:





46


693GG_TXT.indd 46

29/10/2013 16:17

MY GOD! WHAT A DISAPPOINTMENT! . . .

She ought to try eating raw ham in bed in the morning before breakfast. It really does help against nausea . . . She must eat something so as not to lose strength, and eat in small quantities but often, say every other hour, until her appetite comes back.

It is your duty, my dear Nicky, to watch over her and to look after her in every possible way, to see she keeps her feet warm and above all that she doesn’t go out in the garden in shoes.

That is very bad for her.13

If another baby was on the way, nothing was said and the pregnancy did not progress. Alexandra’s English cousin Thora (daughter of her aunt Princess Helena) was making a four-month visit to Russia at the time and made no mention of it.14 Thora described Olga’s second birthday that November in a letter to Queen Victoria: ‘there was a short service in the morning . . . Alix took little Olga with us as it only last[ed] ten minutes or a quarter of an hour & she behaved beautifully & enjoyed the singing & tried to join in which nearly made us laugh.’15 Later that day they went to open an orphanage for 180 6–15-year-old girls and boys established to commemorate Olga’s birth, its upkeep personally funded by Alexandra.16 Life at Tsarskoe Selo was, as Thora told Grandmama, modest and familial: We lead a very quiet life here and one can scarcely realize that they are an Emperor & Empress as there is, here in the country, an entire absence of state. None of the gentlemen live in the house & the one lady on duty takes her meals in her own room, so one never sees any of the suite unless people come or there is some function.17

The self-imposed isolation of her granddaughter clearly concerned Queen Victoria (who had been through her own troubled period of retreat from public view in the 1860s). Victoria demanded further elaboration from Thora, who responded: ‘As to what you say about Alix & Nicky seeing so few people . . . I think she quite knows how important it is she should get to know more of the society but the truth is she & Nicky are so absolutely happy together that they do not like to have to give up their evenings to receiving people.’18

No one caught a glimpse of Alexandra that winter – even in St Petersburg, and nothing was imparted to newspaper readers eager





47


693GG_TXT.indd 47

29/10/2013 16:17

FOUR SISTERS

to know something of the domestic life of their monarchs. ‘It was almost a minor state secret to know if they took sugar with their tea, or had mustard with their beef’, observed Anglo-Russian writer Edith Almedingen.19 In any event, Alexandra seemed to be perpet-ually ill or pregnant – or both. In February 1898 she went down with a severe bout of measles – caught on a visit to one of the charity schools she supported – and suffered severe bronchial complications.20 The St Petersburg season was over by the time she recovered and many of her royal relatives were beginning to worry. When the Duchess of Coburg visited Russia in August that year she opted to stay in St Petersburg rather than endure the domestic boredom of the Alexander Palace. ‘It seems that Nicky and Alix shut themselves up more than ever and never see a soul’, she told her daughter, adding that ‘Alix is not a bit popular’.21 Alexandra for her part cared little. On 21 September when Nicholas unexpectedly had to go to Copenhagen with his mother for the Queen of Denmark’s funeral she was distraught: ‘I cannot bear to think what will become of me without you – you who are my one and all, who make up all my life’, the words eerily like those of her grandmother whenever she was separated from Prince Albert. All Alexandra wanted was that she and Nicky should ‘live a quiet life of love’; besides, she thought she might be pregnant again. ‘If I only knew whether something is beginning with me or not’, she wrote to Nicky as he left. ‘God grant it may be so, I long for it and so does my Huzy too, I think.’22