The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra(7)

‘Of course, I am gay sometimes, and sometimes I can be pleasant, I suppose,’ she admitted to a visitor from Romania, ‘but I am rather a contemplative, serious being, one who looks into the depths of all water, whether it be clear or dark.’27 But such high-mindedness and virtue carried with it a fatal flaw: Alix had not learned ‘that virtue must be amiable’.28 She already took herself and life far too seriously.

There would be more than enough deep dark waters for her to negotiate in the years to come.

*

In 1894 another royal wedding drew Alix and Nicky together once more. Her brother Ernie at last found a suitable bride in his cousin 17

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FOUR SISTERS

Victoria Melita (daughter of Queen Victoria’s son Prince Alfred) and the extended royal family of Europe gathered en masse in Coburg in April for the celebrations. It was here, after much earnest and tearful persuasion from Nicky, that Alix finally succumbed, backed up by the reassurances of Ella, who herself had now converted to Russian Orthodoxy. Perhaps also there was another reason: Alix knew that her pre-eminence in the Hesse court was over with Ernie’s marriage: ‘life will indeed be very different for me, as I shall be feeling myself de trop’, she told the queen.29 In the months that followed it became clear that she did not much like playing second fiddle to her new sister-in-law the grand duchess, but marriage to Nicky was far more than a welcome escape. Alix had at last allowed herself to be happy. She put to the back of her mind ‘all those horrid things which were said about cousins marrying’ (she and Nicholas were third cousins) and refused to worry about the ‘disease which poor Frittie had’ which had been ‘so frightening’. ‘Who else is there to marry?’ she asked a friend; she at least had the great good fortune to be marrying for love.30

Love also won over Alix’s dictatorial grandmother Victoria. She quickly cast aside her disappointment and the considerable personal loss to her of someone she had considered her own child – no doubt remembering that she too had married for love back in 1840. She pushed her instinctive fears for her granddaughter on that ‘very unsafe Throne’ – and with it the dangers of political unrest and assassination – to the back of her mind and focused on the job in hand.31 Her beloved Alicky must prepare for the onerous public role to come and Victoria immediately ordained that she enter a period of retreat in England with her. And so the summer passed: quietly sewing, reading, playing the piano and going for drives with Grandmama. Alix also began taking lessons in Russian with Ella’s lectrice, Ekaterina Schneider, sent specially from Russia, and entered into earnest discussion with Dr Boyd Carpenter, Bishop of Ripon, on how to reconcile her Lutheran faith with conversion to Russian Orthodoxy.

She was, however, far from well, already suffering the sciatic pain that would plague her throughout her life. This was a cause of some concern to her grandmother and other relatives. ‘Alix is again lame 18

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MOTHER LOVE

and cannot walk at all, she had even to drive to church’, wrote the Duchess of Coburg to her daughter during the visit. ‘What a deplor-able health she has’.32* Rumours had already been circulating that Alix had inherited her mother’s sickly physique and nervous constitution, a fact that could not be advertised abroad when the wife of the future heir to the Russian throne should, above all things, be robust enough to produce healthy babies. She suffered also with inflammation of the ear (otitis), from frequent nervous headaches that turned to migraines, and poor circulation. But it was the sciatic pain – often so severe that it was impossible for her to walk, ride, or play tennis – that was the real problem. Alix rarely complained about her ‘wretched legs’, but they frequently consigned her to long hours lying down or reclining on a sofa.33 The European press had already got wind of her health problems and gossip was – and had been – circulating for some time, to the point where an official statement was issued in the summer of 1894 asserting that reports on the princess’s poor health were ‘absolutely without foundation’.34

But Queen Victoria was taking no chances. Vigilant as she always was about her own health, she was a great believer in bed rest at every opportunity. She regretted that Alix had not been ordered ‘a strict regime of life as well as diet’ sooner (the fault of the family doctor at Hesse – ‘a stupid man’), nor had she been able, the previous autumn, to take her granddaughter for a rest cure to Balmoral ‘which is the finest air in the world’ – Alix having previously found Scotland a tad too ‘bracing’.35 The queen had no doubt that all the stresses and strains of the young princess’s engagement to Nicky had ‘tried her nerves very much’ and so, after Alix arrived from Darmstadt, on 22 May she was despatched to Harrogate to take the waters.

Alix’s incognito as the ‘Baroness Starkenburg’ failed to convince anyone and word was soon out, fuelling further speculation in the press. ‘Princess Alix would not have buried herself at a Yorkshire watering-place in the height of the London season if she was in * The former Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna, a daughter of Alexander II, who had married Queen Victoria’s son Prince Alfred. She took the title Duchess of Edinburgh until Alfred inherited the throne of Coburg in 1893, his older brother Bertie having relinquished his right of succession to it.