Alexandra (19 page)

Ducky was ill, the Darmstadt court was shrouded temporarily in dishonour, and the Romanovs discovered a fresh reason to be contemptuous of Ernie’s sister Alix, who could not, they
supposed, have been ignorant of her brother’s unmentionable proclivities.

Another member of Alix’s large extended family, her childhood friend and cousin Helena Victoria, came to Russia for a visit in the
winter of 1897–98, and in
her cousin’s presence some of Alix’s perpetual social discomfort seemed to abate. For a few weeks Alix and Nicky took Helena Victoria out into Petersburg society, introducing her at
embassy parties, escorting her to balls and suppers. But then Alix caught the measles, and had to go into seclusion for many weeks, cutting short her participation in the winter season.

Illness came again in the summer of 1898 when Olga developed scarlet fever and Alix, giving the new English nurse complete charge over Tatiana, devoted herself for many days and nights to
Olga’s care.

‘I can remember her so well during these days and nights sitting by the cot in which her small daughter slept,’ Mouchanow recalled, ‘clad in a dressing gown of white flannel .
. . her fair head resting on her hand, absorbed in her thoughts, and with that sweet but anxious expression on her beautiful face.’
⁵
The
Madonna-like image was striking, but even more striking was Alix’s sudden burst of candour. Until this time she had treated her chief waiting maid only as a servant, never as a confidante;
now, made wretched by her worry about her daughter, her loss of sleep and general depression, she opened her heart.

What tormented her was that her mother-in-law, Aunt Miechen and her other in-laws, far from commending her for watching by Olga’s bedside, scolded her for exposing herself to the very
contagious disease of scarlet fever when the possibility existed that she might be pregnant – and with a son. Olga would live or die, they seemed to be saying, the outcome of her disease was
of no consequence, and therefore Alix ought not to hover over her. All that mattered was that Alix keep herself healthy so that she could give the realm the all-important heir.

‘As if that mattered,’ Alix burst out to Mouchanow. ‘Even if I died . . . the Emperor would always find another wife who perhaps would be luckier than I have been, and able to
give him an heir. No one would miss me, with the exception perhaps of these children.’ She broke down and wept, and her maid of honour, taken aback, tried to reassure her that she was wrong,
that Nicky loved her as ‘no woman had ever been loved’.

‘Ah, my dear,’ Mouchanow remembered her replying, ‘what good does it do me to be loved by my husband when all the world is against
me?’
⁶

That Alix and Nicky were bound by a very deep, enduring intimacy was beyond question. Later in the year, after Olga had recovered from her illness and the family had gone to Livadia to spend the
autumn months, Nicky was suddenly summoned to Denmark, to attend the funeral of his grandmother Queen Louise.

‘My own precious Darling,’ Alix wrote to him on the day he left, ‘you will read these lines when the horrid train will be carrying you always further and further away from poor
Wifie. Our first separation since the marriage – I am frightened of it, I cannot bear the idea of your going away so far without me.’ Bereft of her husband’s company, Alix felt
the full force of her isolation, her dependency. ‘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.’

Her letter went on and on, covering many sheets of notepaper. She promised to sleep in Nicky’s cabin on the yacht
Standart
, moored at the foot of the steep whitewashed steps
leading from the palace terraces to the bay below, so that she would feel nearer to him in his absence. She was, as always, anxious. She believed that she might be pregnant, but couldn’t be
sure. ‘God grant it may be so,’ she wrote, ever convinced that the key to her restoration to favour in the eyes of her in-laws and her husband’s subjects lay in her finally giving
birth to a son.
⁷

Her sister Irene had come once again for a visit, and she relied on Irene in Nicky’s absence, and on Martha Mouchanow and also on her maid of honour Marie Bariatinsky, who had become her
‘true and devoted friend’, as she called Marie, a valued ally in a poisonous court environment where Alix felt that all the world was against her.

Not long after Nicky’s return from Denmark, late in 1898, Alix became certain that she was pregnant once again. Her morning sickness was severe in the early months and, when it subsided,
she began having such crippling sciatic pain that she could not walk at all, and had to be in a wheelchair all day. Nicky insisted on pushing
her himself, and took her out
each afternoon in the hunting sleigh along the cleared sleigh paths at Tsarskoe Selo.

Despite Nicky’s diligent efforts to care for Alix and raise her spirits, she became ill and gloomy and, as winter retreated and the first leaves began to appear on the trees in the palace
park, she felt pessimistic, not only about the sex of the child she was carrying, but about her own future. The depression that had attacked her during her last pregnancy returned, with thoughts
that she was replaceable, that another woman in her place might well be luckier, and even darker ruminations.

‘I never like making plans,’ she wrote to her oldest sister Victoria early in April, 1899. ‘God knows how it will all end.’
⁸

Her labour began in late June. Weakened by months of illness and immobility, Alix had a very difficult and painful time, wrestling for many hours with the arduous task of delivering her child.
For a few hours the accoucheur seemed to lose hope, and his doubts alarmed the nurses, the waiting women, and the other palace servants. If Alix should prove unable to expel the baby, then Nicky
would be faced with the terrible, and at that era all too common, decision many husbands had to make: should he save Alix, at the risk of having the child be stillborn, or should he tell the doctor
to perform a caesarean delivery at great risk to Alix’s life?

Fortunately Alix rallied; both mother and child were saved, and just after noon on June 26, 1899, the third daughter of Nicholas II and Alexandra came into the world. Whether, as at
Tatiana’s birth, the accoucheur was instructed to give a secret signal indicating the baby’s sex, sparing Alix shock and disappointment, is unknown. Perhaps the sheer relief that both
mother and child came through the ordeal alive was all that counted – at least for the moment. In any case, the word that another daughter had been born was spread from the birth room out
into the corridors beyond, the courtiers informed one another, shaking their heads in frustration and disbelief, and a courier was dispatched to Petersburg to instruct the gunners in the Peter and
Paul Fortress to begin their cannonade.

Another girl! The Petersburgers heard the guns go off, counted each boom eagerly, then groaned in discouragement when only one hundred and one shots were fired. The
German bitch had failed again.

The new baby, a rosy, robust child – the strongest Alix had yet produced – was named Marie, after her grandmother, and all the Romanovs went to church to give thanks for her
birth.

Telegrams of congratulation arrived from all over Europe, and Alix, as she began to recover her strength, addressed herself to the task of answering them. It was a bittersweet task, for she well
knew that an unspoken disappointment lay behind every telegram, every good wish. The securing of the Russian succession was a matter of great concern to every court, the stability of Europe was
affected by it; bound up with Alix’s private sorrow was a public problem of growing seriousness.

And it became more serious when, two weeks after Marie’s birth, Nicky’s brother George succumbed to illness following a bicycle accident and died, making Michael heir and
tsarevich.

Almost immediately there was a change in the atmosphere of the court. Michael was now sought-after, his views solicited, his activities regarded and imitated. There was a tacit acceptance of the
fact that he would become the next tsar; after three unsuccessful tries, Alix was not expected to have a son any time in the future.

Michael’s new-found pre-eminence began to cause difficulties. To the existing rift between Minnie and Alix was added the complication of Michael’s probable succession, and
Minnie’s preference for him. Old factions were strengthened, new factions formed. Michael was courted and supplicated and approached for favours, which undermined the already fragile support
Nicky enjoyed among his officials and ministers.

At foreign courts, queries were made about Michael, who began to be entertained by diplomats and invited abroad. Queen Victoria, shrewdly assessing the situation in Russia, invited Michael to
visit her at Balmoral and, liking him, saw to it that he enjoyed himself while in the Highlands and went home with a favourable view of the English.

She had sent Alix a telegram of congratulations when Marie was born, noting tartly, ‘I am so thankful that dear Alicky has recovered so well, but I regret the
third girl for the country.’

No one regretted the third girl more than the empress. She began to speak of herself as a ‘Pechvogel’, a ‘bird of ill omen’, who was bringing bad luck to Russia. Her
tired mind, desperate for an explanation and worn out with analyzing and reanalyzing her unhappy situation, cast about for answers outside the sphere of reason. Her strong Lutheran upbringing had
taught her to trust in Providence; her adopted Orthodoxy induced a deeper, more superstitious reverence for the power of the unseen. With all the fervour of her romantic nature she began to reach
out, with expanding faith, into the realm of the occult.

I
n the dim interior of the tiny Kremlin church of the Exaltation of the Cross, the emperor and empress knelt before the iconostasis. All was quiet
save for the shuffling of feet across the mosaic floor, as pilgrims passed in and out to kiss the wounds of Christ and prostrate themselves before the holy icons.

The walls of the church glowed golden in the candlelight, their painted images of Saint Michael and Saint Sergius, of Christ the Redeemer and the Virgin Mary shining as if lit from within. The
wide golden haloes of the holy figures, radiant bands in which were embedded flashing emeralds and rubies, their facets reflecting every shimmer of the flickering candles, gave the dark interior an
unearthly quality, making the pale faces of the painted saints look almost animate.

It was Holy Week, the week before Easter, 1900, and Alix and Nicky had been observing the Great Fast, living on mushrooms, cabbage and fish, taking no food at all some days, attending two- and
three-hour services every morning and evening and, between services, making the rounds of the ancient Kremlin churches. They watched reverently the rite of brewing the Holy Chrism, the fragrant
oils stirred by priests in huge silver cauldrons while Biblical texts were read aloud by candlelight. They repeated the Eastertide prayers, joined processions, spent time in private devotions. They
immersed themselves in the richness of medieval liturgies and traditional ceremonies, feeling, as the days passed, that in the words of the proverb, ‘there is nothing above the Kremlin except
heaven’.

With Ella, Alix had taken on a large sewing project, embroidering velvet hangings for a church of which Ella was patron. She felt ‘like
an ancient
Tsaritsa’, Alix told her biographer years later, ‘sitting in her rooms in the Kremlin with her sister and their ladies’, working away at the intricate designs, surrounded by heavy
antique furnishings, dark stonework and crackling fires. In contrast to the classical austerity of baroque Petersburg, Moscow was intimate, mysterious, half-Asiatic, full of shadows and enigmas. It
ignited the soul.

Focused as they were on the old rites of the Moscow Easter, the tsar and tsarina gave scant notice to the swiftly changing contours of the old city, whose sprawling suburbs, greatly enlarged
since the start of Nicky’s reign, were home to tens of thousands of factory workers newly arrived from the countryside. They had endured a hard winter, made harsher by food shortages and
chronic unemployment; now, in Holy Week, they stood in long lines outside soup kitchens and shelters, waiting in the snow for small rations of food. Had Alix seen these long lines, and looked into
the faces of the desperate, she would surely have done what she could to alleviate their distress. She had contributed to famine relief in the previous year, and she was tender-hearted and
generous. But her attention was fixed elsewhere, on the dim, incense-filled churches with their rich atmosphere of hidden mysteries and infinite possibilities, and on her own fervent, heartfelt
prayers.

In particular, her attention was fixed on the wonder-working icons, those glowing holy pictures with their haunting lifelike quality, their almost speaking presences. They had been known to cure
the sick, to bring rain or stop floods, even to turn back armies. Icons focused the power of God. Bearing the images of His saints and of Christ and the Virgin, they were more than slabs of wood
and smears of paint; they were nothing less than fragments of the divine, and as such, they could be supplicated, and were capable of working miracles.