The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (3 page)

of his body still visible on it.11

Two flights of stone steps led up to the now deserted children’s

apartments – where once again the adored Alexey’s large playroom

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dominated – full of wooden and mechanical toys: a music box that

played the Marseillaise, picture books, boxes of bricks, board games, and his favourite ranks of toy lead soldiers. Languishing among

them a large teddy bear – one of the last gifts from the Kaiser before war changed everything – stood sentinel by the door.12 The tsarevich’s adjacent personal bathroom often made visitors gasp in

sympathy; it was ‘full of beastly surgical instruments’ – the calipers and other ‘encasements for the legs, arms and body made of canvas

and leather’ that had been used to support him when his attacks of

bleeding had left him temporarily disabled.13

Beyond, and modestly subsidiary to the tsarevich’s larger apart-

ments – just as its occupants had been secondary to him in the eyes

of the nation – were the bedrooms, classroom, dining and reception

rooms of his four older sisters: Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia.

Their light and spacious bedrooms were furnished with simple

ivory-painted and polished lemonwood furniture and English chintz

fabric curtains.14 A stencilled frieze of pink roses and bronze butterflies above pink coloured wallpaper had been chosen by the younger

sisters Maria and Anastasia. For Olga and Tatiana, the frieze was of

convolvulus flowers and brown dragonflies. On the girls’ matching

dressing tables there was still a scattering of boxes, jewellery cases, manicure sets, combs and brushes – just as they had left them.15

Elsewhere, on their writing tables, were piles of their exercise books with multicoloured covers, and in profusion on every surface, framed

photographs of family and friends. Yet in the midst of so much

typical, girlish ephemera, one could not fail to notice the presence

everywhere in the sisters’ rooms of icons and popular religious prints and pictures. By their bedsides there were gospels and prayer books,

crosses and candles – rather than the usual clutter one might expect

to find.16

In their wardrobes, the girls had left behind many of their clothes,

hats, parasols and shoes; the uniforms worn by the elder sisters with such pride when they rode side saddle at the big military parades

for the Tercentary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913; even their baby

clothes and christening robes. They would have no need in Siberia

of their finely made formal court dresses – four of everything:

matching sets in pink satin with silver embroidery, with pink brocade
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kokoshniki
headdresses; or for that matter of the four sets of large summer hats, all meticulously stored in boxes. Outside in the hallway trunks and hampers still stood, half-packed with many more of the

girls’ possessions – ready for that last journey, but never taken.

In the children’s dining room the table was still laid with mono-

grammed Romanov china ready for the next meal. ‘You feel the

children are out playing somewhere in the garden’, wrote a visitor

in 1929. ‘They will be back at any moment.’17 But outside in the

acres of parkland beyond the high iron railings surrounding the

palace, a wilderness had grown up among the neat and orderly

avenues of lindens, where in the soft undergrowth on either side

the Siberian buttercups ‘large, double, and fragrant as roses’, the

wood anemone and forget-me-nots had bloomed in such profusion

in the spring.18 The palace itself might have been preserved as a

historical monument but its once admired park was now overgrown

with weeds, the grass waist-high in places. The long leafy avenue

where the Romanov children had once played and ridden their

ponies and their bicycles; the neatly ordered canals where they went

boating with their father; the little blue-and-white painted playhouse on the Children’s Island with its profusion of lily of the valley and nearby the little cemetery where they buried their pets . . . everywhere and everything connected with those vanished lives now had

about it a sense of absolute desolation.

*

The Alexander Palace might have once been the residence of now

denigrated ‘former people’ liquidated by the revolution, of whom

ordinary Russians were increasingly fearful to speak, but, as the

palace’s devoted curator recalled, that last lingering indefinable

‘aroma of the epoch’ was never quite eradicated. The honeyed scent

of the beeswax used to polish the floors and the odour of Moroccan

leather from the many volumes in the tsar’s library lingered on –

along with the faint smell of rose oil in the icon lamps in the

tsaritsa’s bedroom – until the onset of the Second World War and

the palace’s occupation by the German military command consigned

it to near destruction.19

In the days before the war, the tour of the state apartments

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culminated in the central, semicircular hall at the rear of the palace, where the tsar had held official receptions and dinners for visiting

dignitaries, and where, during the First World War, the family had

sat down together on Saturday evenings to enjoy film shows. That

last night, 31 July–1 August 1917, the Romanov family had patiently

waited out the long tedious hours here, dreading the final order to

leave their home for ever.

During the preceding days the four Romanov sisters had had to

make painful choices about which of their precious possessions –

their many albums of photographs, letters from friends, their clothes, their favourite books – they should take with them. They had to

leave their childhood dolls behind, carefully arranged on miniature

chairs and sofas, along with other treasured toys and mementoes,

in hopes that they might be cherished by those who came after.20

Legend has it that it was through the central door in the semi-

circular hall that Catherine the Great had first entered the palace

in 1790, carrying her young grandson, the future Alexander I, when

the palace that she had ordered to be built, and later presented as

a gift to him, was completed. Just after sunrise on 1 August 1917,

127 years later, with the cars pulled up and waiting for them outside, the last imperial family of Russia passed out of the echoing space

of the Italian architect Giacomo Quarenghi’s eighteenth-century

hall with its great arc of windows, through that same glass door and

into an uncertain future – 1,341 miles (2,158 km) away in Tobolsk

in western Siberia.

The four Romanov sisters, still thin from the after-effects of the

severe attack of measles they had suffered early in the year, wept

inconsolably as they left the home where they had spent so many

of the happy days of their childhood.21 After they had gone, a dejected Mariya Geringer spoke of her still lingering hopes for them. Perhaps

the girls would be lucky somewhere in exile and find decent, ordi-

nary husbands and be happy, she said. For her, and for other loyal

retainers and friends left behind, the memory of those four lovely

sisters in happier times, of their many kindnesses, of their shared

joys and sorrows – the ‘laughing faces under the brims of their big

flower-trimmed hats’ – would continue to linger during the long,

deadening years of communism.22 As, too, would the memory of

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their vivacious brother who daily challenged his life-threatening

disability and refused to be cowed by it. And always, hovering in

the background, a woman whose abiding virtue – and one that,

perversely, destroyed them all in the end – was a fatal excess of

mother love.

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N

There once were four sisters – Victoria, Ella, Irene and Alix – who

lived in an obscure grand duchy in south-western Germany, a place

of winding cobbled streets and dark forests made legendary in the

fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. In their day, these four princesses of the house of Hesse and by Rhine were considered by many to

be ‘the flowers of Queen Victoria’s flock of granddaughters’, cele-

brated for their beauty, intelligence and charm.1 As they grew up

they became the object of intense scrutiny on that most fraught of

international stages – the royal marriage market of Europe. Despite

their lack of large dowries or vast territories, each sister in turn

married well. But it was to the youngest and most beautiful of the

four that fate dealt the biggest hand.

The four Hesse sisters were daughters of Princess Alice – second

daughter of Queen Victoria – and her husband Prince Louis, heir

to the Grand Duke of Hesse. In July 1862, aged only eighteen, Alice

had left England heavily veiled and in mourning for her recently

deceased father Prince Albert, after marrying Louis at Osborne

House. By the dynastic standards of the day it was a modest match

for a daughter of Queen Victoria, but one that added another strand

to the complex web of royal intermarriage between European first

and second cousins. During her long reign Victoria had orchestrated

the dynastic marriages of her own nine children, and remained

meddlesome enough into old age to ensure that, after them, their

children and even their grandchildren secured partners befitting

their status. Princess Alice might well have achieved something

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better had she not fallen in love with the rather dull Prince Louis.

As royal domains went, Hesse was relatively small, perpetually finan-

cially overstretched and politically powerless. ‘There are English

noblemen who could endow their daughter with a richer dower than

falls to the lot of the Princess Alice’, observed one newspaper at the time. Hesse Darmstadt was a ‘simple country, of pastoral and agricultural character’, with an unostentatious court. It was pretty but

its history till now had remained unremarkable.2

The capital, Darmstadt, set in the oak-forested hills of the

Odenwald, was deemed ‘a place of no importance’ in the eyes of

the pre-eminent Baedeker tourist guide.3 Indeed, another contem-

porary traveller found it ‘the dullest town in Germany’, a place ‘on

the way to everywhere’ – nothing more.4 It was built on a uniform

plan of long, straight streets and formal houses populated by ‘well-

fed burghers and contented hausfraus’, not far from the River

Darmbach, and ‘the general absence of life’ in the capital gave it

‘an air of somber inactivity’.5 The older, medieval quarter had a

degree of bustle and character, but aside from the grand-ducal palace, the opera house and a public museum full of fossils there was little

to redeem the city from the insipid stiffness that permeated the

Darmstadt court.

Princess Alice had been dismayed upon her own arrival there,

for although her upbringing had been authoritarian it had been

liberal, thanks to her father Prince Albert. For him, Alice was ‘the

beauty of the family’, and she had grown up happy and full of fun.6

Her wedding day had, however, been totally overshadowed by her

father’s premature death and her mother’s crippling state of grief.

The brightness of an all too brief childhood was soon further dimmed

by painful separation from her beloved siblings, particularly her

brother Bertie, all of which heightened her deeply felt sense of loss.

There was an air of sorrow about the princess that nothing would

ever quite assuage.

Her new life at Hesse promised to be undistinguished. The old

order that persisted there kept clever, forward-thinking women such

as herself down.7 Virtue and quiet domesticity were all that counted, and Alice found the hidebound protocols at the Hessian court

burdensome. From the outset, she suffered the frustrations of not

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being able to exercise her own considerable progressive and intel-

lectual gifts. An admirer of Florence Nightingale, Alice would have

liked to take up nursing, having more than demonstrated her skills

during her father’s final illness in 1861. If this was not to be then there were other ways in which she was determined to make herself

of use in her new home.

With this in mind she embraced a range of philanthropic activ-

ities, including regular hospital visiting and the promotion of

women’s health, fostering the establishment of the Heidenreich

Home for Pregnant Women in 1864. During the wars of 1866

against Prussia and 1870–1 against France that stirred Darmstadt

from obscurity and took her husband off on campaign, Alice refused

any suggestion of taking refuge in England and took on the moth-

ering of her children alone. But this was not enough for her crusading social conscience; during both wars she also organized hospital