Alexandra (8 page)

Doing their best to lay aside their inner misgivings, Ernie and Ducky were proceeding with the wedding arrangements, with Alix’s help. She busied herself overseeing the preparation of
their suites at the palace and at the summer residence at Wolfsgarten, and she corresponded with Ducky in order to find out her tastes and also to cement their friendship. She met with members of
the staff and arranged the hiring of new servants. She conferred, rather wistfully, with Ernie, who, she wrote, was ‘always running into her room at every hour of the day’, as the
wedding day approached.

Though she did her best to remain cheerful, presiding as usual as Ernie’s hostess and looking after his household, she was overcome at times by sadness. She missed her father. She knew
that she would soon miss her brother, for after he married their relationship would not be the same. She even found herself thinking about the little sister she had lost so many years earlier,
little May, who had she lived would have turned twenty in this year of 1894.
¹³

She wrote to Queen Victoria asking if she could come to England for a few months after the wedding, for she did not want to be in the newlyweds’ way. She was beginning to withdraw,
tactfully, from the world of married couples, to enter that limbo occupied by spinsters. Accustomed to keeping busy – attending her brother’s formal audiences, seeing to the comfort of
visiting dignitaries, entertaining friends, even on occasion picking flowers and arranging them in the
palace chapel when a wedding was to be held there – she
expected to become idle once Ducky took her place and assumed all her responsibilities.

As the new year 1894 opened, Alix was apprehensive. ‘I cannot help always dreading the coming of the New Year,’ she wrote to her grandmother, ‘as one never knows what is in
store for one.’

In fact Alix could foresee only too clearly what was likely to be in store for her. Not marriage, for she could not imagine marrying anyone but Nicky, and that was impossible. And besides, Nicky
would no doubt marry someone else before long. Not a home of her own, for without a husband there could be no real home, only temporary stays with her sisters Victoria and Irene (not Ella, it would
be too painful to go to Russia again) and, if she and Ducky got along well enough, a marginal role in Ernie’s household. Before long her grandmother would die, possibly quite soon, and then
she could no longer count on long stays at Windsor or sojourns at Balmoral.

She was already the subject of much gossip. She was known as the grand duke’s beautiful sister who had turned down two glorious thrones, rejecting first the heir to the British imperial
title (poor Eddy, who had died in 1891) and then the heir to the Russian Empire. She was something of a mysterious figure, her attitudes hard to fathom. In time, as her beauty faded, she would be
labelled an eccentric. She would float from one relative to another, watching her nieces and nephews grow up, treated (she hoped) with kindness touched with pity. She would fill her time with
charitable works, reading and embroidery. She would play the piano and make polite conversation, while bearing the painful burden of a constant sense of emptiness and waste.

Such was the constrained and narrow life Alix foresaw for herself as she spent yet another bleak winter in Darmstadt, nursing her wounded heart and expecting, before long, to have a great deal
of time on her hands.

M
ilitary bands played and a guard of honour stood smartly to attention beside the track as Nicky, in uniform, stepped out of the imperial train
onto the platform at Coburg, flanked by his Uncles Paul, Serge and Vladimir. He smiled affably as Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, came forwards to embrace him and the others on the platform
greeted him in their turn. Ernie and Ducky, whose wedding day was only three days away, were also on the platform to greet Nicky, and Alfred’s sister Vicky and brother Bertie, Ducky’s
sister Missy and her husband, Crown Prince Ferdinand of Rumania, and a score of others. But the only one Nicky wanted to see was Alix, and he greeted her warmly, all but ignoring the others, intent
on her response.

He had almost decided not to come to Coburg, for his sister Xenia had told him that Alix remained fixed in her opposition to any thought of marriage to him. Xenia had recently written to Alix to
say that she was ‘ruining Nicky’s life’ by her refusal; Alix had written back to say that Xenia’s accusation was cruel, and that, no matter what, ‘it NEVER can
be’.
¹
For emphasis, Alix had sent a telegram saying the same thing, and when he heard about it, Nicky had been very upset. But his mother had
convinced him not to give up so quickly, and by the time the train arrived he had regained his courage. He would speak to Alix, alone, and all would be well.

He was so convinced that all would be well, in fact, that he had brought along a chaplain, Father Yanishev, to instruct Alix in the Orthodox faith, and a tutor, Fräulein Schneider, to teach
her Russian.

But when on the following day Nicky had his first private conversation with Alix, he found her to be resolute, though emotional. He too was keyed up, his emotions in
turmoil; this was the crucial talk which for months he had longed to have with her, his chance to sway her with the force of his love and his reasoned arguments. For two hours he tried to persuade
her to give in, to drop her objections and agree to marry him, alternately arguing and pleading, while she wept and repeatedly whispered, ‘No, I cannot.’

Deeply moved, part of her wanting nothing more than to yield to his pleas, still Alix resisted. She could not forgo her loyalty to the Lutheran church, she could not be false to it. Fidelity to
her church loomed in her mind as the ultimate test of her character, the defining core of her personal honour. Again and again she shook her head, tears rolling down her cheeks, and whispered,
‘No, I cannot.’
²

Finally Nicky gave up, and went out into the rainy afternoon and took a drive with Ella and Serge, then a long walk with Uncle Vladimir to the old Coburg castle on the hill.

No record remains of what Alix did that afternoon, but inwardly she had clearly come to a crossroads. Ella, Serge and now even Ernie were bringing pressure to bear on her to accept Nicky,
probing her attitudes and feelings, looking for a way around her adamant objections. Tsar Alexander and Minnie were inviting her into the family, and would be affronted if she refused their
invitation. She was about to lose the only home she had, and enter the featureless land of spinsterhood. Her will was strong, but her heart was breaking under the strain, with the man she loved
holding out his arms to her, offering her all his sweetness and warmth – if only she would take one hallowed step, across the threshold of Orthodox Christianity.

Alix’s firm and independent stance on the marriage issue was, if not unheard-of, very rare. Women in 1894 were not masters of their own destinies; they did not assert their desires in
opposition to the strong urgings of their suitors and relatives. To do so was considered unfeminine, even unnatural. Deference to others was the expected norm for a woman of any age in that era,
especially where marriage
and family were concerned, and the force of convention was exceedingly strong.

So Alix, standing at her crossroads, showed remarkable power of will, assailed as she was by prevailing social expectations, by the threat of lifelong loneliness, by her family, by her adored
Nicky.

Thus assailed, she did not capitulate – but she began, tentatively, to search for a way out of her dilemma.

In conversations with Ella and Serge and Ernie it slowly began to be apparent to Alix that what troubled her conscience so deeply was not the prospect of being baptized into the Orthodox church:
it was forswearing Lutheranism. She had always assumed that the two things would have to go hand in hand. But perhaps they need not. Ella, when voluntarily adopting the Orthodox faith, had not been
required to abjure her Lutheranism. And other German princesses, facing the same difficulty Alix faced, had, it now appeared, arrived at compromises that allowed them to continue their loyalty to
the Lutheran creed while entering into their new church.

One such princess was Aunt Marie, Maria Pavlovna, born a Princess of Mecklenberg-Strelitz – known in the Romanov family as ‘Auntie Miechen’ – the wife of Uncle Vladimir.
(Not to be confused with Aunt Marie, the sister of the late Tsar Alexander II and wife of Duke Alfred of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.) Alix went to visit Auntie Miechen, at her brother’s urging,
presumably to talk about her conversion. To Nicky, Ernie gave an encouraging message – that ‘there was hope of a happy outcome’.
³

Two days now remained before Ernie and Ducky’s wedding, and more and more family members were arriving at the Coburg station. There were excited greetings, tearful hugs. When passing one
another in carriages, the affectionate members of Queen Victoria’s large family sometimes got out and ‘started kissing in the middle of the road’, much to the amusement of the
visiting Russians. The official topic of conversation within the family was the forthcoming marriage, what a handsome couple Ernie and Ducky made, how enviably tiny Ducky’s waist was, where
the newlyweds would go on their honeymoon, what a cheery, ebullient fellow the grand duke was, so
debonair and artistic. How surprising it was that he had never married
until now.

But at the same time, much attention was focused on the drama between Nicky and Alix. Would they become engaged? Why was she hesitating? Had Queen Victoria said or done something to prevent the
two from marrying?

In the evenings, after the theatre, when champagne was served in the billiard room and the men gathered to smoke and drink and talk, Nicky was asked about Alix. How did things stand? What could
be done? His cousin Willy, German Emperor, was especially solicitous. He would talk to cousin Alix, Willy said. He would take command of the situation. Alix could not hold out against him. All
would be well. The champagne flowed freely, and Nicky, who confided to his diary that he was suffering ‘great fears and doubts’, did not go to bed until the early hours of the
morning.
⁴

The arrival of Queen Victoria provided a temporary respite from these preoccupations. Clutching a thick black cloak around her, she drove in her carriage from the train station through the town,
shivering in the northern chill – she had just come from warm Florence – and smiling her endearing shy smile at the cheering Coburgers. The elderly queen felt a strong nostalgic
attachment to the duchy of Coburg, for her beloved late consort Prince Albert had been raised there and she viewed everything associated with Albert through a haze of sentiment and regret. She had
taken to wearing a miniature of Albert around her neck, and speaking to it on occasion. One imagines that she had much to say to his image on this April afternoon, as her carriage, escorted by an
entire battalion of guardsmen, clattered along the cobble-stoned streets. Handfuls of flowers were flung in front of her carriage wheels as they rolled under an enormous triumphal arch of welcome.
In the palace square, in front of Schloss Ehrenburg, she paused to receive her official welcome.

All the relatives had assembled to greet the family matriarch, the women in formal afternoon attire, the men in freshly pressed uniforms. They took tea with her, but could not all dine together
as there were far too many to fit around the long dining table. The
queen, white-haired and benign, her lumpy figure (Nicky unkindly referred to her as
‘belly-woman’ and ‘a round ball on shaky legs’) encased in an old-fashioned dress of black bombazine, her Indian servant at her side, presided comfortably over all, content
that her matchmaking had succeeded in bringing Ernie and Ducky together. Alone of those present, the queen was unaware of the gossip about Nicky and Alix; she was under the impression that, having
done her best to prevent any engagement between them, the possibility of their union no longer existed.
⁵

The wedding day came, and in the royal chapel of the palace, amid masses of flowers and garlands of fir branches, Ernie and Ducky stood to repeat their vows. The ceremony had hardly concluded
before a violent thunderstorm broke, drenching the newlyweds as they drove off in their carriage and forcing the mayor to cancel the evening fireworks display.

The rain continued all that night, and Alix, her head by now spinning with excitement, cannot have slept well. The ray of hope she had begun to glimpse two days earlier had broadened into a
beacon. There was a way, it seemed, to square the demands of her conscience with her heartfelt desire, she could enter the Orthodox church without formally abjuring the Lutheran faith. She could be
true to herself – and marry Nicky.

On the following morning two more hasty conversations were held – the first between Alix and cousin Willy, the second another discussion with Auntie Miechen. She was no longer in any
doubt. No obstacles remained in her path. She was ready to accept Nicky.