Alexandra (9 page)

‘[She] came into the room where I was sitting with the Uncles,’ Nicky wrote, describing the scene in a letter to his mother. ‘They left us alone and . . . the first thing she
said was . . . that she agreed! Oh God, what happened to me then! I started to cry like a child, and so did she, only her expression immediately changed: her face brightened and took on an aura of
peace.’
⁶

Later Alix would castigate herself for being so stubborn for so long. She asked Nicky to forgive her. She had not been able to see clearly, she had imagined barriers where none existed. Now all
restraint fell away, and the lovers embraced, their fervour all the greater for the long season of frustration that had kept them apart. ‘I went about all day
dazed,’ Nicky wrote in his diary. ‘I could not believe that all this had happened to me.’ Alix wrote her friend Toni Becker that she was ‘endlessly happy,’ and when
she and Nicky burst into the adjoining room to announce to Willy and the aunts and uncles that they had agreed to marry, she was radiant.

Queen Victoria was the next to be told – and great must have been her astonishment! – then Aunt Marie and Uncle Alfred and the hosts of other relatives who indulged, Nicky wrote, in
‘an orgy of kissing’.
⁷
Telegrams were sent to Russia and elsewhere, and by evening many more telegrams had begun to pour in,
congratulating Alix and Nicky and wishing them happiness.

‘Please tell your dear fiancée from me,’ Tsar Alexander telegraphed to Nicky, ‘how much I thank her for at last consenting, and how I wish her to flourish for the joy,
comfort and peace she has given us by deciding to agree to be your wife!’ Xenia too sent her congratulations, and Alix wrote her an ecstatic note. ‘I cannot describe my happiness
– it is too great . . . And what an angel the dear boy is.’
⁸
Alix and Xenia had long been on the most affectionate terms. Now they
would be sisters-in-law – and would be brides together, as Xenia was soon to marry her cousin Sandro.

Over the following few days the engaged pair were together most of the time, eating their meals together, driving out in a pony carriage, having photographs taken, sitting together at the opera
and afterwards, late into the night, staying up together in the privacy of Alix’s sitting room with only Gretchen von Fabrice as chaperone. As one by one the wedding guests departed, Alix and
Nicky seemed to have Coburg to themselves, the lilac-scented gardens, the crooked narrow streets and quaint houses, the small opera house and wooded environs. The intensity of those romantic days,
the joy each of them felt in the presence of the other, were beyond description. ‘I am more happy than words can express,’ Alix wrote to her old governess Madgie. ‘At last, after
these five sad years!’
⁹
‘My soul was brimming with joy and light,’ Nicky wrote, referring to those ‘golden days’
following his engagement.
¹⁰

It was as if every detail of their rapturous days stood out with special significance: an operatic aria they both loved (‘Once again, once again, once again, O
nightingale!’), the pink flowers Alix habitually wore, and Nicky came to love, the house on the road from Coburg to Ketchendorf where they shared an erotic interlude. Time hung suspended, or
so it seemed – though on rainy afternoons they both managed to attend to their correspondence and to answer each of the more than two hundred telegrams that came for them.

Plans for the future had to be made, but there would be time for this in the summer. Nicky was to return to Russia, then come to visit Alix in England. While they were apart they agreed to
communicate by telegram, in a special code. After a last day spent in Darmstadt, where they visited Ernie and Ducky, they said their reluctant goodbyes, and Alix left for Windsor.

She arrived looking happy but tired, and with pain in her legs. Over the course of only a few short weeks an immense change had been wrought in Alix’s life, and the strain of it was
apparent. After a visit with family and a conference with the Bishop of Ripon – no doubt a discussion of her conversion – she went to Harrogate to treat her pain with a course of
sulphur baths and rest.

Hoping to avoid attracting the attention of journalists and the curious, she adopted the incognito ‘Baroness Starckenburg’, and settled into a routine of immersing herself in the
waters and studying Russian with her teacher Catherine Schneider, the Baltic Russian Nicky had engaged to instruct her. (‘It is amusing, but certainly not easy!’ Alix wrote to Madgie,
describing her Russian lessons.
¹¹
) She made progress, but soon lost all her privacy. Her true identity was discovered. People crowded around her
lodgings, bothering her very pregnant landlady, trying to peer in at the windows, observing her every coming and going.

The British were enthralled by the story of this beautiful granddaughter of Queen Victoria who, having waited so long to marry, had at last become engaged to the future tsar of Russia. They were
curious about every detail of her future. What would her wedding gown be like? Her trousseau? When was the wedding to be? Just
how rich would she be, as the wife of the
Russian tsar? Was it true she had rooms full of diamonds?

‘Of course it is in all the papers that I am here,’ Alix wrote to Nicky, ‘and all the tradespeople send epistles and beg of one to order things, even a piano and tea were
offered. The rude people stand at the corner and stare; I shall stick my tongue out at them another time.’
¹²

The speculation mounted, the crowds grew. People stared through their windows at her lodging, opera glasses in hand. Every time Alix drove out they congregated and got in the way, forcing her to
go in and out through a back entrance; once they discovered the back entrance they clogged it too, and some ran behind her carriage when it went out. It became impossible for her to enter a shop
without drawing a group of onlookers, who gawked quite rudely and called out, ‘That’s her.’

When Alix’s landlady gave birth to twins, and asked her celebrated guest to be godmother to the babies, the church was full of noisy strangers attending the christening service, watching
as the infants were given the names Nicholas and Alexandra, their attention fixed on the godmother and not on the babies or their parents.

‘If I were not in the bathchair I should not mind,’ Alix told Nicky, and tried to make light of the annoyance. She was vulnerable, however, for the wheeled chair was unwieldy and,
had she ever felt herself in danger she could not have run away, not on her sore legs.

There was one woman in the crowd who stood out. She was always there, wherever Alix went. She came closer than the others, peering at Alix, her manner suggesting mania or mental imbalance. Alix
wondered whether it might be the same woman who had annoyed Nicky earlier in the year, stalking him and writing him letters.
¹³
Watching out for
the woman kept her nerves on edge, and the atmosphere of constant surveillance made rest and healing impossible. The sulphur baths failed to ease her pain, and seemed to increase her fatigue. Her
attitude was fatalistic. ‘It does not matter so, suffering pain,’ she told Nicky. ‘I daresay it is even good to have to bear pain.’
¹⁴

Towards the end of June Nicky arrived from Russia, and Alix left Harrogate with its beleaguering crowds and travelled to Walton, to her sister Victoria’s house, to meet him. They grew
closer than ever
during Nicky’s month-long visit, picnicking, going for long drives together in the hot summer afternoons, breakfasting at Frogmore with Queen
Victoria, paying calls on Uncle Bertie and Aunt Beatrice and all the numerous English cousins.

From Walton Alix and Nicky went on to Windsor, where Nicky good-humouredly adapted to the formalities and protocols of the old palace, putting on old-fashioned knee breeches, tight shoes and the
Windsor coat with red collar and wristbands to please ‘Granny’. He also helped to commemorate an important family event – the birth of a son to Bertie’s son and heir George
(brother of the late Eddy); this child, who would grow up to be King Edward VIII, ensured the continuity of the dynasty into the next generation, and Nicky was asked to be his godfather.

In the intervals between garden parties, family luncheons, visits to the theatre and opera, Alix and Nicky were often alone together. During their private hours Nicky wrote in his diary, and
Alix interrupted him to write in her own notes and loving thoughts. ‘God bless you my angel,’ she wrote in the margin. ‘All’s well that ends well.’ She drew a heart,
and within it wrote ‘You you you’ in French. ‘I dreamed that I was loved, I woke and found it true,’ went another of her interpolations, ‘and thanked God on my knees
for it. True love is the gift which God has given – daily stronger, deeper, fuller, purer.’
¹⁵

Nicky’s confession to Alix of his long affair with Matilda Kchessinsky drew from her a longer passage in the diary.

‘My own boysy dear,’ she wrote, ‘never changing, always true. Have confidence and faith in your girlie dear, who loves you more deeply and devotedly, than she ever can
say.’ She assured him that ‘what is past, is past, and will never return and we can look back on it with calm. We are all tempted in this world and when we are young we cannot always
fight and hold our own against temptation, but as long as we repent and come back to the good and on to the straight path, God forgives us.

‘I love you even more since you told me that little story,’ she added, ‘your confidence in me touched me, oh, so deeply, and I pray to God that I may always show myself worthy
of it.’
¹⁶

Thunderclouds gathered in the hot, humid air and sudden squalls drove everyone indoors during the long afternoons. ‘We were dying from the heat,’ Nicky noted
in his diary. Week after week of incessant, crowded social events left both Alix and Nicky longing for privacy. Her leg pains continued to bother her, though she did not complain. As for Nicky, he
had had enough of ‘the fat aunts and their husbands’, and was becoming irritated with Beatrice’s naughty children, his patience frayed by constantly having to ‘sit with
hands folded and always to wait without end’ while Granny took her time getting ready for the next tea party or special exhibition.
¹⁷
Nicky
was energetic; if he didn’t get his daily walk he chafed and grew restless. He distracted himself buying jewels for Alix from the jewellers who, he complained, ‘camped in his
room’.

He had already given her a beautiful pink diamond engagement ring, along with a necklace of jewels so dazzling that she ‘nearly fainted’ when presented with it. Now he added other
engagement gifts: a pink pearl necklace and ring, a bracelet with an enormous emerald, a sapphire and diamond brooch. Some of the jewellery sent to Alix from the tsar’s court was very costly,
and the queen, when she saw the fabulous display, was quick to chide her granddaughter. ‘Now do not get too proud, Alix,’ Victoria said, perhaps unaware that her own humility and lack
of material greed or pretension had made a far more lasting impression than any words she could say.

To judge from her letters and other written comments, Alix in fact gave little thought to the high state she would one day occupy as Nicky’s wife. Exalted status and position were not
important to her; love was. And love she certainly had, and gave – a love that seemed to grow daily, and to flower into a rich, perfectly satisfying compatibility. She and her fiancé
were of one mind, one outlook. Being together was enough to make them rapturously happy.

They were tender with each other, they were teasing, they laughed and joked and, none too kindly, made fun of other people. They laughed together over an English phrase book Nicky was studying,
compiled by Russians,
‘English as She Is Spoke.’
(‘At what o’clock dine him?’ ‘It must never to laugh of the unhappiest.’ ‘Dress your
hairs!’)

Alix told Nicky that her ‘most earnest desire and prayer’ was to make him happy, and he, equally devoted, made it clear to her that her happiness was his
prime object. ‘I love you, my own darling, as few persons can only love!’ Nicky had written shortly after their engagement. ‘I love you too deeply and too strongly for me to show
it; it is such a sacred feeling, I don’t want to let it out in words, that seem meek and poor and vain!’
¹⁸

When towards the end of July the day came for him to go aboard the yacht
Polar Star
to return to Russia, he was mournful and depressed. Parting, even for a little while, was painful.
‘The sadness and longing have made me feel faint,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Was exhausted from sadness and longing.’
¹⁹

The separation would not be long, Alix assured him. They would meet in two months, at the end of September, at Wolfsgarten. Meanwhile Alix would go on with her religious instruction, training
for her formal ceremony of acceptance into the Orthodox church, and with her Russian lessons. She had ordered her trousseau from Madame Flotov, a fashionable designer, and there would be many boxes
of gowns, hats, undergarments and nightgowns to try on and approve.

‘Ever true and ever loving, faithful pure and strong as death,’ Alix wrote in Nicky’s diary on the night before he left. Nothing could separate them now, not the cold of the
North Sea, not the passing of time, not accident or fate. ‘Once again, once again, once again, O nightingale!’ Alix sang to herself after watching the departure of the
Polar
Star
. She limped back down the landing stage towards the shore, turning her engagement ring on her finger. Her legs hurt, but what was a little pain, when such happiness lay just beyond the
horizon?