The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra(10)

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with the Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt with the birth of a son’.50

In the dynastic scheme of things, Alix’s primary and most urgent duty was to provide a male heir to the Russian throne.

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chapter Two


LA PETITE DUCHESSE


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From her very first days in Russia, Princess Alix of Hesse was determined to counter anything she saw as a threat to the quiet family life that she had envisaged for herself and Nicky. Family had been her only security when death had taken those most dear from her; she was far from home, lonely and apprehensive, and dreaded being exposed as an object of curiosity. But in protecting her own deeply held insecurities by retreating, at every opportunity, from public view, she only succeeded in accentuating her already marked air of chilly reserve. Alexandra Feodorovna, as she was now styled, found herself at the receiving end of hostile looks from a Russian aristoc-racy that was already critical of her English upbringing and manners – and, to their horror, her poor French, which was still very much the language of their elite circles.1 Worse, this insignificant German princess had, in the eyes of the court, displaced the much loved and highly sociable former empress, Maria Feodorovna – a still vigorous widow in her forties – from her central position at court.

From the first, Alexandra found the strain of fulfilling her ceremonial duties almost intolerable, such as in January 1895, when she had to face a line of 550 court ladies for the New Year baise-main ceremony at which they all processed to kiss her imperial hand. Her visible discomfort and habit of recoiling in horror when anyone tried to get too close were quickly misinterpreted as manifestations of a difficult personality. Her new sister-in-law Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna later recalled: ‘Even in that first year – I remember so well – if Alicky smiled they called it mockery. If she looked grave 26

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LA PETITE DUCHESSE

they said she was angry.’2 And so, in response, Alexandra retreated behind the protective wall of domesticity, preoccupied with the one thing primarily expected of her – getting pregnant. Everyone was watching for the telltale signs. Grand Duke Konstantin

Konstantinovich pointedly noted in his diary within weeks of the wedding that ‘the young Empress again felt faint in church. If this is for the reason the whole of Russia longs for, then praise be to God!’3 Sure enough, by the end of February Alexandra was confiding to Ernie (whose own wife was about to give birth to her first child in Darmstadt and to whom Alexandra was sending the imperial accoucheur Madame Günst to attend her): ‘I think now I can have hopes – a certain thing has stopped – and I think . . . Oh I cannot believe it, it would be too good and too great a happiness.’ She swore Ernie to secrecy; her sister Ella had ‘fidgeted in December already about it’ and her other sister Irene too, but she would tell them in her own time.4 As for her old nurse, whom she had brought with her from Darmstadt, ‘Orchie watches me the whole time in a tiresome way’. Within a week of this letter, Alexandra was ‘feeling daily so terribly sick’ that she could not attend the funeral service for the young Grand Duke Alexey Mikhailovich who had died of tuberculosis, and thereafter she was frequently confined to bed with violent nausea.5 Orchie coaxed her to have the occasional mutton chop, which more often than not would send her fleeing from the dining table to vomit. Alexandra was fearful that she was being watched for signs of her legendary poor health, and again begged Ernie not to tell anyone about how severe her morning sickness was.6 From now until her due date tsarist officialdom protected Alexandra’s health and welfare behind a wall of silence; there were no announcements or bulletins in the Russian press and the people at large knew nothing of her condition.

For the time being the couple was still living at the Anichkov Palace in St Petersburg. Alexandra spent her days here resolutely hidden away from view in a ‘big armchair in a corner, half-hidden by the screen’, reading the Darmstadter Zeitung, sewing and painting, while her adored husband dealt with his ‘aggravating people’. She resented Nicky’s absence on official business for even a couple of hours in the morning (echoes of her grandmother Victoria’s solipsism 27

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FOUR SISTERS

and inability to let her beloved Albert out of her sight). But she did have him to herself in the afternoons: ‘whilst he usually reads his heaps of papers from the ministers, I look through the begging letters, of which there are not [a] few & cut out the stamps’, the latter act a mark of her ingrained Hessian frugality.7 The business of state seemed an irritating diversion – ‘a horrid bore’.8 Evenings were spent listening to Nicky reading aloud, after which, while he decamped to his study for more paperwork, Alexandra would spin out the time playing the board game halma with her motherin-law until Nicky returned for more bedtime reading. What few perfunc-tory duties Alexandra was obliged to fulfil – meeting foreign depu-tations or line-ups of ministers – were now made doubly unpleasant, for she was feeling dreadfully sick and suffering constant headaches.

Nevertheless, the tsaritsa had every reason to be confident that she would produce the expected son before the year was out. The statistics certainly favoured it, there having been plenty of boys born to the previous three Romanov tsars. Male children were crucial in a country where the succession laws, changed in 1797 by Tsar Paul I, were based on male primogeniture.9 The Russian throne could pass to a woman only if all legal male lines of descent were extinct.