The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra(3)

*

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 6

693GG_TXT.indd 6

29/10/2013 16:17

THE ROOM OF THE FIRST AND LAST DOOR

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 semicircular 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, ordinary 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 7

693GG_TXT.indd 7

29/10/2013 16:17

FOUR SISTERS

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.

8

693GG_TXT.indd 8

29/10/2013 16:17





Chapter One


MOTHER LOVE


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’, celebrated 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 9

693GG_TXT.indd 9

29/10/2013 16:17

FOUR SISTERS

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