The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra(5)

wept North Sea coast of Belgium; or at Schloss Kranichstein, a seventeenth-century hunting lodge on the edge of the Odenwald.

When it came to her children’s religious and moral development Princess Alice took a very personal hand and inspired high ideals 12

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in them, her greatest wish being that they ‘should take nothing but recollections of love and happiness from their home into the battle of life’.13 Life’s battle included being taught to appreciate the sufferings of the sick and poor, visiting hospitals with armfuls of flowers every Saturday and at Christmas. But Alice’s own life was increasingly one of chronic pain – from headaches, rheumatism and neuralgia, as well as overwhelming exhaustion brought on by her commitment to so many worthy causes. The last child of the family, May, was born two years after Alix in 1874, but by then the happy childhood idyll at Darmstadt was over.

Gloom had irrevocably settled over the family, when at the age of two Alice’s second son Frittie had, in 1872, shown the first unmistakable signs of haemophilia; his godfather, Queen Victoria’s fourth son Leopold, also was blighted by the disease. Barely a year later, in May 1873, the bright and engaging little boy, on whom Alice had absolutely doted, died of internal bleeding after falling 20

feet (6 metres) from a window. Alice’s consuming morbidity thereafter – a species of douleur so clearly in tune with that of her widowed mother – meant that a mournful dwelling on the dead, and on the trials and tribulations rather than the pleasures of life, became part of the fabric of the young lives of the surviving siblings. ‘May we all follow in a way as peaceful, and with so little struggle and pain, and leave an image of as much love and brightness behind’, Alice told her mother after Frittie died.14

The loss of one of her ‘pretty pair’ of boys opened up a four-year gap between the only other son, Ernie – who also was for ever haunted by Frittie’s death – and his next sibling Alix.15 With her three older sisters growing up and inevitably distancing themselves from her, Alix instinctively gravitated to her younger sister May and they became devoted playmates. With time, Princess Alice took solace in her ‘two little girlies’. They were ‘so sweet, so dear, merry, and nice. I don’t know which is dearest,’ she told Queen Victoria, ‘they are both so captivating.’16 Alix and May were indeed a consolation, but the light had gone from Alice’s eyes with Frittie’s death and her health was collapsing. At a time when she and her husband were also becoming sadly estranged, Alice retreated into a state of settled melancholy and physical exhaustion. ‘I am good for next to nothing,’ she told her mother, ‘I live on my sofa and see no one.’17

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The accession of Prince Louis to the throne of Hesse in 1877 and her own promotion to grand duchess brought only despair at the additional duties that would be placed upon her: ‘Too much is demanded of me,’ she told her mother, ‘and I have to do with so many things. It is more than my strength can stand in the long run.’18 Only Alice’s faith and her devotion to her precious children was keeping her going but her air of fatalistic resignation cast a shadow over her impressionable daughter Alix.

In November 1878 an epidemic of diphtheria descended upon the Hesse children; first Victoria, then Alix fell sick, followed by all the others bar Ella, and then their father too. Alice nursed each of them in turn with absolute devotion; but even her best nursing skills could not save little May, who died on 16 November. By the time she saw May’s little coffin taken off for burial Alice was in a state of collapse. For the next two weeks she struggled to keep the news of May’s death from the other children, but a kiss of consolation for Ernie on telling him the news may well have been enough for the disease to be transmitted to Alice herself. Just as her children were recovering Alice succumbed and she died on 14 December, at the age of thirty-five, achieving the longed-for Wiedersehen with her precious Frittie.

The trauma for the six-year-old Alix of seeing both her mother and her beloved little playmate May taken from her within days of each other was profound. Her treasured childhood tokens were taken from her too – her toys, books and games all destroyed for fear of lingering infection. Ernie was the closest to her in age but now under the separate control of tutors as heir to the throne, and she felt her isolation acutely. Her eldest sister Victoria recalled happier times to their grandmother: ‘It sometimes seems as if it were only yesterday that we were all romping about with May in Mama’s room after tea – & now we are big girls & even Alix is serious & sensible & the house is often very quiet.’19

It would be Grandmama, the solid and reassuring Mrs Orchard – known to Alix as Orchie – and her governess Madgie (Miss Jackson) who would fill the terrible void of her mother’s death, but the little girl’s sense of abandonment ran very deep. Her sunny disposition began to fade into an increasing moroseness and introspection, laying the foundations of a mistrust of strangers that became ever more 14

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deeply engrained as the years went by. Queen Victoria was anxious to act as a surrogate mother, for Alix had always been one of her favourite granddaughters. Regular visits to England by Alix and her siblings, especially to Balmoral in the autumn, had consoled Victoria in her own lonely widowhood, and such regular proximity allowed her to supervise Alix’s education, her tutors in Hesse sending her regular monthly reports. Alix herself seemed content to play the role of the ‘very loving, dutiful and grateful Child’, as she so often signed her letters to the queen, and she never forgot a birthday or an anniversary, sending numerous gifts of her own exquisite embroi-dery and handiwork.20 England, which she visited often, became a second home to her.