The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra(8)

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perfect health’, commented the Westminster Budget: The anxiety of the Court to contradict the report that [she] is in delicate health is unquestionably due to an apprehension that it may cause her engagement to be broken off. It is a sine qua non that the wife of the heir to the throne of Russia should be of a thoroughly sound constitution, and his marriage to anyone not in good health is positively prohibited by the Romanoff family statutes.36

Alix’s four-week stay in Harrogate with her lady-in-waiting, Gretchen von Fabrice, was, despite the press attention, a happy one.

She made the most of the home comforts of a roomy, terraced villa at Prospect Place in High Harrogate – the fashionable end of town.

But every morning she had to run the gauntlet of prying eyes watching her – some even through opera glasses – as she went down the hill by bath chair or carriage to the Victoria Bathing House for sulphur or peat baths and glasses of the evil-smelling sulphurous waters. Every afternoon she would re-emerge, to be taken on excur-sions in a special Coventry Cycle Chair (a combination of bath chair and pedal cycle), to admire local beauty spots and be further invigorated by the bracing Yorkshire air. A detective followed by bicycle at a discreet distance.37 Soon, however, Alix had to adopt avoidance tactics, as she told Nicky: ‘They stand in a mass to see me drive out and tho’ I now get in at the backyard, they watch the door and then stream to see me . . . when I go into a shop to buy flowers, girls stand and stare in at the window.’38 The crippling embarrassment she felt was made doubly so by the fact that she was in a bath chair and felt vulnerable. For most of her stay it poured with rain and the pain in her legs was little better by the end of it, but she remained at all times cheerful and polite to the attendants and local people whom she encountered, all of whom remembered her as ‘affable and unassuming, nothing stiff or formal about her’.39

Shortly after her arrival at Prospect Place, Alix had been delighted to discover that her hostess, Mrs Allen, had just given birth to twins, a boy and a girl. She felt this was a lucky sign and asked to see the babies. She was extraordinarily informal around the household, insisting that they treat her like an ordinary person, and ‘tripping 20

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and singing about the house, like a happy English girl, just home from school’,

now popping into her bedroom, and alarming the servant by helping her to make the bed; then startling Mrs. Allen by tapping at the kitchen door, with a pretty ‘May I come in,’ dandling the lucky twins, or standing with her back to the fire, like a Yorkshire man, whilst she chatted as to the cooking operations, or held lengthy discussions along with the Baroness Fabrice as to the best way of dressing and training children.40

At the Allens’ request Alix agreed to stand as godparent for the twins at their christening on 13 June at St Peter’s Church, Harrogate, when they were given the names Nicholas Charles Bernard Hesse and Alix Beatrice Emma. Afterwards, she presented the children with generous gifts of gold jewellery, as well as photographs of herself and her fiancé, so that when they grew up the children would see who they were named after.41* It was a happy interlude, filled with hopes for her own future life as a wife, surrounded by the children she longed for; a time when Princess Alix was her natural self – open, loving and generous to those who mattered within her own private, domestic world.

In mid-June, Alix was joined in England by Nicky – ecstatic to find himself at last ‘in the embrace of my destined one, who seemed to me even more beautiful, even more dear, than before’, as he told his mother.41 For three idyllic days by the River Thames at Walton, staying with Alix’s sister Victoria and her husband Louis of Battenberg, the couple spent time walking; sitting on a rug in the shade of a chestnut tree, with Nicholas reading aloud as Alix sat sewing; or going for drives, the latter, for once, unchaperoned. Then they joined the queen at Windsor and travelled on to Osborne with her, during which time Nicholas’s domestic chaplain, Father * A year later when the twins had their first birthday Alix sent gifts of Russian gold and enamelled cutlery, serviette rings and salt cellars bearing the imperial coat of arms and the babies’ initials, as well as two matching pink and blue petti-coats that she herself made specially for the occasion. Further presents followed from Russia in 1910 when the twins were confirmed and again in 1915 when they reached twenty-one.

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Yanyshev, arrived from Russia to give Alix instruction in the Russian Orthodox religion. He had a hard time of it; Alix was a rigorous and questioning pupil. Her evangelical upbringing had taught her to dislike dogma and she refused adamantly to make a formal statement renouncing her Lutheranism as heretical. A compromise had to be reached.

With the wedding scheduled for the spring of 1895, Alix antici-pated having several quiet months back home in Hesse to prepare, but plans were dramatically changed with news from Russia that Alexander III had fallen dangerously ill and was not expected to live. By now reconciled to the marriage, he wished to see Alix before he died and she left Hesse in great haste, making the long train journey south to Simferopol in the Crimea accompanied by her loyal friend Gretchen. After she had joined Nicky at the Romanov palace at Livadia, the couple was formally betrothed in front of the dying tsar. Alexander’s death on 20 October* was followed the day after by Alix’s formal acceptance into the Russian Orthodox Church.