Alexandra Read Online Free PDF Page B

summer it was beginning to appear as though, against all odds, Alix might actually have to enter her second social season
unattached, bearing the stigma of looming spinsterhood.
    Queen Victoria now stepped in in an effort to prevent that disaster. It was the queen’s habit, when she intended to promote a match, to invite both members of the potential couple to one
of her residences for a visit at the same time; during the course of their stay, with the queen as chaperone, they were expected to fall in love (or at least acquire a liking for one another) and
come to an understanding about their future.
    She invited Alix and Eddy to Balmoral in hope that, under the influence of the wild and romantic Scottish countryside and the almost equally potent influence of their determined grandmother,
they would at last do what had long been expected of them by many in their families, including Eddy’s parents. (Many – but not all. Ella had strong reservations about Eddy as a husband
for Alix; he was physically feeble and of only mediocre intelligence, and the fact that he would one day be king of England and emperor of India made him no more attractive.)
    For Alix the time at Balmoral must have been awkward at best, and at worst extremely uncomfortable. She listened to Eddy’s protestations of love, she endured her grandmother’s
scrutiny and, most likely, her pointed lectures on what a fine husband Eddy would make, how few eligible men there were of appropriate social rank for her to choose from, how her chances of
marriage were certain to diminish even further if she waited until she was any older (she was then seventeen) to make up her mind. 13 In the end,
Alix refused Eddy’s proposal – but neither he nor Queen Victoria quite gave up hope that she would change her mind. ‘We have just a faint lingering hope,’ the queen wrote to
her granddaughter Victoria; as for Eddy, he was to be sent abroad to recover from his disappointment. 14
    What neither the queen nor Eddy knew was that Alix had acquired a Russian language exercise book, and was applying herself to learning Russian in preparation for her forthcoming visit to Ella
– a visitduring which, she was certain, she would see a great deal of her cousin Nicky.
    Thick ice crusted the Neva in January of 1890, and deep snowdrifts lined the long, straight boulevard of Nevsky Prospekt where Ella and Serge’s massive red palace stood, squat and
four-square, opposite the far grander Anitchkov Palace where the tsar and his family were in residence for the season. The city was in darkness most of the time; a feeble sun rose just above the
horizon for a few hours at midday, but its pale wintry light, glowing on the snow, was almost spectral, and in order to provide enough light along the canals and walkways, lanterns had to be kept
lit even at noon.
    Horses slipped on the icy streets, the jingling of their harness bells a constant noise from morning until late into the night. For St Petersburg in winter came alive in the evening, when the
city’s elite, elegantly gowned and jewelled, drove to one another’s mansions to attend grand soirées. Lines of carriages filled Nevsky Prospekt every night, jostling as they
clogged the broad avenue, the drivers in their thick greatcoats shouting and swearing and urging the horses forwards, the thick reins clutched in gloved hands.
    Foreign observers noted a carnival atmosphere among the crowds at St Petersburg dances and receptions, a spirited gaiety that distinguished the highborn Russians from the decorous, ponderous
Germans or the homely albeit ceremonious British. The Russians had style, bravado, dash; their mansions, their clothing, their banquets, the very livery of their servants had a splendour that was
almost gaudy by comparison with the high society of Western capitals. It was, in part, a lavishness of scale; everything in Russia was large, in keeping with the vast land itself – the
fortunes, the aristocratic