The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 there-
    after – 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 conso-
    lation, 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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    FOUR SISTERS
    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