The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) Read Online Free PDF

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
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    MOTHER LOVE
    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.
    *
    During her lifetime, Princess Alice had had strong feelings about
    the future for her daughters; she wanted to do more than educate
    them to be wives. ‘Life is also meaningful without being married’,
    she had once told her mother, and marrying merely for the sake of
    it was, in her view, ‘one of the greatest mistakes a woman can make’.21
    As she grew into a teenager, the best that the beautiful but poor
    Princess Alix of Hesse could have hoped for to relieve her from the
    unchallenging tedium of Darmstadt provincialism was marriage to
    a minor European princeling. But everything changed when on her
    first visit to Russia in 1884 (for the marriage of her sister Ella to Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich), Alix’s third cousin, Nicholas
    Alexandrovich, heir to the Russian throne, had taken a shine to her.
    He was sixteen and she was only twelve, but thereafter Nicky, as
    she would always call him, remained besotted. Five years later, when
    Grand Duke Louis took Alix back to Russia on a six-week visit,
    Nicky was still stubbornly determined to win her as his wife. The
    shy schoolgirl had become a slender, ethereally beautiful young
    woman and Nicky was deeply in love. But by now – 1889 – Alix
    had been confirmed in the Lutheran faith prior to coming out, and
    she made clear to Nicky that despite her deep feelings for him,
    marriage was out of the question. Virtue prevailed. She could not
    and would not change her religion, but she did agree to write to
    him in secret, their letters being sent via Ella as intermediary.
    The royal marriage stakes at that time were unforgiving to girls
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    FOUR SISTERS
    who did not grasp a golden opportunity when it presented itself; as
    one contemporary newspaper observed, ‘Love in royal circles is not
    an epidemic affection’.22 It seemed that Alix’s inflexibility was going to deprive her of the one thing so many of her young royal contemporaries craved – a marriage based on love and not expediency. To
    a forlorn Nicky there seemed an insurmountable gulf between them
    and he allowed himself to be