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

temporarily distracted by other pretty
    faces. For her own part, Alix was enjoying a degree of status back
    home, as a big fish in the very small Hesse pond. Her widowed
    father, whom she adored, increasingly depended upon her, as the
    only unmarried daughter, to take on formal duties for him at the
    Hesse court. Alix became his constant companion; the little time
    she did not spend in her father’s company was devoted to study, to
    painting and drawing, making and mending her own modest dresses,
    playing the piano (at which she was most accomplished) and a great
    deal of quiet, religious contemplation. And so, when Louis suddenly
    collapsed and died aged only fifty-four in March 1892 ‘dear Alicky’s
    grief’ was ‘terrible’, as Orchie confided to Queen Victoria. Worse,
    it was ‘a silent grief, which she locked up within her’, as she did
    most things.23 Alix’s concerned grandmama gathered her orphaned
    granddaughter to her bosom, vowing that ‘while I live Alicky, till
    she is married, will be more than ever my own child ’.24 Alix joined her, in deep mourning, at Balmoral for several weeks of quiet,
    womanly commiseration. But by this time the press, paying little
    deference to royal grief, had other things on its mind.
    Princess Alix was twenty and highly marriageable and gossip
    began circulating about a possible match between her and the young
    Prince George, second son of Bertie, Prince of Wales. Three years
    previously, a surprisingly determined young Alix had vigorously
    resisted the queen’s attempt to marry her off to Bertie’s heir, Eddy, Duke of Clarence. Victoria had been extremely put out that Alix,
    by then in love with Nicky, should turn down the opportunity of
    being a future queen of the United Kingdom. As the last of the four
    daughters of the House of Hesse yet to be married, Alix’s prospects
    were hardly the best. Never mind; perhaps she could be persuaded
    to marry George instead, thought the queen, particularly once the
    unfortunate Eddy succumbed to pneumonia in January 1892. It
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    didn’t work; Alix was adamant, and when George settled instead for
    Eddy’s disconsolate fiancée May of Teck, it soon became evident
    where Alix’s affections were firmly fixed. She only had eyes for the
    Russian tsarevich. Queen Victoria’s anxiety at the prospect of such
    a marriage mounted. She had been highly mistrustful of Russia since
    the Crimean War, looking upon Britain’s former enemy as ‘false’
    and ‘unfriendly’ and much of its population ‘half oriental’. Russia
    was ‘a corrupt country, where you can trust no one’.25 She fired off
    exhortatory letters to Alix’s eldest sister Victoria, demanding she
    and Ernie intervene to prevent it: ‘for the younger Sister to marry
    the son of an Emperor – would never answer, and lead to no happi-
    ness . . . The state of Russia is so bad, so rotten that any moment
    something dreadful might happen.’26
    In Russia, Alix’s other sister Ella was meanwhile quietly working
    against the queen’s plan to subvert the match. She had seen the
    lovelorn Nicholas at first hand and despite the fact that his father
    Alexander III and his wife were also, at this time, opposed to the
    match, Ella gave it her full support. In the midst of all the behind-
    the-scenes discussion of her future, Alix maintained a stony silence, locked into a personal vow made to her father before his death, that
    she would never change her religious faith. Since Louis’s death she
    had become more devoted than ever to Ernie, for whom she was
    now performing a similar central role at the Hesse court. Behind
    the impenetrable, dignified froideur that she projected, Alix was proud of the high standards she set for herself; proud of her own
    purity of heart and her independence of thought and moral integrity.
    ‘Of course, I am gay sometimes, and sometimes I can be pleasant,
    I suppose,’ she admitted to a visitor