Alexandra by Carolly Erickson

had become ‘the dream
and the hope by which I live from day to day’. He was quite bewitched by Matilda Kchessinsky, who had become his mistress, but his feelings for Alix were of another order entirely. ‘I
resisted my feelings for a long time,’ he wrote in December 1891, ‘trying to deceive myself into believing that my cherished dream could not be realized.’ But the more he thought
about her, the more he began to believe that his cherished dream was not impossible. She had not become engaged to anyone else. He was ‘almost convinced’ that she felt as strongly about
him as he did about her. ‘The only obstacle or gulf between her and me is the question of religion,’ he wrote, and while his parents never ceased to emphasize that obstacle, it had
never been a problem in the past; whenever a Protestant had married the tsarevich, she had always converted to Orthodoxy.
    ‘Everything is in the will of God,’ Nicky wrote. ‘Trusting in His mercy, I look to the future calmly and resignedly.’ 16
    Alix was becoming concerned about her father. As winter closed in on Darmstadt in January 1892, and the snow began to pile high in the palace park, Louis was often short
of breath, his face pale and his gait unsteady. The cold seemed to bother him more than usual, and many days he did not leave his room. He had always been physically strong, though far from fit;
his uniforms had had to be made larger year by year, as his paunch expanded, but he still wore them proudly, with his array of medals and ribbons gleaming across his broad chest.
    On a March afternoon as he sat eating lunch with his family, he collapsed. Alix, anxious and tense, sat by his bedside for the next nine days, sleeping very little, keeping vigil along with
Ernie. Telegrams were sent to Irene and Victoria, who arrived quickly. Only Ella was missing.
    No one expected Louis to die. It seemed impossible that so robust a man could succumb so suddenly. ‘Death is dreadful without preparation,’ Alix recalled long afterwards, ‘and
without the body gradually loosening all earthly ties.’ She watched in vain for some flicker of recognition on her father’s wan face, but he did not regain consciousness. On the tenth
day after his attack, his pulse ceased. Alix, haggard from her long vigil and inconsolably grief-stricken, was now an orphan.

5

    A small, carefully wrapped package arrived from Windsor, from Grandmama Victoria, for Alix’s twentieth birthday in June 1892. It was a
decorative enamel, with a whiskery portrait of the late Grand Duke Louis – a sad memento.
    Pale and thin, and in pain from her sore legs, Alix had suffered a good deal in the aftermath of her father’s death. The strain on her nerves was considerable, and she was not resilient;
for months she had been tearful and slept badly, while her hardier sisters Victoria and Irene, sombre in their black mourning gowns, had hovered around her and her brother Ernie, who now assumed
the title Grand Duke of Hesse, made vain efforts to comfort and cheer her.
    Orchie too hovered around Alix, muttering that she ought to get married as soon as possible, indeed that she ought to have married Max of Baden while she had the chance, and Baroness Grancy,
spry and elderly, counselled Alix to pull herself together and think only of doing her duty, not of her grief. Only Gretchen von Fabrice struck the right note; she was sympathetic, warm and
retiring.
    But Alix, gazing at the enamel likeness of her father and confined to bed, was slow to recover despite the ministrations of those around her. She had lost her ‘precious one’, the
father she had loved and clung to, the dear papa whose handsome face and solid bulk were in her earliest memories. 1 She had lost him before
confiding in him fully about her great desire to marry Nicky and her qualms about adopting his Orthodox faith – qualms that had recently begun to grow stronger. She could no longer turn to
her father for advice, indeed