gifts: a pink pearl ring, a necklace of large pink pearls, a chain bracelet bearing a massive emerald, and a sapphire- and-diamond brooch. Grandest of all was a
The heat was stifling in England that summer. Nicholas began riding out from Windsor Castle in the morning while it still was cool. He liked to trot down Queen Anne’s Way, a popular horse path bordered by magnificent trees, then come back home through open fields, “galloping like a fool.” He was always back by ten to join Alix and the Queen for coffee. Lunch was at two, and afterward everybody rested and tried to ward off the heat. Before tea, Nicholas and Alix drove under the great oaks of Windsor Park and admired the blooming rhododendron. Nicholas admitted to his mother, “I can’t complain. Granny has been very friendly and even allowed us to go for drives without a chaperone.” In the evening, when the air had cooled, they dined with guests on a balcony or terrace and listened to music being played in the castle courtyard. Once when a violinist came up from London, Alix accompanied him on the piano.
Despite her lessons with Father Yanishev, Alix frequently popped into Nicholas’s rooms. He apologized to his mother for not writing home more often. “Every moment,” he pleaded, “I simply had to get up and embrace her.” During one of these visits, apparently, Alix discovered that Nicholas was keeping a diary. She began to write in it herself. These entries, most of them in English, began with short notes—“Many loving kisses,” “God bless you, my angel,” “forever, forever”—and progressed to lines of verse and prayers:
“I dreamed that I was loved, I woke and found it true and thanked God on my knees for it. True love is the gift which God has given, daily, stronger, deeper, fuller, purer.”
As the object of such overwhelming devotion, Nicholas felt that he had to speak about certain episodes in his past. He told her at this point about Kschessinska. Although she was only twenty-two, Alix rose to the occasion like a true granddaughter of Queen Victoria. She forgave him handsomely, even gushingly, but she also delivered a brief little lecture which cast Nicholas in the role of the male redeemed by the purity of love:
“What is past is past and will never return. We all are tempted in this world and when we are young we cannot always fight and hold our own against the temptation, but as long as we repent, God will forgive us.… Forgive my writing so much, but I want you to be quite sure of my love for you and that I love you even more since you told me that little story, your confidence in me touched me oh so deeply.… [May] I always show myself worthy of it.… God bless you, beloved Nicky.…”
Knowing Nicholas’s love of military pageantry, the Queen arranged a succession of displays. At Windsor he watched a thousand cadets from the naval academy at Greenwich perform gymnastics to music. He reviewed six companies of the Coldstream Guards, and the officers invited him to dinner. Normally, Nicholas would have jumped at this invitation, “But … Granny loves me so and doesn’t like me missing dinner, nor does Alix,” he wrote, explaining to his mother why he refused. At Aldershot, the huge British military camp, they watched a torchlight retreat ceremony and listened to a massed choir of English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish voices. Next day, Nicholas, dressed in his uniform of the Imperial Hussars, took the salute of columns of British infantry, cavalry and horse artillery. He liked especially the pleated kilts and the skirling pipes of the Highland regiments.
While Nicholas was in England, a baby was born into the British royal family. “Yesterday, at 10 o’clock a son was born to Georgie and May to the general joy,” he wrote. The baby, named Prince Edward, would become King Edward VIII, and later the Duke of Windsor. Nicholas and Alix were chosen as godparents of the little Prince. “Instead of plunging the infant into the water,” noted the Tsarevich, “the archbishop sprinkled water on his head.… What a nice, healthy child.” Afterward the baby’s father dropped in on the engaged couple at Windsor. Even in his diary Nicholas showed a quaint touch of prudery as he described the visit: “Georgie came for lunch. Alix and he stayed in my room with me. I add these words ‘with me’ because otherwise it would sound a bit odd.”
Before he left England, the Tsarevich and his fiancee went with the Queen to Osborne, the seaside royal residence on the Isle of Wight. From the palace lawns they could watch flotillas of sailboats scudding before the wind. Like a small boy, Nicholas took off his shoes and walked through the waves rolling up on the sand.
As the end of July approached, the six-week idyll came to an end. Alix had filled the diary with messages: “Love is caught, I have bound his wings. No longer will he roam or fly away. Within our two hearts forever, love sings.” As the
Next day, Nicholas stood at the rail watching a fiery sunset off the coast of Jutland and gazing across the water as twenty ships of the Imperial German Navy dipped their flags in salute. Entering the Baltic through the Skaggerak, the
“I am yours,” Alix had written, “you are mine, of that be sure. You are locked in my heart, the little key is lost and now you must stay there forever.”
There was another entry, too—a strangely prophetic line from Marie Corelli: “For the past is past and will never return, the future we know not, and only the present can be called our own.”
* Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, the wife of Nicholas’s eldest uncle, Grand Duke Vladimir.
CHAPTER FOUR
AT GATCHINA, Nicholas found his family in a state of alarm over his father’s health. Troubled by headaches, insomnia and weakness in the legs, the Tsar had consulted doctors, who recommended that he rest, preferably in the warm climate of the Crimea. But Alexander III was not a man to disrupt his schedule simply because he was not feeling well. The family entrained in September, not for the Crimea, but for the Imperial hunting lodge at Spala in Poland.
There, the Tsar continued to feel ill, and a specialist, Professor Leyden, was summoned from Vienna. Leyden carefully looked over the bearlike frame and diagnosed nephritis. He insisted that his patient be moved to the Crimea immediately and forced to rest. This time, Alexander III agreed. Nicholas, meanwhile, found himself caught in a struggle between “my duty to remain here with my dear parents and follow them to the Crimea and the keen desire to hurry to Wolfsgarten to be near my dear Alix.” Eventually, he suppressed his ardor and went with the family to the summer palace at Livadia in the Crimea.
There, amid warm breezes scented with grapes, the Tsar began to improve. He ate well, took sunbaths in the garden and even went down to walk on the beach. But this improvement was only temporary. After a few days, he again began to have trouble sleeping, his legs gave way and he took to his bed. His diet was rigidly restricted and, to his distress, he was forbidden ice cream. Sitting alone by his bedside, his sixteen-year-old daughter, Olga, suddenly heard her father whisper, “Baby, dear, I know there is some ice cream in the next room. Bring it here—but make sure nobody sees you.” She smuggled him a plate and he enjoyed it immensely. A St. Petersburg priest, Father John of Kronstadt, whose followers believed him capable of miracles, was summoned. While the doctors worked, Father John prayed, but the Tsar grew steadily worse.
Sensing what was coming, Nicholas asked Alix to come to Livadia. She came immediately, traveling by train as an ordinary passenger. Normally the fiancee of a tsarevich would have been honored with a special train, but the Minister of the Imperial Court, whose job it was to make such arrangements, was so involved with the illness of the Tsar that he simply forgot. Approaching the Crimea, Alix wired ahead that she wanted the ceremony of her conversion to Orthodoxy to take place as soon as possible. Nicholas could not suppress his happiness. “My God, what a joy to meet her in my country and to have her near,” he wrote. “Half my fears and sadness have disappeared.”
He met her train in Simferopol and brought her to Livadia in an open carriage. During the four-hour drive, they were stopped repeatedly by Tartar villagers with welcoming bread and salt and armloads of grapes and flowers. When their carriage rolled up in front of the palace guard of honor, it was brimming with fruit and flowers. In his
