wringing hands, Alexandra suppressed her own small, pathetic happiness. “One’s feelings one can imagine,” she wrote to her sister. “One day in deepest mourning lamenting a beloved one, the next in smartest clothes being married. There cannot be a greater contrast, but it drew us more together, if possible.” “Such was my entry into Russia,” she added later. “Our marriage seemed to me a mere continuation of the masses for the dead with this difference, that now I wore a white dress instead of a black.”
The wedding took place on November 26, one week after the funeral. The day selected was the birthday of Empress Marie, now the Dowager Empress, and for such an occasion protocol permitted a brief relaxation of mourning. Dressed in white, Alexandra and Marie drove together down the Nevsky Prospect to the Winter Palace. Before a famous gold mirror used by every Russian grand duchess on her wedding day, the bride was formally dressed by the ladies of the Imperial family. She wore a heavy, old-fashioned Russian court dress of silver brocade and a robe and train of cloth of gold lined with ermine. From a red velvet cushion, Marie herself lifted the sparkling diamond nuptial crown and settled it carefully onto Alexandra’s head. Together the two women walked through the palace galleries to the chapel where Nicholas waited in the boots and uniform of a Hussar. Each holding a lighted candle, Nicholas and Alexandra faced the Metropolitan. A few minutes before one in the afternoon, they became man and wife.
Alexandra was radiant. “She looked too wonderfully lovely,” said the Princess of Wales. George, the Duke of York, wrote to Mary in England, “I think Nicky is a very lucky man to have got such a lovely and charming wife and I must say I never saw two people more in love with each other or happier than they are. I told them both that I could not wish them more than that they should be as happy as you and I are together. Was that right?”
Because of the mourning, there was no reception after the wedding, and no honeymoon. The young couple returned immediately to the Anitchkov Palace. “When they drove from the Winter Palace after the wedding, they got a tremendous … ovation from the large crowds in the streets,” George wrote to Queen Victoria. “The cheering was most hearty and reminded me of England.… Nicky has been kindness itself to me, he is the same dear boy he has always been and talks to me quite openly on every subject.… He does everything so quietly and naturally; everyone is struck by it and he is very popular already.” At the Anitchkov Palace, Marie was waiting to welcome them with bread and salt. They stayed in that night, answered congratulatory telegrams, dined at eight and, according to Nicholas, “went to bed early because Alix had a headache.”
The marriage that began that night remained unflawed for the rest of their lives. It was a Victorian marriage, outwardly serene and proper, but based on intensely passionate physical love. On her wedding night, before going to bed, Alexandra wrote in her husband’s diary: “At last united, bound for life, and when this life is ended, we meet again in the other world and remain together for eternity. Yours, yours.” The next morning, with fresh, new emotions surging through her, she wrote, “Never did I believe there could be such utter happiness in this world, such a feeling of unity between two mortal beings. I love you, those three words have my life in them.”
They lived that first winter in six rooms of the Anitchkov Palace, where the Dowager Empress Marie remained mistress of the house. In his haste to be married, Nicholas had allowed no time for preparation of a place for himself and Alexandra to live, and they moved temporarily into the rooms which Nicholas and his brother George had shared as boys. Although he ruled a continent, the young Tsar conducted official business from a small sitting room while the new twenty-two-year-old Empress sat next door in the bedroom working on her Russian language. Between appointments, Nicholas joined her to chat and puff on a cigarette. At mealtime, because the apartment lacked a dining room, Nicholas and Alexandra went to dine with “Mother dear.”
The young couple minded their cramped quarters less than the long hours apart. “Petitions and audiences without end,” Nicholas grumbled, “saw Alix for an hour only,” and “I am indescribably happy with Alix. It is sad that my work takes so many hours which I would prefer to spend exclusively with her.” At night, Nicholas read to her in French, as she wanted to improve her use of the court language. They began by reading tales by Alphonse Daudet and a book about Napoleon’s life on St. Helena.
Occasionally, on snowy nights, Nicholas bundled Alexandra into fur robes beside him in a sleigh. Then he set the horses to flying under the walls and domes of the city and across the frozen white landscape. Back in their apartment, they changed into dressing gowns and had a late supper before a roaring fire.
On the last day of 1894, Nicholas looked back at the enormous events of that fateful year. In his diary he wrote: “It is hard to think of the terrible changes of this year. But putting our hope in God, I look forward to the coming year without fear, because the worst thing that could have happened to me, the thing I have been fearing all my life [the death of his father and his own accession to the throne], has already passed. At the same time that He has sent me irreparable grief, God has sent me a happiness of which I never dared to dream, in giving me Alix.”
Certain problems are universal. Nicholas, genuinely grieved for his abruptly widowed mother, tried to comfort her by his presence, dutifully dining with her and often staying to sit with her after dinner. During the early months of his reign, Nicholas turned to his mother for political advice. She gave it freely, never suspecting that Alexandra might be resenting her role. To Marie, Alexandra was still an awkward young German girl, only recently arrived in Russia, with no knowledge or background in affairs of state. As the period of mourning ended, Marie returned to public life, to the clothes, the jewelry, the brilliant lights she loved so much. She was constantly seen driving down the Nevsky Prospect in an open carriage or sleigh pulled by a pair of shiny blacks, with a huge, black- bearded Cossack on the runningboard behind her. In the protocol of the Russian court, a dowager empress took precedence over an empress. At public ceremonies, Marie, dressed all in white and blazing with diamonds, walked on the arm of her son while Alexandra followed behind on the arm of one of the grand dukes. So natural did the leading role seem to Marie that when she discovered that her daughter-in-law was bitter, Marie was surprised and hurt.
Alexandra, for her part, felt and behaved much like any young wife. She was shocked by the sudden blow which had struck Marie, and her first reaction toward her mother-in-law was sympathetic. Before long, however, the strains of living under the same roof and competing for the same man began to tell. At meals, Alexandra was doubly insulted. Not only was she completely ignored, but the older woman treated her beloved Nicky like a schoolboy. Despite elaborate politeness between “dear Alix” and “Mother dear,” a veiled hostility began to appear.
One incident especially irritated Alexandra. Certain of the crown jewels traditionally passed from one Russian empress to the next, and, indeed, protocol required that Alexandra wear them on formal occasions. But Marie had a passion for jewelry and when Nicholas asked his mother to give up the gems, she bristled and refused. Humiliated, Alexandra then declared that she no longer cared about the jewelry and would not wear it in any case. Before a public scandal occurred, Marie submitted.
Like many a young bride, Alexandra sometimes had difficulty accepting the swift transition in her life. “I cannot yet realize that I am married,” she wrote. “It seems like being on a visit.” She alternated between despair and bliss. “I feel myself completely alone,” she wrote to a friend in Germany. “I weep and I worry all day long because I feel that my husband is so young and so inexperienced.… I am alone most of the time. My husband is occupied all day and he spends his evenings with his mother.” But at Christmas she wrote to one of her sisters, “How contented and happy I am with my beloved Nicky.” In May she wrote in his diary, “Half a year now that we are married. How intensely happy you have made … [me] you cannot think.”
The domestic tensions eased in the spring of 1895 when Nicholas and Alexandra moved to Peterhof for the summer and Marie left Russia on a long visit to her family home in Copenhagen. More important, Alexandra discovered that she was pregnant. Grand Duchess Elizabeth came to stay with her sister, and together the two young women painted, did needlework and went for carriage rides in the park. Both Nicholas and Alexandra marveled at the baby’s growth. “It has become very big and kicks about and fights a great deal inside,” the Tsar wrote to his mother. With the baby coming, Alexandra began planning and decorating her first real home in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, fifteen miles south of St. Petersburg. “Sad to leave Peterhof and … our little house on the shore where we spent our first summer so quietly together,” Nicholas wrote to Marie. “But when we entered Alix’s apartments [at Tsarskoe Selo] our mood changed instantly … to utter delight.… Sometimes, we simply sit in silence wherever we happen to be and admire the walls, the fireplaces, the furniture.… Twice we went up to the future nursery; here also the rooms are remarkably airy, light and cozy.”
Both parents hoped that the new baby would be a son; a male heir would become the first tsarevich born directly to a reigning tsar since the eighteenth century. As the date approached, Marie returned, bubbling with
