Free Alexandra by Carolly Erickson Page B

themselves, the lilac-scented gardens, the crooked narrow streets and quaint houses, the small opera house and wooded environs. The intensity of those romantic days,
the joy each of them felt in the presence of the other, were beyond description. ‘I am more happy than words can express,’ Alix wrote to her old governess Madgie. ‘At last, after
these five sad years!’ 9 ‘My soul was brimming with joy and light,’ Nicky wrote, referring to those ‘golden days’
following his engagement. 10
    It was as if every detail of their rapturous days stood out with special significance: an operatic aria they both loved (‘Once again, once again, once again, O
nightingale!’), the pink flowers Alix habitually wore, and Nicky came to love, the house on the road from Coburg to Ketchendorf where they shared an erotic interlude. Time hung suspended, or
so it seemed – though on rainy afternoons they both managed to attend to their correspondence and to answer each of the more than two hundred telegrams that came for them.
    Plans for the future had to be made, but there would be time for this in the summer. Nicky was to return to Russia, then come to visit Alix in England. While they were apart they agreed to
communicate by telegram, in a special code. After a last day spent in Darmstadt, where they visited Ernie and Ducky, they said their reluctant goodbyes, and Alix left for Windsor.
    She arrived looking happy but tired, and with pain in her legs. Over the course of only a few short weeks an immense change had been wrought in Alix’s life, and the strain of it was
apparent. After a visit with family and a conference with the Bishop of Ripon – no doubt a discussion of her conversion – she went to Harrogate to treat her pain with a course of
sulphur baths and rest.
    Hoping to avoid attracting the attention of journalists and the curious, she adopted the incognito ‘Baroness Starckenburg’, and settled into a routine of immersing herself in the
waters and studying Russian with her teacher Catherine Schneider, the Baltic Russian Nicky had engaged to instruct her. (‘It is amusing, but certainly not easy!’ Alix wrote to Madgie,
describing her Russian lessons. 11 ) She made progress, but soon lost all her privacy. Her true identity was discovered. People crowded around her
lodgings, bothering her very pregnant landlady, trying to peer in at the windows, observing her every coming and going.
    The British were enthralled by the story of this beautiful granddaughter of Queen Victoria who, having waited so long to marry, had at last become engaged to the future tsar of Russia. They were
curious about every detail of her future. What would her wedding gown be like? Her trousseau? When was the wedding to be? Justhow rich would she be, as the wife of the
Russian tsar? Was it true she had rooms full of diamonds?
    ‘Of course it is in all the papers that I am here,’ Alix wrote to Nicky, ‘and all the tradespeople send epistles and beg of one to order things, even a piano and tea were
offered. The rude people stand at the corner and stare; I shall stick my tongue out at them another time.’ 12
    The speculation mounted, the crowds grew. People stared through their windows at her lodging, opera glasses in hand. Every time Alix drove out they congregated and got in the way, forcing her to
go in and out through a back entrance; once they discovered the back entrance they clogged it too, and some ran behind her carriage when it went out. It became impossible for her to enter a shop
without drawing a group of onlookers, who gawked quite rudely and called out, ‘That’s her.’
    When Alix’s landlady gave birth to twins, and asked her celebrated guest to be godmother to the babies, the church was full of noisy strangers attending the christening service, watching
as the infants were given the names Nicholas and Alexandra, their attention fixed on the godmother and not on the babies or their parents.
    ‘If I were not