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Authors: Carolly Erickson
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could not marry him because the Orthodox church forbade marriage between first cousins.
Doing their best to lay aside their inner misgivings, Ernie and Ducky were proceeding with the wedding arrangements, with Alix’s help. She busied herself overseeing the preparation of
their suites at the palace and at the summer residence at Wolfsgarten, and she corresponded with Ducky in order to find out her tastes and also to cement their friendship. She met with members of
the staff and arranged the hiring of new servants. She conferred, rather wistfully, with Ernie, who, she wrote, was ‘always running into her room at every hour of the day’, as the
wedding day approached.
Though she did her best to remain cheerful, presiding as usual as Ernie’s hostess and looking after his household, she was overcome at times by sadness. She missed her father. She knew
that she would soon miss her brother, for after he married their relationship would not be the same. She even found herself thinking about the little sister she had lost so many years earlier,
little May, who had she lived would have turned twenty in this year of 1894. 13
She wrote to Queen Victoria asking if she could come to England for a few months after the wedding, for she did not want to be in the newlyweds’ way. She was beginning to withdraw,
tactfully, from the world of married couples, to enter that limbo occupied by spinsters. Accustomed to keeping busy – attending her brother’s formal audiences, seeing to the comfort of
visiting dignitaries, entertaining friends, even on occasion picking flowers and arranging them in thepalace chapel when a wedding was to be held there – she
expected to become idle once Ducky took her place and assumed all her responsibilities.
As the new year 1894 opened, Alix was apprehensive. ‘I cannot help always dreading the coming of the New Year,’ she wrote to her grandmother, ‘as one never knows what is in
store for one.’
In fact Alix could foresee only too clearly what was likely to be in store for her. Not marriage, for she could not imagine marrying anyone but Nicky, and that was impossible. And besides, Nicky
would no doubt marry someone else before long. Not a home of her own, for without a husband there could be no real home, only temporary stays with her sisters Victoria and Irene (not Ella, it would
be too painful to go to Russia again) and, if she and Ducky got along well enough, a marginal role in Ernie’s household. Before long her grandmother would die, possibly quite soon, and then
she could no longer count on long stays at Windsor or sojourns at Balmoral.
She was already the subject of much gossip. She was known as the grand duke’s beautiful sister who had turned down two glorious thrones, rejecting first the heir to the British imperial
title (poor Eddy, who had died in 1891) and then the heir to the Russian Empire. She was something of a mysterious figure, her attitudes hard to fathom. In time, as her beauty faded, she would be
labelled an eccentric. She would float from one relative to another, watching her nieces and nephews grow up, treated (she hoped) with kindness touched with pity. She would fill her time with
charitable works, reading and embroidery. She would play the piano and make polite conversation, while bearing the painful burden of a constant sense of emptiness and waste.
Such was the constrained and narrow life Alix foresaw for herself as she spent yet another bleak winter in Darmstadt, nursing her wounded heart and expecting, before long, to have a great deal
of time on her hands.
6
M ilitary bands played and a guard of honour stood smartly to attention beside the track as Nicky, in uniform, stepped out of the imperial train
onto the platform at Coburg, flanked by his Uncles Paul, Serge and Vladimir. He smiled affably as Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, came forwards to embrace him and the others on the platform
greeted him in their turn. Ernie and Ducky, whose
Doing their best to lay aside their inner misgivings, Ernie and Ducky were proceeding with the wedding arrangements, with Alix’s help. She busied herself overseeing the preparation of
their suites at the palace and at the summer residence at Wolfsgarten, and she corresponded with Ducky in order to find out her tastes and also to cement their friendship. She met with members of
the staff and arranged the hiring of new servants. She conferred, rather wistfully, with Ernie, who, she wrote, was ‘always running into her room at every hour of the day’, as the
wedding day approached.
Though she did her best to remain cheerful, presiding as usual as Ernie’s hostess and looking after his household, she was overcome at times by sadness. She missed her father. She knew
that she would soon miss her brother, for after he married their relationship would not be the same. She even found herself thinking about the little sister she had lost so many years earlier,
little May, who had she lived would have turned twenty in this year of 1894. 13
She wrote to Queen Victoria asking if she could come to England for a few months after the wedding, for she did not want to be in the newlyweds’ way. She was beginning to withdraw,
tactfully, from the world of married couples, to enter that limbo occupied by spinsters. Accustomed to keeping busy – attending her brother’s formal audiences, seeing to the comfort of
visiting dignitaries, entertaining friends, even on occasion picking flowers and arranging them in thepalace chapel when a wedding was to be held there – she
expected to become idle once Ducky took her place and assumed all her responsibilities.
As the new year 1894 opened, Alix was apprehensive. ‘I cannot help always dreading the coming of the New Year,’ she wrote to her grandmother, ‘as one never knows what is in
store for one.’
In fact Alix could foresee only too clearly what was likely to be in store for her. Not marriage, for she could not imagine marrying anyone but Nicky, and that was impossible. And besides, Nicky
would no doubt marry someone else before long. Not a home of her own, for without a husband there could be no real home, only temporary stays with her sisters Victoria and Irene (not Ella, it would
be too painful to go to Russia again) and, if she and Ducky got along well enough, a marginal role in Ernie’s household. Before long her grandmother would die, possibly quite soon, and then
she could no longer count on long stays at Windsor or sojourns at Balmoral.
She was already the subject of much gossip. She was known as the grand duke’s beautiful sister who had turned down two glorious thrones, rejecting first the heir to the British imperial
title (poor Eddy, who had died in 1891) and then the heir to the Russian Empire. She was something of a mysterious figure, her attitudes hard to fathom. In time, as her beauty faded, she would be
labelled an eccentric. She would float from one relative to another, watching her nieces and nephews grow up, treated (she hoped) with kindness touched with pity. She would fill her time with
charitable works, reading and embroidery. She would play the piano and make polite conversation, while bearing the painful burden of a constant sense of emptiness and waste.
Such was the constrained and narrow life Alix foresaw for herself as she spent yet another bleak winter in Darmstadt, nursing her wounded heart and expecting, before long, to have a great deal
of time on her hands.
6
M ilitary bands played and a guard of honour stood smartly to attention beside the track as Nicky, in uniform, stepped out of the imperial train
onto the platform at Coburg, flanked by his Uncles Paul, Serge and Vladimir. He smiled affably as Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, came forwards to embrace him and the others on the platform
greeted him in their turn. Ernie and Ducky, whose
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