The Romanov Empress

by C. W. Gortner

  “In Russia, we have many princesses and princes,” he said, “but within our royal family, we are known as grand dukes and grand duchesses.”

  “Like in Prussia,” I said. “How curious. Do you have many of them?”

  He chuckled. “According to my father, too many. He wants to curtail our autocratic privilege, but his brothers—my uncles, the grand dukes—will have none of it. They don’t want anything to change, although,” he said, taking my hand, as he was now apt to do during our conversations, “it must. My father says if we are to survive, we have to leave the past behind. A Romanov’s duty is to serve Russia first, before himself.”

  I admired his love for his country; it was something we shared, as I loved mine. He asked me many questions about Denmark and I eagerly obliged, but as I heard myself extolling our small nation’s accomplishments, and silently comparing them to the might of Russia, I began to realize we didn’t have much else in common. Besides being heir to the most powerful empire in the world, Nixa was very well traveled, having been throughout Europe and all the way to Asia, and very erudite, as only an imperial prince could be. I felt keenly my own lack of learning and experience, my reading of insipid poetry, my silly watercolor painting, and my covert cartwheels on the lawn when Mama wasn’t looking. The differences between us stretched as wide as the Gulf of Finland, and while he didn’t seem to mind, surely his mother the tsarina would.

  And indeed, as I soon discovered, if Nixa had disconcerted me, his mother would even more so.

  That remote empress who’d spoken only a few innocuous words to me was altogether changed. She arrived on her way to Nice for her annual respite; when I greeted her in the drawing room under Mama’s watch, she embraced me with delight, kissing both my cheeks in the French style and holding me at arm’s length, looking me over with her keen yet melancholic gaze. “How lovely you are, Minnie dear. Such a tiny waist and those big black eyes—why, you’re enchanting.”

  I was? I couldn’t help but glance at Mama, who sat suffused with pride. I recalled that Nixa had first been ordered by his father to woo Alix. Had the tsarina also deemed my sister “enchanting”? Was this her polite way of easing any awkwardness? Born a princess herself, Maria Alexandrovna—her imperial name, as adopting a Russian name upon conversion to Orthodoxy was required of a foreign bride—had presided over her husband’s court for many years. She couldn’t be oblivious to the delicacy of our situation.

  “Has she ever sat for a daguerreotype?” she said, turning to Mama.

  Mama gave a forlorn sigh. “Not in several years.” She didn’t add that photography was novel and expensive; we’d never had enough money to hire an official photographer, if we could have even found one in Denmark.

  “Then we must remedy that,” said the tsarina. “I must have a portrait of her to show Alexander. I’ll send for someone in France. There have been remarkable improvements. Sitting now for a daguerreotype isn’t nearly as arduous as it used to be. Would you like that, my dear?” she asked, returning her smile to me.

  I nodded. She had me sit beside her, engaging me in small conversation that expertly avoided any pitfalls. I left feeling as puzzled as when I’d arrived. It was nice to be admired, but once again, nagging doubt overcame me, causing me to withdraw from Nixa, not overtly but in a subtle manner he eventually noticed.

  He hadn’t yet proposed. I appreciated his tact, not blurting it out until he’d earned my affection, until one night after supper, as everyone retired to the drawing room, he tugged at my sleeve and drew me into one of the screened alcoves in the corridor.

  Before I could ask him what the matter was, he said, “Do you not love me?”

  “Love you?” I regarded him in astonishment. “We’ve only just met.”

  He lowered his eyes. “But I thought…”

  “Nixa.” Though I’d been mindful to never touch him first, I did so now, lightly setting my fingers on his sleeve. Feeling him tremble, I left my hand there. “What did you think?”

  “I thought that you…” He appeared to have trouble finding the words. Then he squared his shoulders. “I thought you might wish to be my wife one day.”

  I considered him in silence before I said, “I believe I might. One day.”

  “Then you would say yes if I…” He looked so eager now, yet also so braced for rejection, I wanted to laugh. But laughter wouldn’t be appropriate. He’d gone visibly taut, his entire person strung like a wire, until I said, “If you ask properly, I think I would.”

  He clumsily embraced me, careful not to press his lean figure too close to mine. I heard him whisper in my ear, “I’m afraid to ask.”

  “Yet you must.” I drew back. “A girl must always be asked.”

  “Will you marry me?” he breathed, and I feared he might actually drop to one knee.

  “Yes,” I said.

  For I wanted to—which was the most unexpected thing of all.

  * * *

  OUR ENGAGEMENT WAS greeted with joy by my parents and the tsarina; by the time Nixa left with his mother to continue to France, the news had winged its way to England, where Alix, who had delivered her first child in January, a son, was so elated that she insisted on coming to visit us once she persuaded Victoria. Though her delivery was already six months past, the queen apparently worried over the health of everyone in her family, mandating that as a new mother, Alix must undertake as little travel as possible.

  “Alix says Bertie wants them to attend my wedding,” I read aloud from her letter.

  Papa smiled. “That would indeed be noteworthy. No member of the British royal family has set foot in Russia in many years; Victoria and Alexander are not on the best of terms. Just think, your marriage could be cause for a détente between the two empires.”

  “Never mind that.” Mama snatched my sister’s letter from me. “Politics are of no account here. Two young people have fallen in love and are blessed to have found each other. If Their Highnesses of Wales wish to celebrate the blessing in person, so be it.”

  Papa winked at me. I saw that while he was happy for me, it also saddened him to know I’d leave his side for a foreign land. I vowed to spend extra time with him, though his duties as king were such that it was a challenge to see him at all.

  As for Mama’s refusal to exalt political benefits to the match, it didn’t matter. Nixa had chosen me, for me. I’d not made it a simple task, but in the end he won my heart—not because he was the tsarevich but because of who he was inside. I fell in love with Nixa Romanov himself, with his gentle spirit and noble soul.

  That love buoyed me as months separated us, our distance bridged by the exchange of frequent letters. The photographer from Paris arrived and I sat for my portrait. I did not view the finished product until weeks later when a framed copy arrived, the original having been sent to the tsarina. I was dismayed by my image, dressed in a high-necked white gown and my hair in contrived ringlets, my enormous eyes overpowering my monochrome face. Mama declared it a perfect likeness. She hired her own photographer for our court and dispatched our portraits by special courier to St. Petersburg in profusion.

  In return, Nixa sent his portrait and those of his relations, so I could put faces to the names of my future Romanov family. One portrait, in particular, of the tsar and tsarina surrounded by their six sons, who ranged in age from Nixa’s twenty-one to Grand Duke Paul’s four, along with their surviving daughter, eleven-year-old Grand Duchess Marie, caused me to laugh and point at a hulking figure who seemed to stand apart from them, though he was in fact beside Nixa himself.

  “Look! He must be a Cossack.”

  Mama remonstrated, “Honestly, Minnie. That’s not a Cossack. He’s Grand Duke Alexander, Nixa’s brother. In the family, they call him Sasha. He’s only seventeen months younger than Nixa. He and Nixa are very close.”

  “Are they?” I peered at that stolid figure, who towered o
ver the others. “Nixa barely mentioned him to me. And he doesn’t look like any of them.”

  Nixa also sent a box of books for me to read, including Russian fairy tales of witches, dancing bears, and immortal sorcerers; poetry by the celebrated Pushkin, which I didn’t find sad at all; and novels by the literary idol Tolstoy, as well as a Russian primer so I could become acquainted with the language. He wrote that the Russian embassy in Copenhagen would provide an Orthodox priest to instruct me in my new faith, as my conversion to Orthodox Christianity was a requirement and not anything I could protest. As Mama assured me, “In Russia, they still revere our Savior.”

  Late at night, I sometimes woke from a restless sleep. As I listened to my little sister, Thyra, breathing beside me, I tried to conjure Nixa in my mind and see him in his milieu, in that great Winter Palace where generations of his ancestors had lived, with its fabled Malachite Room. I tried to envision the first pristine snows, the joyous sleigh rides as the people took to the frozen outdoors, and to hear the crack of ice as it overpowered the Neva, turning its shallows so solid that one could strap on skates and glide across it.

  I couldn’t maintain these illusionary images for long. They appeared and vanished like smoke, leaving me disorientated, with an uneasiness that began to gnaw at me.

  “Nerves,” Mama said when I confided in her. “A new bride’s nerves are an instrument of torture if she lets them get out of hand. You mustn’t dwell on what you do not know. Think only of how much he loves you and let the future take care of itself.”

  She behaved accordingly, occupying me with plans for my trousseau, which included evening gowns by the renowned couturier Charles Frederick Worth, whose sumptuous creations were the height of fashion. I did not ask how we could afford such extravagance, as his atelier was in Paris, but in this matter Mama was immovable. I must travel to my nuptials dressed in the latest styles, so no one could say Denmark was behind the times.

  Monsieur Worth sent dresses on cunning miniature dolls, including the corsets—elegant mannequins that Thyra squealed over and Mama forbade her to touch. After making our selections, Mama told me we’d travel to Paris to have the gowns fitted in person. I grew excited at the thought of arriving in Russia, dressed like one of those idealized dolls.

  We had just purchased our passage to Paris when my entire world fell apart.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mama entered my room with the telegram. Having returned to Copenhagen, I was packing, or trying to pack, clothes strewn all over the bed as I debated what to take. We would travel to Nice after our sojourn in Paris; the tsarina was already there, having left St. Petersburg earlier than usual due to an unspecified ailment. Mama had told me that Maria Alexandrovna suffered from weak lungs and required regular proximity to the sea. She had various seaside palaces in Russia, but apparently she required proximity to a sea beyond her husband’s domain. Nixa had joined her there so we could spend time together before my trip to Russia; when I noticed the paper in Mama’s hand, I didn’t think anything of it.

  “Did Her Imperial Majesty send word again?” I asked, holding up my battered straw hat. “Do you think this will do for our time at the villa? I know it’s early spring, so it won’t be too hot, but I don’t want to get any spots. Or would a parasol be better?”

  Mama said, “Minnie.” The quiet in her voice, under which lurked a slight quaver, immobilized me where I stood. The hat crunched in my hands, its straw gone brittle.

  She didn’t move from the threshold—not because she didn’t want to, but because she apparently couldn’t. Her hand came up against the doorframe as though she might fall.

  “Nixa,” she said, and the hat dropped from my fingers. “He’s had an accident.”

  I didn’t say a word. I looked at her stricken expression, at that slip of paper in her hand, and the room capsized around me.

  “He was thrown from his horse,” Mama said, still in that awful hushed voice. “He developed pain in his back. He couldn’t walk. Then fever set in. Her Imperial Majesty summoned a specialist from Vienna. Minnie, he has spinal meningitis.”

  She might have cited any disease; it made no difference. As her words plunged through me, consumed by the pounding tempo of my heart in my ears, I reached out for something, anything, to hold on to.

  Mama rushed to me, catching me about my waist and lowering me onto the bed, where I sat limp, voiceless, staring into nothing.

  “He has asked to see you,” she said. “Oh, my child, we must make haste. He has already received the Last Rites. The tsarina begs us to come at once.”

  * * *

  I HAD NEVER been to France, and I didn’t see anything when I finally went. We traveled by train for four days, through odious Germany. The tsarina sent tickets for the best class; from Dijon, her own imperial train conveyed us to Nice, with the French emperor Napoleon III ordering all other trains canceled to abet our passage. In an upholstered walnut-paneled compartment as luxurious as a palace, equipped with uniformed servants, I sat by the window and watched the French countryside slide past without marking a single sight, as if I were rushing through an interminable tunnel.

  Mama spoke little. No words could ease my agony. I’d fallen in love and pledged to marry; now my fiancé was being taken from me. Even if she had tried to console me, I wouldn’t have listened. I nursed the fissure in my heart and prayed over and over, in tandem with the clattering wheels on the rails: Let it not be true. Let him recover. Give me a miracle to heal him. Do not let him die.

  I believed if Nixa died, I would die, too. Like Victoria with Albert, I would want to join him in his tomb, for I couldn’t envision my life now without him.

  I believed this with every fiber in my being.

  I was still so very young.

  * * *

  THE TSARINA WAITED at the entrance to her splendid Villa Bermont, nestled among orange groves and fragrant acacia, overlooking the Mediterranean—a vista that assaulted me with its cruelty, that such a beautiful place could be the scene of such devastation.

  In her bruised eyes and grateful embrace of my mother, I saw we were not too late. I also knew, without anyone saying it, that God would not answer my prayers.

  “He asked to see you as soon as you arrived,” the empress told me.

  “I must change first,” I heard myself whisper. I sounded so remote, not myself at all.

  “Nonsense.” Mama prodded me toward the tsarina, who brought me through the airy villa, which smelled of the sea, to his room.

  “He’s not in pain,” she whispered when I paused at the doorway. “He’s been given laudanum. Go to him, my dear. He has waited longer than—” Her voice fractured.

  Longer than he should have. Longer than God had intended for him to wait.

  I moved to his bed. His eyes were shut, his skin so pale he almost blended with the sheets, his skull incised under his skin, as if what had claimed him was determined to devour him to his bones. I choked back tears. I mustn’t cry before him. He mustn’t see me disconsolate; he must take strength from my presence, know that I—

  “Minnie.”

  His voice reached me across the distant murmur of the sea outside, the room’s windows left ajar to admit the air. Though he couldn’t see the water, he could hear it.

  I sat on the stool by his side, taking his hand. His skin was cold, shocking me. And in his red-rimmed gaze as he raised his eyes, I saw fear. He might not suffer visible pain, because of the drug, but he felt a deeper pain, inside.

  Nixa knew he was doomed.

  His parched lips opened. “No,” I said, retrieving a glass of water from the bedside table. “Don’t speak. I am here. I will not leave you.”

  His hand clutched at mine. He avoided the glass I tried to set at his lips. “Listen,” he rasped. He had no strength, but his fingers dug into my palm. I leaned closer to him, smelling his fetid breath, his unwashed body soaked
in perspiration. “You must listen to me. I must tell you…I…I failed you. I spoiled your happiness. Like Enoch.”

  “No. You haven’t. Never.”

  “Yes.” His hand was crawling to my wrist, gripping me. “I—I am lost to you. We cannot marry. I promised you…”

  Without knowing why, as if something inside me sensed an unseen presence, the pad of a footstep nearby, I turned my head to the door. No one was there.

  I returned my gaze to Nixa.

  “Sasha,” he said. “Promise you will marry him instead. He’s my brother. He—he will love you as much as I do. More so, because of me.”

  I might have pulled away in disbelief, but his fingers were wrapped about my wrist like icy vines, and his face—dear God, his face. He was beseeching me.

  “Promise me, Minnie.”

  I couldn’t utter the words he needed to hear. I wanted to, for his sake, but I felt as though I was tumbling off an endless cliff toward the sea and I would never reach the water; I would forever flail and twirl in the empty air until I disintegrated.

  He went limp. His fingers unraveled from my wrist, and he lay so still, I thought he must be dead. But I saw his chest moving almost imperceptibly and I did not move from the stool, watching him as he drifted away, like Enoch on his boat.

  * * *

  —

  MAMA STEERED ME to rooms prepared for us, while the tsarina resumed her watch over Nixa. A servant brought a meal to our room, which I couldn’t look at, much less taste, and as I undressed for bed, Mama asked, “Did he say anything to you about Sasha?”

  I met her sorrowful eyes, wondering how she knew. “Why would he?”

  She regarded me strangely. “He said nothing?”