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Ella and Alix had been among the seven children born to Victoria’s daughter Alice, who had
been married to the Grand Duke of Hesse, a tranquil but admittedly rural and somewhat backward
section of Germany. From the start, Alice’s family had seemed marked for tragedy. When Alix, the
fifth in line, was merely a year old, her older brother Frittie had tumbled from a window onto the
stone patio below. He appeared to come through miraculously well, with only the predictable lumps
and scratches, but shortly afterward had died from internal bleeding, a relentless seepage of his life
force that the German doctors had been helpless to stem. It was a profoundly unfortunate event which
had given rise to even more profoundly unfortunate speculation: That the royal family of England
might carry the dreaded disease of hemophilia, a curse most often passed from mother to son, with the
women being carriers but rarely victims.
So poor little Frittie had bled to death, slowly and in agony, and Alice had never been the same.
Although she had gone on to bear another child, a daughter named May, the loss of her son left Alice
anxious and diminished. When a wave of cholera swept through her family five years later, carrying
away little May with it, Alice had no fight left in her. She eventually succumbed to the disease as
well, leaving her grief-stricken husband and royal mother in charge of her five surviving children.
Victoria took a vigorous interest in the lives of all of her grandchildren, but had always had a
special soft spot for Alice’s motherless brood. Ella, Alix, their sisters Irene and Vickie and brother
Ernest had spent all their summers at Windsor with the Queen and she had grown exceptionally fond
of Alix, whose nickname of ”Sunny” was deeply ironic. For ever since her mother’s death, Alix had
been a somber, serious child, lost in her books. Unlikely to be talked into or out of anything.
The Queen was of split mind about what to do next, an unusual state for her and one she found
unpleasant. On one hand, a correspondence between two youngsters, even one which had endured
over four years of separation, was hardly the basis of a royal engagement. Most likely they were
more in love with the idea of each other than anything else. But on the other hand, the Queen knew
her granddaughter’s temperament –gentle on the surface but with a ribbon of steel underneath. To
simply forbid the girl to continue to write the boy would only turn him into an even more highly
desired prize. Darling Granny would have to be far more cunning than that. She would have to
devise some way that would make it seem as if the severance of the bond was the girl’s idea. Or
perhaps the boy’s. Certainly not the result of squabbling between their two families. The Queen most
emphatically did not wish to cast Alix and Nicky into an imperial version of Romeo and Juliet. No
matter where or how it was staged, that story never seemed to end well.
A servant offered her tea, but Victoria turned her chin away in refusal. Her ladies in waiting
were doing just that, waiting in various pleasant situations about the lush green lawn, some of them