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eading or holding needlework, others sipping tea, a few more on their feet and wandering about,
presumably in search of flowers to press into volumes. Victoria had been queen for the entirety of her
adult life, since she was barely older than Alix, and one of the distinct but rarely mentioned
advantages of her position was that a queen was never required to look busy. She need not poke
needles with bright threads through cloth or pretend to read books that did not interest her or make a
great fuss of drinking tea that she does not crave. The utter absence of distraction, the endless
opportunity to bob within the pool of her own thoughts, had throughout the years turned Victoria into a
bit of a mystic.
For if one was granted the privilege and the patience to simply sit for hour after hour,
interesting images begin to arise. The Queen’s gaze moved down the bright lawn and settled again on
the still form of Alix, perched in the grass beneath a tree and possibly the only one of all the ladies
present who was actually reading the book she held in her hands. The Queen felt a discomfort inside,
a slight lurching of the heart, at the sight of the child’s sweet face. The continuing stability of her
monarchy – indeed all of Europe – demanded that Victoria give up her daughters and granddaughters
into marriage with foreign husbands, but these were decisions she always made reluctantly.
Sacrificial lambs, the girls were, brokered into unions that were rarely of their own choosing, packed
off and shipped about the continent as if they were bolts of cloth. Although they wore diamonds
around their necks and slept in high soft beds, it seemed to Victoria that the women of royal families
were little more in control of their destinies than the serfs of Russia.
The depth of the Queen’s skepticism toward marriage would have shocked the vast majority of
her subjects, for her own union with Prince Albert had been a resoundingly successful one. But
Victoria knew that she had been lucky, perhaps singularly so; love matches between royals were rare
and happy families even rarer. Marriage was a lottery, a gamble that rarely paid off for either gender,
but while a bad match could damage a man, it would destroy a woman altogether. The Queen had
never attended a wedding without a pit of dread in her stomach, the sense that the spinning wheel of
fate could come to rest on disaster just as easily as providence.
Alix had now leaned back against the trunk of the tree which shaded her, had turned a page of
her book, and was frowning intently at its successor. How abstracted she is, the Queen thought. She
not only reads, she reads too much. She has the character of a nun, if indeed Lutherans had nuns, and
it would be especially intolerable to see this delicate girl cast willy-nilly into the dark pit of
marriage, most specifically marriage to a Russian, potentially the deepest pit of all. Ella’s letters
were contrived to be amusing, but the Queen had seen the truth behind her droll descriptions of life at
court. The imperial family did not fully accept her. Serge was proving cool and distant, not as