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“Darling Granny” and ended with “Your Most Devoted Ella,” each phrase written in Ella’s large
swooping handwriting, a penmanship so distinctive that the Queen had known the author of the
missive before she had broken the seal on the envelope. No, it was quite clear that Ella did not
merely want to show off a Russian composer or the vastness of the Winter Palace – this visit was all
part of her plan to bring Alix into the intricately webbed world of the Romanov royal family, to align
the girl with Nicholas II, the young tsesarevich, a man who would someday rule a kingdom far larger
than Victoria’s.
Even if that kingdom did exist almost exclusively of frozen tundra, vodka, and illiterate
peasants.
An alliance between the Romanovs and the Hanovers was not without precedent. Alix and
Nicky had, after all, first met at the very wedding of Ella and Serge, her sister and his uncle. At the
time he had been sixteen and she, merely twelve. Why a boy of his age would have noticed a girl of
hers was beyond the Queen’s capacity to imagine, but notice her he most certainly had, and the two
children had since engaged in an unlikely but apparently quite persistent correspondence. Alix had
confided to her grandmother that she felt warmly for Nicky; for a girl of Alix’s calm and careful
temperament this was the equivalent of someone like Ella leading a parade.
The Queen’s first impulse had been to recoil at the news. She had already lost one
granddaughter to those barbarous lands of the east and did not intend to offer up another. One can
only, after all, throw so many pearls before swine, can only watch so many English roses be trampled
under Cossack boots. But another part of Victoria, the part who answered to “darling Granny,” had
been more alarmed than angered by Alix’s shy declaration of love.
Victoria was propped in her padded chair on the rolling lawns of Windsor with her large, deep
eyes focused on Alix, who sat some distance away, reading a book whose title the Queen could not
quite decipher. This was no surprise. Alix was always reading. At first, appropriate books of the
Queen’s own choosing, but as of lately, who could tell? Alix was fluent in four languages, as were
most of the royal grandchildren, but there were times when Victoria regretted that she had been quite
so rigorous in her instructions regarding their education, especially the girls. This modern necessity
of speaking multiple tongues may have been exaggerated; upon deeper reflection it had occurred to
the Queen that any words which could not be said in English were perhaps best not spoken at all. The
Queen’s own French was spotty, her German half-forgotten, her Russian non-existent. Therefore, she
could never be quite sure what any of the children were reading in her presence. She might possibly
have bred a nest of vipers within her own family.