The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (40 page)

with the officers’. How ironic that a mother so scrupulous about

her daughters’ moral probity should allow them the ‘greatest inti-

macy’ with these young men, unsupervised, and ‘in perfect inde-

pendence without a lady to look after them’.31 The duchess was

anxious to prepare her daughter for what she considered a degree

of difficulty when the Romanians arrived: ‘People who think they

know all have decided that Carol intends marrying Tatiana, not

Olga, as the eldest could not be missed by her parents, being a great help to them and would remain in Russia.’32

The Crimea would have seemed the far more logical location

for a first meeting – being only a short journey across the Black Sea from Romania, but the duchess assured Marie that the Romanovs

would not invite them there. In Livadia ‘the acquaintance would

have been hopeless as the naval favourites would laugh into ridicule

every prince that would come with matrimonial intentions’. The

duchess was deeply disapproving of the girls’ familiarity with the

officers of the
Shtandart
, which she considered totally
infra dig
:
‘Each girl, the big ones like the small ones, have their favourites,
qui leur
font la cour
[who pay court to them] and Alix not only allows it but finds it natural and amusing.’33 This particularly troubled the duchess’s rigid sense of
comme il faut
. Despite the fact that ‘Olga and Tatiana are very well educated’, as well as being ‘gay, natural and

amiable’, she felt they were entirely lacking in the sophisticated

social skills of the kind needed by any young woman marrying into

a royal court. ‘You must put away all
our
ideas of imperial young ladies’, she told her daughter. ‘As they have now no governess, no

lady, they cannot be taught any manners, they have
never
paid me a visit and I really don’t know them at all.’ Even their aunts Xenia

and Olga had at least been ‘allowed to go out and never had any

intimacy with officers’.34

There was one other important topic that did not pass without

comment – haemophilia. The duchess had clearly been checking

the lie of the land in this regard ahead of her daughter’s visit: ‘What can I find out about inheriting that sad illness? We all know that it can be propagated, but the children can also escape. I can only quote Uncle Leopold’s two children who never had it but Alice’s boys

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inherited it.’
*
It was, as the duchess concluded, ‘a mere chance, but one is never sure. The risk is there always.’35 Such comments beg

the question of whether other royal houses had by now considered

and rejected the Romanov daughters as prospective brides, for fear

of haemophilia being brought into their families. And then there

was the prospect of union with a country as politically unstable as

Russia. The duchess’s letters to her daughter that January and

February are full of foreboding about the future of the country, with a tsar too timid to spend time with anyone beyond his family circle

and a tsaritsa stubbornly isolated from society through a combina-

tion of perverted choice and physical incapacity, hiding herself away with her only two friends – her ‘false prophet’ and Anna Vyrubova.

The duchess sensed a ‘despair and hopelessness’ in St Petersburg

so great that ‘people are panting with fear and anxiety of it all’. She was longing to get away – ‘the heavy moral atmosphere simply kills

me’.36 Nevertheless she had tried to have a private word with

Nicholas and Alexandra about the possible engagement. ‘What shall

I say? Do I think it very hopeful? They seem to wish it but Alix is

so strange and I have not the slightest idea what she wishes about

her daughters.’ The duchess had long since given up on her, and

now thought the tsaritsa ‘absolutely mad’.37

On 15 March 1914 Crown Prince Ferdinand of Romania, his

wife Marie and their son Carol arrived in St Petersburg and were

installed in the west wing of the Alexander Palace. That same day,

Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna officially completed her ten-year

period of studies. Her final exams had covered the history of the

Orthodox Church; Russian language (dictation, composition and

answers on the history of Russian words); general and Russian

history; geography and three foreign languages – English, French

and German, with dictation and composition in each. (All these

subjects had been taught at home; for physics lessons she and her

* Queen Victoria’s son Leopold, Duke of Albany, who died after an attack of haemophilia brought on by a fall at the age of thirty-one, had a son and a daughter: his son Charles was not a haemophiliac but his daughter Alice was a carrier and passed it on to her sons, Maurice who died in infancy and Rupert who died of haemorrhaging after an accident when he was twenty.

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GOD SAVE THE TSAR!

sisters had gone to the Nicholas II Practical Institute in Tsarskoe

Selo.)38 In all of them Olga had received top marks, although she

had struggled with English composition and German dictation. ‘An

average of 5 [out of marks 1 to 5],’ she noted in her diary. ‘Mama

was pleased.’39

During the week of the Romanian visit she acted as escort to

her second cousin Karlusha – as she referred to him (a somewhat

belittling, Russian diminutive form of Carol’s name). She seemed

unimpressed with his shock of blond hair, sticky-out ears and bulbous blue eyes – the latter an unmistakable Hanoverian trait inherited

from his English grandfather Alfred. Nevertheless Olga dutifully

went everywhere with him: to church, for walks round the park,

dinner with Grandmama at the Anichkov and a ball at the exclusive

Smolny Girls Institute. She smiled and chatted and went through

the motions (in so doing giving the lie to the Duchess of Coburg’s

insistence that she had no social graces) but revealed nothing. A

young secretary at the Romanian legation noted during the first day

of the visit: ‘The Imperial Family retired rather early to their chambers, with the daughters casting short and anxious glances at Carol.

I found out later that they had not liked him.’40 The gossips still

insisted that Olga was not the object of Carol’s interests. An American diplomat heard tell that he was actually ‘trying to get Tatiana, but

Olga must go first’.41 In the event the two sets of parents were

disappointed at the negative outcome but were not quite ready to

give up. They agreed that the Russians would reciprocate with a

visit to Constanza in June to enable the young couple to take a

second look at each other. The Russian press made no comment on

a possible marriage, but in London
The Times
put it eloquently into perspective: ‘The view propounded in official quarters is that Russia would like to see Rumania as free to choose her friendships as Prince Carol and the Grand Duchess Olga are to follow the inclinations

of their hearts.’42

Three days later, with a sigh of relief the Romanovs boarded the

imperial train for the south and Easter in Livadia. On board the

Shtandart
that year (and contrary to what the Duchess of Coburg had heard) there had been a distinct shift in the attitude of the crew to the now teenage Romanov sisters. Nikolay Vasilievich Sablin

noted in particular how Olga had ‘turned into a real lady’. On the

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Shtandart
, like everywhere else, the officers had begun discussing the future marriages of the sisters and had come to ‘a kind of

unspoken agreement . . . to conduct themselves with these charming

Grand Duchesses no longer as juveniles or little girls’.43 Sablin was fully aware that the older two sisters ‘preferred the company of

certain officers to that of others’ – no doubt an allusion to the

favouritism for Rodionov and the now departed Voronov. But the

former relationship the men had had with the sisters was now ‘inad-

missable’: ‘We had to remember they were the daughters of the

tsar.’ These were not the same little girls they had first encountered seven years previously, and they must all ensure that they behaved

punctiliously, as officers and gentlemen. They did, however, gently

tease the sisters, telling them ‘that they would soon be brides and

leave us’. In response the girls had laughed and promised that they

would ‘never marry foreigners and leave their beloved homeland’.44

Sablin thought this was wishful thinking; for since when, he asked,

had royal brides ever had freedom of choice? In this respect, however, he was most certainly wrong.

The men in the
Shtandart
were not the only ones to notice how the Romanov sisters were all becoming beautiful young women that

last hot summer before the war. Visiting Count Nostitz’s estate near

Yalta one day, they were taken by the countess to feed the black

swans on the lake: ‘I thought how lovely they looked as they flitted

in and out among the flower-beds in their light summer dresses,

like so many flowers themselves’, she recalled.45 At a ball at the

White Palace shortly afterwards the sisters enjoyed another magical

Crimean evening, when ‘a great golden moon hung low over the

dark ruffled waters of the Black Sea, gilding the silhouettes of the

tall cypress trees’.

From the ball-room behind us came the dreamy lilt of a Viennese

waltz, the light laughter of the Grand Duchesses Olga and

Tatiana, their merry eyes sparkling with pleasure, as they drifted

past the open windows, dancing with Jean Woroniecki and Jack

de Lalaing.46
*

* Foreign Office official Prince Jean Woroniecki, and Comte Jacques de Lalaing,
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GOD SAVE THE TSAR!

It was a perfect picture-book image; but it would be the girls’

last ball in their beloved Crimea.

With the visit to Constanza imminent, Nicholas walked over to

visit Grand Duchess George at Harax one last time before leaving,

‘escaping from the horde of detectives and his bodyguard by taking

the mountain paths’. As the duchess’s lady-in-waiting Agnes de

Stoeckl stood with him looking out over the sea in the still of the

Crimean evening, he turned to her: ‘We are in June now,’ he said,

‘we have had two very happy months, we must repeat them . . . Let

us make a pact we all meet here again on 1 October.’47 And then

after a pause he added ‘more slowly, rather seriously’ – ‘After all,

in this life we do not know what lies before us.’48

Alexandra too was privately expressing her apprehensions about

what might be to come. During a discussion she had with Sergey

Sazonov on the balcony of the White Palace before they left for

Constanza, she spoke of the possible political repercussions of high-

profile dynastic matches and the responsibilities her girls would have to take on. ‘I think with terror . . . that the time draws near when

I shall have to part with my daughters’, she told him.

I could desire nothing better than they should remain in Russia

after their marriage. But I have four daughters, and it is, of

course, impossible. You know how difficult marriages are in

reigning families. I know it by experience, although I was never

in the position my daughters occupy . . . The Emperor will have

to decide whether he considers this or that marriage suitable for

his daughters, but parental authority must not extend beyond

that.49

Privately, although Sazonov had been bullish about the desira-

bility of the Romanian match, saying that ‘It’s not every day that

an Orthodox Hohenzollern comes along’, Olga was already very

clear in her mind, even before they had set sail. ‘I will never leave Russia’, she told her friends in the
Shtandart
and she said as much to Pierre Gilliard too.50 She was adamant that she did not want to

a secretary at the Belgian legation, were house guests of the Nostitz family at their estate at Yalta.

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be a queen or princess in some foreign court. ‘I’m a Russian, and

mean to remain a Russian!’

*

On 1 June the Romanovs sailed from Yalta across the Black Sea to

Romania. It was a glorious sunny day, ‘smiling, windless and yet not

too hot, a day of rare beauty’, when the
Shtandart
steamed into view at Constanza escorted by the
Polyarnaya Zvezda
, like ‘two marvelous Chinese toys of laquer, black and gold’.51 Waiting on the quayside,

the Romanian royal family caught sight of Nicholas on deck, ‘a little white figure’ and his wife ‘very tall and dominat[ing] her family as

a solitary poplar dominates the garden’. As for the girls, it was the same bland, collective view: ‘four light dresses, four gay summer

hats’.52

As they disembarked, the Romanovs were greeted by a fanfare

of guns, flags, hurrahs, military bands and a warm welcome from

King Carol and Queen Elizabeth, their son Crown Prince Ferdinand,

his wife Marie and their children. Crown Princess Marie later wrote

to her mother about their ‘great Russian day’, which had been an