Alexandra by Carolly Erickson Read Free Book Online Page A

given her pause. Ella, walking out with Alix on fine days, her complexion shaded by a green-lined parasol, appeared lovelier than ever, her
grey-blue eyes unclouded. She occupied herself with her religious devotions – she had become a communicant of the Orthodox church – and in designing and sewing her own gowns and making
her own face-lotions from cucumber juice and sour cream. After six years of marriage she and Serge still had no children, but she did not appear at all distressed by her childless state. Her one
aim seemed to be to make things so that Alix too could live in Russia, as the wife of the heir to the throne.
    September 18 came, and, greatly to Alix’s disappointment, Nicky did not arrive at Illinsky. Quite possibly he was prevented from going there by his parents, for there was a great deal of
gossip that summer about Nicky and Alix, and the tsar and tsarina had decided to send their son on a long trip abroad to broaden his mind and experience and ensure that he didn’t see his
cousin Alix for a long time.
    With his sickly brother Georgy, his cousin George of Greece and a travelling party of young officer friends under the supervision of Prince Bariatinsky, Nicky went aboard the frigate
Memory
of Azov
in Trieste in November of 1890 and embarked upon a round-theworld journey.
    During his prolonged odyssey the tsarevich rode donkeys along the Nile, steamed down the Suez Canal, went on crocodile hunts in Java and attended balls, banquets and receptions held in his
honour by local dignitaries throughout the tropics. Apart from the bazaars, Nicky found most of the local culture tiresome; his diary entries reveal that he and his young companions were much more
interested in the Egyptian dancing girls, who ‘undressed and got up to all sorts of tricks’, and performing geishas (with whom they had ‘a very jolly time’) than they were
in visiting museums or temples. 11 They drank heavily, caroused at night and generally behaved like the fun-loving, immature young men they were.
In Japan, however, something went wrong. Gossip afterwards said that, in their pursuit of uninhibited pleasures, the Russians visited male brothels; according to therumour, George of Greece, who was homosexual, had made offensive advances to a Japanese boy. 12 The result was swift and
unexpected.
    Nicky was in a rickshaw in the town of Otsu, travelling from a temple back to his hotel, when suddenly a burly policeman attacked him with a sabre, striking two blows which, had they been
slightly better aimed and had Nicky not been wearing a thick felt hat, might have killed him. Nicky leaped nimbly out of the rickshaw, calling out, ‘What are you about?’ while George,
who was riding in another rickshaw immediately behind Nicky’s, knocked the assailant down with several swift blows of his cane. The rickshaw drivers subdued the policeman, bound his wrists
and legs, and dragged him to a nearby house where they left him while they ran for help.
    The wounds Nicky received penetrated to the bone, and blood poured down his face. He was rushed to the governor’s house, his frightened companions terrified that he would die. Fortunately
his wounds, though serious, were not fatal. He had a long red gash on the top of his head, and would suffer permanently from chronic severe headaches.
    ‘I was very touched by the Japanese,’ Nicky wrote in a letter to his mother, ‘who knelt in the street as we passed and looked terribly sad.’ The peaceable, law-abiding
Japanese were shocked that such a violent assault against the heir to the Russian throne could occur in their country – though in fact this was not the first attack on Europeans. Recuperating
in Kyoto, Nicky received hundreds of telegrams from all over Japan expressing polite regret. Emperor Meiji himself came to visit, with his entourage of princes. ‘I felt sorry for them,’
Nicky wrote, ‘so stricken were they.’ 13
    While Nicky was seeing the world, Alix too was