When Willy arrived – dressed in the uniform of a British admiral, an honorary position that he took very seriously – he was on his best behaviour. Even the Princess of Wales, who disliked him intensely, could find no fault in him after he had said that he would keep out of everyone’s way, his only wish being to see his grandmother before she died.
A day later Maudie arrived, as did Ernie. Children and grandchildren took turns filing in and out of the bedroom, Louise telling her mother – who could now no longer see – who it was who was coming and going. At one point the Queen rallied enough to ask that her little dog, Turi, be brought to her, and he was laid on the bed so that she could place her hand on his soft fur and have the comfort of feeling him near her.
The day after Maudie and Ernie’s arrival it was obvious that the end was near, and on her doctor’s advice the bulletin ‘The Queen is slowly sinking’ was issued.
‘I’d like to be with her,’ Willy said to Bertie.
‘You’ll have to wait.’ Bertie was under enormous strain. ‘You had a couple of minutes with her when you arrived, and her Connaught grandchildren haven’t spent time with her yet.’
May was standing nearby and she held her breath, certain Willy was about to erupt in indignation.
He didn’t. Mindful of his grandmother’s impending death, Willy, perhaps for the first time in his life, controlled his temper. Abruptly turning away from Bertie, he saw May and said, through clenched teeth, ‘I’m going for a walk. Are you coming?’
May was only too willing to escape the tension in the crowded house, and ten minutes later she was walking with him across the snow-covered lower terrace.
‘Damned arrogance!’ he erupted, with such rage that the upturned ends of his stiffly waxed moustache trembled. ‘I’m the firstborn grandchild and the favourite! If Grandmama wants anyone at her bedside, it’s me.’
Where arrogance was concerned, Willy took some beating, but May thought what he had said was probably true. No matter how badly he behaved, the Queen always forgave him and reminisced as to how her late beloved Albert had once swung Willy in a napkin when he had been only a few months old.
‘And it is only out of respect to my grandmother that I didn’t publicly take Bertie to task for speaking to me as if he was an uncle talking to a nephew, when although I am his nephew, I am also the Kaiser and an emperor – and he is only the Prince of Wales! It’s my opposition to the Boer War that he can’t stomach. The Boers are Dutch. Why should the republics they founded half a century ago now come under British control, just because they are rich in diamonds and gold?’
May remained silent. It wasn’t up to her to begin defending the Boer War. But as her father-in-law and Willy were going to be fellow emperors, and would then have to see eye-to-eye with each other over world events of great gravity, it seemed to her that her father-in-law should have injected a little more regret into what he had said.
Mercifully, and with characteristic speed, Willy changed the subject yet again. ‘How’s my godson?’
‘He’s nine months old and bald as a badger.’
Four children in seven years had shown May that, when it came to babies, she wasn’t naturally maternal.
With a mood change as swift as his change of subject, Willy barked with laughter. ‘You have three fine sons. I have six strapping sons. And poor old Nicky can’t get a son to save his life.’ His satisfaction at his own virility was blatant. ‘Alicky and I don’t get on well any more. All that Kindred Spirit nonsense ended long ago, where she is concerned. If you are still in close contact with her, you might tell her to put a stop to all this religious palaver with so-called holy men that she’s begun resorting to, in the belief it will help her conceive a boy. My ambassador in St Petersburg says she’s gone from being merely unpopular to being actively disliked. Hides herself away at Tsarskoe Selo, somewhere no member of the public can ever see her. Nicky should take her in hand, but he won’t. I’m fond of Nicky – he’s a splendid chap, but weak as water.’
At his mention of Kindred Spirit nonsense, May had come to an abrupt halt. As Willy came to a halt, too, waiting for her to catch up with him, she said dry-mouthed, ‘Do you remember the Kindred Spirit blood-pact the three of us made years ago on the beach at Osborne? Alicky and I have kept it up, but you haven’t, Willy. By regarding it as nonsense, you’ve broken it.’
The hairs on the nape of her neck prickled.
‘Is that why bad things have begun happening, Willy? Alicky not being able to give Russia an heir? Me living in daily dread of receiving a black-edged telegram telling me that one, or maybe all, of my brothers fighting in the Transvaal has been killed? You not having the respect shown to you that, as Granny Queen’s eldest grandchild, should be shown?’
He stared at her. Willy believed very deeply in portents and signs. And things were always going wrong for him. He was always being criticized in the British and German press for saying things that would have been better left unsaid.
‘With regard to the blood-pact’ – a pulse had begun throbbing at the corner of his jaw – ‘if it’s been broken, can it also be mended?’
‘No. Blood-pacts and vows don’t work like that.’
If Willy didn’t want to believe something, he always found it very easy not to. And he didn’t want to believe that bad things were going to happen to him, now that the blood-pact between himself, May and Alicky had been broken.
Regarding the matter as closed, he began walking again and, as May fell into step beside him and they reached the end of the terrace and the snow-covered steps leading down to the lawn, Willy said, completely out of the blue, ‘Uncle Bertie doesn’t like me.’ At the bottom of the steps he continued with great feeling, ‘When he becomes a fellow emperor, he’s never going to take advice from me in the way dear old Nicky does. He’s far too fond of France, and no good will come of Britain forming an alliance with France – or, for that matter, with Russia. If Uncle Bertie forges an alliance with France and an even closer alliance with Russia, Germany will be encircled and vulnerable. It doesn’t bear thinking about. It isn’t something that would happen with Georgie as England’s King and Emperor, but how many years is it going to be, before he is? And by the time he is, the damage will be done!’
He came to a halt, carried away by his own passionate language, seeing himself as a Prussian St George in bronze helmet and breastplate, shield in one hand, sword raised gloriously aloft in the other.
May, aware that Willy was what George called ‘theatrically posturing’, turned and looked back at the house. How long had they been away and out of touch with what was happening? Ten minutes? Fifteen? Instinct told her that, however short the period of time, it had been far too long.
With a terrible sense of premonition she said urgently, ‘It’s time we went back.’
Willy blinked, reminded himself that when he was at Osborne it was his half-English side that was dominant, not his Prussian-German side, and immediately set off at a pace so brisk she could hardly keep up with him.
The crowded bedroom was tense with fearful expectation. The Queen’s doctor, Dr Reid, was at one side of the bed, supporting her against her pillows, with Bertie on his knees beside him. When Willy moved forward, kneeling at the opposite side of the bed and sliding his good arm around his semi-conscious grandmother, supporting her as Reid was doing, no one, not even Bertie, protested.
The Dean of Windsor, who had been summoned a day earlier, began reciting the Queen’s favourite hymn, ‘Lead, Kindly Light’.
When he had finished Beatrice said, ‘Mama always thought of Papa and Alice and Affie and Leopold, and of her longed-for reunion with them, whenever she sang the line, “And with the morn those angel faces smile, Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile”.’
‘And not only of your sister and two brothers,’ Uncle Christian said gruffly. ‘She would have been thinking of Christle and Eddy as well.’
A long, tortured hour passed, and then another one. Occasionally, having
to obey the calls of nature, people left the room and then returned to it. Throughout it all Willy never moved by so much as an inch, even though, having only one useable arm, he couldn’t take pressure off it by changing sides with Reid.
The January afternoon drew to a close; the sky darkened. The Queen’s breathing changed in rhythm and Reid said gravely, ‘It won’t be long now.’
‘Then let us call out our names to her,’ Louise said. ‘Her children first, then grandchildren and then other close family members.’
Amid floods of tears, and as Reid kept his thumb on the Queen’s pulse, the emotional roll-call began.
As it ended, Reid made a slight motion with his free hand, for the Queen’s face had taken on an expression of inexpressible peace. An awed silence fell. For a moment there was a faint movement of her lips, as if she was about to whisper a name, but all that came was a last long, slow exhalation of breath.
Reid lifted his hand from her wrist and gently laid it back on the coverlet. ‘It is over.’ His voice was raw with emotion. ‘Her Majesty The Queen has peacefully passed from this life into eternity.’
Sobs that had been stifled were stifled no longer. Irène collapsed half-insensible with grief into Heinrich’s arms.
Beatrice said, her voice thick with tears, ‘The name she was trying to say was Papa’s. I know that it was dear Papa’s.’
‘I’m sure you are right, Bea.’ Louise hugged her close. ‘And she will now be reunited with him. For forty years it is all she has longed for. We shouldn’t cry for her. She wouldn’t want us to. She would want us to be happy for her.’
Maudie gripped tight hold of May’s hand, saying with tears streaming down her face, ‘Without Granny Queen, nothing is going to be the same.’
‘No, Maudie dear, it isn’t.’ Not since Eddy had died had May been so close to breaking down.
Bertie rose to his feet, saying unsteadily, ‘With Arthur’s help, I will lay Mama in her coffin.’
It was something Willy had wanted to do and he said, ‘If I am not to perform that service for my grandmother, can I request that the coffin is draped with the Union Jack?’
Vastly relieved that Willy hadn’t asked for it to be draped in a German flag and thankful for small mercies, Bertie said courteously, ‘Yes, of course, Willy. The Union Jack.’
Looking at her father-in-law, May wondered what kind of a king he was going to make. When she had been a child, his habit of ‘chaffing’ had ensured that she’d always gone to great lengths to avoid him. Over the last few years – and as her father-in-law – his ‘chaffing’, where she was concerned, had become a thing of the past, although he did like to shatter her natural primness by telling her risqué jokes and convulsing her in laughter.
But a king who told risqué jokes in mixed company? A king who, for nearly all the years of his married life, had been openly unfaithful to his wife? A king who, as king-in-waiting, had never been instructed in the use of political power and whose entire existence had been a life of fashionable leisure?
Alicky often referred to Bertie slightingly as being an ageing playboy, and now the ageing playboy was King and Emperor, and not only would things never be the same for the family, but they most certainly would never be the same for the country and the empire.
May’s last thought that night, before falling into an exhausted sleep, was that the Victorian age was over. A new, unknown age was about to begin under Bertie, and all anyone could do was to pray for the best.
PART FOUR
THE DARKEST NIGHT AND THE GLORIOUS DAWN
Chapter Thirty-Three
JULY 1904, PETERHOF, GULF OF FINLAND
It was the last day of July and the heat was suffocating. By her doctor’s calculations, Alicky was due to give birth any day, and she was resting on a sun-lounger in the shade of one of the palace’s many verandas. It would be her fifth child and so far she had only given birth to girls. With each failure to give birth to a son, her panicked anxiety had grown, for Russia’s Salic law meant that none of her and Nicky’s daughters could inherit the crown. Only a son could inherit and, unless she produced a male heir, the crown would pass to Nicky’s younger brother.
Their four girls were their joy and deepest happiness, and Nicky had never blamed her when, time after time, the gun salute that announced the birth of a child to a tsar – firing out over St Petersburg one hundred times for a girl, three hundred times for a boy – only ever fired one hundred times.
As she waited for her pains to begin, fear ate away at her, crippling her with anxiety. This time it had to be a boy. It had to be! She loved Nicky with every fibre of her being, and not to be able to give him the one thing so essential to him as Tsar was such a monstrous cruelty there were times when she could scarcely breathe, her sense of failure weighed so heavily upon her.
She remembered the breaking of the blood-pact. Was that the reason she only gave birth to girl after girl? That other people had boys and she couldn’t? May now had four of them. Willy had six. At the thought of Willy, Alicky gritted her teeth. His badgering of Nicky was giving her husband migraines. No matter what the situation, international or domestic, Willy constantly showered Nicky with unwanted advice. Russia had been an ally of France for more than ten years, and the fact that she was an ally was a perpetual bee in Willy’s bonnet. ‘A monarchy allied with a republic?’ he would thunder down the telephone line from Berlin. ‘Stuff and nonsense, Nicky! We emperors must stick together. Germany and Russia, not Russia and France!’
Eight-year-old Olga ran out onto the veranda, saying as she ran over to her mother, ‘Aunt Ella and Uncle Sergei have arrived, Mama. They are here to have lunch with us, and Papa says we are to dine al fresco.’
‘Then you must be sure to wear a wide-brimmed sunhat – and so must your sisters. Will you tell them so for me?’
‘Naturellement.’ French was the language of the Russian court and Olga spoke it as easily as she did English and Russian. Throwing her arms around Alicky’s neck, she gave her mother a kiss on the cheek and then scampered off to do what had been asked of her.
Although terrified of having a fifth daughter, Alicky loved the daughters she had, with all her heart, and counted her blessings that they were all healthy. Her eight-year-old niece Elisabeth – Ernie and Ducky’s only child – had died of typhoid fever a little less than two years ago, shortly after Ducky had so shamefully insisted on divorcing Ernie. What had made her death doubly horrific had been that it happened when Ernie and Elisabeth had been on holiday with her, Nicky and their children at their Polish hunting lodge, and that Elisabeth had died before Ducky could reach her.
Irène, too, had lost a child. Her and Louis’s little boy, Henry, had died from the family bleeding disease six months ago after falling and bumping his head.
As hard as she prayed that the child she was carrying was a boy, she prayed that if it was a boy, he would be free of the bleeding disease. Although Irène, the sister next to her in age, was a carrier of it – Henry’s older brother, Waldemar, suffered from it, too – Vicky had two boys, George, who was eleven, and four-year-old Louis, and neither of them had inherited it, which indicated that Vicky wasn’t a carrier. Whether Ella was, it was impossible to know, for she and Sergei had no children, but as Vicky was quite clearly not a carrier, then it was quite possible that Alicky was not a carrier, either.
Having eased her mind a little, and helped by a stick and her lady-in-waiting, she walked the short distance to where the luncheon table was set out, and where Nicky, Ella, Sergei and her little clover leaves – which was how she lovingly referred to her four daughters – were waiting for her.
Such a relaxed, informal luncheon would have been impossible if they had been living in the Winter Palace or any of the other palaces in St Petersburg, for there formal court protocol was set in stone. Only here, at Peterhof, and at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo could she and Nicky live the informal family life she had grown up with as a child and that was so vitally important to her.
The conversation that had come to a halt as Alicky took her place at the table had been about the war that Russia was fighting in far-away Manchuria, against the Japanese.
Five months ago Japanese destroyers had attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur and war had been declared. Initially no one had been very worried, for it had been assumed that Russia’s army and naval strength would soon bring the Japanese to their knees. It wasn’t working out like that, though, and the war was beginning to cause a lot of anxiety. It had also hit very close to home. The battleship that Nicky and Sergei’s cousin Kyril was serving on as First Officer was torpedoed, with the loss of more than seven hundred lives, and as well as nearly drowning, Kyril had suffered life-threatening injuries.
Aware that war was perhaps not a suitable topic for a woman about to go into labour at any minute, Sergei changed the subject by saying, ‘How are your social projects managing, without you being able to be hands-on at the moment, Alicky? Which of them has precedence?’
‘The nurse-training school at Tsarskoe Selo.’ She smiled across at Ella. ‘Do you remember how, when we were children, Mama once established a similar project in Darmstadt?’ She turned her attention back to Sergei, ‘Our mama was always trying to think of ways of improving people’s lives. Once, she—’
She stopped speaking and, with the blood rushing to her face, pushed herself abruptly away from the table. ‘I think the baby is coming! I’m sure it is.’
Her last two babies, Marie and Anastasia, had both come with wonderful speed and this one came even more quickly. Within an hour of Alicky leaving the table, the baby’s head was crowning and minutes later, as Nicky gripped her hand so tightly it was bruised for days, a healthily plump baby boy slithered into the midwife’s broad, capable hands.
‘It’s a boy, Alicky!’ Nicky could hardly believe his eyes. ‘Thanks be to God. It’s a boy!’ Tears of relief and gratitude poured down his face. They had a son! Russia had a Tsesarevich. The long, hideous years of torment were finally over.
The Summer Queen Page 34
