“You must come sledding with us tomorrow!”
“Goodness, don’t crush her, Xenia!” Nicholas smiled at me. “But you truly must come sledding. There is a simply grand hill in the park, the soldiers have poured water on it so that it is so slick one fairly flies!”
“If Ella and Sergei do not have any plans…” I began hesitantly.
“I assure you, we will be there,” said Ella, who stood nearby. “We had planned upon it from the very start.”
“Until tomorrow, then,” said Nicholas, kissing my gloved hand once more.
“Until tomorrow.”
As I walked down the hall and up the stairs to my bedroom, it was as if my dance slippers had little wings, made of silk and pearls, perhaps, or spun snow that glittered as if with a thousand shards of diamonds, and never melted.
Dreamily I hummed a lively polka from the ball as I removed the hairpins from my coiffure and watched my dark blond tresses fall from their intricate style down past my waist. How well it had all turned out, beyond anything my nervous mind had concocted. The fluttering caged bird I had felt in my stomach from earlier in the evening returned, except not fluttering in nervousness, but in utter delighted anticipation.
There was so much ahead of me here, so many possibilities.
“Oh, thank you God!” I cried, rushing to the window and peering out into the night. A few stars glimmered in the darkness, but each and every one of them, visible and not visible, stood for all that I was grateful for, and all that I knew I would be.
Maybe it's cheesy, maybe it's sappy, it is probably very over-sentimental-romantic, but I really like the way this story turned out. Maybe because I never was stuck on it.
I have no idea what Alix truly felt, or anything about a ball held at Ella and Sergei's, but I was inspired for this, oddly enough, riding home from my grandparent's on New Year's Eve. I started writing it right then and there, because I had my laptop with me in the car.
There is one definite inaccuracy, as Alix and Nicholas first saw each other after four years at the train station when Alix arrived, but... Dramatic license!
Alix and Nicholas eventually married in 1894, and had five children: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, who famously "survived" (DIDN'T!) the family's eventual 1918 massacre, and Alexei, whose hemophilia caused Alix (Alexandra by then, having changed her name upon conversion to Russian Orthodoxy,) great stress and pain. Alexandra would be very misunderstood, (she was criticized for not caring for Russia and being proud and cold because of her excessive shyness,) and disliked eventually during WWI, (she was called the "German Woman" as she was half German,) but her and Nicholas's happy marriage has been called one of the greatest royal romances of all time.
It is hard for me to think of the princess in my story, if indeed she really was like I portrayed her, and even if she was not, being shot down by Bolshevik/Soviet soldiers with hearts of stone, along with her true love and beloved children, in a cellar in the Ural Mountains thirty years after she and Nicholas truly began to fall in love other than a childish infatuation. It was a true tradgedy, and Rest in Peace.
Alix in an engagement portrait, 1894.
I have lately been very much absorbed and interested by the early, pre-engagement life of this fasctinating, beautiful, shy princess with a mind of her own, and I would most certainly expect more stories on her!
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