Chapter Thirteen Alix
Chapter Thirteen
Alix
Hélène was undoubtedly a bad influence, Alix thought, her entire body flushed with anxious heat. Just look at what Alix was doing now, leaving a party to wait at the top of the servants’ staircase at Osborne House. Waiting for Nicholas.
Hélène had suggested it earlier in the evening, after she and Nicholas had danced together very publicly, multiple times. Alix understood that it was all for show, and yet—it was hard to watch, knowing that everyone assumed Hélène and Nicholas really were on the brink of an engagement.
When Hélène had looped an arm through Alix’s and suggested they walk along the gallery, Alix had readily agreed. At least it would separate Hélène from Nicholas.
Behind them, the party had been in full swing.
Uncle Bertie always hosted a gathering at Osborne House for the opening night of the Cowes Regatta; but this year Grandmama was present, so the event was less raucous than usual.
Guests in their evening finery drifted through the Royal Pavilion, spilling from the billiards room to the reception hall to the dining room.
“I finally understand how awful you felt last year, when Grandmama was trying to match me with Eddy,” Alix said softly. And it must have been worse for Hélène. At least Alix knew that this courtship between Hélène and Nicholas was all a sham.
“I know you hate it—seeing me and Nicholas together.” Hélène’s voice darkened as she added, “I hate it, too. I keep thinking about Eddy. What must he think of me right now?”
They were walking the marble corridor, its walls lined in great windows that reflected the light of the chandeliers.
Alix glanced outside. Osborne House looked out over the Isle of Wight, its dark slope dotted with houses, all currently rented out for the regatta.
In the distance, moonlight glittered on the waters of the Solent.
“I’m so sorry,” Alix murmured, because what else could she say?
“It’s all right. I have a plan.” Hélène’s reply was bright, but Alix heard a quiver of fear underneath.
“How can I help?”
“You can’t. If things end in disaster, I don’t want you suffering for my mistakes.”
Alix drew to a halt. “That sounds dangerous.”
“Don’t worry! Come on, let’s rejoin the party. I should get back to Nicholas,” Hélène declared. “And you need to rejoin that nice German man your grandmother found for you.”
Alix felt a stab of guilt at the thought of Maximilian.
Yesterday on the ferry, when he’d seen her shivering and damp with sea spray, he had wordlessly shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over her shoulders.
Not in a romantic way, but with tenderness, the way he might care for a younger sister.
He had offered to be a friend, and here she was, using him to distract Grandmama from the truth of who she was really occupied with.
“Maximilian is sweet,” she told Hélène, wondering why she was defending him. “It’s just that he’s not…”
“Not Nicholas, I know,” Hélène finished for her. “Good thing you and Nicholas are meeting up later.”
“What?”
“At least one of us should be getting some time alone with our beloved.” Hélène’s voice was still determinedly bright. “I need to deal with May before I can find Eddy again. But there’s no reason you and Nicholas shouldn’t be together.”
Alix had flushed at what she’d thought Hélène meant. “How would we do that without getting caught?”
“You won’t get caught.” Hélène had smiled, and there was a touch of mischief in it. “Don’t worry, I’m an expert in sneaking around at crowded parties. I know all the tricks.”
Which was how Alix had wound up here, waiting for Nicholas at the servants’ staircase.
He and Hélène had made a very public exit just half an hour earlier.
Hélène had complained of a stomachache, but assured her parents and Vladimir—who were all enjoying the party, most especially the drinks—that they should stay.
She would return to the yacht with Nicholas and her lady’s maid, Violette.
Once they had entered the long drive that snaked toward Osborne’s main gates, Nicholas would slip out of the carriage—an easy feat on a road lined with such thick foliage. He would head back uphill to the main house, where Hélène had opened one of the ground-floor windows earlier in the evening.
Alix had waited a few minutes after their departure, then complained of a similar stomach pain. Perhaps it had been the prawns, she said, to enough people that no one would check on her.
From downstairs she heard the roar of the party, the gossip and music and clinking of glassware.
“Alix?” a voice whispered from the bottom of the staircase.
“Nicholas!” She hurried down a few steps, hardly believing that Hélène had arranged this for them. “You came.”
“You didn’t think I would? I’m quite sneaky,” Nicholas said softly.
“You? Sneaky?” He was the most painfully forthright person she knew.
He gave a nervous smile. “You’re right, I’m not. But I try to do the things that matter; and you matter a great deal to me, Alix.”
They needed to get off this staircase before someone appeared. “Will you come up?” Alix asked.
Still, Nicholas hesitated. “I didn’t realize—I mean, I thought we could go to a sitting room, or—”
“Please, Nicholas. There’s nowhere else in this house that we can be alone.” Feeling shockingly bold, she padded down the stairs to where Nicholas stood, then led him up to the hallway.
Each door was mounted with a small brass frame that contained a card—a card that was lined, as all Her Majesty’s paper goods were, in an inch-wide band of black. Nearly thirty years since Albert’s death, and the queen still observed his mourning.
Princess Alix of Hesse, read the card on her door.
Alix pulled Nicholas inside, then turned the lock behind him. The sound of the bolt falling into place felt oddly final. As if she’d turned some corner, reached some decision within herself, that would forever change things.
Nicholas wandered over to the window, which looked out over the eaves of the roof. He released the latch and lifted the windowpane, letting in the cool night air. They both stared out at the wine-dark sky.
“Misha and I used to climb on the roof of the Winter Palace,” he mused aloud.
“Really? Ernie used to do the same, but I was never so brave. Not after Frittie.” Her younger brother who’d fallen out of a window. A ground-floor window, but a window just the same.
Nicholas instantly started tugging the window shut. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think.”
“It’s all right.” Alix was tired of being afraid, of living with regrets. She ducked her head out the open window.
Then, before she could think twice about it, she lifted the skirts of her gown and clambered outside.
“Alix! What are you doing?” Nicholas tried to pull her back, but her feet were already on the slate tiles.
“Come on!” she insisted. Nicholas smiled softly and joined her outside, sliding down to a flat section of roof that was several yards square. They settled next to each other, staring at the moonlit harbor, their hands clasped.
“What did you and Misha do on the roof of the Winter Palace?” Alix asked. “Were you hiding from your tutor, or did you play pranks, as Ernie did? He loved to throw stockings full of water on unsuspecting people.”
“Misha had his fair share of pranks, but I spent most of our time on the roof trying to plot how to leave.”
“What?” Alix looked over at Nicholas, startled.
“My tutor taught me the basics of navigation: how to calculate one’s location by triangulating the distance between two points, how to use the sun, that sort of thing.
I had told him I wanted to be an explorer.
” Nicholas’s voice was rough. “My tutor used to take me down to the shipyards. I peppered the workers with questions—how did they hammer the metal plates of the hull together, how did the propellers work? When the ship increased in speed, could you feel it? That’s part of why I find it so perplexing, staying on a yacht that’s anchored in a harbor,” he added with a humorless laugh.
“I prefer to be on a boat with a destination.”
“Why didn’t you serve in the navy instead of the army?” Alix asked.
Nicholas turned to her then, his expression resigned. “My father, of course. When he learned what was going on, he fired my tutor. Said it was unseemly for a future tsar to be out mixing with commoners, asking them questions, as if I was not God’s appointed ruler and above them all.”
“I’m so sorry, Nicholas.”
“Father told me it was a foolish wish, wanting to be an explorer. That there was nothing left to explore, because we know every last corner of the world now, anyway.”
“ ‘And Alexander wept, for there were no lands left to conquer,’ ” Alix murmured.
Nicholas let out an amused breath. “That’s not what Plutarch wrote, actually. It was misquoted.”
“In an English translation, I know.” Alix smiled. “I prefer the misquote, though. It sounds rather poetic. The English are good at that.”
“At getting things wrong or sounding poetic?”
“Both, probably.”
Alix looked at Nicholas’s hand, still clasped in hers. She felt as if he’d reached that hand up into the twist of her blond curls, pulling them loose from their pins, and then she would tip her head back and bring her mouth to his—
She blinked. Her imagination was playing tricks on her.
Or perhaps her mind was skipping ahead of her body, which had every intention of actually doing all those things.
Suddenly she understood why Hélène had risked everything to sneak around with Eddy.
“I think we should go inside,” she declared.
Nicholas rose to his feet, then held out a hand to help her up. “Of course. It’s getting cold, isn’t it?”
“I meant, let’s go into my bedchamber. Together,” she said clearly.
When he understood her meaning, Nicholas’s eyes widened. “Alix, no, we can’t—”
Before he could talk her out of it, she lifted a hand and put it on his lips.
This was all new and exhilarating and terrifying and wondrous.
But whatever it was, Alix wanted to feel it in all its intensity.
She wanted as much of Nicholas as she could get, for whatever time they had before he needed to leave.
“I am very certain of this,” she replied. “Please, Nicholas, don’t tell me no.”
And then she brushed a kiss lightly over his lips.
When they pulled apart, Nicholas’s voice was ragged. “I have no intention of ever telling you no. I will tell you yes, as much as I can, for the rest of our lives. But if at any point you change your mind—”
“I won’t.”
Still, once they were inside, Nicholas gave her so many chances to pull away. He started with her hair, pulling out its pins one by one, just as she’d daydreamed. When it fell in a cascade over one shoulder, he reached out to cradle her face with his palm. His lips were so close to hers.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you,” Alix echoed.
They fell together onto her bed, not bothering to close the window, letting the night air kiss their bare skin.