The Birth of a Son

When the baby was just a week old, alexandra noticed blood seeping from his belly button and unaccountable bruises blooming over his body. The realization dawned that her son, the new tsarevitch alexey, had the same condition that had killed her brother fritzi all those years before. From there on out, protecting alexe would become a central preoccupation of alexandra's life - hardly less for nicholas too. They wrapped the boy's illness in secrecy. It was the difference between czar and czarina. All of this pressure for alexandra to bear a son, and so little respect for who she was as