Alexandra Feodorowna, however, became suspicious of this advice, perhaps because she distrusted the Grand-Duke Sergius just as much as her other relatives. Yet advice she felt she must have. It would have been natural for her to seek that of her brother, the Grand Duke of Hesse, and of her other sisters, the Princess Victoria of Battenberg and the Princess Henry of Prussia, but while the former had never been her favorite, the latter refused--at the instigation of her husband, most probably--to be mixed up in things which did not concern her, and intrenched herself behind her ignorance of Russian customs and Russian society. The Empress felt frantic, and it was then that she was seized with violent attacks of homesickness, which she did not attempt to conceal. More than once she was heard to say that she wished she were back in Germany, where at least she would find people capable of understanding her and of advising her well and soundly.
Germany has always, as is but too well known to-day, maintained an army of spies in Russia. Very quickly a report of what was going on in Tsarskoye Selo reached the ears of William II. He saw his opportunity and forthwith wrote to his cousin, reminding her of their former friendship and telling her that he was entirely at her disposal to help her, by his knowledge of Russian affairs, which he professed was very great, and by his experience of the world.
The Empress caught at the opportunity, and from that day there was established between them relations of the closest intimacy, linking the Empress and the Lord of Potsdam. She took the habit of sending him a kind of diary of what she was doing and of what went on at the Russian Court--a diary in which she did not spare her mother-in-law, or her husband, whom she reproached with not taking her part more openly.
Of course it was not easy to carry on such a correspondence. The young Empress was closely watched, a fact of which she was but too well aware. She tried the medium of the German Embassy, but apart from the fact that it would have seemed a suspicious thing to send there letters in a regular way, the Ambassador, Prince Radolin, refused to be the means of forwarding messages of which he did not know the import, and did not care to be involved in an intrigue that would inevitably have brought him to grief if discovered. Some other way, therefore, had to be devised, and for a time it seemed as if it would be next to impossible to find any. Once or twice the Princess Hohenlohe, wife of the Imperial Chancellor, who, through the fact that she was the owner of large estates in Lithuania, often visited St. Petersburg, brought with her messages from the Kaiser to the Empress Alexandra, and took back with her to Berlin the latter’s replies. But this was not sufficient, and during the first visit paid by the Czar and his Consort to the German Court William and the young Czarina came to an understanding, after which their correspondence continued through the medium of friends of the Kaiser, who somehow appeared regularly in Russia whenever this was considered necessary.