The Accidental Empress Read online

“Ouch!” Karl yelped in pain, halting his horse and sliding out of the saddle before collapsing into a heap on the ground. From the stream of blood curling downward from his nose, Sisi knew she had hit her mark.

  They had to seize their opening. “Helene, run!” Sisi ordered, pushing off from her crouched position. She charged toward home on the other side of the field.

  “Why, you little witch!” Karl yelled at Sisi’s passing figure, but he remained prostrate on the ground, stunned by her assault.

  Heart flying in the heady moment of victory, Sisi raced across the meadow toward the large house. Her own legs might not carry her as swiftly as Bummerl’s could, but they were strong, agile from years of skipping up the mountains, swimming in the lake, hopping across the fields in search of plants and small animals. They would be enough to deliver her to safety.

  Glancing over her shoulder to ensure that Helene followed, Sisi cried: “Hurry up, Helene!” She grabbed her older sister’s arm, forcing her to keep apace. They shared the same parents, but little else. Helene thrived indoors: studying languages, reading philosophy, knitting, or writing quietly in a shadowy corner by a fire. Sisi always took charge when they were out of doors.

  A few more steps and, hands linked, they cleared the meadow. Panting, Sisi rushed past a startled footman and flew into the front hall of the castle, Helene following behind her. Through the latticed window she saw that her brother had regained his mount and now trotted away from the lake toward home.

  “Papa,” Sisi cried, running into the large drawing room. “Oh, thank goodness you’re here, Papa!”

  Duke Maximilian’s inanimate frame occupied a large, overstuffed chair in the corner of the dark room. At his feet, beside his mud-licked boots, reclined two snoring hounds, their own paws caked in dirt. They lifted their heavy heads in a perfunctory greeting as the girls ran in, but the duke continued to snore. A lit pipe sent up a curl of smoke where it burned in Duke Max’s lap, forgotten.

  “Papa, wake up.” Sisi removed the hot pipe before it singed a hole in his woolen pants, and placed it on the side table. “Wake up!” The duke choked out one last snore before he emerged from his deep slumber, his breath overripe with the sour stench of beer.

  “Papa, Karl is chasing Néné and me. Please, wake up.”

  “What’s that?” The duke rubbed his eyes, bloodshot and droopy-lidded.

  Sisi heard her brother barking a question at the startled servants outside: “Which way did they go?” The front door opened and she heard Karl step into the great hall, his boots landing heavily on the stone floor.

  “Ah, Sisi.” Now Duke Maximilian shifted in his armchair, staring at her through glassy eyes, the same honey color as Sisi’s, though not lucid this afternoon. “You’ve arrived just in time. I was just learning a new tavern song.” The duke looked at his favorite daughter with a drowsy grin, lifting an index finger as he began to sound out a bouncy, peasant tune. “But have the others left? Gone home, already?” Duke Max looked around, his gaze listless.

  Sisi’s frame sagged as she heard Karl’s footsteps outside the drawing room. “Papa, please—”

  “You little wretch, you’ll get it this time.” Just then, her brother appeared in the doorway. His nose seemed to have stopped bleeding, but a sheen of crimson had caked into a muddy line between his nose and lips. “You hit me in the face with that rock.”

  Sisi straightened up, turning from her father to face her brother. “You deserved it.”

  Helene began to simper. “Papa, please.” But their father stared into the sputtering flames of the fireplace, his empty beer mug tipped toward his lips in an effort to sponge any last drop.

  “Sisi, what do we do?” Helene backed away from Karl. Sisi cursed under her breath as her victory turned to failure. She should have heeded Helene’s pleas and mollified Karl; her own reckless pride had led them to this.

  “I’ll teach you sneaky whores to defy me.” Sensing weakness, Karl lunged first toward Helene.

  “Get off her!” Sisi tightened her hands into two hard fists and prepared to land the first blow before what would undoubtedly turn into her own beating. She shut her eyes, so that she didn’t see the figure emerging just then through the doorway.

  “There you are.” Duchess Ludovika swished into the drawing room, an imposing figure of black silk, crinoline-hooped skirt, and thick brown curls. Karl instantly recoiled at the sight of their mother, retreating into a shadowed corner.

  “Good, you’re all here.” The duchess crossed the room in two quick strides and yanked open the drawing room curtains, setting free a cloud of dust. “Helene, Elisabeth, I’ve been searching everywhere for you girls.”

  “Mamma!” Sisi ran to her mother, falling forward into the duchess’s long, slender frame. She shut her eyes, dizzy with relief.

  “Sisi, my girl. Whatever is . . .” But the duchess paused as her eyes moved from Sisi toward her husband’s reposing frame, and the large slicks of mud darkening the carpet. “Look at this mud!” The duchess sighed, her shoulders rising and falling with each irritated intake of breath. “I suppose the servants will have to clean the carpet again.” Then, under her breath, she murmured, “And I’ll have to ask them to dust in here, as well. And this curtain needs mending. And I must remember to ask how the chickens are doing with eggs . . .” Ludovika sighed, tugging once more on the tattered curtains. Unlike her husband, who seldom concerned himself with the managing of their home or the petitions of the local peasants—and certainly not with the concerns of his children—Ludovika always had too many tasks, and too little time in which to complete them.

  The duchess looked to her daughters now, the two of them cowering beside her like frightened kittens, and then to Karl’s bloody face. Understanding spread across her features. She let out a weary sigh, looking out the window, as if longing to escape this dark, mud-stained room.

  “Gackl,” Ludovika spoke, her tone suddenly sharp. “Is that your horse I see in the garden, untethered?” Their mother used the familiar nickname for Karl, the name they had given him in his cradle because of the noises he had made. Gackl was the local Bavarian term for a dirty, barnyard rooster. Sisi thought it suited Karl just fine.

  “Well, is it?” The duchess repeated her query when Karl didn’t respond. Karl looked out the window, fumbling for a reply. She cut him off.

  “Go get that animal immediately and take it to the stables. If you can’t care for your horse properly, you shall have no horse at all.”

  “Yes, Mother.” Karl answered, his ink-colored eyes burning with a warning to Sisi: This is not over.

  “That boy.” The duchess turned from her departing son to her daughters. “And look at you girls—no better. As dirty as a pair of reapers.” The duchess scowled at Sisi, surveying the tracks of mud that lined her daughter’s skirt. Yet she never forbade them from wandering into the woods to pick flowers, or down to the lake to fish.

  “Quiet down, Ludovika, I can hardly hear Frau Helgasberg speak.” Their father looked up at his wife from his armchair, momentarily pausing a conversation he appeared to be conducting in his head. Sisi felt herself cringe at the name. Frau Helgasberg was one of her father’s favorite mistresses. That he uttered the name now so unashamedly was nothing new: everyone in the home knew of her existence. Everyone in the duchy knew of her existence. And yet the brazen and frequent reminders of her father’s infidelity never failed to infuriate Sisi.

  Ludovika, for her part, was unflappable, not faltering for a moment. “Max, how about a walk to the lake?” The duchess glided to her husband’s side and lifted one of the empty glasses to her nose. She sniffed disapprovingly and swept the other empty mugs into her hand.

  “Up you go, Max, you’ve squandered enough of this day.” Ludovika pulled at the wool blanket covering her husband with her remaining hand, but he pulled back, keeping his arms on the cover.

  “Away!” He growled, a loose dribble of slobber slipping out the side of his mouth.

  “Max, I beseech y
ou,” Ludovika kept her voice quiet, controlled. She was the picture of composure, even if she did feel the same frustration that now caused Sisi to seethe. “Get up. Please.”

  “Stop this at once, Ludovika. And do not talk to me this way in front of our distinguished guests! The baron and I will finish our conversation.”

  The duchess studied her half-lucid husband, apparently weighing the efficacy of arguing further. She sighed, and, turning to a footman, said: “Coffee for the duke. And quickly, please.” Turning back to her two daughters, she clapped her hands. “You girls had better go wash up. Change your dresses and come down for supper in something more fitting. Your father and I”—now the duchess threw a perfunctory glance in the general direction of her husband—“have news for you.”

  “Sisi, my wild girl! Helene! Come sit, we are waiting on you two, as usual.” The duke appeared more alert at dinner, no doubt thanks to the mug of Turkish coffee his wife had placed before him.

  The family was gathered in the castle’s formal banquet room, surrounded by the stuffed heads of the large caribou, reindeer, and bright orange fox that decorated the walls. The spoils of her father’s countless hunting expeditions. Watching him now, his frame jittery and his eyes bloodshot, it was difficult for Sisi to imagine Duke Maximilian hunting his way through Bavaria. But tales of his skill as a sportsman were well known; he was seldom at home in Possenhofen for more than a few months before fleeing on another such trip. He, like Sisi, loved the wilderness. Perhaps even more than he loved women and liquor.

  “Your mother insisted that we all clean up for this dinner. What do you think she has afoot?” The duke grinned at Sisi, his amber eyes twinkling with teasing, and Sisi’s disdain for him lessened ever so slightly.

  In their unstructured household, such formal dinners were a rarity. The duke was seldom at home in the evenings. Their mother, though she tried valiantly to impose some sort of order over a masterless household, found it hard to wrangle her brood of wild and free-spirited children. This time of year, with the days stretching out as they did, long and mild, Sisi’s evening meal was often little more than a bowl of cold soup whenever she wandered indoors, sun-kissed and dirt-stained, from a day spent in the fields and woods.

  Sisi presumed that the formal dinner had to do with the news to which her mother had alluded earlier in the day. Was it possible that there was another baby on the way? What with the four siblings that had come since Karl—the little girls Marie, Mathilde, Sophie-Charlotte, and the baby boy, Max—Sisi had grown accustomed to such announcements. It seemed that, however much enmity existed between her parents, they both submitted willingly, and often, to the task of producing heirs for the duchy. Each one of Papa’s long absences was inevitably followed by his unexpected return: a chaotic, confusing family reunion; weeks later, news of another baby.

  But Sisi did not suspect that that was her mother’s news this time; not when Mamma’s busy behavior lately had been so unlike her past pregnancies.

  Sisi took a seat now at the large mahogany table beside Helene. She had dressed, according to her mother’s wishes, in a simple gown of black crepe, and the maid, Agata, had brushed and styled her long hair into two plaits.

  “Black dresses again tonight. Always black.” Sisi had lamented to her sister and the maid while dressing before dinner.

  “Hush, Sisi. Don’t let Mamma hear you complaining about the mourning clothes yet again,” Helene had chided her. Like her mother and Helene, Sisi’s wardrobe was limited these days, on account of an unknown aunt’s recent passing.

  “But I’m tired of black. I didn’t know Great-Aunt . . . whatever her name was . . . and I want to wear blue. Or green. Or rose.” Sisi yanked her head in opposition to Agata’s tight braiding.

  “Hush now, Miss Elisabeth,” the round-faced maid replied, speaking in her wiry Polish accent as she adjusted the tilt of Sisi’s head. “Always so impatient. Try to be sweet like your sister.”

  Karl, opposite Sisi at dinner now, wore a fine black suit and cravat. He had wiped the blood from his wound, but a light-purple bruise had begun to seep along the flat ridge of his nose. As he gulped his beer, scowling at his sisters and tugging on the too-tight cravat around his thick neck, he appeared more like a schoolyard menace than the heir to the duchy.

  The younger four siblings, under the age of twelve, did not dine with the family, but ate in the nursery with their governesses.

  “Wine, Master Karl?” Agata circled the table, pouring wine into goblets while two footmen stepped over the snoring dogs to deposit platters of hot bread, potatoes, and cabbage slaw.

  “No wine for me, Agata. More beer.” Karl proffered his empty stein for refilling. Sisi noted how Agata replenished Karl’s drink while keeping her body a safe distance from his; her brother’s hands—like his father’s before his—tended to wander when an unsuspecting woman got too close.

  “Now that we are all here.” Duchess Ludovika sat straight-backed and alert, her manners impeccable, a foil to her husband’s tired slouch across the long table.

  “Before you begin”—Duke Max waved a finger in the air—“I have something very important to say.”

  “Oh?” Ludovika eyed her husband. “What’s that, Max?”

  “I think the servants have been touching my mummies again.” Max ignored his wife’s sudden scowl, continuing on with words that strung together like pieces of sloppy linen hanging on the laundry line. “I don’t want them touching—”

  “Max, they have been told countless times not to touch your Egyptian memorabilia. I assure you they have not.” The duchess, at the opposite end of the long table, speared a link of bratwurst with her fork and deposited it onto her plate.

  “But I think they have been. I swear that my mummy’s arm looks off balance.”

  Sisi had witnessed this exchange enough times to know that her mother had to suppress the urge to offer an impertinent reply.

  The duke continued to grumble: “I can’t have the servants meddling with such priceless treasures.” Sisi knew that her father, when he was not off stalking wildlife, drinking his way across Bavaria, or fathering illegitimate peasant children, cared about nothing more than the collection of artifacts he’d assembled in his study at Possenhofen Castle—chief among them the relics with which he’d returned from Egypt decades earlier, on a trip to the Temple of Dendur. Sisi had always lived in fear of the mummified young female body kept in her papa’s study—especially after Karl had taken the time to explain in vivid detail about the dead girl’s corpse, just about the size of her own, preserved under the crusty, yellowed wrappings.

  “Well, Max, if you are certain.” Ludovika sipped her wine through tight lips, exchanging a knowing glance with Sisi. “I will have another word with the servants to remind them not to touch the mummy.”

  “Or the stones . . . I don’t want them touching the temple stones either.”

  “Or the stones, then.” The duchess managed a quick, taut smile. “Anyhow, girls”—she turned her gaze from her husband to her daughters, seated beside one another—“as I told you, I . . . we . . . have big news.”

  “What is it, Mamma?” Sisi glanced at Helene. While dressing for dinner, they had tried to guess, but neither of them had come up with a reasonable theory as to what their mother’s announcement might be.

  “Perhaps Karl is betrothed,” Helene had guessed, a contemptuous smirk on her face as she had helped Agata braid Sisi’s mass of dark golden hair.

  “Poor girl, if that’s the case,” Sisi had answered, laughing with her sister and her maid.

  To Sisi’s surprise, however, the news seemed to have nothing to do with Karl. “Your father and I have been thinking about your futures.” Ludovika lifted her knife to cut into the link of wurst. “Isn’t that right, Max?”

  Sisi sat up, her back stiffening against the chair.

  “Surely you girls remember your Aunt Sophie?” The duchess fed herself slowly, eyes flitting back and forth between her two daughters.

>   “Aunt Sophie, the Austrian?” Helene asked.

  Sisi remembered the woman she had met five years earlier, during a trip to Innsbruck in Austria. Aunt Sophie had been strong and tall and thin, in many ways resembling her mother. But unlike Ludovika, Aunt Sophie had had a sharp edge that permeated her entire being—her voice, her mannerisms, even her smile.

  It had been 1848—the year that the uprisings roiled throughout all of Europe. Vienna was burning and Austria’s royal family, the Habsburgs, had been at risk of losing their ancient hold on the crown. Aunt Sophie, who had become a Habsburg when she married Emperor Ferdinand’s younger brother, had begged Ludovika to come support her at the royal family’s emergency meeting in Innsbruck.

  They met at the imperial retreat, high atop the stark Austrian Alps. Sisi, then ten years old, remembered the trip well; she had grown up in the mountains, but had never seen anything quite like the snow-capped scenery into which they traveled.

  “We are at the top of the world,” Helene had gasped, as the carriage had climbed higher and higher. Sisi remembered wondering at what point the sky stopped and the heavens began.

  On the first night in Innsbruck, her mother had left them in a dark nursery, rushing away beside her elder sister and a crowd of men in clean, crisp uniforms. The adults had all seemed very busy and very cross—tight-lipped whispers, creased foreheads, darting eyes.

  Innsbruck passed, for Sisi, as interminable hours with stern, unknown governesses in that quiet nursery. Karl had been perfectly pleased; the imperial nursery was well-stocked with candied nuts and their cousins’ trains and toy soldiers. But Sisi had longed for her mother. At home, they were never separated from her for more than a few hours. And they seldom spent summer days entirely indoors, but rather conducted their education by climbing the mountains around their beloved “Possi,” fishing the lake, riding horses, and studying the local flowers.

  Sisi had spent the hours of that trip staring out the glistening windows of the nursery at the mountains, wondering where the birds that flew overhead landed in the rocky, barren vista.