The Empress Chronicles

by Suzy Vitello

  Was she still in Munich, then? Clothed in her disguise, her veil, her faerie skirts?

  I worried over this night after night, and at long last made a decision. I requested to accompany Mummi on one of her outings to Uncle Ludwig’s Nymphenburg Palace so I might see for myself. Through Baroness Wilhelmine, I made my plea. “In my study of people of import, I would so love to examine the portraits in my uncle’s Schönheitengalerie.”

  My governess obliged, smiling even. “Why, Duchess, you finally understand that you must occupy your head with matters that befit a young lady of your station.”

  And so it was that not quite a fortnight before the Easter holiday, I donned the Parisian pantalettes, a new pair of silk stockings, a fine modern corset fitted with baleen busks from the cold northern waters. Nurse pressed my skirts with the mangle, and I allowed my hair to be fashioned into a complicated braid the fuss of which forced me to sit in one place for half a day. Again, I stretched the delicate cloth of white gloves over my increasingly chapped and scabbed fingers. I kept hearing Lola’s voice: If you find your virtue in jeopardy, you may toss one of the gloves from your bedroom window, and I will come.

  We were to arrive at Nymphenburg in time for tea. The spaniels, Mummi had decided, would stay in their apartment, for King Ludwig sneezed in the company of dogs—though often it was reported the king’s mistresses enjoyed the presence of a hound or a mastiff when seen in public with the monarch. Mummi, I imagine, was leery of being mistaken for a consort when unaccompanied by her husband, the duke.

  “Mummi,” I begged once the coach rolled to a stop in front of the main hall of the Nymphenburg. “Might I sketch the portraits in my journal after we are received? I would so like to gaze once again at the splendor of all those magnificent ladies in the gallery.”

  Mummi nodded her approval. Her eyes rolled from my new boots to the silk ribbon that pulled at my crown hairs. She pinched another layer of red into my cheeks before allowing the footman to help her down the carriage stairs, and as she descended, she turned her head round toward me, winking. “I understand young Karl may be joining us later. Perhaps you should do your sketching first. I’ve arranged for your cousins to join you in the hall.”

  Her words plowed a swath of excitement through my chest, where my suitor’s very picture still lay closed up against my breast. “Karl,” I whispered into my gloves; a puff of breath bounced off my hands and curled up my nose. Thank goodness I had remembered to cleanse my mouth with parsley after the morning meal.

  The Schönheitengalerie lay in the south pavilion of my uncle’s castle, and it was quite a long walk from the center residence. A small retinue escorted me to the edge of the apartment, where I was joined by my uncle’s mad daughter, Amalie, and his round-faced young grandson, Little Ludwig. Amalie dismissed the servants and, reluctantly, they bowed and exited.

  Amalie and I curtseyed to one another, and Little Ludwig, velvet tails and all, performed his best bow, his pointy nose nearly touching the marble floor.

  Amalie was a slight bit older than Nené, but already, rumor had determined she was unmarriable due to her fits of apoplexy and melancholia. This afternoon she was dressed all in white undergarments, as though for bed. She wore brocade slippers on her slender feet. “My father tells me you wish to see the paintings of his tarts?” she sang.

  “Paintings of his tarts,” echoed Little Ludwig, much like one of my parrots.

  I was not certain, even with the repetition, that I had heard correctly. “I beg your pardon, Your Grace?”

  Amalie burst out in operatic tones then, singing the scales at top voice, the do re mi of her vocal chords echoing off the domed rotunda we now walked under.

  “She swallowed a glass piano when she was small,” Little Ludwig informed me.

  We Wittelsbachs were known for our eccentricities, but it had been many months since I had last taken the company of these cousins, and I’d all but forgotten how strange they were. Fortunately, they were not dawdlers, these two. I often found that my pace was much swifter than that of my escort, and it was so welcome to finally journey to a destination at the speed I required. Angels’ wings, as always, beneath my feet.

  The south pavilion had fantastic light but, alas, the sun was at its least generous interval. Once inside the gallery the three of us scurried about to light candles so as to view the paintings under optimum conditions.

  “She—” Amalie pointed to a far corner, where Aunt Sophie, the archduchess, hung upon the wall “—wears man’s britches under her skirt.”

  I smiled, remembering my first hunt the spring before and my own secret britches.

  Amalie, a candelabra in one hand, her finger like a lashing willow switch in the other, proceeded round the large room, pointing to portrait after portrait, singing out accusations as though an aria. “She, and she, and she have slept with the king. She refused to. She possibly did but then went off to the convent. She gave birth to two red-haired children, Wittelsbachs no doubt, but claimed otherwise. She was a shoemaker’s daughter. My father plucked her right out of the nursery, I would guess. But she died a virgin. And she and she and she were virtuous, I do believe. And that most beautiful one? In the corner? She was the tart no man could win.”

  They were all enchanting and lovely, the women. Indeed, “the tart no man could win” had astonishing flaxen hair, and in her eyes was the notion that she could have whomever she chose. But others of these beauties were equally engaging. Dozens of smiles, of bosoms, of jewels cast their number into the room. I pulled out my journal. Where to begin with my sketching and notes?

  “Oh, Sisi, what a pretty notation book,” exclaimed Little Ludwig, clapping his chubby hands with glee.

  I was prepared this time with a more modern pen, upon which I had fastened my fox brush lest I needed something to mop a mess. I also thought to bring along a closed bottle of ink with a cork stopper. I had peeled off my gloves and lashed them to my body through my silk sash, and was now scrambling to keep up with Amalie, her descriptions, jotting them fiercely in my book. Lady after lady. The scandal, the background, the tale’s end—never, it seemed, a happy one. And naturally, she’d saved the most enigmatic and most luxurious creature for last. Upon the wall nearest Aunt Sophie, the wild gaze of Lola Montez pulled me toward her.

  But before Amalie launched into Lola, she offered, “And there, crammed in the far dark wall, is the portrait of me.” She sighed, looking down at her frilly garment. “I didn’t look so mad then, did I?”

  I curtseyed, for that was what decorum dictated, and said, “Your Grace, not one bit mad. And in addition, you are the loveliest of them all.”

  “Liar,” my cousin sang, her high-pitched yelp like a cat catching a canary. She set her candle on a big block table in the center of the room and then skipped round the table screeching, “Liar, liar, liar, liar, liar, liar.”

  “Oh dear,” offered Little Ludwig, hands on his ears now. “That must have been a shard in her throat from the glass piano.”

  Alas, I had lied. My cousin was the sort of mad where one forgot to comb one’s hair. Her eyes were wild and unfocused. The gentle, comely girl in the portrait was far off from the stick-thin girl who stood in her nightclothes before us now.

  “If you please,” I ventured. “That one on the far wall. Lola Montez? Do you know her by chance?”

  Little Ludwig by this time had sidled up next to me and began to stroke my fox brush as though it were a pet. “Why, she is the worst of them all,” he ventured. He grabbed my fox pen and pointed it like a saber at his aunt. “She put a spell on Amalie and turned her into that.”

  I was taken aback. “A spell?”

  Amalie twirled round, her footwear causing her legs to slip right out from under her, and she plopped on the shiny floor, feet in two directions.

  Little Ludwig scrambled up to me and shushed me with my pen, pushing the bushy tail against my lips. He whispered loudly, “We must not speak of it, or she will retu
rn.”

  Around the edges of the brush I said, “She?”

  “Lola.”

  “But she has returned,” I blurted. “I met her at the ball not four weeks past.”

  Amalie rose up again and walked over to where I stood. She pulled the gloves from my sash. “She gave you these, did she not?”

  I felt a shiver. How would Amalie know this?

  “And did she tell you to toss them from your chambers if you need find her?”

  I nodded, breathless and unable to speak.

  “Well then,” Amalie sang. “You shall become as mad as me. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.”

  I grabbed at my gloves, but Amalie was too quick and danced about the room, holding them out in front of her.

  I began to panic. I could feel sweat gathering at my hairline. “What do you mean?”

  “You do not know her,” sang Amalie. “Her boldness knows no bounds. She bared her breasts in this very castle when she did not get the attention she sought. Just ripped her clothes off of her own body and stood in front of my father, naked. And in doing so, she soon became Countess of Landsfeld. Her brand of madness worked. But mine, well, judge for yourself.” Amalie tossed the gloves back to me, turned on her heel, and marched toward the door. “Elisabeth Wittelsbach, you will see. You must have something that she desires. She will not stop until she takes it from you.” She turned back to me then and removed an invisible cap from her head as though she were a gentleman bidding me adieu, and disappeared with a shrill soprano cry down the long hall.

  Little Ludwig and I found ourselves alone in the gallery amongst the beautiful ladies, their secrets, and their reputations. The portraits were of courtesans, nobility, beggar maids and faeries, side by side with no thought to rank or privilege. In court, all things proceeded in order of class. One’s station depended entirely on to whom one was issued, to whom one was married. Whether one was born male or female, and in which order of birth. But here, in my uncle’s gallery, all that mattered was beauty. And because the forms of beauty were somewhat vast and unrankable, it mattered not the clothing, the hairstyle or the age. It was delightful, really. And so different than anything in my recent experience. Indeed, the equality displayed upon the walls hearkened to my quickly evaporating childhood, the peasants and blackamoors with whom I played as a child, all of us running, laughing, climbing trees in the yard.

  “Who do you wish to marry when you grow up?” asked my little cousin as I sketched and wrote in my journal.

  Marry? I had not given one moment’s thought to the question, though lately Mummi had begun to ponder that very thing. My locket, buried beneath camisole, corset and yards of lace, caressed the picture of a possible suitor, though I’d not thought much beyond the kissing and riding and general frolicking. “Why, Ludwig, perhaps I shall never marry,” I ventured. “Perhaps, like Amalie, I shall spend my days as I please, running through palaces at will in whatever costume I prefer at the moment.”

  Little Ludwig placed his chubby, well-scrubbed claw upon my own. “But do you not long for a fancy gown? An enormous castle? Ladies-in-waiting rubbing ointments into your hands?”

  Embarrassed, I withdrew my uncared-for hand from my cousin’s and worried it into the glove. “Ludwig, what did Amalie mean when she mentioned Lola and taking something she desires? Was it merely madness?”

  My cousin shrugged his small, round shoulders. He dashed to the section of wall where blue-eyed, dark-haired Lola looked over her shoulder at the other ladies. “She let me fire her pistol once,” he said. “But I didn’t much care for it.”

  “Her pistol?” I began to recall my mother’s months earlier warning. She’d called Lola a witch. A dark enchantress.

  “But then your governess came in and the two began to quarrel.”

  “Baroness?”

  Little Ludwig demonstrated the scene from his memory, acting out his recollection on me. “She called Lola ‘sister’ and grabbed her by the shoulders. She slapped her hard. Then Lola took her leave and warned that sow, Wilhelmine. Told her she’d come to a bad end.”

  Baroness Wilhelmine and Lola Montez, sisters? Why, that was even more improbable than Archduchess Sophie and Mummi sharing blood. I wished to know more, but at that very moment, in from the hall walked my beloved. My Karl, who had grown taller, thinner and more awkward than his likeness in my locket.

  I curtseyed immediately, as did young Ludwig, apparently confused by the archduke’s sudden appearance.

  He beamed. “Ah, at long last, I might speak with you in the flesh.”

  “Yes,” I said, struck dumb about what next to say.

  “We have been wondering what has been keeping you, Duchess,” Karl offered, saving me from embarrassment. “Tea is now served in the pavilion.”

  “Your forgiveness, Your Grace,” I mumbled, feeling my cheeks grow hot as though ignited by coal.

  “Not to worry, dear Sisi.” Karl laughed, his eyes crawling over me head to toe. “It is fitting that you would linger in the hall of beauties.” My face grew hotter yet, and I attempted to conceal my book and pen behind my back, causing my bodice to project as though I’d intended for Karl to look there, upon my bosom. It was most awkward. Most unappealing. However, that was exactly where the archduke’s eyes did land.

  Little Ludwig interjected, “She is beautiful, is she not? Her tresses. Her carriage. Grace, elegance. Perhaps she will be queen one day.”

  I needed to alter this line of thought, as it reflected most boastfully on my person, and the words tumbled out. “I am wearing the handsome locket Your Grace so sweetly bestowed upon me.”

  Karl’s brows knit, and it was difficult to not look at the pustules that had grown larger yet upon his forehead since last we’d met. A cluster of angry red bumps, some festering tacky ooze. I hoped that he would not creep any closer. And yet, he did. He thrust his hand toward me, toward my bosom. “May I see it?”

  “Jewels,” screeched Little Ludwig, clapping his hands. “I love jewels.”

  I did not wish to reject the request, but modesty prevented my retrieval of the piece, which was nestled deep beneath layers of undergarments and tightly bound to me between busks.

  I did not know what to do, and then Little Ludwig supplied the answer. “Perhaps the lovely Duchess Elisabeth wishes to refresh before tea? We have been here a long while, after all.”

  “Of course.” Karl sighed, stepping backwards one, two, three times, but still, his eyes were pasted upon that part of me that ladies did not share.

  Little Ludwig led the way, down the hall and through the passage, and I kept step, feeling it improper to walk beside the archduke, who, when I turned round, seemed quite pleased to be viewing my skirts from three paces back.

  Once we arrived in the main apartment, I curtseyed and excused myself to attend to my needs in the ladies’ dressing room off of the main parlor. Behind the privacy screen, I felt warm, wet tears leak out my eyes. My heart had been emboldened with the promise of a beloved, the intoxication of romance, and now there was an emptiness. I was given to a new, cruel truth. I would not and could not love Archduke Karl. In his presence, I felt repulsion. Where my heart had kindled for a possible suitor—someone of royalty and good breeding, someone who bestowed gifts upon me—once that possibility loomed in the flesh, my heart felt flattened as if by mangle.

  Papa had spoken of this on occasion, the sadness of falling out of love. And here it had happened to me. It had happened against my very vow: to never unlove once I had loved. Through the watery assault of pity, I constructed my lament on a fresh page of my diary, recalling Heine, in his sad poem “The Lorelei”:

  I don’t know what it could mean,

  Or why I am so sad: I find,

  A fairytale, from times unseen,

  Will not vanish from my mind.

  The fairy tale of Karl. It had vanished. In an instant, no less, beneath the portraits of beauties. The hunger in his eyes as he’d painted hi
s desire over me. How it had made me feel like a mere sketch of myself. Only to be gazed upon, never to gaze back. Only Lola’s portrait seemed different. Her eyes had intention, purpose, as they bore out into the room. The other ladies, even the powerful archduchess, were merely impressions, there for taking. I closed my journal and stood, waiting for a sign. Waited for the next thing to happen.

  And then, it did happen. Lola’s words whispered like a flickering candle against my ear, the memory of her counsel: Virtue. Vision. Voice.

  The gloves she had bestowed upon me covered my hands. In their whiteness, they bespoke the idea of virtue, but inner wisdom? Indeed, white gloves were someone’s idea of virtue, for they did nothing but make using my hands more of a hardship. Virtue, ha! I pulled them off and cast them to the floor.

  But what of inner virtue? Of voice? My poems. My papa. The horses. The woods. These were the things I treasured beyond all else and felt ready to sing to world thereof. My personal chest of riches. I knew of these loves and felt bound to them, as though my heart’s desire could be satisfied just by being truly myself.

  And, so, what of vision? The locket. Yes. I reached my hand into my fine garments and with fingers that could now work correctly, as they were no longer encumbered, I grabbed the winged edge of Karl’s locket and cut through the corset laces, from inside to out. I ruined my brand-new garment, and yet, a rush of joy was the only thing I felt as my body was released from its torture.

  Once I was no longer constrained, I eased the locket and its chain over my head, where it tangled in my careful construct of ornament and braid. It had tarnished quite badly, perhaps rubbing against my scratched-up skin. I ripped the chain quite roughly through my hair and my scalp cried in pain, but I answered this like my mad cousin, Amalie. From the canary-song part of my throat I began to laugh. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. The more I heard my own laughter, the greater my desire for more. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha.