The Empress Chronicles

by Suzy Vitello

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Somehow we manage to keep Cory’s ingestion of pills and booze from Willow and Dad. I had the practice, was around enough borderline kids, addicts, and sociopaths to know how to keep parents guessing, but this is different. Cory’s a good kid with a big hole in his heart. I want to know what’s behind all of his sudden despair. And I want to read Sisi’s pages, find out more about the jagged, tarnished necklace hidden in the spine of the diary. So I agree to keep quiet. Cory and I, it seems, have struck another bargain.

  After Cory stops puking, and after I manage to get him to drink about a gallon of water and bury the empty vodka bottle in the bottom of the recycling bin, and, finally, at long last empty my very full bladder, Cory, the trench coat, and I wander into the clover, where bees are pollinating right and left under the noonday sun.

  I don’t want to know, not really, don’t want to stir things up, but out my mouth comes, “Did you and Jewellee win your beer pong game?”

  Cory sort of laughs, but it’s the kind of laugh that’s full of irony. “She was trying to make her emo boyfriend jealous. The two of them split as soon as the cops showed up.”

  I try to make my mouth not yank itself up in a smile. Schadenfreude.

  “It brought back some stuff, that party. That girl. The cops,” he says.

  I have no idea what he’s referring to, but I nod as if I do. Then I point to the tractor, which has become our little office, parked in the middle of the field. “What do you think?”

  “Good a place as any.” Cory shrugs, making a grab for the trench coat. “Plus, we have our tool bag.”

  It’s the very first truly hot day since summer started. Sweat beads have gathered at my hairline. If I lick my top lip I’ll taste salt. Dad and Willow will be busy in the goat shed all afternoon. I picture the newborn kid, its slick coat, its spindly legs. By now it’s probably standing on its own. Walking, even. Life happens so fast.

  And yet, here lies a 150-year-old story in the pocket of the coat, inches from us, about to unfold. It’s old hat now, this B and E business, and Cory gets us into the combine cab as easy as if he’s slicing a bagel in half. The cab is oven hot. He sets the trench coat between us: him in the pilot seat, me the co-pilot, Empress Elisabeth and her secrets in the middle.

  “I’m nervous,” I tell him.

  Cory reaches into a pocket and pulls out the old chain. The metal chunk at the end of it swings back and forth as he holds it up. The tip that scraped me raw sticks out like a fishhook.

  “Do you think that’s valuable?”

  Cory narrows his eyes. “Maybe it once was.”

  It looks like at one time it was a pocket watch. I can make out some Roman numerals etched into its face like a sundial. There’s a little clasp behind the jagged tip that resembles one of those wing pins flight attendants give to little kids. I pull it to me, the green, tarnished, coppery thing. My bumbling fingers manage to find their way to the tiny clasp, and with the poke of a fingernail, the latch springs open.

  Cory lets loose with a “Dude!” as though I’ve just found a treasure chest overflowing with gold.

  It’s a worn sepia picture inside. A photograph of a monarch. A queen, maybe.

  Cory examines the bleached, cracked miniature photograph. “Is this that empress?”

  “I don’t think so. It looks more like a Greek goddess or something.”

  Sweat drips down my face. Pools of water form between my shoulder blades, my armpits. As gross as this feels, it’s the same as the kid birth; I can’t imagine being anywhere else. From the coat pocket, I pull the collection of pages sandwiched inside my ingestion log cover. The diary. I look at Cory, who’s still examining the odd locket-watch. “You ready?”

  Cory hands the locket to me, clears his throat, and grabs the diary. “First page,” he says. “Looks like some poem. It says something about swallows and toils and prison bars.”

  I follow Cory’s finger as it draws down the page.

  “And here’s a sketch of locked-up girl, like Rapunzel.”

  “How Grimms.”

  “Yeah, but remember, the real Rapunzel was, um, ‘with child.’” When Cory said, “with child,” a weird bitterness popped into his voice. And something else.

  “What?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Cory?”

  “It’s just, you know, when you asked me about if I had a girlfriend in Germany?”

  I nod.

  “Well, what I like about Grimms? It’s not Disney. Not everything is a happy ending.”

  I touch his arm. The hair there is thick and a little slicked down from sweat. I think about the newborn kid. “It’s okay. You don’t need to spill it. Just in case you want to, you know?”

  He nods then pages ahead, scanning the words quickly. “The usual teenage-girl hearts and puppy dogs stuff.” Then, “Here’s something sort of cool. Her love interest maybe? A count? A sketch of the two of them on horseback.”

  “Let me see.” I scoot closer to him.

  There’s a faint drawing of a young girl sitting behind a tall, uniformed man, the two of them on a horse with a ridiculously long back. And some writing above the sketch.

  I point to it. “What’s this word here, Cory? Opfer? Das Opfer?”

  “Sacrifice,” he says. “I know that one because of all the church we had to go to.”

  Count Sebastian must die, in my head.

  Cory continues paging through the book and finds a passage that makes him laugh. “The baroness has taken to her bed again, this time with a bottle of castor oil and a hose to evacuate her bowels.”

  “Ha,” I say. “The gasbag.”

  He scans the yellowed pages, his eyes taking in the scripted foreign language. In the cab a fly buzzes about, lingering at the window, its little legs flattened like it’s trying to get moisture from the glass. It’s even too hot for insects. Warming vinyl smell fills my nostrils. I begin to itch. Finally, Cory says, “This is super weird here. It’s talking about a picture of her boyfriend. A dude named Sebastian. And other things she found in her diary. She blames some evil witch.” He looks up at me, the old winged necklace in my hand. “There’s something about the locket. Magic. She says here that the picture in the locket foretells the future.”

  “This locket?” I’m scratching my fingernail against the layers of tarnish.

  “I guess. Look here.” Cory points to a bunch of scribble. “‘Lola and I have made a bargain. I must agree to go to Bad Ischl.’”

  “According to the book I have, that’s where Franz Joseph proposed to her. It was a weird switcheroo. He was supposed to marry her sister.”

  “Yeah? Well, here’s this whole section about a lie. A bargain she made with this so-called witch, this Lola. It says something about having to go along with the plan and if she did, she’d live happily ever after with the count she was in love with. But we know that that didn’t happen.”

  Cory keeps reading, sharing bits with me now and then. It sounds like a fairy tale, Sisi’s diary: the castles, the spell, things disappearing, shape shifting. Lola. And the gassy governess, Baroness Wilhelmine. Fate. Love. Disappointment. All the elements of a story. But unlike the fairy tales I’m familiar with, there is no knight in shining armor. No prince or king who saves the day. Sisi married Franz Joseph and slowly went nuts.

  “This baroness of the enema,” Cory says. “She was in cahoots with this Lola witch. Sisi says the woman admitted it to her during the whole engagement party in that Austrian spa town.”

  I palm the locket; the old cracked picture leers at me. “Do you believe her?”

  “Believe what? That some weird spell was cast? Oh, c’mon, Liz.”

  I pull the old diary away from Cory. Scan through the pages of German, of writing set into verse. Drawings. And then I land on a sketch of Cory. It’s not really Cory, but it’s a dead ringer. In fact, it looks just like the picture I scribbled on the torn page. A roguis
h boy cloaked in a hood. It’s as though Sisi found my sketch and added to it. But that would be ridiculous.

  Drips of perspiration roll down my backbone. A funny twinge works its way up from my stomach. Something really weird is going on. And then I wonder about Dr. Greta. What does she know about the contents of this diary? My very last appointment with her is scheduled for tomorrow. What will I ask her? Will I confess to having stolen the diary? Does she even know about the locket?

  Like he’s reading my mind, Cory says, “So this Sisi chick had a pretty crazy imagination, seems like. What do you think your therapist knows about it all?”

  Engagement, Dr. Greta might call it, what I’m doing now. Ironic, but I’m engaging with the history I literally stole from her office. “Cory, don’t you remember this picture? I drew it. Part of it. And now, it’s different.”

  “You drew it?”

  “The torn pages, remember? I crammed them back into the diary. The boy in the hoodie.” I point to the sketch, which had turned the hoodie into a cape, but my pencil marks were still there. That was the face I drew. Cory’s face.

  “Dude,” says Cory.

  I push my face up close to the pages. “Don’t you see? It’s this guy she was in love with. She took my picture of you and turned it into this.”

  Cory seizes the book and then we both jump as a line of Harleys roars by on the road out front. “She put a caption there, the object of my fascination has found me even in my personal pages, something like that.”

  My heart triple-times right there in the fancy tractor cab. “Cory, what if, what if the story that’s written about the thing, well, what if it’s unfinished? What if writing now can change what happened then?”

  He cocks his head and scrunches his eyebrows. “You high?”

  “What if we, you and me right now, have the power to rewrite history?”

  “You are high. When did you pinch a bud off your dad’s stash?”

  I swat him with the back of my hand. “We have to test this.”

  Again, I get the cocked head.

  “Write something down, here.” I point under the sketch and the caption. “Let her know what her fate is. Warn her!”

  “Oh, come on, Liz. Really?”

  I swallow hard. Look into his eyes with the same overwhelming need I did when I ruined everything by lunging for Jeremy. But this is not another misread, not another Jeremy-the-gallery-owner blunder. “Cory,” I plead, “imagine what life could be like if you had the power to erase mistakes. Yours, or someone else’s.”

  Cory’s dark eyes get shiny. But just for a second. “What should I write?”

  I guide him back to the page. If this works? We’ll be engaging with royalty. Or, rather, a duchess who won’t have to become the empress of Austria after all. “Tell her to run. Tell her not to believe Lola. Tell her that if she wants true happiness with her count, she must flee Bad Ischl. She must not get engaged on Emperor Franz Joseph’s twenty-third birthday.”

  Cory takes a pen from the enormous dashboard of this behemoth tractor, and he begins to scrape foreign words across the yellowed page under the sketch of the boy that started out as him. Under the sketch he forms the words that, if I’m right, will spare this poor girl the agony she’d been destined to live.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  It was well after midnight when the gala concluded, and I left the grand ballroom wetter than a doused rat from perspiration, my sister and mother leading the way back to our rooms. The whole evening was a blur, my cotillion dance with the emperor included.

  Poor Nené could barely contain her disappointment, for not only had he not invited her to the dance floor—nobody had. My dear sister sat in her chair the entire night, carrying on conversations with the archduchess and being introduced as “my dearest niece” when well-wishers came by to pay their respects. The only consolation for Duchess Helene was that, sitting in such proximity to her aunt, she received the gusts of breeze from the attendants as they fanned the emperor’s mother, and thus stayed as fresh as the moment she walked into the ballroom.

  I, however, was less so.

  There had been four couples on the floor when the emperor and I had danced. Weckbecker and two other in the privy of Franz Joseph, with an equal number of ladies of the court. Oh, how I loved waltzing from partner to partner, the pattern and rhythm of it, so much like riding a quadrille on horseback. Though the emperor had barely paid me mind during the cotillion itself, as soon as the music died, he’d plucked his boutonniere from his uniform and, after kissing my wrist, he gathered both of my hands and presented me the single red rose, as though inserting a pearl back into an oyster. His face was ever so handsome, but I did not allow myself to gaze upon it. Instead, I envisioned my count’s face upon every man with whom I danced.

  I did not look upon the crowd, for fear of embarrassing my sister who, I was certain, would also receive a flower before the night was done. Perhaps he would offer Nené a nosegay proper?

  Once having tasted the movement to the music, I found it hard to sit back down and twiddle my thumbs while others danced. Good fortune followed as Weckbecker introduced me to a series of young men thereafter, and I danced nearly every dance.

  The end of the ball had come too soon, and Mummi bade we take our leave, thanking the archduchess and the emperor personally, but he was entangled in some other matter with his privy, so it was only his mother for whom we’d curtseyed before leaving.

  Then the archduchess did the most curious thing. She took both of my hands in her own, looked me in the eye, and said, “Elisabeth, I have misjudged you. Your grace on the dance floor, the way you unfold like a rose in the sun, well, it took my breath away.”

  I kissed her ring, and stuttered out a “Your Grace,” and then the three of us Wittelsbachs were escorted out by the ancient gentlemen, who’d all but disappeared until this moment and who smelled of herring and pipe smoke.

  We were left to attend to our nighttime rituals, with the directive that we were to join the emperor and his mother for a birthday luncheon on the day following. Oh, how I wished I could just sink into the bed and not face what I knew I was about to face.

  Whereas my sister had stomped and stormed and hissed and spit the day previous, now she merely lay down on the bed and wept. And not the angry weeping of a girl who did not get her way—this was a deeper, sadder, more egregious sorrow. It was as though someone had died and, of all of us, I would know most how the tentacles of grief reached within a heart and squeezed its life away. Had I not been bolstered by the thought of reuniting with Count Sebastian, I, too, would be aggrieved.

  Mummi stroked Nené’s back, and I joined them on the bed. “Do not give up, dear sister,” I offered. “We do not know what tomorrow will bring.”

  With those words my sister sprang bolt upright, as though awoken from a dream, and in one death grip of strength she pulled hard the locket, breaking the chain, and hurled the keepsake floorward. The fancy wing of the timepiece resembled a soaring eagle bound for a fish as my keepsake hit the wood.

  “Oh, my!” said Mummi.

  “I should have given that stupid necklace to the attendant!”

  Attendant?

  I picked the locket up. Inside, the same uniformed emperor stared out into the room, his countenance taking on an unapologetic demeanor, as though he were actually with us in the flesh. I was curious. “Why would you give my necklace to an attendant?”

  “A lady who admired it. She asked me if I would trade it for some silk gloves. I should have done so.”

  This puzzled me, briefly, and then I queried, “This lady, what did she look like? What did she say?”

  Before she could respond, there was the sound of a rough knock at the door. The knock I knew so well, for it was the same I’d heard lo these past dozen years. Baroness Wilhelmine.

  I opened the heavy door and there stood our governess, bearing a large, shrouded frame. “Help me in with this, Sisi,” she sai
d. “I cannot wait to hear! How went the ball?”

  As soon as this inquiry slipped out into the room, it propelled a new round of sobs from Nené. Mummi pointed to her eldest daughter and, turning to face the baroness, she mouthed, Not so well.

  I aided my governess in sliding her burden, the giant painting of Duchess Helene, across the floor and over to the window, and Baroness Wilhelmine scolded because I remained off-balance while I was still holding the locket. “What little bauble have you there, Sisi?” she asked. “Can you not put down your toys for one minute?”

  I held up the locket, tick-tocking it by its severed chain. “We had a little mishap.”

  The baroness scrunched her eyes and her brow became one long line. “Your locket!” she said. “So. What happened, exactly?”

  I offered my account of the evening, and Mummi edited my version, and then Nené overwrote both of our accounts of what had transpired, and all the while our governess shook her head.

  She muttered quietly under her breath, and perhaps I was the only one to hear her utter, “Lola Montez is up to no good.”

  So she knows. Perhaps Little Ludwig and Amalie were not mad, after all. Lola’s warning continued to sound in my head. Her dictate to go along with any event in Bad Ischl. But how could I be reunited with the count if the emperor chose me over my sister? I turned back to the matter at hand. “Let us look at that painting,” I suggested, peeling the blanket back.

  It still smelled of oil and turpentine, and in the heat, I sensed it was still somewhat tacky, but the wrapping had been carefully stretched to the frame, two pieces of intersecting balsa wood protecting the fresh paint. Now unveiled, Nené’s portrait loomed menacingly in the semi-dark of the room, and the “X” made by the wood pieces amplified the less-than-flattering likeness, so that, if one were being honest, it looked as though the duchess were being negated, the intersecting balsa covering her bosom.