One afternoon he took me to a site just a few blocks from the Residence on Prinzregenstrasse, and he told me that he was building me a little palace of my very own. He referred to it as our Little Olympus, and he was intensely proud of his plan. He had worked closely with his architects on the design, and he told me that in one year it would be complete.
“But my dear,” I protested fondly, “I have been so happy at the Residence, close to you. I don’t need a house of my own.”
“Of course you do. Nobility must keep up appearances, my dear.”
“But I’m not nobility, Ludwig,” I laughed.
“Yes, you are. I have given you baronial title to the estate and lands around Ravensfeld. You are a Baroness, dear Venus!”
I stared at him. “You’re joking, of course.”
He looked hurt. “You know me better than that. It is within our power to confer titles as a reward for services rendered to the crown. You have done us an incalculable service, and we wish to show our appreciation. And we will not brook refusal.”
“I certainly shan’t refuse, then,” I smiled. I had never before heard him use the royal “we.” I kissed him fondly. “Thank you, your Majesty.” And that is how I became Rhawnie, Baroness von Ravensfeld.
Of course the Baron von Zander was livid when he heard the news. He mounted a real campaign against me. One afternoon when Ludwig and I were riding in my special carriage—it bore a small picture of Venus on the side, surmounted by the royal crest—we were pelted by ripe fruit and stones. An angry mob of students swirled around the carriage, and instead of whipping up the horses, our coachman stopped to berate them. They climbed on the steps outside the doors and hammered at the windows with their fists.
“How dare they! Ludwig, can’t you do something? This is outrageous, insulting!” I cried.
“Would you like to get out and walk?” the King suggested mildly.
“And be trampled to death? No, thank you.” I shouted up to the driver, “For Heaven’s sake, ride through them! Come on, hurry up!”
Finally the frightened horses bolted and we swept forward, scattering the shouting mob. It was the first of many such incidents. The King seemed saddened but resigned. “My only regret is that they have upset you,” he said. “But you, they might have hurt you!” I cried.
“Oh, no,” he shook his head. “They wouldn’t do that.” My only confidante was Anna. “I know who is responsible for this,” I told her. “The Baron. He sees that my influence over the King is growing and he is frightened because he thinks I have Ludwig under my thumb, the way he has Maximillian under his. The fool! I don’t want to rule this stupid country! I only want to live here and enjoy the good fortune that has come our way. And the lies he is spreading! That I have put some kind of Gypsy spell on the King! That I am robbing the country and sending money to confederates aboard! Confederates! I don’t know anybody! Such nonsense. I have a good mind to confront him publicly and deny everything!”
Anna put her arms around my shoulders and shook her head violently. Her frizzy curls waved and her homely face was filled with concern.
“You’re right,” I said more calmly, “it would be a mistake to goad him into doing anything nastier. As long as he draws the line at scandal—I’m used to that—a few angry students don’t frighten me.”
What did bother me was Ludwig’s refusal to believe in the gravity of the situation, and in the Baron’s treachery. Every so often he would startle me with a remark like, “I am tired of being King. I have done all I can for them.” And, “Maximillian is ambitious; he should rule before he loses the hunger to rule, before he gets too old.”
“But the Baron!” I reminded him. “Your son is in his power!”
“Oh, I’m not worried about Wolfgang,” the King said. “And you shouldn’t worry, either. Beauty was never meant to to strain her brains over politics.”
Sweet as he was, he could be rather infuriating, this King of mine.
We spent the summer at Nymphenburg, the estate west of Munich which had been built by Ludwig’s grandfather or great-grandfather on the model of the French palace at Versailles. In addition to the main house, which was built in the seventeenth century, there were several smaller houses on the grounds, elegant cottages or pavillions, as Ludwig called them.
Prince Maximillian and the Baron came to spend a week in early September, just before the King and I planned to return to the city. They wanted to enjoy the first hunt of the season. The Baron called on me at the Amalianburg, the hunting lodge where I was staying. I preferred it to the big house, because it was small and private. I invited the Baron to take tea with me on the small terrace that overlooked a sleepy stream. Swans drifted past, gathering at the riverbank to fight for crumbs of cake that I tossed them.
“Will you hunt with us tomorrow?” the Baron asked me.
“And what do you hunt around here, Baron. Yellow haired Russian singers?”
The Baron laughed. “No, that species is too rare, Baroness, to risk extinction. You are much more valuable to me alive. We hunt wild boar. It’s a very thrilling sport, but it can be dangerous. A cornered boar is not like an English fox. He does not stand still and let the dogs tear him to pieces. Boars have been known to charge horses—and men. But perhaps you would prefer a tamer sport, Baroness.” Every time he used the title, he stressed it mockingly. “We can fish in the river, for example.”
“I am not afraid of Bavarian pigs,” I said meaningfully. “I would like to see this hunt of yours.”
“I am delighted that you feel you can trust me,” the Baron smiled.
“Oh, I don’t trust you. Not a bit.” Automatically I studied the pattern of the leaves in the bottom of my tea cup. I saw travel, money, love. But no sign of danger or death. “I have heard that some of the most dreadful rumors are flying around Munich,” I said thoughtfully. “Even as we sit here, people listening to and believing the most ridiculous stories about me. You and I both know that these tales have no basis in fact. Their source is the imagination of one man: you.”
“Dear Baroness!” The Baron’s long face widened as he grinned at me. He tried to assume an air of injured innocence, but he was too pleased that his scandal had reached my ears. “I am as fond of you as the King himself, believe me! What possible reason could I have for wishing you ill?”
“None. But a man like you doesn’t need a reason. A whim will suffice. You know very well that I’m no threat to your power, Baron. Power doesn’t interest me—to keep it is too much like hard work. What you are doing hurts the King more than it hurts me. Why don’t you stop?”
“You excite me, Baroness,” he said softly, hitching his chair closer. “Ordinarily I have no patience with women. I admit your grasp of politics is a little shaky, but that’s not important. You’re still not like the rest—stupid, boring bitches. You have known deep passion, strong hatred, and pain.” He touched one of the gold filigreed bracelets that Seth had given me. They were the only items of jewelry that remained from those days. It didn’t matter. I had plenty of things to remind me of him. The Baron sighed, “These fascinate me. They are so delicate, so exquisite. And unusual. I understand you are rarely seen without them. It’s intriguing.”
He covered my wrists with his hands, pinning them to the table. His fingers were long and strong, and my attempts to pull away were futile.
“But you wear bracelets underneath as well, don’t you?” he asked. He released the catch on the left bracelet and it fell open, exposing the thin purple scar underneath. “London, wasn’t it? You see how well I know you. You were in the depths of despair over that absurd gambler. And you persuaded him to marry you. Ah, these are the loveliest bracelets of all. Bracelets of pain.”
His face was only inches from mine. His pupils were so small they were almost non-existent, and his eyes looked like metal coins, cold and hard and flashing. I felt simultaneously attracted and repulsed by him. He embraced me, coiling around me like a serpent, caressing and choking me.
“What did it feel like?” he whispered. He was trembling all over. “Did you bleed much? Were you naked when you did it? I would have been. Oh, to feel the warm blood flowing over my naked body! Death must have been very near. So near, so beautiful. Is Death warm, or cold? Tell me about the pain. Show me.”
I showed him. I overturned a teacup and smashed it down on the table, then I grasped a sharp-edged shard and slashed at his face. He gave an ecstatic sob, like a man in the heights of ecstasy, and put his fingers to his cheek. Blood oozed through them and splashed on the tablecloth.
I leaped up, panting. He didn’t move for a whole minute. He just sat there, breathing deeply, eyes closed, mouth slightly open. I was horrified, but I couldn’t tear myself away.
“You—you are sick,“ I whispered. “You are disgusting!"
He opened his eyes and focused on me with difficulty. “I must have you,” he said hoarsely. “An alliance—we must join together in love and pain. For the King. And the country—”
“You’re crazy,” I said bluntly. “I’d sooner bed with a wild boar.” And I picked up my skirts and ran into the little house.
The next day, I set off with the hunters. Even though I was on my guard, the Baron managed to manoeuvre me away from the rest of the party. We urged our horses up a low cliff and stood listening for the sounds of the pursuit. Villagers beat drums and pans and shouted loudly, trying to drive the beasts out from their lairs in the thickest part of the forest into the range of the hunters, who were armed not with guns but with spears. I could hear the baying of dogs and the occasional whinny of a nervous horse.
“They’re over there,” I said to the Baron. “On the other side of that thicket.”
“You’re afraid to be alone with me?” the Baron asked, chuckling. “Then we should join the others without delay. Oh, how annoying.” He dismounted.
“What’s the matter?”
“This one has a habit of sucking in air before he is saddled and letting it out later.” He pounded his horse’s side with the flat of his hand and jerked the girth tighter.
“He thinks it’s a great joke to do it when we’re rocking along full tilt. He threw me badly once. You wouldn’t mind holding his head, would you. Baroness? Of course, if you are afraid—” He let the taunt stand in the air.
“Of course not.“ I climbed off my horse and walked around to the front of the Baron’s mount. “Why didn’t you do this before you left the stable?“
“I did,” puffed the Baron, giving the strap a final jerk before fastening it, “but he always manages to hold some in reserve for half an hour later. There, that should do it. Shall we go?”
We walked to my horse and he bent over to give me a leg up. As I was swinging my other leg into the saddle, he put his arms around my waist and dragged me down to the ground. He took me by surprise and had me pinned under him before I could begin to repulse him.
“Stop it!” I breathed angrily. “Stop it at once!”
He endured my struggling for only a few minutes before he struck me a vicious blow on the face with his fist. Then he shoved my legs apart and tried to ram something hard into me. It kept bumping into my thighs, and it was certainly not human flesh and muscle. I twisted and squirmed, and when he sat back to reconsider his approach, I kicked him in the face.
He sprawled on the ground. I leaped up. Glancing down, I saw something silvery shining in the grass. It was a riding crop, with an ornate handle topped with a boar’s head. Our Baron had an odd sense of sexuality.
I snatched up the crop and began to lash him with it, on his face and neck and shoulders. At first he put his hands up to ward off the blows, but then something strange happened. He let down his defense, opened his arms and lay spreadeagled under me.
“Harder!” he moaned. “Hit me harder, I beg you!”
I stared at him. I felt utterly sickened and revolted. What kind of man was this? I dropped the riding crop.
“You are a depraved animal!” I breathed. And I mounted my horse and rode away from him. That was the end of my day of boar-hunting. I knew there would be no point in telling Ludwig about the incident; he simply could not or would not believe the Baron capable of such behaviour.
When King Ludwig and I got back to Munich, I found that in our absence work on my little house on the Prinzregenstrasse had been accelerated. The Little Olympus was almost finished.
“I wanted it to be ready before winter came,” the King told me. “I put two hundred extra men to work on it.” The finished product was truly exquisite, a miniature palace with jewel-box rooms decorated with gilded cornices and mirrors. King Ludwig donated some of his finest works of art to adorn the walls and to fill the empty spaces. I had a fine Rubens in my bedroom, the Praxiteles Aphrodite in my drawing room, and two gorgeous panels by Dürer in my dining room, a naked Adam and his Eve. My music room had a vaulted ceiling covered with paintings of the nine muses, beautiful Teutonic-looking girls, each wearing a scanty diaphanous tunic of a different color from the rest. Enthroned among clouds in the center of the ceiling was Aphrodite herself, who bore, not surprisingly, a remarkable resemblance to myself.
“The Queen and Source of all inspiration,” said the King rhapsodically. “You, dear Venus. You!”
My drawing room attracted the usual number of gallants and sycophants. Admirers paid court, dukes and princes vied for the honor of my company at dinner, poets came seeking inspiration and musicians begged me to sing their songs. One night the King brought Franz Liszt to a dinner party I was giving.
Liszt greeted me warmly and kissed my hand. “Ah, the beautiful Golden Gypsy!” he said, giving birth to a title that would follow me for the rest of my stay in Bavaria, and even after that. “You are even more beautiful than I remember, Baroness. Tell me, did you follow my advice and begin the study of voice?”
“I did indeed, Monsieur Liszt,” I said. “My King insisted and I had to obey.”
“The world is fortunate,” Liszt smiled.
“Signor Loccatelli has nothing but praise for her,” said the King enthusiastically. “You should hear her, Franz! She really would shame a nightingale now!”
“I would love to hear you sing, Baroness,” said Liszt. “Perhaps we can have an impromptu recital?”
The guests crowded around the piano in the music room. I sang Italian songs, Schubert lieder, opera arias, and finally some Gypsy songs that Liszt and I both loved. When we were finished our little audience roared its approval. I flushed with pleasure—it was the first time I had sung in public—and I thanked Liszt warmly.
“It was a pleasure for me, too,” he assured me. “I want to compose for you. You inspire me!”
“She inspires all of us,” King Ludwig said. “Ah, Franz, in one more year my new opera house will be finished. Loccatelli says Rhawnie will be ready to appear in public. If you would consent—it would be such an exciting experience—!”
Liszt said, “I cannot refuse, your Majesty. I would be delighted to accompany the Baroness in her first solo recital. I shall begin at once to compose for the occasion.” Suddenly a window shattered. A woman screamed, and the occupants of the music room, which was on the second floor of the house, surged towards the doors. I grabbed the King’s hand and ran to the windows. The street below was clotted with students, all shouting things like. “The King pays for a whore while the people starve!”
“The Russian harlot is a spy!”
“Must our taxes finance a King’s lust?” We learned later that the leader of the demonstration, which the police soon broke up, was not a student at all but a professional radical. He was doubtless in the pay of the Baron von Zander.
“This is outrageous,” I muttered. “They must be stopped.” I went out on the balcony that overlooked the street. When they saw me their fury intensified. A stone whizzed past my ear.
“Rhawnie, for the love of Heaven, come back!” the King pleaded.
“My God, will music lose you just when she has found you?” Liszt fretted.
I ignored them. “Why don’t you tell the man who is paying you to show himself and accuse me to my face!” I said to the crowd. “Or is the Baron von Zander too much of a coward to denounce me publicly?”
My remaining guests gasped at my foolhardiness. To insult the Baron was tantamount to idiocy. I didn’t care. I wished I could tell the world what kind of degenerate reptile he really was. But no one would believe me.
I was determined to show the people of Munich that I would not be intimidated by the Baron’s tactics. I rode daily in the parks, accompanied King Ludwig on his strolls around the city, and went out every night to parties, balls and the theater. Once or twice I even went to a gambling salon to try my luck, and I won. Sheer accident, I told myself. But I knew that the old magic was there; yet every moment I spent at the faro table reminded me of Seth Garrett, and it was painful. I didn’t stay long.
I wore elegant furs and velvets. My finery, particularly my jewels, became the subject of cartoons and critical articles in the press. One evening at the opera I wore a magnificent ruby necklace that had belonged to the King’s grandmother. He presented it to me on his birthday and told me that it was the only piece in his collection that could do me justice. At other times he gave me tiaras, diamond chokers, bracelets, rings. The press had a field day, accusing me of sacking the public treasury. Of course the pressmen were in von Zander’s employ. I found that I could not defend myself against the lies they printed. Editorial writers began to suggest that if the King didn’t send his tart away, his government would fall.
“Can’t we do something to stop him?” I asked the King. “I don’t care for myself—but you! Oh, my friend, why should you endure such insults? Every day the crowds get bigger and more hostile and the articles in the papers are more vicious. Where will it end?"
“Aren’t you sorry you learned to read?" the King asked. “If you were still illiterate you wouldn’t even know that newspapers existed."
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