Sisi, page 41
Just before eleven, while she was in the final minutes of her lesson, a knock sounded on Sisi’s door. That’s odd, she thought. Baron Nopcsa and her ladies guarded her privacy ferociously—and the footmen always turned away petitioners who came uninvited or without appointment. Kathi Schratt was expected to visit with her and Franz later that day, but surely she would not have come this early.
Just then Ida burst into the room, her mouth open as if she were choking on words she couldn’t stand to utter. Baron Nopcsa swept in right behind her. “What is the meaning of this?” Sisi gasped, rising, still clutching her Greek book in her hands. She was entirely unused to such abrupt interruptions. “I have not invited either of you in here.” But when she saw the baron’s pale face, her irritation vanished, replaced by a sensation of thick dread. “What…what is it?”
“Your son, the Crown Prince Rudolf…” the baron began.
“Yes, what about Rudy? He’s at Mayerling, at the hunting lodge with his gentlemen.”
“He was at Mayerling hunting, indeed. But not with his gentlemen. With the lady.”
Sisi blinked, suppressing the groan that formed in the back of her throat. “What do I care about his female company?”
“Your Grace.” Baron Nopcsa swallowed, as if the words could not make their way past his lips.
The Greek book slipped from Sisi’s hands, falling to the floor. “What? What is it, Baron?”
“The Crown Prince and Mary Vetsera…”
“Yes, what of them?”
“They are both dead.”
OUR CROWN PRINCE IS DEAD!
The black ink crawled spiderlike across the front page of every newspaper in Austria-Hungary as, around the capital, everything went dark. Black banners were unfurled, draping the windows of the Hofburg, every façade on the Ringstrasse, and the city’s churches. Black garb enshrouded the people who shuffled, heads down, through the quiet streets.
Outside the palace the crowds wept and prayed, this gathering entirely different from that of thirty years earlier, when they had descended upon the outer gates of the Hofburg to dance and celebrate. When Sisi, a young mother, had held her newborn Rudy to her breast, infatuated with him and reveling in the merriment outside her bedroom windows that heralded his birth. Now she drew the shades of that same bedroom, closing out the light and the sight of the mourners, inviting in nothing but black.
Blackest of all was the news that came the following day. While all around the capital and the empire the initial reports swirled, inside the palace, Sisi and Franz Joseph slowly came to understand the cause of their son’s death. Rudolf’s sudden demise was not the result of some hunting accident or attack by a mad Slavic separatist, as initially supposed. It was not a case of poisoning at the hands of a court enemy or vengeful servant. It was not an assault by a jilted husband, hoping to avenge himself on the lascivious prince. It was not due to a heart attack or a fatal mixing of the prince’s medications. It wasn’t even, as some reports indicated, a result of the infatuated Mary Vetsera murdering her royal lover, as Sisi had come to believe.
No, the truth was worse than all of that. Worse than what the worst report had suggested. Their deaths were the result of a suicide pact—a ghoulish contract initiated and acted out by Rudolf himself. Rudolf, so long denied authority and respect by his father and his father’s court, had exerted his authority over the one person who had told him that he was her god. As the crown prince of the city known as “the suicide capital of the world,” Rudolf had staged one ultimate and irreversible act of defiance. In shooting his willing lover and then shooting himself, he had found himself, at last, to be brave and powerful. And he had finally gotten his father’s attention.
Rudolf had left a letter to his mother, apologizing for not being a better son. He had left another note for Valerie, urging her and her fiancé to leave Austria. But most telling of all was the fact that he had left no letter for his father, Emperor Franz Joseph.
The blows kept coming, arriving at the Hofburg like storm-fueled waves assaulting the shore. The following day, the distressed and confused Baroness Helene Vetsera arrived at the gates of the Hofburg, begging for information. Her daughter had been missing for days, and she’d had no word from her. The last she knew was that the girl had gone out with a female friend to do some shopping. This friend, a confidante of the crown prince’s, had been planning to take Mary with her to see the prince, and together the lovers were to travel to Mayerling Lodge. Baroness Vetsera lingered in the palace, weeping and begging for admission to Sisi’s rooms. Pleading for any information the palace might share with her of her daughter’s whereabouts.
Meanwhile, on the other side of her doors, Sisi received more terrible news: palace aides and doctors had completed their search of the crown prince’s rooms and clothing, including the clothing he had worn on the fateful night of his suicide. Found in the prince’s uniform pocket was a letter from the lady who had served as go-between for Mary Vetsera and Rudolf—the lady who had facilitated their meeting and their trip out to Mayerling to enact their morbid plot. The name of that lady: Countess Marie Larisch.
This last bit of news, on top of the previous days’ shocks and discoveries, sent Sisi into a state of near paralysis. Someone carried her to bed—Marie? Ida?—where she lay, her head splitting with pain and her thoughts clawing their way through her mind in quick, unrelenting succession. She, Sisi, was to blame! She had brought Larisch into this household. She, the mother who had given Rudolf his sensitive and moody disposition, had refrained from speaking to her son about his dangerous behavior. She had denied how deep the troubles ran, always taking refuge behind her own personal unhappiness. In so many ways, she had aided this horrific and ghastly turn of events. It was her fault—she might as well have fired the gun that killed her only son!
Both Valerie and Franz agreed that Sisi was in no state to attend the funeral. It promised to be a draining and very public event, attended by heads of state from across Europe, as well as the thousands of commoners who had descended upon the capital. Instead, Sisi spent the day of the funeral in bed, covers pulled tight over her, bedroom shades drawn. Even with the windows shut and the daylight blocked, Sisi could hear the doleful drums as, outside, the funeral procession glided past. Franz, dutiful Franz, was out there, marching with his son’s coffin. Shouldering his burden, playing his imperial part. As the parade moved on and eerie silence settled in its place, Sisi was left alone once more with her own thoughts. Her own inescapable realization that she, more so than anyone, could have saved her son. And yet, she hadn’t.
Late that night, after all the mourners had scattered, Franz Joseph returned to the Hofburg. As he shut himself into his room to grieve in private, Sisi dressed. She covered herself in black, pulling a thick veil over her face, and she slipped out a side door of the palace. There, under cover of the dark wintry night and her mourning attire, she made her way on foot, anonymously, to the nearby Capuchin Crypt where Rudolf’s body rested. Odd, she thought, her body numb to the frigid air and bitter midnight wind. I finally find a way to slip out of the palace to walk the city incognita.
Sisi knocked outside the gates of the ancient monastery. Overhead the church tower clamored abruptly, the bells beginning their twelve peals. A cloaked figure emerged from the far door, the aged man’s face registering shock at the black-garbed figure that lurked at his gates, like a haunting midnight apparition.
“Good evening, Father.”
The priest approached hesitantly. “May I help you, Madame?”
“Please, Father, won’t you let me in to visit the tomb of the crown prince?” Sisi felt that even the utterance of these words sapped so much of her strength that she might collapse. She clutched the rusted iron gate for support.
The priest looked up at the bell tower, still chiming overhead, as if to confirm the midnight hour. “The crown prince? But…but you come so very late. And who are you, Madame?”
“I am his mother. And you are correct; I’m so very late, entirely too late.”
XVI
SHE LIES MOTIONLESS IN BED, detecting a soft gurgling sound, like the trickle of water. Surely she is dreaming, because she is indoors, in her bedroom, where no brook can reach her. And yet, water seeps in now through the crack under her door. The stream of water picks up until it is no longer a trickle but a flood, pouring in through the sides of her door and her windows. Does she dream? She sits up, horrified, as she stares out the windows, glimpsing the moon shining in through the water. But this is no ordinary moon: it shines as bright as the midday sun, and the room is suddenly bathed in a cool, otherworldly glow.
“Irma!” she calls out, terrified. The flow of water has stopped, but the door opens slowly, creaking and groaning, sloshing the water about on the parquet floor. Irma would have rushed in, would have come running at the sound of her mistress’s terror. But this isn’t Irma who stands before her in the blinding moonlight. “Ludwig?” She says the name with a mixture of shock and incredulity. “Ludwig? It can’t be you. Can it?”
Ludwig stands unresponsive, his entire figure soaking wet, his clothing and hair heavy with moisture.
“Ludwig! Why are you so wet?”
Now he answers, his voice calm. “I’ve come from the lake.”
She feels her skin ripple with goosebumps. Surely she is dreaming. But why is it that she cannot force herself to wake, as she always does during her other nightmares? “The lake? But…you’re dead.”
Ludwig stares directly at her, his light eyes illuminated by the sunlike moon. “Dead, but not yet free.”
She dreams—surely she dreams. “Not free?” she repeats. “Why not free?”
“Because…my fate is tied to others.”
She shivers under the bedcovers, saying nothing.
“Soon you will join me,” Ludwig continues, still standing in the doorway, “and we shall be free, and we will be together.”
“Join you?”
“Yes.” He nods, his damp hair matted to his handsome, youthful face.
“Join you…where?”
Ludwig turns, stepping back through the door. If he isn’t real, if he isn’t really here, why do his boots thump on the floor, disrupting the puddles of water? Before leaving, Ludwig pauses, turning back to Sisi as he hovers at the threshold. “In paradise. It won’t be much longer now.”
CHAPTER 16
Gödöllő Palace, Hungary
Spring 1889
Grief stalked Sisi, following her to Gödöllő, turning the place of so much earlier joy into a haunted, uninhabitable perdition. The glimpse of new crocuses pushing their way through the frozen earth reminded her that life continued on, even though her son was gone. She recalled how she had once delighted in springtime in Hungary—the smell of acacia, the vivid hues of the river, the stables and meadows lined with tulips—but even those memories now caused her raw and red-rimmed eyes to sting with fresh tears. This was, after all, the country that had loved and been most dearly loved by Rudolf. They loved him because of his relationship to her, Sisi. They loved him for his physical and emotional resemblance to her. The memory of that love now curdled into heartbroken grief, overwhelming her, carrying with it the noxious medley of reminder and rebuke. Nowhere would she ever be safe from memory. And thus, from self-rebuke.
Nor was she safe from the reports being written back in Vienna. Vicious stories claiming that the empress, driven mad with grief, kept to her rooms; descriptions of her cradling a pillow in her lap, cooing and speaking to it as if it were her baby boy, the crown prince. As the public learned the truth of Rudolf’s suicide—a truth that Franz’s ministers had frantically tried to conceal—the newspapers churned out reports and commentaries on Sisi’s connection to the Wittelsbach madness, a genetic taint that had steadily and patiently seeped its way across the family’s borders, poisoning even the steady and sensible Habsburgs, as surely as a plague. Always the blame was on her, Sisi; never did the writers concede that Franz, a Habsburg, was also 50 percent Wittelsbach. That his mother, Archduchess Sophie—the most sensible of them all—had passed her Wittelsbach blood to her son. No, it was always Sisi’s diseased heritage; the taint of madness was always her parental contribution and birthright. The Wittelsbach madness, they all suspected—the scourge that had first taken her father, then her cousin Ludwig, and now Rudolf—would surely take her next.
Back in Vienna, Franz, who sought his familiar and tested form of therapy by burying himself in his work, made a valiant effort to refute these reports. He even addressed parliament directly, disavowing the rumors that his wife now added to his sorrow and burden with her own unstable behavior. And yet, the slanders continued to slide off of the printing presses and into the hands of voracious readers across the continent and, indeed, as far away as America.
“I should just give myself up to madness, to make them all happy rather than make them liars,” Sisi said one morning in early spring, looking over the papers as her breakfast turned cold on the table before her. “Well, at least all of those people who have always hated me so much can take satisfaction in the fact that my son shall never sit on the Habsburg throne.” With that, she propped her elbows on the table and wept.
Into this state of melancholy came, at last, some welcome news, like a spear of sunlight piercing the walls of a black cloud. Andrássy wrote. He had heard that she was in Hungary, and he wished, after all this time, to visit her. She told him that his visit would be most welcome.
Sisi received Andrássy in her private rooms. Though she stood to welcome him, she felt her legs tremble at actually beholding her guest. Here he was, after all this time apart, after so much life had been lived, and lost, in his absence.
“Hello, Sisi.” He hovered in her doorway, looking tenuously at her, as if he felt a shyness that he’d never before displayed, even in the earliest days of their acquaintance.
“Andrássy, hello. Please come in.” She watched him enter, taking in his appearance. She noted how his hair, once so thick and dark, now fell limp and white around his face. His eyes, once like black velvet, appeared sunken, the skin creeping in on them from all sides. Andrássy had become an old man, Sisi realized, with a pang of fresh sadness.
But of course he had, she reasoned, chiding herself for such nostalgia. It had been years, decades, since they had been young idealists, falling in love with each other and the idea of Hungarian autonomy. And yet, to behold him so changed, to see how drastically this present version of the man disagreed with the version of him that she held in her mind—it was staggering.
“Thank you for coming,” Sisi said, her voice slightly breathless. If he looked so ragged and weary to her, how must she appear to him? And suddenly, for the first time in she didn’t know how long, she felt a blush warm her cheeks, a sensation he had always pulled from her, but one she hadn’t experienced in what felt like an eternity.
“Sisi.” He smiled at her now, and she saw the faintest glimmer in his eyes, like the last flames of a fading fire.
“It’s good to see you, Andrássy. You look very well.”
He lifted a finger, wagging it at her. “You’ve never been good at lying. You’ve never been able to hide your thoughts.”
She couldn’t help but laugh now. “Not from you, at least. Please, sit.”
He did so, willingly, but she noticed how he winced, grabbing his lower stomach as he settled into the chair.
“Can I order us some tea?” she asked.
He shook his head, so she ordered just a cup of tea for herself. “Then if not tea, how about something else? Champagne? Perhaps even we have cause to celebrate; it’s not every day I have my old friend back with me after all this time.”
“I wish I could, but it causes me such terrible pain to drink.” He grimaced at the thought. “I won’t subject you to that.”
“Are you ill?”
“Yes. My physician calls it a cancer.” Andrássy pointed toward his lower abdominals.
“Is it…is it serious?”
“They do not know. They don’t know much about it. So, I suppose, as with all unanswerable questions, only time shall reveal the truth.”
She nodded, sipping her tea as a silence spread between them. Andrássy and illness were two things that had never mingled together in her mind, two threads of clashing colors that could never be woven into the same braid. Andrássy, to her, was strength, perpetual and unfailing strength. And yet, even he now failed.
His next words pulled Sisi from her reverie. “I can’t tell you how devastated I was—we all were—to hear the news.”
She shifted in her chair as she felt her eyes begin to sting. Taking a sip of tea, she fought off the threat of fresh tears.
“We all loved him here.”
“I know,” Sisi said, lowering her teacup. “Thank you.”
But he leaned forward, continuing: “I hope you don’t blame yourself. No mother should ever have to see…It was not something—”
She lifted a hand, silently begging him to stop. Knowing that she would not be able to fend off the grief that was surging through her if he went on. “I know, Andrássy. He was…Rudy was…a troubled man.” It was all she could manage.
Andrássy ran his hands through his limp white hair, and Sisi fought hard, clutching and clawing her way out of the suffocating haze of despair that lurked all around her. She looked back at Andrássy and forced her thoughts to land elsewhere, on anything other than the memory of Rudy. She focused on the man before her, forced herself to remember the thick waves of brown that had once flown wildly around his animated features.
When he spoke next, she heard a trace of his old passion. “I could flay the people who have dared to write anything about you. They won’t leave you in peace, even now?”
At this, she felt less raw. It was easier to talk about her own anger—that had hardened and scabbed over after all of these years—than it was to speak of the fresh and aching pain of Rudy’s recent death.
