Sisi, page 6
Rudy looked at her appraisingly, his opinion of her credibility clearly still undecided. How many tricks had Gondrecourt played on him, each with some hidden moralistic lesson? Surely he thought this was just another such test. Oh, but to have Gondrecourt come back now would be the cruelest one!
“Rudy, you can trust me. I am your mamma.” Sisi swallowed, reaching into the fold of her skirt. “See here? This is you. As a little boy. I carry it with me always.” She showed the miniature portrait to the boy, who looked at it but would not take it into his own hands, as she suggested. She replaced the portrait into her pocket. “And see?” She lifted another miniature likeness. “I carry this one, as well.”
“Gisela,” Rudy said, the faintest hint of a smile touching his lips as he said the name of his elder sister.
“Rudy, I was away for a bit. But I’m back now. And I promise that you will never see that man again. Do you know what a promise is?”
The little boy didn’t answer.
“A promise,” she explained, “is when somebody says that they will do something, and you know that they will do it. You can trust them.” Andrássy’s face burst into her mind, but Sisi forced herself not to think of him, not to think of the yearning she felt for that man. How he had once told her this very same thing when she had been wounded. I want to show you that you can trust again, Sisi.
She folded her hands in front of her on the table and looked squarely at her son. “I promise you, Rudy, you are done with that man.”
After supper, she convinced him to take off his military uniform, averting her eyes at his clear bashfulness. “My darling, the bathwater is warm. I promise you.” Rudy walked distrustfully toward the tub, clearly not believing her. He put his hand in and, noting that it was in fact warm, looked at her in mild surprise.
He sat in the tub for a few moments, motionless. She recalled, her heart thrashing inside of her, how bath days had been such a wild and unruly time in her childhood home at Possenhofen—how she and Néné had played and sung and made such a mess of the weekly event. Such a carefree contrast to the little boy who sat before her now like a block of ice that needed thawing.
Once he was dressed in his nightclothes, Sisi tucked Rudy into bed and curled up beside him, wrapping her arms around him, breathing in the scent of his freshly washed chestnut waves. “Do you see your papa or grandmamma at night?” she asked.
“Not on nights when I have lessons,” he said. The sound of his voice slipped so softly from his lips that Sisi was taken aback for a brief moment. But he had spoken to her, at least!
“When do you see them?”
“In the mornings, Your Majesty.”
“Please, my darling, please call me Mamma.”
Rudy gave her a quizzical look, as though he believed that he hadn’t heard correctly. She nodded to encourage him, but the boy remained unconvinced.
“You see them in the mornings then, you were saying?”
“Yes, Your Maj—” Rudy paused, catching himself. He was nothing if not conditioned to obey the orders of adults. “For an hour. When I’m good.”
Sisi nodded, chewing on her lip as she considered this. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Eventually, she spoke again, trying another strategy for entering into the boy’s confidence. “Would you like to hear about Mamma’s farm in Hungary?”
Rudy didn’t answer.
“I have horses,” she continued. “And chickens. And dogs. Big dogs.”
“Grandmamma has dogs, but hers are little.”
The little rats that she has trained to growl at me, Sisi thought.
“She says she despises big dogs,” Rudy added.
“Precisely,” Sisi said, omitting the remainder of her thought: Precisely why I have them. “And you know what else, Rudy?” Sisi kept her tone bright. “You have a sister named Valerie.”
“I have a sister named Gisela.”
Sisi winced, momentarily silenced. “That’s right, you have an elder sister named Gisela. And you also have a baby sister named Valerie. You might not remember her very well—she is much younger, and she was born in Hungary, but you’ll get to know her now. She has big, bright blue eyes. And she has her first tooth now, too. Would you like to go with Valerie someday, to Mamma’s farm?”
He considered the question a moment before asking: “Are the dogs nice?”
Sisi frowned, her heart breaking at the fear lurking behind what otherwise might have been a child’s innocent question.
“Because Count Gondrecourt told me he was going to take me to see dogs that looked like wolves. Dogs that hunt little boys in the woods, and then, if the little boy is not strong and brave, they—”
“No, Rudy, these dogs are nothing like wolves. If they scare you for even an instant, we will lock them up. But I promise you…they are very friendly. All they will want to do is kiss you and lick you.”
She touched the tip of his nose with her finger, and he smiled, just a faint hint of a smile. A flimsy look that she might have missed had she blinked, but Sisi thought in that moment that it was the most beautiful look she had ever seen. Except, perhaps, for Valerie’s baby smiles.
“Good,” she said, trying not to react too vociferously for fear of startling the skittish boy. “Good, then I shall take you with me to Hungary someday. But first, I shall speak to your father.”
The emperor was out for the evening, having already made plans to attend the night’s showing at the Court Theater with a delegation of visiting ministers from France. And Franz Joseph would never have considered canceling.
Sisi appeared outside his apartments early the next day, bathed and dressed and looking as lovely as she could manage, given the circumstances. She hadn’t slept a minute of the previous night, hadn’t even looked at her breakfast tray, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to eat until she had Franz’s assurances that Rudy might be saved.
Sisi knew Franz Joseph’s daily schedule—and she knew that he of all people would not have modified it in her absence. His personal motto, after all, was “I don’t change.” First he would wash and say his prayers; then the mornings were his time alone at his desk with his ministerial reports and letters and endless paper work. She also knew that the emperor did not allow visitors during these hours and that no one, save for perhaps his mother, ever dared to approach his study without an invitation or previously scheduled appointment.
“I must speak to the emperor,” Sisi said now, standing before the impassive guard, his face as rigid and unmoving as the starched military uniform he wore. “I know that he is in there. Tell him that his wife wishes to speak to him.”
The guard hesitated a moment, as if not quite sure whether to heed the order, but he turned and left to dispatch the message. A few minutes later, the heavy door groaned open, and Sisi was led into her husband’s study by a small army of footmen wearing the black-and-gold Habsburg livery. Her presence was announced, and Emperor Franz Joseph rose from his desk, nodding as his wife bowed before him.
“Your Majesty,” Franz said, his tone guarded, his voice betraying no hint of his deeper emotions at seeing her after so long.
“Your Majesty,” Sisi said in return, her eyes lowered to the hemline of her dress.
“Welcome back to Vienna,” he said. “It is my pleasure to see you. Please, please…rise.” Sisi stood back to her full height. With a nod of his chin, Franz dismissed all attendants from the room so that only the two of them remained. Man and wife, alone. He raised a gloved hand and asked: “Some refreshment? Shall I order coffee? Cakes? You look thin.”
“No, thank you.” Sisi looked toward his desk piled high with papers, then toward the settee and chairs upholstered in red damask, their rich color matching the drapes and carpet. “Habsburg red,” it was called, because of her husband’s—or, perhaps more precisely, her mother-in-law’s—clear preference for the scarlet color in decorating. Sisi gestured toward the settee. “May we sit?”
She wouldn’t sit across from him at his desk like some minister or bureaucratic supplicant. She was his wife. Rudy’s other parent. And she was here to discuss something no less important than the very survival of their child.
“Oh, yes, yes, of course,” Franz answered, raising his hand to direct her.
They kept several inches between their bodies, perching stiffly on the sofa with their legs angled toward each other. Sisi took in the long-unseen face of her husband; the time they had spent apart showed itself in his appearance. His hair now grew in thinner on top, giving the impression that his forehead had stretched. His beard was thick, meeting his sideburns in a tangle of strawberry blond and silvery gray—more of the latter than when Sisi had last seen him. His blue eyes were as she remembered them, light and clear and ever alert, but surrounded by a soft webbing of lines. He seemed to be fending off fatigue, though he would never have dared admit to such a human weakness.
“You look very well, Elisabeth.”
“Thank you, Franz.” Had he just read her own thoughts about his aging? “You do, too.”
“No need to lie,” he said, cracking half a smile. He put his hands on his knees, looking straight ahead now. “It’s good to see you. Very good to see you.”
“You, too.”
“What did I say about lying?”
Sisi laughed in spite of herself. Looking up, she noted how her portrait, the Winterhalter masterpiece she had given him, still hung over his desk. A second Winterhalter painting of her hung just beside it—this one similarly intimate, but with Sisi flashing a beguiling smile rather than looking off into the distance. Smaller framed images of her also decorated his desk, accompanied by miniatures of each of their children. So Andrássy had been correct: her husband did stare at her likeness every day. She shifted now, folding and unfolding her hands in her lap.
“How was everything in Hungary?” Franz asked.
“Good.”
“Gödöllő continues to please you? Does the house lack anything?”
“No.”
“You’ll let me know if there is anything that I can do to make it more comfortable for you?”
“Franz, I know that a separation as long as ours necessitates some sort of polite small talk. Some exchange of niceties.” She angled her body toward his, waving her hand. “But I have something very important to discuss with you.”
Franz looked toward her, nodding once. He hadn’t changed, but now he saw that neither had she. His voice was even as he said, “I heard that you tried to dismiss Gondrecourt.”
“Not tried,” she said, a cold lump of panic forming in her gut. Was that terrible man back in the palace, tormenting Rudy even at this very moment? Making a cruel deceiver of her after she had promised her son that Gondrecourt was gone? “That man must go.”
The emperor shifted in his seat, sighing as he patted down a nonexistent wrinkle in his immaculately starched pants. So he still dressed daily in his military uniform: cream-colored tunic and scarlet trousers, the attire from his days as a young officer in the Austrian cavalry. The daily apparel that had earned him the friendly nickname of “Old Red Pants” from some in the empire.
“Elisabeth, you have been gone a long time.”
“I know. And I am back now, because I was made aware of what that horrid man was doing to our son.”
“It’s hardly appropriate for you to come in here and disrupt the course—”
“It is even worse than I had imagined. After seeing Rudy, I am convinced it’s essential for his mental, physical, and emotional well-being, his very existence, that we put a stop to this madness.”
“Who told you? Who went to you with these drummed-up and exaggerated reports?”
“It doesn’t matter who told me.” And it didn’t. Besides, she would never betray Gisela’s confidence. It would be her own private secret with her daughter, her first secret with her daughter. “What matters is that the situation got so desperate that the news reached me all the way in Budapest.”
“Elisabeth, you have been gone. But you must try to understand, there are certain ways that things are done, and you can’t just come here and—”
“How things are done. Subjecting a small child to water cures and perpetual fear? Shock tactics taken directly from the battlefield? It’s incomprehensible.”
“It’s military training. It’s what I went through. Mother had me in the uniform by age four.”
“She was wrong to do so. It doesn’t mean we must subject Rudy to the same abuse. Why, he’s only a small child. He’s petrified! He’s made ill by it.” As the heat in her voice rose, Franz kept his tone steady, controlled, as if she herself were an unruly child in need of reasoning.
“The boy has a weak constitution.” Franz Joseph scratched at his sideburns, looking away from Sisi and across the room. “Someday he will be expected to assume his rightful role as leader of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He will require strength, both inner and outer, to carry on our dynasty. To lead our army into battle. The only way to strengthen Rudolf is to—”
“Strengthen him? Why, have you seen him? The boy is an invalid! He is malnourished. He trembles like an epileptic. He wakes in the dark from night terrors.”
Franz sighed. “Then we shall simply have to redouble our efforts to fortify his constitution. Gondrecourt knows what he is doing. Gondrecourt will see to it that the crown prince—”
“Gondrecourt is a sadist and a fool, and I will no longer allow him near my son.”
“Elisabeth.” Franz paused now, weary of her interruptions, her impassioned entreaties so different from his own measured statements. “The boy is too sensitive. He is not of the right mold to become emperor. We must turn him through practice and discipline into what he is not, by nature, inclined to be. Rudolf is not enough like…He’s too much like…”
“Too much like his mother?” Sisi said, the words bitter on her tongue. “Not enough like his stoic father? Oh, and how often your mother likes to say it, right?”
Franz didn’t answer, but his silence resounded louder than a hearty agreement.
Sisi exhaled, exasperated. “Franz, I’ve seen our son. I’ve spoken to him.”
“I visit the crown prince regularly. If the situation were as dire as you claim it to be, I would know. Rudolf would have expressed some of his discomfort to me. Or to his grandmother. He’s very close to the archduchess.”
Sisi ground her teeth hard but forced herself to remain focused. “The boy is petrified. He’s practically mute. Trust me—your efforts to toughen him through this regimen of brutality are having the opposite effect. Instead, he—” But Sisi was interrupted by the figure that appeared in the doorway at that moment. She swallowed the rest of her words, her body stiffening on the couch with the instinctive need to assume a coating of protective armor. Both Sisi and Franz turned their gazes to the entryway.
Archduchess Sophie paused on the threshold as the two women made eye contact. Neither one moved, and Sisi thought in that moment: It’s remarkable, really, how much can be said between two women without a word being spoken.
“Elisabeth.”
“Sophie.”
“Franzi,” the archduchess said, turning her steely, pale-eyed gaze on her son.
Sisi could feel her husband’s body tense as he rose from the sofa. “Mother, hello.” Franz hated nothing more than to be caught between these two women. It had happened hundreds of times, and yet he’d never quite figured out how to manage. He, the man who ruled a fractious empire, had never been able to bring peace to his own household. Except, Sisi thought, when I’m hundreds of miles away.
“It’s good to see you, Elisabeth. You make your old Aunt Sophie happy.” Sophie swept forward into the room now, and Sisi let her head fall to the side, eyeing her mother-in-law with a look that said the archduchess fooled no one. Sophie ignored Sisi’s gaze and continued: “I’m comforted to see that you’ve finally realized that your place as wife and mother—as empress—is here. Not off on that Hungarian horse farm.”
Sisi looked away, not responding. Franz, still standing, shifted his weight.
“How is the child? Valerie?” Sophie asked, her lips exaggerating the name—the only grandchild’s name that she herself hadn’t picked. Sisi felt her heartbeat quicken involuntarily, the instinct to run or fight pulsing through her insides; she didn’t like her mother-in-law speaking the baby’s name.
“She thrives,” Sisi answered, forcing herself to meet the archduchess’s gaze directly.
“God is good,” Sophie said, knitting her fingers together before her bell-shaped skirt. “I pray for her…and you…and all of my loved ones. Daily.”
“Indeed,” Sisi said, keeping her tone level. “I am back here for my other child, though. Rudy’s health is quite another story. I am here to rescue my son from that barbarian you have installed in his household.”
Sophie addressed her son directly. “I presume that you have tried to explain to her what is best for Rudolf?”
Franz Joseph nodded, looking from his mother to his wife with a grim expression.
“I remain unconvinced of the merits of your way of doing things,” Sisi said.
Sophie made to answer, but a coughing fit interrupted her. Franz called for water, which Sophie refused to drink, shaking her head. “I’m fine, I’m fine.” Clearing her throat, tears pooling in her eyes, the archduchess inhaled a slow and unsteady breath, her splotchy breast rising visibly with the intake of air. She put a hand on her son’s desk but then quickly removed it, as if trying to hide the need for such support.
“Mother.” Franz crossed the room to Sophie, putting a hand on her arm. “Please, at least sit.”
“Don’t worry about me, Franzi. You have enough to worry about, my darling boy.” Sophie made a visible effort to appear recovered, but her breathing was labored, Sisi noted. It hit Sisi in that moment just how aged the archduchess appeared. This woman, once so robust and round from her butter creams and thick stews and prime cuts of beef, a figure who had clipped down the halls of the Hofburg issuing orders and outpacing the imperial guards, was now, somehow, finding it difficult to stand. This woman who stood before her, coughing and wheezing, was entirely altered.
