The Accidental Empress, page 8
“We’ll be fine.” Sisi nodded. The last thing she wanted at the moment was a stranger in here, snooping and adding to Helene’s nerves.
“I’ll be back to help you girls dress for supper, if I have time.”
“Yes, please come if you can. I’d like you to braid my hair.” Sisi smiled at her maid.
“You won’t be needing me to style your hair much longer . . . now that Helene is set to marry the emperor. Why, I imagine you’ll each have scores of hairdressers and valets and maids to yourselves.”
“Don’t be jealous, Aggie. You’ll always be our favorite,” Sisi said. Agata giggled and exited the room.
The bedroom in which Sisi and Helene were installed was mercifully adjoined by a small water closet, complete with a large porcelain tub. Some faceless servant had already filled it with balmy fresh water, and the experience of bathing was a welcome one after several weeks on the road. Sisi enjoyed how the scent of the perfumed water stayed on her skin even as she slid into one of the soft silk robes that hung on the nearby hooks, also provided by a faceless Habsburg servant.
The bedroom itself was large and bright, with floor-to-ceiling windows that donned a view over the back gardens of the palace complex. Sisi, hair still wet from her bath, pressed her forehead to the clean glass of the window.
Staring out over the yard, she watched the dizzying hive of activity. Half a dozen wigged secretaries cut intersecting lines, carrying papers and books and other parcels. Armed soldiers drilled in crisp rows. Their commander’s shrill orders rose up above the barks of nearby dogs, their tails wagging as maids carried baskets heaped with vegetables toward what had to be a kitchen.
“What do you think they are all doing?”
Helene, in the bathtub, could not have heard Sisi’s question, nor did she answer. How much activity went into the household of one man—and a bachelor, at that! Sisi sighed, her warm breath fogging up the windowpane, as she remembered the persistent looks of her cousin.
Across the yard, behind a cluster of small administrative buildings, Sisi spotted a broad flat building that most certainly looked like stables; her heart sped up at the thought of taking off into the surrounding hills on horseback. Once Helene had settled into her role, Sisi decided, she would look into taking a ride. Not until Helene was settled, though. “Don’t be selfish, Sisi,” her mother had repeated throughout the journey. Once more, the handsome face of her cousin popped before her in her mind’s eye. Sisi blinked, forcing his image away.
Sisi turned from the window back toward the bedroom. Though the Kaiservilla had only recently become Franz’s summer home, this room lacked for no small comfort. A fire blazed in the fireplace even on this warm August afternoon. Wooden parquet floors were covered by a dark, ornately patterned carpet, and a four-poster bed much like their bed at home was piled high with downy pillows and a hand-stitched silk bedcover.
Just then Helene emerged from the water closet, her hair wet and her face appearing somewhat refreshed after her bath.
“Helene! You’re looking revived. Let’s pick something for you to wear this evening.” Sisi crossed the room and peered into her sister’s open trunk, removing the few dresses Agata had not yet unpacked.
Helene slipped behind the dressing screen, its thin silk panels covered with delicate butterflies, and slid out of her robe.
“So, Helene.” Sisi ventured to speak to her sister now that they were alone and feeling more comfortable. “What did you think?” Sisi stared into the full-length mirror, considering a gown of navy-blue silk for her sister. Not bright enough for this balmy summer night, she decided.
“Of what?” Helene emerged from behind the dressing screen, wearing bloomers and her shift.
“Of your fiancé, of course.” Sisi arched her eyebrows, catching her sister’s gaze through the reflection of the mirror.
Helene shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know.” She sifted through her mountainous pile of dresses.
“Helene, come now,” Sisi sighed, lowering the navy-blue dress. “It’s me. You may answer truthfully.” She picked up the yellow gown once more and now held it out to consider it against Helene’s complexion.
“Not that one.” Helene swatted the dress away. “I didn’t get much of a chance to form an impression of Cousin Franz.”
“Well, then, I’ll tell you what I thought,” Sisi offered, holding the yellow gown up against her own reflection once more.
“All right.” Helene looked at her sister, half-amused. “And what did you think, Sisi?”
“He’s very good-looking.”
“I suppose.” Helene let her eyes slip from Sisi’s gaze.
“Even you must have noticed that.”
Helene shrugged. “If you like the military uniform.”
“He seems to have a very kind and approachable demeanor, Helene. Why, the way he told us not to bow to him. He seems much less preoccupied with his position than his mother is.”
Sisi thought back to her good-natured cousin, still finding it hard to believe that he was the same young boy she had met years earlier. In spite of herself, she blushed as she remembered the multitude of occasions in the tearoom during which their eyes had locked. “I was certainly surprised that he was the emperor,” Sisi said, revealing only half of her thoughts. Surprised, certainly. And perhaps a little bit disappointed, as well. But she blinked, shaking that thought away before it could take root. “He looked nothing like I remember him. Though Aunt Sophie was largely unchanged.”
“Sisi, don’t you think it was sort of duplicitous of our cousin and Aunt Sophie to conceal who he was?”
Sisi thought about this, wishing that her aunt and cousin had not played this trick on them. Had she known from the beginning that it was her sister’s fiancé she looked upon, Sisi never would have conceded to herself how good-looking he was. But of course, she could never admit this to her sister.
“I was too shy, wasn’t I?” Helene joined Sisi before the mirror.
“Perhaps you could have spoken up a little more,” Sisi admitted, replacing the yellow gown in the trunk.
“But conversation does not come naturally to me.”
“You do not know that. You haven’t tried.”
“What if I appear a fool?—”
“What did Goethe say?”—Sisi turned to face her sister—“Hmm? Come now, you’re the scholar.”
“But you’re the romantic. Tell me.”
“Leap, and the net will appear.”
“I don’t quite feel like leaping,” Helene said, raising a gray gown up to the mirror to examine it against her figure.
Sisi leaned toward her sister, removing the gray gown from Helene’s hands. “Néné, you are not wearing gray. You just arrived in black. How about some color?”
“But I like gray.” Helene reached for the dress, which Sisi withheld.
“How about something brighter?”
“This one suits me just fine.” Helene leaned forward and snatched the gray gown from her sister’s grasp.
“You’re not even going to try to look happy to meet your groom?” Sisi sighed, growing increasingly frustrated with her sister.
“I cannot hide my true nature,” Helene stated, her tone as emotionless as her face.
“It’s one thing to hide your true nature. It’s quite another to flatly refuse to show any of your lovely and appealing qualities. Come now, I’ve never in all our years known you to be so stubbornly mute as you were at tea today.” It was true. It was as if Helene, beginning with the moment her engagement had been announced, had become impermeable, even to the sister who knew her best in the world. Helene, usually shy and timid, yes, but still charming and warm, had suddenly become aloof, ornery, and obdurately mute.
“If Franz refuses to marry me because I choose to wear gray to dinner, I’d rather have it be done with sooner rather than later, Sisi.”
Was Helene trying to forfeit Franz’s interest? Or was this simply her timidity crippling her? Surely her sister was as kind and good and loving as any girl in the entire Austrian Empire, and just as deserving as any Prussian princess or Hungarian countess. Sisi fortified herself, refusing to drop the argument. Her sister would marry the emperor.
“We never had much occasion in Possenhofen to meet young men, did we?” Sisi tried a new tack. “We were so often alone, just our family, in that castle. I can see why this would be terribly daunting.”
Helene looked at her sister now, her gaze softening just the slightest bit. Sisi continued. “But, you know, Helene, Mother is right. Most young ladies would line up through the streets to have a chance to win a man like Franz. He seems kind. And he’s much more handsome than I had imagined he would be. You are not so unlucky as you think you are.”
“If there are young ladies lining up for him, why can’t one of them have him?”
“Néné, I could search this entire kingdom and I know that I’d never find a person as kind as you. You must see that you deserve this.”
“You don’t understand.” Helene turned to face her sister, the look in her eyes alluding to tears that seemed imminent.
“What don’t I understand? Explain to me.” Sisi calmed her tone, taking her sister’s cold hand in her own.
“I miss Possi,” was all Helene managed to say.
“Of course you do.” Sisi sighed. “I do, too. But Helene, Possenhofen is exactly as it was when we left, and it shall remain that way.” Sisi wrapped an arm around her sister’s shoulders. “There was nothing in Possenhofen. No one for you to marry. No one for you to even talk to, except for me. And Mamma. Weren’t you ready for something larger? More adventure?” Sisi urged her sister with what she hoped would be contagious enthusiasm.
“No,” Helene answered, her voice remaining flat.
“So you were content, then? When all our days looked the same: lessons and walks to the lake and meals with our parents? Days in which the only young man we ever saw was our brother Karl?”
“Yes, I was satisfied with that.” Helene nodded.
For her part, Sisi could not understand how her sister was not enthralled by this new life for which she was intended. She had always known that her restless spirit would likely carry her somewhere far, far away. The highlights of her days in Possenhofen had been when Mamma had allowed her to saddle up Bummerl and run free through the woods and fields. She wanted adventure. She wanted love; love like the love she read about in the books she stowed away and carried up to the tops of the mountains. Love that devoured, like what Isolde experienced in her tragic tale. Or love like what Shakespeare’s young women felt; women who braved shipwrecks and battlefields and villains and the damning hand of fate.
As if reading her sister’s mind, Helene said, bluntly: “Sisi, I’m not like you. I never have been. I’ve always admired you for the ways in which you are different from me, but I’ve never wanted the same things as you. I don’t want a life like this—” Helene waved her thin arm toward the large windows, outside of which the hive of activity buzzed as madly as before.
“A life with all sorts of strangers to meet, and dinners to attend, and a groom to impress.” Helene shook her head. “No, I want a quiet life. A life of solitude does not scare me. In fact, it seems quite nice.”
Sisi had known this about Helene: that her sister possessed reserved—almost hermitic—tendencies. That the boundaries of Possi would be enough to contain her for life, and happily, too. But as a young woman, Helene did not have that luxury; Helene could not forgo marriage to remain in her father’s isolated Bavarian duchy. Helene had to marry the man who chose her. Or rather, the man who was chosen for her.
The fact that that man was kind and good and handsome—and happened to be the emperor of Austria—seemed, to Sisi, to be uncommonly good fortune.
“I had hoped that Mamma would allow me to enter a nunnery,” Helene confessed after several moments, her shoulders wilting as she said it. “And I was planning to ask them. But this all happened so quickly.”
Sisi cut her sister off. “My sweet Néné, we know how impossible such a fate is. You heard Mamma explain.”
“Yes, I did.” Helene slowly slipped into the gray dress.
“Well, my sweet Néné.” Sisi stepped into her petticoat now, and she walked toward the window, gazing out once more at the household that her elder sister would have to manage. “This is your new life, and I know that you will make the best of it. You will be such a sweet wife that Franz will adore you, as I adore you.”
“You look lovely, Miss Elisabeth.” Agata admired Sisi, whose long hair she had just fashioned into her favorite style: two plaits woven into a thick bun. “Miss Helene, are you certain that I cannot fashion your hair for dinner?”
“I’m certain. Thank you, Agata.” Helene, following her aunt’s orders, was applying a meager amount of rouge to her cheeks, but her black hair she insisted on wearing in her customary style—parted down the middle and pulled back into a sensibly tight bun.
“We must give her credit, Agata.” Sisi looked at her sister in the mirror’s reflection. “My sister will never be the type of monarch who changes to suit the fancy of the times.”
Though her sister was adamant about wearing a muted gray gown, Sisi had selected a dress of soft blue with white lace and pearl trim for herself. She felt a rush as she gazed in the mirror, seeing bright color once more, and she couldn’t help but smile.
“Well, let me see my girls in their fresh clothing.” Ludovika swirled into the room, a blur of raspberry brocade and tightly pressed dark curls.
“Hello, Mamma.” Sisi ran to the duchess.
“Sisi, how nice you look. Wasn’t it a relief to have a good bath and a change of clothes?” The duchess’s spirits seemed higher than they had been following the afternoon’s initial introduction. That was, until she spotted her elder daughter. “Oh, Helene, gray? Must you wear something so colorless?”
“What’s wrong with gray? I like gray,” Helene repeated her earlier justification, standing up from the dressing table.
“Gray is fine for mass during Lent. But can’t you put on something a bit merrier to have dinner with your groom?” Ludovika riffled through the pile of gowns her daughters had unpacked. “How about this nice yellow gown? Or perhaps something in peach? Or why don’t you borrow the one Sisi has on?” Ludovika gestured toward her younger daughter. “Sisi, let Helene wear the blue.”
“But, Mamma, I am wearing this one,” Sisi answered, folding her arms protectively over her dress.
Ludovika shot Sisi an aggravated scowl. “Yes, but perhaps your older sister should wear it instead.”
“I don’t want to wear that one.” Helene shook her head.
Ludovika slouched, the buoyancy with which she’d entered the room suddenly gone.
When Franz Joseph’s name was announced, he entered the receiving area flanked by men wearing the same white and red uniform. Everyone waiting in the anteroom bowed.
“Cousin Helene, Cousin Elisabeth.” He approached his cousins first. “Please rise. And please, allow me to say how lovely you both look this evening.”
Helene offered nothing by way of reply, but instead threw furtive glances around the room, her dark eyes avoiding the curious stares of the guards and whispering courtiers. Sisi could sense her sister’s panic at the thought of speaking with these strangers. For fear of their appearing rude, Sisi answered their cousin. “Thank you, Your Majesty.”
“Please”—he raised a gloved hand—“it’s Franz.”
Sisi smiled, surprised—yet flattered—to find the emperor speaking to them especially. As she lifted her eyes from her curtsy she noticed, a bit guiltily, that his stare rested on her, and she hoped that he did not notice the reddening of her cheeks.
Franz had not changed out of the white and red military uniform he had worn earlier, but his hair had been combed back and he smelled fresh with the scent of eau de cologne. His stiff, high-necked coat made him appear impeccably dignified.
A gong sounded, announcing dinner. Extending an arm toward each of them, Franz smiled. “May I escort you ladies in to dinner?”
Sisi waited so that Helene could take his arm first and thereby enter into some pleasant conversation. But she noticed, as they walked into the dining hall, that Helene did not speak.
They left the antechamber and proceeded through a candlelit hallway, illuminated by crystal chandeliers and bordered on each side by a column of imperial footmen.
Sisi stared from side to side at the two rows of footmen, each figure identical in a crisply pressed livery of black and gold, eyes unblinking, mustaches trimmed tidily, much like her cousin’s. “They are so serious,” Sisi observed, watching them intently. They kept their gazes fixed ahead on some unmoving point, so that even though Sisi walked between them, they did not seem to see her.
“Don’t be afraid of them, Cousin Elisabeth. They appear more intimidating than they are,” Franz whispered to his cousin.
“How do they stand so still?” Sisi wondered aloud. “Like statues.”
“Lots of training,” Franz answered. “You could do the same if you needed to.”
“I very much doubt it,” Sisi laughed.
Franz kept his attention fixed on Sisi as the three of them made their way toward the banquet hall. “Are you pleased with the Kaiservilla?”
“Oh, indeed.” Sisi nodded, turning from the motionless figures back to her cousin. When their eyes met, Sisi forced herself not to smile at him. And then, to look away. There was no good reason to be staring into the clear, light-blue eyes of her sister’s fiancé.
The sound of violin music now floated delicately through the air, and Sisi peered through the open archway into the dining hall. In spite of herself, she gasped at the candlelit splendor of the room they now approached. “My word.”
The dining hall was flooded in amber light, festooned with a line of overhead chandeliers, each one ablaze with several dozen candles. A long central table beneath the chandeliers ran the length of the wood-paneled room. Sisi admired the scene, not sure how they would fit any food on the table between the heaps of silver candelabra, ripe summertime flowers overspilling the china vases, and hors d’oeuvres of pâté, butter rolls, and miniature pickles.
