The Empress Chronicles (12 page)

Oh, to hear those words of friendship, of conspiratorial glee. Ever since my dear sister became Duchess Helene, I wanted so badly for a girl with whom to frolic. This faerie, whoever she was, I cared not. Heat from the candles warmed me inside and out. Light in this period of darkness. High spirit in an otherwise slow, dull life. “Yes,” I heard myself say.

“But we must be careful,” she said, her sudden, cool voice stopping my joy like a guillotine crashing down. The candlelight striped her face with shadow.

I could hear the flickering in the courtyard. “Careful?”

“You must not speak of this night, of this place, to anyone.”

A secret? Well, I was very good with secrets. But in times past, I was the offerer of the secret, not the receiver. I nodded.

“You must seek me out,” she continued. “I cannot come to you.”

I nodded, not at all sure how I might do so.

“If you trust me, I will help you avoid an unpleasant fate.”

A candelabra full of blaze flickered out, and half the courtyard went black. “I do not understand,” I said.

“There are some things you should know.”

The ball was in full motion by now. Inside there would be dancing, music. A table full of sweets. And yet I longed to stay exactly where I was, with this mysterious faerie.

“You will have such a full life, Elisabeth,” she said. “If you choose to let me help you.” She reached her hand toward me, and I placed my palm in hers, but then she dropped it and snapped her fingers. “The other,” she said.

I still held my diary, now in my newly gloved hand, having snatched it up at the very last moment. “This?”

“You must give that to me now,” she said, attempting to tug at the very end of the fox brush that squirmed out from the middle of the pages. “For you will be tempted to write of this eve, and you must not.”

I tucked my book inside my waist sash quickly. I was intrigued by this faerie, but since Count S. and his discovery of my journal, I was not about to let go of this private document. This declaration of my innermost thoughts. “No,” I said. “But do not worry. I will not write of this night.”

Her face contorted, then relaxed. “Very well,” she said. Then, “Are you wearing your locket this evening?”

That she knew of my secret gift from Archduke Karl should have surprised me, and yet, we were in such an odd state, it did not. I nodded and wiggled my hand under the collar of my ball gown, producing the winged timepiece and locket that I wore day and night.

The chain of it strained against the back of my neck as the faerie pulled it to her. “Yes, yes, this is the one,” she murmured.

The music in the hall had reached such a pitch that it now could be heard out in the courtyard. I wanted to dance, to eat the sweets I knew would be laid out on the table. But there was now a question introduced to the night’s events. The faerie was so curious in her powers of knowing what others could not possibly know. “Whatever do you mean, ‘the one’?”

The mystical lady only said, “If you do not care for the image inside of this locket, or if you find the timepiece itself displeasing or malfunctioning, you must find me and I shall set it to rights.”

She let go the locket chain, and I stuffed it back into the confines of my bodice. “Set it to rights? In what way? And how would I find you?”

She pointed to the gloves. “These will help maintain your virtue—your dignity and your sense of inner wisdom. If you find your virtue in jeopardy, you may toss one of the gloves from your bedroom window, and I will come.”

Of virtue I was a failing student—but it was not for lack of understanding. The need for virtue was the all-consuming message at Mass, and in Sunday lessons. I nodded.

The faerie spoke ever so softly so that with the increasing volume of the ball, I could barely hear when she added, “Then there is the matter of the locket, the vision; the most important person in your life will always appear inside of it. Elisabeth, your locket there, if you allow it, can be a source for your future: your loves, your passions and your very humanity. It can predict what is to come.”

My future
?
The most important person in my life
?
Karl
?

I ran my thumb against the tip of the wing. “The Archduke Karl has declared himself my suitor,” I said. “It is his face in this keepsake; however, I hardly think of him as the most important person in my life.”

The enchantress smiled. “No. He most certainly is not. As your heart changes and reveals its landscape, you will see someone very different. Trust me.”

Trust her? Well, thus far she had prevented me from suffering punishment and had offered magic and adventure. Why should I not trust her? But how did this woman, this faerie, know all of this?

“Then, there is the third caution. Which is the hardest for a girl.”

We were in the dark now and she took my elbow, coaxing me to the unseen doorway back behind the stones of the fortresslike Residenz. I felt her mouth upon the waxy curl near my ear, and she whispered, “Voice, Elisabeth. With faith, you might one day be the most powerful woman in the land. But you will need my help. Your voice must reach forward. Do not let yourself be stifled.”

This seemed quite odd, given the faerie’s request not minutes before. “You yourself have cautioned against my writing of this night. Do you now retract?”

She laughed now, a deep laugh, almost like a man. “Very good, Duchess. You learn quickly. Despite what your governess says.”

“My governess? The baroness Wilhelmine?”

“Long ago,” the faerie continued, “she herself had a choice to make. She made the wrong one. She now suffers the consequence. But you, dear child, you have a powerful voice. Do not ruin it.”

My blood cooled, and I stood frozen to a place in this cold castle. Who was this woman? What did she want from me?

Then, before I could ask more about Baroness Wilhelmine, or my future, the mystic took my hand and led me under the bridge, through a narrow hallway, past the rough shelves of pigs’ feet, and to the door that opened onto the ladies’ dressing room. She opened the door but stayed on the other side of it. “Until the next,” she whispered as I walked through.

The dressing room had emptied of ladies. Only a couple of maids were left, and they were napping on chairs in the corners, bulky flesh spilling out the sides of their dresses, feet pushed out in front of them, happy to take a rest until the music died for the first break and the ladies would re-swarm the room for more tucking, fussing and smoothing. More chatter.

I stood in front of a well-used mirror, picked up a comb and worked stray wisps back where they belonged. The gloves given me by this curious woman were of the very thinnest material, like butterfly wings, and when I pulled them on they made my hands feel like live things unattached to me.

With this new fragile skin I reached into my bodice and drew out my journal.

You will be tempted to write of this eve, and you must not
.

I flipped open the cover, and a sudden clarity hit me as hard as if I’d fallen headfirst from a horse. I had just met the infamous Lola Montez! The dancer, the seductress, the erstwhile Countess of Landsfeld.

I squeezed tight my eyes, wishing the image to remain, impregnated on the landscape of my memory until I could reproduce it in my journal. The lace, the shadowy face, the huge blue eyes, her witchlike knowledge of my plight. I wished to write of it, even in the face of her warning that I must not. But alas, it would have to wait, for there was no longer a trace of the pen on the little writing table. Not one drop of ink.

Mozart’s father, Leopold, was a composer. Most Mozart biographies paint his dad as overbearing and possessive, but Mozart wasn’t exactly an easy kid to raise. He had tantrums, was arrogant, and basically took his genius for granted—so the way I see it, if not for Leopold’s disciplined ways, him parading Amadeus around like a puppet, we’d never have gotten
Don Giovanni
,
The Marriage of Figaro
, or
The Magic Flute
.

Another musical icon. Ludwig van Beethoven. He gave his first public piano performance at the age of eight. Beethoven’s dad was a court tenor, and he hoped his son would turn out to be the same sort of child prodigy Mozart was. Sure, he boxed Beethoven’s ears when he screwed up his allegrettos and humiliated him when he seemed slow to catch on to composing. But look, in the end, Beethoven’s bust sits in the living rooms of music lovers all over the world.

Sisi’s father, Duke Max, taught her circus tricks. According to
Death by Fame
, he said to her once, “Sisi, if we were not princely born, we could have performed in a circus.” He let his kids run wild except for two requirements. They had to learn to ride well, and walk as though they had angels’ wings beneath their feet. Would Sisi have become such a style icon if her father’d let her slouch?

My own father grew up in a household of musicians. He was forced into piano lessons at the age of four. Strings at six. At fourteen, he was first violin in the Portland Youth Philharmonic. At sixteen, he quit. Everything. When my mom brought a piano into our home and signed me up for lessons, Dad started spending more and more time at the garage, tinkering with his Swedish cars. My first recital, I sat down at the bench, my silk robin’s egg skirt a smooth fan across my thighs, and pounded out “Für Elise”—only two mistakes. At the end, with rare poise, I scrambled off the bench, curtsied at the clapping audience, and when I raised my eyes at the crowd, I zoomed in on Dad’s face. It was frozen in sadness. Like a hunk of granite with two little downward cracks.

Had I really played that badly?

In the weeks after the recital, my parents argued more. Dad didn’t want to continue my lessons, said we couldn’t afford them. Mom accused him of having an affair, of spending money on motel rooms. Dad told Mom she was delusional. I practiced and practiced. If I could just improve, make Dad proud of me, he wouldn’t need to flee every time I sat down to play.

Now, on the smelly futon in the spare room, I can’t sleep. There’s a bright moon outside my window, coyotes whooping it up nearby. I keep thinking about Dad and a sadness that seems to come in waves. He left Mom, moved in with someone he said made him happy, but still, he didn’t
seem
happy. He came to Willow Creek for the simple life, and, guess what? I complicated that by showing up with all my problems—and now there was another problem. A delinquent boy who didn’t seem to want to be here at all. Cory, at this very moment, is right across the hall in a down sleeping bag, on the porch where wasps are waltzing above his head.

It isn’t exactly that I have a crush on Cory. I’m no stranger to those feelings. At Lincoln, when I liked a boy the first thing I would do is memorize his schedule so I could figure out what part of school he was in when. That way I’d accidently be standing near his locker and let him know that he dropped something when a notebook or soccer cleat tumbled out. I would just happen to be parked outside English or bio when the object of my infatuation rushed out the door. I was an excellent calculator, my stalking recon accurate enough to get me in the lunch line a person or two away from my crush most days.

But this feeling I’ve been carrying in my belly for the past several hours, it’s weird—like when you’re attracted to someone off-limits. Your cousin or something.

I pull my comforter around me, snug. I’d barricaded the door with Willow’s weaving loom so she wouldn’t bust through unannounced, and now I worry that her little brother will do the same. Out the window, through the wavy glass, a half-moon swims all wiggly.

Five thousand miles away, Mom probably has her blue silk sleeping mask in place.

I reach under my pillow for the ingestion log and pencil and open it up to the page where Dr. Greta—or someone—had written that deadly message. The two loose pages I’d accidentally torn from the empress’s diary are a disappointment. They’re filled with blotches from a leaking pen. Even if I could read German, I wouldn’t have been able to make heads or tails of the writing.

I hold the book at a tilt so the beam of moon that angles in puts a spotlight on
Count Sebastian must die
and underneath that, just for fun, I think about adding,
I’m going to die
. I hold my pencil poised over the page. After all, this is my journal. It’s not like I’m defacing something by writing in it, but it feels like destroying evidence somehow. What if there had been an actual murder?

Instead of
I’m going to die
in my journal, I take the stolen empress diary pages and beneath the incomprehensible writing, I sketch a face. It’s a handsome face, certainly worthy of a count. Strong jaw, piercing eyes. I shroud the head in a hoodie.

In the psych ward, they were big on us sketching self-portraits and signing our names over and over. It was the latest evidence-based craze in treatment of borderlines and sociopaths and self-harmers. That’s what I am, according to the bold orange sticker on my chart: a self-harmer. Someone who
somatizes
. I’m just about to write a caption under my sketch, something sort of snarky. Better off dead, or some such. And just as my sketching pencil touches the space under the picture, the loom scrapes across the floor, and in walks Cory.

I jerk my pencil up and it flies across the room, slapping against the wall that separates me from Dad and Her. I yank my comforter around me, shove the pages of the journal underneath the folds of cloth and whisper, harshly, “Cory!”

His hand is on my mouth before I can make another sound, his other hand’s index finger across his lips. “Shhh,” he whispers. “I just want to ask you something.”

He takes his hand from my mouth, but I feel trapped, his big clunky mass of boyness parked there on the futon next to me. I can practically hear my own heartbeat. “Are you crazy? Get out!”

He chuckles the way boys with much too much self-assuredness do. Those lopsided dimples again. “Don’t be like that, Lizzie. I’m not going to, you know, violate you or anything. I’m just, like, dying for a spliff.”

“Are you crazy?”
What the hell?
I’m wearing my fuzzy Cardinals sweatshirt, but under the comforter—nothing but underwear.

“You saying you
can’t
hook me up or you
won’t
hook me up?”

“Out here?” I say. “I know it’s Oregon and everything, but it doesn’t, like, grow in the clover.” Of course I don’t tell him that all he has to do to get weed is steal it from my father. I’m pretty sure I know where he keeps it, too.

Cory starts looking around my room like a cat that knows a mouse is there,
somewhere
. He walks over to the bookcase where I’d alphabetized my books, their spines lined up straight with the edge of the shelf like in a library. He tips back
Anna Karenina
and says, “Toldstory. Yeah, I know this guy.”

He’s barefoot, and the frayed edges of his saggy jeans are picking up cat hair. He still smells like a cedar chest, and the scent is even stronger than before, only now it’s mixed with campfire from earlier in the night, when Dad and Willow had built a halfhearted one in hopes of us all breaking the ice. I rub my naked legs together under the covers and then reach the edge of my toe on the pages.

“Feel free to borrow any book,” I say and then immediately regret the question sound in my voice. “And it’s Tolstoy.”

Cory shoves the book back on the shelf, and now the whole row zigzags.
Don’t freak, don’t freak, don’t freak.

“Nah,” he says then looks at my various versions of the Brothers Grimm. “Man,” he says, “You ever see the real deal?
Brüder Grimm, Kinder-und Hausmärchen?
”

“The whoosit and the whatsit?”

“They didn’t tell you I spent the last two years in Stuttgart? My school was big on the original sources for fairy tales. Waldorf, you know? Whole processes and whatnot.”

“You lived in Germany?”

He laughs. “Great weed overseas.”

“So, do you speak German?”

“It’s the only thing I did right over there, apparently. You know what they say about necessity and the mother tongue.”

It’s all I can do to keep Sisi’s pages under the covers. I’m longing to wave their indecipherable grammatical marks and squiggles in Cory’s face; inside, I’m pleading for some sort of exchange. Sure, I could find my father’s stash.

Cory hefts one of the Grimm books from the shelf. “Fact,” he says. “In the original
Snow White
, and in
Hansel and Gretel
, it wasn’t a stepmother who was the evil witch. It was the
real
mother. The birth mother. The Brüder Grimm must
have had some mommy, eh?”

I think of my own mother, the way she
mirror, mirror on the wall
ed each morning with her makeup brush.

“And
Rapunzel
?” Cory continues, inching his dimple-face closer to mine. “She was knocked up the way it was originally written.”

“Cory,” I say. “Stop. You’re sort of ruining what’s left of my childhood.”

“Sorry,” he says, all Cheshire-cat grin. “I don’t know much, but I know German folklore.”

The way he can make himself so adorable, make his mouth move in a way that his dimple goes from grain of rice small to elbow macaroni fat—clearly, that got him places. Opened doors. I learned about manipulation and compensation in the loony bin: kids develop strategies to justify their lack of skills. When they thought I might be borderline, they did all this accountability therapy with me. Turned out, I wasn’t at all borderline. I was the opposite of borderline. I was not an attention-craver. I wanted people to leave me the hell alone. Borderline was a turquoise sticker, which looked pretty good next to my orange self-harmer sticker, but I was still glad when they removed it.

Even though I turned out not to be borderline, I sure learned a lot about kids who were. The way lying came so easy to them, they never knew after a while what was true and what wasn’t.

I keep the comforter around me bunched in my fist and with my other slow, trembling hand, I pull out the Sisi pages. “Can you tell me what this says?”

Cory snatches the yellowed papers, but gently, in a way that lets me know he has a light touch. I’m sure the Waldorf emphasis on handwork contributed to that. Certainly,
he
wouldn’t have gouged himself with a felting needle. “Where the hell did you get these?” he asks. “And what’s with the drawing of me?”

I feel my face go hot. “It’s not you. It’s the count.”

“Huh?”

I tell him about the cryptic words in my food log, about my shrink, Dr. Greta. And then, before I can stop it, out it comes. “They’re original, I think. The girlhood diary of Empress Elisabeth. Of Austria. I accidently stole them.”

Cory’s nodding his head as he reads the blotchy foreign writing. “Wow,” he says. “This is juicy stuff!”

“You can make it out?” I ask and then feel another wave of hot on my face because what I just said sounds so close to
make
out
.

He hands me back the pages, looks me in the eye, and says, “What’s it worth to you?”

“You have a flashlight?” I ask him.

He nods. “I may not be a boy scout, but I am prepared.”

“He keeps his weed in the milk shed,” I whisper. My legs still bare, I continue. “Give me a couple of minutes to get my sweats on, and I’ll take you out there. Then, you let me know what’s so juicy.” Again, I feel the heat of a thousand stupid blunders spread across my face.

Cory’s smile opens and now his dimples take up the better part of his cheeks. “It’s a deal.” There’s an awkward silence and, before he sneaks out the door, he asks, “So, your mom kick you out, too?”