The Empress Chronicles (26 page)

Nené was inconsolable. Though she had an assortment of freshly tailored dresses and gowns, six pairs of silk boots, a bevy of crinolines, corsets and petticoats, it seemed clear that they were all for naught. The emperor would not announce my sister as his intended bride. And if what the archduchess said was true, it was
I
who would wear the crown. A crown of thorns. A burden. And somewhere in the distance, my dear count walked in exile.

Sisi, do not obey as Lola commands.

Leave at once.

No to the wedding.

You won’t make happy as empress.

I was baffled as I paced the length of our guest quarters. Nené sobbed in the background, every once in a while uttering curses. Flinging words such as “She ruins everything,” and “I wish she’d never been born.”

Mummi claimed a headache and took to her bed. Outside, the clouds had lifted, and the peaks of the Katrin Mountains burst through the sky outside the window. Perhaps Count Sebastian roamed those very hills now. I pulled up my skirts and considered my legs. They were sturdy enough. I fiddled with the locket, still in my pinafore pocket, the broken chain tangling in and around my fingers. Emperor Franz Joseph, a man so much older than I, the most important figure in all the land, wished to claim me as his own. Why was I not joyful? Why did I suddenly feel as though my wings were forever clipped?

I heard voices then. My governess in the hall with an artist from town who’d been summoned to fix the ruined portrait of Duchess Helene. His voice rang clear as a bell with the pronouncement, “It is not fixable. Stieler himself couldn’t make this face beautiful.”

Another sorrow for my poor sister. But luckily, I thought uncharitably, that was one thing that was not my doing.

The artist was dismissed and my governess returned to our quarters, her expression glum.

“Oh, but this trip is turning out to be a disaster in every way,” I lamented. “Poor Nené. I fear I am quite to blame for her predicament.”

Baroness Wilhelmine stood in front of me and took in a sigh that stretched the confines of her bosom to its maximum state, her buttons loosening under the heave. “Look at you,” she said, shaking her head in dismay. “Barely old enough to brush your own hair, and now given over to the crows in Vienna. They’ll peck you alive.”

“Are they that horrid?”

She sighed.

Just then a sadness swept me up as though issued from the very storm winds that had recently departed. I found myself flattened in a spell of weeping. Utterly at the mercy of high sorrow and a feeling of doom.

Baroness Wilhelmine came forth and embraced me tenderly. She patted my hair and allowed my tears to soak her shoulder.

“Why?” I sobbed. “Why can I not marry for love?”

She pulled my face off her and held me to an eye-level gaze. “Love has nothing to do with duty.”

Her words fell like ice dropped into my ears. “But why cannot one have both? Why must love and obligation be separate?”

“They needn’t be, Duchess. But they almost always are.”

With that pronouncement, I drew the ruined necklace from my pocket, the locket dangled before my governess, and she snatched it up.

She peeled open the two halves of the keepsake to reveal the shifting likeness. “Yes. You will marry the emperor, Sisi. It is your destiny.”

I’d been tricked by a witch. But why? What benefit would Lola gain from having me marry him? I longed for an answer. “Baroness, I must confess something to you.”

We walked to the cabinet and closed ourselves in. I pulled my journal out from under the abandoned needlepoint. Before I could stop myself, a flurry of words pushed out of me. My promise to Lola. My sadness over the count. The various changes to the likeness in my keepsake. Throughout, Baroness Wilhelmine sat in rapt attention. At the mention of Lola, she grew somber, her face twisted in something that resembled pain. Finally, I offered the latest curious scribble of notes. The warning:

Leave at once. No to the wedding.

She took the journal from my hand and drew her fingers down the page. “This is very unusual ink. Look, it does not smear. And the color. Where would one find this blue?”

“Do you think Lola wrote this? But why?”

The twisted face of pain upon my governess returned. Beads of sweat glistened at her hairline. She bade me to take a seat on the settee, and then she joined me. From her ample bosom, she unveiled a pouch and drew out small squares separated by thin tissue. Upon the little needlework pillow between us she placed three sepia photographs, all in a row.

The first was a girl of about my age, somewhat plain, but proud. The second was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen: large doe eyes set in a heart-shaped face, hair as fine as silk. Lips full and half-smiling, ready to feast upon something delicious. It was a copy of a portrait I had seen in my uncle’s Gallery of Beauties. The one Amalie had claimed was the tart no man could win.

And the third photograph—it was unmistakably my papa, but a younger, skinnier version.

She pointed to the plain, proud figure in the first photograph. “Your mother, as you know, was born of royal blood. A princess of Bavaria, like all of her sisters.”

I nodded. Again and again I had heard my mother lament that she’d married far beneath her station.

She then pointed to the tart no man could win. “What you do not know is that I was your mother’s lady-in-waiting.”

I could feel my very eyes bulge from my face. “That is you?”

My governess nodded. “Once upon a time.”

“But you could have had such a different life with that face. What happened to you?” As soon as the words had sprung from my mouth, I realized how mean-spirited they were.

But if she took offense, she did not show it. In fact, her look was one of total agreement. “Then perhaps it does not surprise you that your father and I were once special to one another. We planned to ride away together. To a far-off land where it did not matter that I was a mere baroness, and your father, a duke.”

This revelation caught me deep in the chest. Everything I knew, it seemed, I did not really know at all. I held up the picture of my young father, Duke Max. He was so handsome. So full of spirit. He had a hunger and a twinkle in his eye, which had begun to fade as of late. How sad that he was not allowed to be with his true love. I knew the pain of that.

“Duchess, in this world, women rarely win. King Ludwig knew of the secret trysts between the duke and me, and he wished me in his own retinue. He wished me in his service. And therefore, he arranged to have Duke Max marry his sister, my mistress, Ludovica.”

My Uncle Ludwig had a large appetite for women, and it had done him in. Lola Montez was a big part of that, I’d understood. The pieces were coming together. My governess leaned toward me, and between her mountainous breasts, a necklace now freed itself. A necklace exactly like my own broken keepsake.

“The bargain that you made with Lola, it kept you from becoming the king’s mistress, yes?” I asked. Baroness nodded.

“But it did not keep my parents from marrying. You did not win!”

“Duchess, nobody wins who makes a bargain out of hopes for the self alone.”

I nodded. I understood this now.

“Why don’t you let me hold on to that journal? It might be best if you concentrate on your future.”

How could I give up such an important item? Into my journal my deepest thoughts, my poems, my secrets dwelt. But Baroness Wilhelmine seemed to want to keep me from harm. Reluctantly, I gave her my diary. And along with it, my broken necklace.

“Dear Elisabeth,” said my governess, her voice infused with an odd tenderness, “I did win, in the end. I was allowed to raise Max’s children, and through them, especially through you, my dearest, I was forever in his heart.” My governess then removed her own necklace and draped it over my head. “There are three of these keepsakes. All of them possess a certain magic. This one compels its wearer to act with utmost virtue and protect the person within the locket.”

My head was spinning with confusion. “Three?”

Baroness held my broken keepsake before her, and the locket dangled to and fro, like a pendulum. “This locket offers vision. The likeness inside reveals he who holds the wearer dearest.”

Her words sent a shock through me. It wasn’t about my heart, after all. Anyone who wore it would gain insight to the heart of a man who held her dear. Lola, the seductress—it made perfect sense that she would wish to own such a necklace. “But why did Lola not simply take it from me when the opportunity arose?”

“The magic of the locket is uncovered only through an exchange of the heart. If the locket is taken under duress, the magic will not work.”

It was a good thing that we were seated. All of these revelations made my heart skitter. Baroness took my perspiring palms in hers and told me the story of the lockets. Long ago, before Mummi, Baroness Wilhelmine, King Ludwig or any Habsburg or Wittelsbach were on this earth. Before the archduchess ruled the Hof, and Vienna was the center of Europe, the world was a place of love. There were no wars. No arranged marriages. Only a loving presence guiding the good people toward right.

“I would like to have lived in such a world,” I mused.

“Ah,” said my governess. “Would that it were still the way. Alas, a great famine came, and food and water were in short supply. Kindness gave way to might. Kingdoms sprung up, and with them, greed, wars, unjust laws.”

“The revolutionaries? The turmoil at the Hof?”

Baroness bowed her head and squeezed her eyes. “The lockets were uncovered hundreds of years ago by a young princess who, playing in the woods near her castle, heard voices. She followed the sounds, and found three timepieces, identical from the outside, but each bearing its own secret power. They are the only artifacts of that earlier time in our history. Over the centuries, they found their way to the palaces of various rulers.”

I remembered the day I received the package from Karl, his letter to me. He had written as though the keepsake were a mere bauble. Some trifle he had stumbled upon amid his vast assortment of family jewels. “Lola,” I said. “Does she possess the third locket?”

“I do not know what came of the third locket. At one time, your Uncle Ludwig kept it in his vault. He bestowed it upon his daughters and various beauties of his acquaintance, but would take it back once the lady fell out of favor.”

I pulled a hand from the blanket of my governess, and tugged gently on my new locket, but my quivering voice belied my anguish. “Tell me about the magic of the third locket. Is it tremendous? Tell me if it has the power to bring the world back to a place of love.”

“The third locket holds a magic of the highest order. The mighty force of truth. Of authentic voice. The wearer of this locket must stay true to her heart. She cannot tell falsehoods or act against her deepest voice. Your cousin, Amalie, was sent to an asylum after her contact with that keepsake.”

Elisabeth Wittelsbach, you will see. You must have something that she desires. She will not stop until she takes it from you.

Baroness Wilhelmine wrapped her fingers around my locket-holding hand. “Tonight, and all nights, you will wear this, and it will keep you safe. But you must remember that the rest of your life will require strong faith. Will require that you call upon your virtue, your vision and your voice, and that you do not compromise any one of them.”

My fingers trembled beneath the warm grasp of my governess, and she released me. I unlatched the locket slowly to reveal the innards of this treasure, but I knew its contents without even gazing upon them; I knew what I was about to behold. The photograph that my governess—that insufferable, maddening, autointoxicated woman who raised me—had tucked next to her heart, it was a picture of me. Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie in Bavaria.

With the Country Fair looming, Willow Creek is all hands on deck. In a couple of days we’ll pack up the Volvo wagon and a borrowed pickup and trailer and drive a hundred miles south to Veneta, just outside of Eugene, where each year a forest is converted to a wonderland and hippies skip about, selling bamboo-crafted instruments, handmade hemp tunics and pita bread stuffed with meat substitutes and organic heirloom vegetables. A month ago, I would have rather sat in a dark, dingy cell than accompany Dad and Willow to such a place. Now, though, I’m actually looking forward to donning a Willow Creek apron and bandana and handing out toothpicked samples of herbed goat cheese. There is something about being an insider, part of a family, that feels the same way an organized bookshelf feels. The sum of many equaling a whole of something bigger. I’m not all by myself.

Spraying is over, and the tractors in our fields are gone, so Cory and I have moved our office to the rafters of the main barn, where it smells like warm hay bales, and owlets peep in a nest, and the ever-increasing summertime insects buzz and crawl and fly about.

It’s in those rafters that Cory and I rewrite the history of the world.

We’d hidden the locket and diary under a rotted bale of hay that had sprouted new, bright green alfalfa—life refusing to stop. We hole up out there, after the seemingly endless list of chores we’re now assigned, and reread passages, trying to suck truth from the words.

Where Cory wrote to Sisi, warning her of the fate that lay waiting, there is now new writing. Well,
old
new writing. Sisi was reaching out to us. Only, she had no idea that she was communicating with the future. It feels incredible to have crossed over to another time.

Who is this, please?
she wrote.
What reason do you have for writing to me?

The diary is filled with chronicles of good, bad, joy and despair. And the locket, worn down and dirty, hidden away for over a century in the spine of a book—we’d freed it, Cory and I. Even if it is just a hunk of copper on a silver chain, it holds stories inside of it, and now we’re visiting those stories, using her journal as a conduit. For better or worse, we’re giving Sisi the gift anyone would want. A do-over, a road not taken.

Dust and the deep stench of alfalfa cover us as we pore over Sisi’s book. We are discoverers. Pioneers. Skeptical, bad-boy Cory is starting to believe it, too. His shoulder rubs against mine as he writes German into the journal, narrating the translation for me as the pen scribbles down the yellowed page:

We are from the future. If you marry the emperor, you will regret it. You will have children who die, a husband who is unfaithful, and a mother-in-law who will try to control you.

I rub the tarnished wing of the locket like you always see in movies where there’s a genie and a lamp. Before I can stop my mouth, out comes, “If this locket really does have powers—I mean, if you could use it to go back to a certain time—what would you want to do over?”

Cory closes the journal and stretches his arms up over his head, yawning as though the question bores him, but then he says, “In my life, do-overs don’t work.”

“Oh, c’mon, Cory. I’m not saying you
could
change anything. I’m just asking, what would you
want
to change? If you could.”

“I can’t even go there,” Cory says. “Look, the other night? That thing with Jewellee and letting you down?”

Out of nowhere, a lump in my throat forms and goes straight to my stomach. “Jewellee? What about her?”

“Yeah, well, I regret that for a bunch of reasons,” Cory says, grabbing the locket from me and rubbing the wing between his finger and thumb. “So, being a self-serving dude, I could say, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, take me back to Saturday night,’ and I wouldn’t have played hacky, I wouldn’t have talked to her. Not to mention the MIP and cramming your pills and making you make me barf them back up. But this whole chain of stuff happened because I’m an ass, so that’s why I say do-overs are crap.”

I give him a little punch on the arm, but really, I’m pretty sad for Cory. Somewhere in Germany there is a girl Cory loves. She was pregnant when he was sent home from his abroad program. That much Cory shared. I want to ask more about the girl and the pregnancy. Is there a baby somewhere? Is Cory a father? But I can tell that he isn’t ready to talk too much about it, so, instead, I tell him about my dad. “He told me he wished that what he loved and what he was good at were the same thing, but the other day, when I finally watched him play the piano, if that isn’t love, I’m completely stumped.”

Cory dangles the locket by its chain and we watch it swing back in forth as he speaks. “What your dad said is true. But what’s truer is how when you do love the thing you’re good at, sometimes it poisons you.”

The tick-tock of the locket puts me in a spell. Sisi loved horses, loved romance. Poetry. Life. Me? I’m still figuring out what I love. What I’m good at.

Cory breaks my spell. “We got to do a showcase in Munich. Bayern Cup. We were tied for the championship. Came down to penalties. I was the fifth guy. The pressure was unbelievable. Everyone else had made it. Now, maybe I wasn’t as good at soccer as your dad was at violin or piano or whatever, but I was pretty damn good.”

He lets the locket come to a stop. A trio of starlings flit past us. I nudge Cory’s knee. “And so, you missed the PK?”

“Hit the crossbar. The opposing team only had to put in their last shot and they’d win, but then the ref blew the whistle. Keeper had left his line before I kicked. I got a do-over. Nailed it. They missed their last penalty. We won the tournament, but that’s the last time I touched a ball. Even in that split second of thinking I’d messed it up for the team, it killed me. Poison. Letting people down is poison.”

It’s more words in a row out of Cory than I’ve ever heard. But even then, he’s not done. He says, “The Brüder Grimm, they had the right idea. Their original stories were filled with unintended outcomes. Consequences. But people want happily ever after, you know? So they rewrote their fairy tales to suit the whole
princess marries the prince and all their babies are brilliant
thing.”

“Are you done?” I ask.

But he’s not. He keeps rubbing the tarnished locket. “In Prague, there’s this bridge, and there’s a statue on the bridge, a copper statue made of the same stuff as this locket wing, and the whole damn thing is tarnished to hell except for a plaque on its base where there’s a falling priest, and that’s shiny as can be from people rubbing it to get a wish granted. No matter what, you can always count on people believing that there’s a shortcut to happiness.”

I want to slap him for being a downer, but Cory is right. There is no shortcut. And here I thought all this time I had him figured out. His skater-bad-boy self. I think about what he said when he told me he and his siblings had been brought up with one rule: don’t do harm. But now, according to Cory, not doing harm is impossible. You can’t live without affecting other people. Unintended consequences, letting people down, if you live. If you
engage
, you’re going to screw up.

But sometimes, you just have to do the simple thing. Surrender, I guess. Look at the past with a smile, because you can’t change the thing; you can only change the story about the thing. “Um,” I say, “my do-over would be to not mix bleach and ammonia. I think.”

Cory grins, and his dimple grows from an apostrophe to an exclamation point. He lifts the chain of the locket over my head. The winged timepiece, the aged-copper jewelry and faded photo of a goddess, dangles off my neck, suspended, in just this particular moment in time.