The Empress Chronicles (23 page)

Once dinner was over and the music commenced, everyone’s eyes were on Franz Joseph, though most of the ladies coyly inserted fans in front of their faces to avoid detection of their obvious staring.

My face did not pretend to require fanning. I wished to know how well the locket plan was working, and a fan would merely hinder my mission. Karl, naturally, noticed right off that I’d given his gift to my sister, and he sulked beside me. No matter.

“Do you think His Majesty will ask Helene to dance?” I queried.

Karl muttered, “I do not know and I do not care.”

“But do you not find her beautiful?” I badgered.

“She is modest. That is good.” He sipped from his brandy and put his glass down with a thump. “I would invite you to dance, but it would not be proper. Not until my brother has made his choice first.”

I felt bad for poor Karl. After all, he was my first love, and he seemed so sullen and angry at his position behind his brother. But time had ticked on, and I had another beloved now. My heart ached at the memory of Count Sebastian, who had joined the Revolution and was so far away from me. All I had to hold in my heart was our last hour together in the woods. His gentle kisses, and my promise to him that we would some day reunite.

Now, across the hall, the emperor seemed to be ignoring Nené. He looked straight ahead, his brow furrowed in thought. He crooked his finger at a man across the room.

“What do you think he wishes with that man?” I whispered to Karl.

“Who? Weckbecker? That’s his aide-de-camp. I suppose we will soon find out.”

The archduchess, seeing that her son was not making a move toward the dance floor, announced to the guests that they were all free to enjoy the waltz. Couples began dancing.

Karl rose and extended his arm in my direction. I stood, and some attendant removed my chair. The waltz was nearing its conclusion, and he muttered, “The next dance is for you and me, Sisi.”

If I closed my eyes, I thought, perhaps I could pretend to be waltzing with my beloved. But before I could do so, I noticed that this Weckbecker fellow was engaged in personal conversation with the emperor. The music stopped briefly, and then one of my favorite polkas filled the hot ballroom air. Karl again offered his arm, but at that moment the emperor’s aide-de-camp interrupted our progress to the floor.

“Pardon,” he said, directing his apology to Karl. “His Grace wishes that I should dance with young Sisi.”

Karl sighed and sat back down, and before I knew it, this stocky fellow with tufts of hair emerging from his ears was leading me to the center of the room. It was most unusual, this state of affairs, and I lurched my head around to see if now the emperor would invite Nené to dance.

“Relax, Princess,” said Weckbecker. “Show me that rhythm you Wittelsbachs are known for.”

Despite Weckbecker’s frank coarseness, I found him a fine dancer, and his demeanor reminded me of my darling Count Sebastian. So much so that I became drawn into a dream world, imagining that I was floating on the arm of my dear love. Oh, if only Count Sebastian could see me now, in my pale pink frock, making merry on this lavish ballroom parquet! Of course with the heat, my cheeks flushed fiercely, and by the time the fiddles ceased, I felt as though I’d scaled Katrin, so invigorated was I.

“Brava, Princess,” exclaimed my dance partner as he led me back to the table. “I hope we can do this again sometime.”

“But that was so much fun, why not dance the next as well?” I gushed, in spite of the rudeness of such a request.

Weckbecker chuckled. “I suspect one dance is all I will be allowed this evening.”

As I took my seat next to Karl, I noticed that he was sunken even more glumly in his chair. “Brilliant,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“Your fate is sealed, Sisi.”

Karl was acting quite the enigma, and I wacked him ever so furtively under the table with the toe of my shoe.

“Ouch,” he said. “You will require quite a bit of polishing, cousin.”

The bafflement continued to cloud my brain. So much so that when the emperor himself strode up to request my arm for the cotillion, I had the poor man standing at my chair so long I nearly caused the onlookers to faint from holding their respective breaths.

Somehow we manage to keep Cory’s ingestion of pills and booze from Willow and Dad. I had the practice, was around enough borderline kids, addicts, and sociopaths to know how to keep parents guessing, but this is different. Cory’s a good kid with a big hole in his heart. I want to know what’s behind all of his sudden despair. And I want to read Sisi’s pages, find out more about the jagged, tarnished necklace hidden in the spine of the diary. So I agree to keep quiet. Cory and I, it seems, have struck another bargain.

After Cory stops puking, and after I manage to get him to drink about a gallon of water and bury the empty vodka bottle in the bottom of the recycling bin, and, finally, at long last empty my very full bladder, Cory, the trench coat, and I wander into the clover, where bees are pollinating right and left under the noonday sun.

I don’t want to know, not really, don’t want to stir things up, but out my mouth comes, “Did you and Jewellee win your beer pong game?”

Cory sort of laughs, but it’s the kind of laugh that’s full of irony. “She was trying to make her emo boyfriend jealous. The two of them split as soon as the cops showed up.”

I try to make my mouth not yank itself up in a smile.
Schadenfreude
.

“It brought back some stuff, that party. That girl. The cops,” he says.

I have no idea what he’s referring to, but I nod as if I do. Then I point to the tractor, which has become our little office, parked in the middle of the field. “What do you think?”

“Good a place as any.” Cory shrugs, making a grab for the trench coat. “Plus, we have our tool bag.”

It’s the very first truly hot day since summer started. Sweat beads have gathered at my hairline. If I lick my top lip I’ll taste salt. Dad and Willow will be busy in the goat shed all afternoon. I picture the newborn kid, its slick coat, its spindly legs. By now it’s probably standing on its own. Walking, even. Life happens so fast.

And yet, here lies a 150-year-old story in the pocket of the coat, inches from us, about to unfold. It’s old hat now, this B and E business, and Cory gets us into the combine cab as easy as if he’s slicing a bagel in half. The cab is oven hot. He sets the trench coat between us: him in the pilot seat, me the co-pilot, Empress Elisabeth and her secrets in the middle.

“I’m nervous,” I tell him.

Cory reaches into a pocket and pulls out the old chain. The metal chunk at the end of it swings back and forth as he holds it up. The tip that scraped me raw sticks out like a fishhook.

“Do you think that’s valuable?”

Cory narrows his eyes. “Maybe it once was.”

It looks like at one time it was a pocket watch. I can make out some Roman numerals etched into its face like a sundial. There’s a little clasp behind the jagged tip that resembles one of those wing pins flight attendants give to little kids. I pull it to me, the green, tarnished, coppery thing. My bumbling fingers manage to find their way to the tiny clasp, and with the poke of a fingernail, the latch springs open.

Cory lets loose with a “Dude!” as though I’ve just found a treasure chest overflowing with gold.

It’s a worn sepia picture inside. A photograph of a monarch. A queen, maybe.

Cory examines the bleached, cracked miniature photograph. “Is this that empress?”

“I don’t think so. It looks more like a Greek goddess or something.”

Sweat drips down my face. Pools of water form between my shoulder blades, my armpits. As gross as this feels, it’s the same as the kid birth; I can’t imagine being anywhere else. From the coat pocket, I pull the collection of pages sandwiched inside my ingestion log cover. The diary. I look at Cory, who’s still examining the odd locket-watch. “You ready?”

Cory hands the locket to me, clears his throat, and grabs the diary. “First page,” he says. “Looks like some poem. It says something about swallows and toils and prison bars.”

I follow Cory’s finger as it draws down the page.

“And here’s a sketch of locked-up girl, like Rapunzel.”

“How
Grimms
.”

“Yeah, but remember, the real Rapunzel was, um, ‘with child.’” When Cory said, “with child,” a weird bitterness popped into his voice. And something else.

“What?”

He shakes his head.

“Cory?”

“It’s just, you know, when you asked me about if I had a girlfriend in Germany?”

I nod.

“Well, what I like about Grimms? It’s not Disney. Not everything is a happy ending.”

I touch his arm. The hair there is thick and a little slicked down from sweat. I think about the newborn kid. “It’s okay. You don’t need to spill it. Just in case you want to, you know?”

He nods then pages ahead, scanning the words quickly. “The usual teenage-girl hearts and puppy dogs stuff.” Then, “Here’s something sort of cool. Her love interest maybe? A count? A sketch of the two of them on horseback.”

“Let me see.” I scoot closer to him.

There’s a faint drawing of a young girl sitting behind a tall, uniformed man, the two of them on a horse with a ridiculously long back. And some writing above the sketch.

I point to it. “What’s this word here, Cory?
Opfer
?
Das Opfer?
”

“Sacrifice,” he says. “I know that one because of all the church we had to go to.”

Count Sebastian must die
, in my head.

Cory continues paging through the book and finds a passage that makes him laugh. “The baroness has taken to her bed again, this time with a bottle of castor oil and a hose to evacuate her bowels.”

“Ha,” I say. “The gasbag.”

He scans the yellowed pages, his eyes taking in the scripted foreign language. In the cab a fly buzzes about, lingering at the window, its little legs flattened like it’s trying to get moisture from the glass. It’s even too hot for insects. Warming vinyl smell fills my nostrils. I begin to itch. Finally, Cory says, “This is super weird here. It’s talking about a picture of her boyfriend. A dude named Sebastian. And other things she found in her diary. She blames some evil witch.” He looks up at me, the old winged necklace in my hand. “There’s something about the locket. Magic. She says here that the picture in the locket foretells the future.”

“This locket?” I’m scratching my fingernail against the layers of tarnish.

“I guess. Look here.” Cory points to a bunch of scribble. “‘Lola and I have made a bargain. I must agree to go to Bad Ischl.’”

“According to the book I have, that’s where Franz Joseph proposed to her. It was a weird switcheroo. He was supposed to marry her sister.”

“Yeah? Well, here’s this whole section about a lie. A bargain she made with this so-called witch, this Lola. It says something about having to go along with the plan and if she did, she’d live happily ever after with the count she was in love with. But we know that that didn’t happen.”

Cory keeps reading, sharing bits with me now and then. It sounds like a fairy tale, Sisi’s diary: the castles, the spell, things disappearing, shape shifting. Lola. And the gassy governess, Baroness Wilhelmine. Fate. Love. Disappointment. All the elements of a story. But unlike the fairy tales I’m familiar with, there is no knight in shining armor. No prince or king who saves the day. Sisi married Franz Joseph and slowly went nuts.

“This baroness of the enema,” Cory says. “She was in cahoots with this Lola witch. Sisi says the woman admitted it to her during the whole engagement party in that Austrian spa town.”

I palm the locket; the old cracked picture leers at me. “Do you believe her?”

“Believe what? That some weird spell was cast? Oh, c’mon, Liz.”

I pull the old diary away from Cory. Scan through the pages of German, of writing set into verse. Drawings. And then I land on a sketch of Cory. It’s not really Cory, but it’s a dead ringer. In fact, it looks just like the picture I scribbled on the torn page. A roguish boy cloaked in a hood. It’s as though Sisi found my sketch and added to it. But that would be ridiculous.

Drips of perspiration roll down my backbone. A funny twinge works its way up from my stomach. Something really weird is going on. And then I wonder about Dr. Greta. What does she know about the contents of this diary? My very last appointment with her is scheduled for tomorrow. What will I ask her? Will I confess to having stolen the diary? Does she even know about the locket?

Like he’s reading my mind, Cory says, “So this Sisi chick had a pretty crazy imagination, seems like. What do you think your therapist knows about it all?”

Engagement
, Dr. Greta might call it, what I’m doing now. Ironic, but I’m engaging with the history I literally stole from her office. “Cory, don’t you remember this picture? I drew it. Part of it. And now, it’s different.”

“You drew it?”

“The torn pages, remember? I crammed them back into the diary. The boy in the hoodie.” I point to the sketch, which had turned the hoodie into a cape, but my pencil marks were still there. That was the face I drew. Cory’s face.

“Dude,” says Cory.

I push my face up close to the pages. “Don’t you see? It’s this guy she was in love with. She took my picture of you and turned it into
this
.”

Cory seizes the book and then we both jump as a line of Harleys roars by on the road out front. “She put a caption there,
the object of my fascination has found me even in my personal pages
, something like that.”

My heart triple-times right there in the fancy tractor cab. “Cory, what if, what if the story that’s written about the thing, well, what if it’s unfinished? What if writing
now
can change what happened
then
?”

He cocks his head and scrunches his eyebrows. “You high?”

“What if we, you and me right now, have the power to rewrite history?”

“You
are
high. When did you pinch a bud off your dad’s stash?”

I swat him with the back of my hand. “We have to test this.”

Again, I get the cocked head.

“Write something down, here.” I point under the sketch and the caption. “Let her know what her fate is. Warn her!”

“Oh, come on, Liz. Really?”

I swallow hard. Look into his eyes with the same overwhelming need I did when I ruined everything by lunging for Jeremy. But this is not another misread, not another Jeremy-the-gallery-owner blunder. “Cory,” I plead, “imagine what life could be like if you had the power to erase mistakes. Yours, or someone else’s.”

Cory’s dark eyes get shiny. But just for a second. “What should I write?”

I guide him back to the page. If this works? We’ll be engaging with royalty. Or, rather, a duchess who won’t have to become the empress of Austria after all. “Tell her to run. Tell her not to believe Lola. Tell her that if she wants true happiness with her count, she must flee Bad Ischl. She must not get engaged on Emperor Franz Joseph’s twenty-third birthday.”

Cory takes a pen from the enormous dashboard of this behemoth tractor, and he begins to scrape foreign words across the yellowed page under the sketch of the boy that started out as him. Under the sketch he forms the words that, if I’m right, will spare this poor girl the agony she’d been destined to live.