The Accidental Empress (60 page)

They sat in silence for several moments longer. Eventually, Franz spoke, his words as feeble as thread as he grasped for some way to weave them together. “I read that your cousin Ludwig has ascended to the throne in Bavaria.”

“King Ludwig is
our
cousin, isn’t that so, Franz?” Sisi cocked her head. “Don’t forget, your mother is a Bavarian, just like my mother, even if she would never dare admit it.”

Franz slurped his soup, retreating back into silence.

As the first course was cleared, Sisi spoke. “I am sorry to hear about Italy.”

Franz coughed into his napkin, wiping his mustache. “That was a blow, indeed.” He looked into her eyes now, redirecting the conversation. “Did you not enjoy the soup, Elisabeth?”

“Oh, that’s right.” Sisi nodded, rapping the table with ringed fingers. “We don’t discuss politics. Or military affairs. Or anything of import.” She said it with a smile, but her words were without cheer.

“Please don’t be cross.” Franz leaned toward her. “I simply wondered if the meal had displeased you.”

“I rarely eat in the evenings.”

“How is that? I remember you having a healthy appetite. This is a change.”

Many things have changed,
Sisi felt like answering. But she simply said: “It upsets my stomach.” Sisi watched as several footmen appeared with plates of breaded veal, beets, green salad, rolls, boiled potatoes, and candied pears.

“Well, then, I’m sorry I ordered so much food.” Franz watched ruefully as the plates were delivered to the table. He pointed to the veal. “We had to have
Wiener schnitzel
in honor of your return. Won’t you have a bite?”

Sisi obliged him, spearing herself a small serving of the breaded meat. The footmen retreated and they were left alone once more, seated in an uncomfortable, unfamiliar silence.

“Thank you for inviting me to join you for dinner,” Sisi said eventually, looking up at him.

“Of course.” Franz swallowed a mouthful of potatoes. “I was eager to see you. It has been a long time.” He paused. “Too long.”

“It has,” she agreed.

“Four years,” he said, as if she were unaware of the fact.

How much would they actually address of what had happened between them? The reason for her departure? She decided perhaps he ought to be the one to bring it up, to apologize for his part.

“I hope that you are back . . . for good, now?” Franz looked down at his plate, tearing apart his veal with several stabs of his fork.

“I plan to be. I missed the children so very much. I hope I will be able to see them tomorrow?”

Without missing a beat, Franz answered, “I will check with Mother to see what she has planned for them.”

Sisi lowered her fork to her plate, attempting to remain calm. It was the manner in which he had said it: casual, oblivious. Unaware of the painful longing that filled her, the rightful mother. Before Sisi could suppress them, the words burst forward from her mouth like bile. “Do you allow your courtesans near our children?”

Franz choked on a bite of veal and immediately began coughing over his plate. Several footmen rushed forward, hovering nearby like solicitous governesses. Franz took several large gulps of wine. Eventually his cough subsided, and with watery eyes and a red face, he looked up at his wife. “Excuse me.”

“Do you, Franz?” Though she had spoken to no one at court during her absence, and would have had no spies to give her information on the names or positions of the ladies, Sisi harbored no naïve illusion that Franz had abstained from all female companionship in her absence.

“Elisabeth, please.” Looking over his shoulders, embarrassed by the presence of the footmen, Franz leaned forward and whispered, “Our children spend their time with their Grandmamma, my mother. As well as their governesses and their tutors. And with me, of course. No . . . er . . .
courtiers
have much interaction with them, except in the most controlled of capacities.”

Sisi leaned back, pushing away her untouched food. Enough with this Habsburg habit of skirting around things: implications and insinuations but never outright honesty. “Oh, come now, Franz, let’s not be so squeamish. Everyone knows that I was ill. And that’s the reason I had to travel south to Madeira. Your mistress made you ill, and you made me ill.”

Franz threw another nervous glance toward a footman in the corner before leaning in to speak. “You went south to heal, Elisabeth, I’ll grant you that. But no one, not even the doctors, was perfectly certain what caused your illness. And certainly no one told you that you needed to stay away so long.”

“No, that was my decision,” Sisi answered. “That point I will concede. And I hope you will concede that your mistress made me ill. I’ve never heard you apologize.”

“Elisa, of course I regret that you were hurt, but if you would only . . .”

“Elisa?”

“It’s not as though you’ve been blameless,” Franz said, a rare tinge of emotion—irritation, perhaps?—apparent in his voice. “You were gone, long before. And then you outright left us. I wondered how you could stay away as long as you did. It struck me as highly . . . unnatural.”

“Unnatural? And what was natural about our arrangement for me? Losing my children? Spending my days haunted by that . . . that
woman
, Countess Esterházy?”

“Elisabeth, please—”

“Why would I come back? To share you with all of the other women? Your mother, first among them. And then God knows who else?”

“Enough”—Franz winced—“please.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, is it too vile? These things may be done, but just not spoken of, is that how it happens? What did you call it?
Repräsentazions-pflicht
. ‘Keeping up a fine front.’ That’s what you told me on our wedding day, wasn’t it?”

“I shall not even try logic, Elisabeth.” His frustration, his condescension—he sounded so much like Sophie.

“What logic?” she asked, her tone bitter.

“That . . .” Franz paused. “That for an emperor to have a . . . to have companions . . . is a perfectly natural custom. A custom as old as time itself. Especially after you withdrew from me. You never seemed to acknowledge it, but I do have certain . . . rights . . . as emperor. Everyone seems to understand it but you.” His hand gripped the napkin, twisting it, as his eyes avoided hers. “It says nothing about how I feel about you, Elisabeth. Nothing. Surely you know that?”

Sisi exhaled an angry laugh. “You’ll have to forgive me, Franz. I never did quite catch on to the Habsburg manner of doing things.”

They sat opposite one another in a tense stillness. Eventually Franz served himself a second helping of veal. Sisi could barely look at her plate: so rich, so heavy, so
Austrian.

After he had finished a second serving of dinner and several glasses of wine, Franz broke the silence. “I truly regret how things happened between us.”

Sisi didn’t answer. Let him offer more than that, she thought, sipping a glass of cold water.

Franz put his forearms on the table, propping himself up. “I do hope, now that you’re home, that things might improve between us.”

Sisi looked at her husband, head cocked. “How so, Franz?”

“Well, you
are
still my wife.” Franz folded his hands and let the words hang between them. When Sisi did not reply, he took a long sip of wine and continued, “I’ve put a lot of thought into this.” He waved his hands toward her then back toward himself. “I’ve asked myself: What’s best for both of us? What’s best for the children?”

Sisi stared at him, her eyes unblinking.

“Elisabeth, I’d very much like to return to how things used to be between us. Give . . . this . . . another try. If you would be willing to do that.”

Sisi thought about this:
to return to how things used to be between us
. But she was not the girl he had married. She no longer loved him. In fact, she no longer believed herself capable of loving any man. And that was through no lack of effort on her part; that was
his
doing.

“Return to how things used to be between us?” She looked up at him, her eyes cold as she repeated the proposition.

“Yes.” Franz pushed himself back in his chair, his full belly now pressing against the restricting confines of his starched military jacket. “You are still my wife. And I’m still very fond of you.” His eyes wandered down toward her exposed shoulders, her bare arms. Sisi repressed the urge to shudder.

When she spoke next, her tone was light. She could not offend him until she had the guarantee of seeing her children. “I’m here, Franz, aren’t I? I plan to take up my duties as empress once more. I plan to take up my duties as mother. What else do you envision happening?”

His eyelids appeared to be growing droopy, perhaps from too much wine and meat. “I had hoped that you might be willing to . . . return to the marriage.”

Sisi knew how to put him off. “So you are offering to give up your mistresses?”

Franz lowered his gaze, his elbows propping himself up on the table, and Sisi confirmed what she had expected: that he did not expect to have to part with any of his
companions.
Emperors always had mistresses, didn’t they? That was what her mother had told her when Sisi had wept over her husband’s discovered infidelity. The fact that Franz had waited so many years to take a mistress had been testament to his deep love for his empress. Hadn’t Sisi’s own father, a mere duke, produced bastards all over his duchy?

Franz switched to port now, pouring himself a full glass. “Please don’t be vulgar, Elisabeth.”

Franz was not the soft, sensitive boy who had fallen in love with her. He was not the reckless young suitor who had asked her to dance and then presented her with a bouquet of flowers at a ball in Bad Ischl. He was not the love-struck groom who had whispered to her on their wedding day. Sisi saw that. Years of power and pressure had hardened him: years at war, years spent arguing in the council of ministers, years spent bedding pliant lovers.

He was somehow impenetrable now. Haughty, requiring others’ submission. More stiff and more certain of his exalted status as Emperor Franz Joseph.

Seeing that she would not answer him on his proposition, Franz changed topics. “Rudolf reminds me of you, Elisabeth. You ought to see him.”

Sisi did not answer, but her heart faltered in her chest.

“What? You do wish to see your children, do you not?” He looked up from his port.

“I long to see them with an aching more severe than you know, Franz.” Sisi clutched the table and leaned forward. “Please, tell me when.”

He nodded, taken aback by the intensity of her response. “I have no doubt that once you see little Rudy, you will join me in longing for more children. More sons, especially.”

Sisi winced and Franz noticed. “Oh. Is that such a painful thought to you?”

The thought of having more children petrified Sisi. She would not do it. She could not. And not just for the reasons Franz might have expected: hurt feelings, resentment over her separation from the first three. No, Sisi doubted that she could physically carry more children. She had enlisted the services of her own doctor, a Doctor Fischer, while in Bavaria to help her understand why she often went months without having her cycle. Marie told her it was on account of her strict diet and long hours spent riding and hiking. But that mattered not. She had done her duty—she had produced an heir. She had no further desire to share a bed with her husband, not when he had invited other women into their union. He was the one who had severed that tie, not Sisi.

“Franz, just please promise me that I may see the children.”

Franz drained his glass and placed it down on the table, his movements tired. “You may see them, Elisabeth.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Where?”

“Come back here in the morning, following breakfast. I will arrange for them to visit me instead of taking their lessons.”

“Please.” Sisi’s voice cracked. “Please just them. Not your mother.”

Franz sighed, as if to say:
This again?
But he nodded his agreement.

“Thank you, Franz.”

They finished dinner with cordial chatter. Sisi was determined not to anger Franz lest he retract his offer to let her visit the children. And Franz was sleepy from too much dinner and wine.

The gardens outside grew dark and quiet, the only sound wafting through the windows was that of the fountains humming in a low gurgle. Sisi yawned, eager to be asleep so that tomorrow might come sooner.

“You’ve had a long day of travel, Franz. Perhaps I ought to let you retire.”

“Thank you, I think that is best.” Franz pushed himself away from the table and rose to a stand, not helping Sisi this time. They exchanged a casual kiss on the cheek before heading for opposite doors.

Franz paused on the far side of the room, hovering for a moment. Sisi turned.

“Good night, Elisabeth.”

“Good night, Franz.” As Sisi left the room, she could not help but overhear the order given by her husband to his nearby valet. “Fetch the carriage. I shall go and visit Frau Anna Nahowski.”

Sisi walked briskly down the long, candlelit hallway, her heels landing in angry stomps on the varnished floor. Her mind was spinning. Just minutes after proposing a marital reunion between the two of them, Franz was off to visit some woman. Did he spend every night with this woman, just as he had once slept in Sisi’s bed every night? She shivered as she pictured his once-familiar body twisted up in the sheets, his arms around some other body. She had known that he spent time with other women; she had even arrived at some sort of resignation, if not acceptance of it. So then why did it torture her so to hear it confirmed?