The Empress Chronicles Read Online Free PDF

when she was at the end of her rope with us. “Elisabeth is a lady, and you mustn’t let her act like such a hooligan.”
    Mummi was correct that Papa didn’t have much use for formal lessons (he often stated that pretty girls had no need for boring facts), but he was strict on two accounts. We must learn to ride well, and we must learn to move as if we had angels with wings upon our feet.
    Dirt flew off my ponies and whirled around me. Sun pushed its way through the cloud and into the cracks of the stall, and the dust filled up the beams of sunlight. Why couldn’t Mummi and the others understand how good, how real, this felt? The smell of the horses, the leather of the saddles nearby, the piles of rotting dung … this was my life. I sighed with the knowledge that already, I was reneging on my promise to be more ladylike.
    The hard roundness of a curry brush in my hand was as solid a thing as there ever was in the world. And Nené— Helene —would soon give this all up. Not that my sister enjoyed the barn a smidgen the same as I. She was more given to the domestic arts. No one could set a vase of flowers as well as she. Her embroidery was masterful. And she was learning appropriate verse for the drawing room. Goethe and Schiller, mostly.
    Papa was fond of verse stemming from the revolutionaries. He had a particular love for Heine, and when we rode he’d recite:
A mistress stood by the sea
sighing long and anxiously.
She was so deeply stirred
By the setting sun
My Fräulein. Be gay,
This is an old play;
ahead of you it sets
And from behind it returns.
    This, Papa let me know, was irony. Irony was important in this life, he said. Without it, days were drudgery and thoughts were recycled. “Don’t settle for what they tell you must do,” he cautioned. “Think beyond the shadow that’s following you.”
    Once, Papa had stolen me for a ride through the entire countryside. We’d dressed in disguise and borrowed horses from a neighboring farm so we wouldn’t be identified by the crest pressed into our own saddlery. Through the English Garden we’d ridden, through the forest and to the summer beer gardens, where we’d heard fiddlers and the gay sound of tambourines.
    Papa smiled when I asked if we might join the troupe. “By all means, little one.” He laughed.
    I wore my hair braided around my head like a peasant girl. Papa donned a gypsy cape that went all the way to his knee, and strapped a zither to his back. He issued me brass handbells, and atop a pony I stood, ringing the bells as Papa plucked his instrument. Patrons flocked from the beer gardens, gathering about us. From their pockets they tossed copper coins at our horses’ hoofs. I climbed down, bowed and picked the florins up off the ground then settled them into the pockets of my dirndl.
    On our way back to town, Papa exclaimed, “Sisi, had you and I not been princely born, we’d have made our way in the circus.”
    Oh, how I’d missed him these past weeks. How I’d longed to hear his whistle from the adjoining apartment, where Mummi banished him most of the time as punishment for his antics.
    I was lost in yet another daydream where I was a circus rider, standing atop my dappled pony on one toe, when Mummi herself strode into the barn—a rare sight, to be sure. “Elisabeth Wittelsbach,” she shouted. “What am I to do with you?”
    Her eyes seared into the green smear on my sleeve, the smudges of filth which were no doubt coloring my cheeks. She carried baby Sophie, who she had not seen for several weeks. My little sister seemed at odds with the stranger, her mother, who held her as though she were a bag of grain. Clearly, Mummi was past the point where she enjoyed cooing, jostling, and caressing infants.
    I reached out of the stall to chuck the baby under the chin, but Mummi lurched back, recoiling from my dirty hand. “You’ll need to stop at the well and fetch more water. You won’t be sitting at the table covered in grime.”
    My