The Empress Chronicles Read Online Free PDF Page B

mother’s face was twisted up and angry, and her voice barely a movement from sobs. There was more here than my usual unkemptness. I placed the horse brush on the ledge, wiped my hands off on a leather cloth that hung near the stall door, and moved out of the stall to where she stood, a furious quake of a woman.
    “Mummi, what is it?”
    She burst into tears so suddenly, I snatched baby Sophie from her, lest the child drop from her arms.
    “Mummi?”
    My mother looked the way she did after hearing bad gossip about Papa. When someone in the village spied a child with Papa’s enormous green eyes and long neck, for instance. Or when one of us children had been seen talking to herself like a lunatic. But there was an additional layer of fear this time. Her reluctance to disclose what caused her face to look ghostly had me afraid as well.
    “If I could give you any wisdom at all, Sisi,” she finally began, “it would be to do as my sisters wisely did, rather than be stuck like your poor mother, married to a jester, while the men in my own family slowly lose their minds over tarts and witches.”
    Baby Sophie pulled at my hair and then reached for the mane of my piebald, Cupid. I knew who Mummi was talking about; I didn’t even need to ask. For several months we’d all been worried what might happen if Lola Montez managed to find her way back to Munich, back to Mummi’s and the archduchess’s older brother, King Ludwig, whose soft heart and wandering eye could never resist a beautiful woman.
    Mummi beat her fists against the splintery wood of the stall, causing my ponies to pull their heads out of their hay and Sophie to laugh and clap her hands. “Cook was at market today, and talk is that she’s come back, that dancer .”
    Lola’s portrait hung in Uncle Ludwig’s Gallery of Beauties, her seductress gaze right next to the determined glare of my aunt, the archduchess. A courtesan beside a queen. As regal as my aunt was, the notorious heartbreaker was alluring. Lola’s enchanting deep blue eyes, set in china skin and framed by ebony hair, were bewitching to men and women alike. Lola had become my aged uncle’s obsession, causing him to go mad with desire, abdicating his responsibilities as king in favor of what Mummi surmised was “carnal pleasure a man of his age should forego.”
    Oh, how our house in Munich on Ludwigstrasse had burst with Mummi’s tears and rage a few months back. “How could he throw away all his respect, his popularity with the Bavarian people over that wicked enchantress?”
    But soon thereafter, life looked as though it would return, once again, to normal; Lola had been escorted out of the country by an angry mob and warned never to return. Slowly, my Uncle Ludwig sank into a profound depression. He’d claimed the people whose lives he’d enriched had betrayed him. They’d thrown rocks at the apartment where he’d kept his beguiling mistress. They’d threatened to pull the skin from her lovely bones, all because she’d stirred things up, taken control of the kingdom, while my smitten uncle had sat in a lovesick stupor.
    Mummi had heard him lament, “After all I’ve done, they took away the one reason I had to live. To really live.”
    He’d canonized her, made her a countess, to no avail. Lola must go, chanted the crowds. But, now, rumor had it, she’d returned. Some reported seeing her in the wood, dressed as a gypsy. Some said that they’d seen her at the summer ball, hovering on the outside of the dance floor, her gown made of swan feathers. She was a shape-shifter, Lola was. Enchanted. Dangerous.
    Here in the stable, while my mother lamented, baby Sophie waved bye-bye as Mummi covered her face with her hands. I hugged baby Sophie closer to me, feeling her plump baby’s arms wrap around my neck.
    “This is the reason I want you girls to marry out of this circus,” Mummi cried. “When all of Bavaria can turn upside down due to an old man’s folly, nobody is safe. The