In a Gilded Cage by Susan Appleyard

Author:Susan Appleyard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Susan Appleyard
Published: 2021-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20 – Summer 1857

Having refused an escort, Sisi was alone in the summer woods. Grooms and policemen tried to follow her, but she had no difficulty leaving them floundering in her wake. She urged Forester faster. When he showed signs of slowing she used her riding crop on him. Trees raced by and branches flew overhead and the horse’s hooves beat a thunderous tattoo in the green silence. The only people she ever saw were herders or farmers. Sometimes she stopped to watch them. Ordinary people with ordinary lives. She was only nineteen, yet she felt she had lived too long.

Every day she drove in a closed carriage with the blinds down from Laxenburg to the Church of the Capuchins. Alighting in the Neue Markt, dressed from head to foot in unrelieved black, she descended into the crypt where Sophie was buried among her long dead ancestors, to weep and pray at her dead daughter’s tomb.

After returning to Laxenburg, she ordered Forester saddled and, glutted with grief and remorse, rode off into the woods, pushing the horse to his limit as she tried to outrun the anguish that tormented her day and night.

When the sun was past its zenith she turned back toward the palace. Her ladies smiled when they saw her. Sometimes she thought their smiles were so fixed they must sleep with them on.

“Did you have a good ride, Majesty?” Karolin asked brightly.

“Yes, thank you.”

“You’ll be pleased to hear His Majesty has returned. He has asked you to join him in his study.”

“Very well. Get me out of this costume, please.”

“What will it please Your Majesty to wear?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

She caught the exchange of glances between them. Franz had returned to Hungary without her to conclude the negotiations, and now he was back they expected her to take an interest in what she wore to greet him. But nothing interested her. Her Greek reader and her Hungarian tutor came and went daily without seeing her. Even her hairdresser was underemployed. Her secretaries had replied to the many condolence letters she and Franz had received from all over the world according to a standard formula. She attended no court functions or ceremonies, wrote no poetry or letters, ate little, slept badly and cried a lot. When she wasn’t riding she shut herself in her bedroom and thought about suicide. A selfish solution, she knew, to end her suffering by causing suffering to so many others. But she thought about it constantly. The oblivion of the tomb. The silence. The void.

“Your Majesty must be hungry after your ride. These are from Demel’s, your favourite bakery,” Paula said, offering her a plate with several rich cakes.

“You may share them among yourselves.”

She couldn’t eat. She was down from her usual one hundred pounds and couldn’t bring herself to care.

Dressed in a dove grey tea gown, she went through the adjoining rooms into Franz’s study. He was with three of the ministers.

“That will be all for now, gentlemen,” he said when he saw her, and held out his hands to her.

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