“Your Highness, that is all very well but the doctor must confirm it.” Esterházy’s face was a blank space. Elisabeth wondered if it would look the same if it were her skirts lifted to the sky with a man and a funnel inside them.

“Countess, I actually couldn’t see anything.” The doctor sounded apologetic, and fear spiked through Elisabeth. A new fear—not of the violation itself but that it might be in vain.

That she would have allowed these men to hurt her and in the end, they would still declare her unfit. Still keep her from Franz. It all would have been for nothing. The months of longing. The stresses of court. And losing Helene. She would have lost her best friend and the love of her life over some anatomical thing she didn’t control or understand.

“That cannot be.” Elisabeth’s voice was small, her heart smaller.

The room went quiet. One heartbeat, two.

Finally, Leontine stepped in. “Your Highness, you are an avid horseback rider, I believe?”

Elisabeth’s mind scrambled to catch up. She didn’t know why that mattered, but she nodded all the same. Desperate for Leontine—for anyone in the room—to take her side.

“Don’t you know what that means?” Leontine turned to the doctor, raising an eyebrow.

“Indeed,” he paused, “that is a possibility. Her Highness’s hymen could have been torn during riding.”

Elisabeth’s stomach churned. She didn’t know whether this proclamation was hope or doom.

“Without proof of innocence, there will be no marriage.” The beady-eyed priest turned his back again as if that settled it. Elisabeth added him to her mental list of people in the room who deserved a funnel up their skirts.

You love Franz, Elisabeth told herself. You love him more than anything. Do this for him. Sick to her stomach and now visibly crying, she laid back down and grasped Leontine’s hand, pushing her anger, her upset, the fear and the humiliation into that gesture. Leontine squeezed back reassuringly, and Elisabeth tried to send her mind somewhere else. Fly away like a gull, fly over the sea. You are free. You are away. You are anywhere but here.

So many long moments later, the doctor stood and made his proclamation. “I believe in the bride’s virginity, although her hymen is not fully intact.”

The ladies released her legs and Elisabeth sat up, clenching her hands in her skirts. The priest turned, expression smug, the huge cross around his neck flashing a sliver of light directly into Elisabeth’s eyes. “May kings issue from your loins and make all the earth your subjects.”

He bowed and left.

Elisabeth watched him go, watched them all go except her ladies, shock sitting heavy on her like a rain-drenched cloak. Her heart spiraled, a storm of hurt and disbelief and rage.