I am doing my best to raise you properly to be an honorable ruler, but I fear you will be wholly lacking in the virtue necessary to lead a kingdom. If I had shown even an ounce of your irresponsibility, I would never have been able to hold together my realm. If I carried on as you do, I would never have been able to competently lead my empire, let alone protect it from the men who tried to rip it away from me.

I pray that you will see the error of your ways and change before it is too late.

Yours,

Empress Mother

Chapter Two

May 1767

A silent assassin called smallpox was sweeping through Vienna and the rest of Austria. This was not the first time that the virus had paid a visit to the Habsburg family. When it initially reached the doorsteps of Schönbrunn Palace, the royal physicians had implored Mother to try the new form of medicine called inoculation. “The process involves taking the virus from a pustule from an already infected person and introducing it to an otherwise healthy person. The process is showing great promise in the city of Boston in the American colonies,” they told her. Meanwhile, Mother’s religious advisors disagreed. “To do this would thwart the will of God. Man was not meant to intercede in such an unholy manner,” they said.

It wasn’t until our brother Joseph insisted that he get inoculated that Mother relented, deciding to allow the older children to get the inoculation if they wanted it. Those three were my brothers Joseph and Leopold and my elder sister Johanna, soon to be married to the king of the Two Sicilies. And while Joseph and Leopold lived, Johanna did not. She died from the inoculation. After that, Mother took her chances with the virus.

The family was regularly checked for fevers and rashes, but in the end, no one was safe from the devastating virus. Smallpox visited the palace again, finding new hosts among the family that had not yet been touched by its brutal effects. The first of us to come down with the illness this time was Elisabeth. Beautiful, vain Elisabeth, she told the physicians, “Do what you must to save my face, the rest of my body be damned. If I lose my beauty, let me die, I would rather be dead than to be deformed.” She lived, but her face was horribly disfigured.

After Mother contracted smallpox herself, earlier in the year, she had sequestered Josepha, Amalia, Karl, and Maximilian. None of them had had the virus before, and she wanted to make sure they remained safe. Antoinette and I had had the virus when we were young, but we were placed into quarantine right along with the others. The doctors were concerned that we could get it again if we were exposed.

Life sheltered away from the rest of the family was incredibly dull. Brandis lectured Antoinette and me from sunrise until supper. The ogre thought this a great opportunity to train us as proper archduchesses. Antoinette and I, on the other hand, wanted nothing more than to escape the confines of this sorry excuse for palace life. While Brandis droned on and on about long-dead relatives that I could not care less about, I kept my eyes fixed on the perfect spring weather that allured me from outside the window. The palace grounds were filled with lush green lawns and flowers of vibrant blues and pinks.