Chapter Text
History dictates that the Habsburgs built an empire in marble and gold, forged by soldier’s blood and peasant’s coin. I say it was stitched in silk by generations of gentle-handed, quick-tongued women.
Tapestries and thrones, rarely spoken in the same breath, but they should be. From the cradle we women are trained. Not in statecraft, but in pattern, patience, and thread. Not for the beauty, but for survival.
My mother, Elizabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, was a Braunschweig Princess of strict Lutheran rhetoric and gracefully deft hands. She taught me how to wind the shuttle, to spin thread without snapping, manipulating spindles without tangling. To sit still as the world burned outside the window.
***
Then came Amélie.
When I was ten, Father, Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, returned from Gibraltar.1 With him came a barred cart of decaying bodies that stunk of blood and battle smoke, expertly hiding a street-scarred girl. A girl whose dark chocolate eyes flared with hatred, illuminated by her dreadlocked curls matted in a mixture of bloody dust. Her left leg from the knee down, gone, a new injury, wrapped in the bloodstained white coat of the Bourbon-Spanish2 usurpers.
“She’s a gift,” Father said, ruffling my curls. “We believe she’s about your age.”
Mother did not flinch as the girl latched onto her skirts. But her fingers twitched at the hem of her sleeve. I noticed; so did the girl. Smug, suspicious pride wove itself across her face, wounded yet unbowed. And I envied that.
***
The maids began to whisper as they passed me along the corridors; I caught every word:
“A Moorish scrap, they say, plucked off the battlefield like spoilt fruit.”
“Dragged back like a trinket for His Majesty’s amusement. Filthy little foundling.”
“Her mum was likely some wandering camp woman, her sire a Bourbon bastard, if she’s got one at all.”
“Her Majesty won’t stomach it. Not with no heir but three little girls, and now this creature in her skirts?”
***
Amélie limped with an oaken cane. She ate with her fingers, spoke rarely, refused to bow to Father's court, and played cruel tricks on Mother’s ladies-in-waiting.
She was an unsettling enigma, another daughter when all Father wanted was a son. Perhaps she was a result of a decision made during a bout of the madness that plagues our family.3 Yet she is my liberator, a friend in the viper den.