A Little Empire Of Their Own
This enthralling story revolves around Empress Charlotte, the lethally sharp-witted widow of Archduke Maximilian, the (very) short-lived Emperor of Mexico. Set during World War I, the Empress lives in a run-down chateau in Belgium. She still commands considerable respect from the German government, and her request for an attaché from the German High Command is granted. The attaché, a Major Gerhard von Schwartz-Schilling, becomes an unwitting pawn in the Zimmermann telegram scandal, all arranged with delicious duplicity and underhandedness by the Empress herself.
Intertwined with the main story is a two-sided telling of the war between Mexico and France, the French having the idea of sitting the Archduke on the throne and then bleeding silver-rich Mexico dry. Blasio, the Empress’s driver and former secretary to the Archduke, tells the Major about the war as he saw it. He also owns a set of three diaries taken of a dead officer of Benito Juarez’s Mexican loyalists, who were battling the French and their land-owning Mexican supporters. The major reads the diaries, seeing the other side from the officer’s point of view. This subplot itself is spellbinding. Thus the reader gets two great stories in one novel.
