Chapter 268: Grand Prince of Transylvania
While Bruno was away at war, and waiting for a response from the Bulgarian Government for potential military access through their southern borders. Heidi received an unexpected visitor.
Archduchess Hedwig von Habsburg came to Berlin to visit the wife of the man who she once had a crush on when she was younger. Her reason was obviously not to speak with Bruno, but rather Heidi.
In the past, the woman would have had reservations about being alone in a room with one of her husband's many fangirls, but she had long sensed moved on from the past, and her previous possessive jealousy.
Instead, she ensured that tea and cookies were properly prepared for her most royal guest, and sat across from the girl who had grown up into a beautiful young woman with a smile on her own flawless face.
Despite entering her mid-thirties, Heidi remained unblemished from age, or the stresses of lie that one endured on a daily basis. So much so that even Hedwig appeared slightly jealous, as this was the first time she had seen the woman in years, and it had appeared as if she had hardly aged.
After several moments of small talk, the Archduchess of Austria was quick to make her reason for visiting known.
"Let me be frank with you, Princess von Zehntner... My father intends to thoroughly reward your husband for his victory over Serbia, and the justice he gave to the usurper King Peter I and his family of fiends."
Heidi had more or less an inkling of the reward that Franz Joseph had planned for Bruno. Though rewarding officers with titles of nobility had fallen out of fashion in Austria during the later years of the preceding century. It was not impossible to do so.
Certain orders and medals would once grant a man and his family the title of Count at the highest. But it remained within the Austrian Emperors' sole discretion on whether or not he rewarded a man with a noble title of any kind.
There was no requirement other than his will in this regard. And though it had been some time since this was enacted, Bruno's absolute victory over the Serbians, which not only avenged Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie but also saw the capitulation and annexation of Serbia into the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a feat worthy of Austria's highest honors.