Isabelle entered the room where her little girl was.
She didn't want to go there, not now or like that.
Her daughter's health conditions seemed to worsen progressively and she was unable to do anything to help her.
During that night the little girl had begun to complain, to desperately cry, presenting some respiratory problems and it hadn't been too long until guards and doctors came to Charlotte's aid.
The young princess had fainted in the arms of those few doctors who were now left at court.
In those days, waiting for the start of a new war against France, the work of a doctor had become one of the most complicated and least practiced and no one too eagerly required to work at court, as they knew that meant certain death.
So there were few doctors left at her disposal, but now Charlotte, her child and only heir, was now in such desperate conditions.
In those days they had tried, with Aleksei to conceive a child, a possible male, who could rule in the place of his older sister, but despite everything Isabelle had repeatedly realised that it was not her cousin's plan to have a child, not with her.
Since his brother's death, he had been particularly traumatised, to make himself rethink of the alliance with the crown, of his betrothed, of his work as foreign minister.
It had made the prince reconsider the innocence of his partner so much so that he no longer wanted to have any children with her, or more than anything else, not wanting to leave a child in those difficult conditions of war and revolution.
It was a difficult condition, as, being Isabelle the legitimate queen, she would have had to go to war by law and having made a clean sweep of all her brothers, she could not leave any prince regent there except the young and sick Charlotte.
She could not even leave Aleksei in command, despite being her betrothed and despite being a prince.
It was too risky, because she surely couldn't trust him as she would have trusted herself or her child.
The princess had only her daughter at that time, her legitimate and only heir and if she died and Isabelle was no longer able to conceive a child, it would have been the end of House Hannover, at least from her bloodline.
She did not care about her cousin not wanting to have a child with her, because in order to get pregnant Isabelle would have been able to undertake secret love affairs with any man that could please her.
She thought, as if outside her family, she had never had anyone to love.
However, he was not unknown to the world, that for several generations, the royal family had mixed several times between relatives, amplifying genetic defects that had slowly led many of them to madness.
His father, for example, adored the death of others, looking into their eyes, the fear of all the people to whom end is near...
Her father was usually reasonable enough, calm, royal in the manner of a true king, decent, but sometimes, when it was about declaring someone's death or life, he didn't hesitate to make the more drastic choice.
She was so too, he admitted, this thing she must have inherited from her father, unlike her half brothers who found nothing good in death.
Henry had never thought of death as she did, and even Thomas who seemed to her a kind and weak boy.
-Majesty, forgive me- the doctor came out of the room where young Charlotte was lying, he seemed to have a worried look, almost anxious, to communicate something to her.
-the princess seems to have calmed down, she has recovered, now she is able to speak and understand again- said the doctor putting a light and faded smile on his face - it will be necessary to do something for the health of your daughter, for her panic attacks...-.
-What do you recommend to do, then?- Isabelle asked hoping to find a cure for her child's malaise.
-There is a light drug, we could inject it, any time princess Charlotte starts to panic...-.
-You won't dare drug my daughter!- protested Isabelle.
If there was any hope of saving the child, that was not the best choice.
Killing her child slowly and painfully was not the solution.
Even knowing that everyone at that moment was eager to make her die, along with her precious blood and memories...
Everyone longed for Isabelle's head, to be able to place it on a pike, to be able to set it on fire.
She would have died, yes, but her Charlotte, she could not have died, never she would have left her only heir to such a cruel death.
The doctors' heads were hung on a pike and burned that same evening.