Twice Fallen, Twice Crowned

The man who spent a night with Cecilia Vane at a pleasure house in the capital took her for a woman doing it out of greed for money and rank, and he went away with that opinion of her. He was the emperor, in that building by accident, and she did not know that either. She was there because her father had been accused of treason. The household was seized and he was sent into exile in the cold north, and Cecilia, a sheltered daughter of that house, gave up her name and her standing to perform for money at the largest establishment of the kind in the capital, to raise what it would take to get him back. Some time after that night she found she was pregnant, and the child was the emperor's only heir. The woman who ran the house learned of it, saw a way to power in the child, and began threatening her, and the threat turned into something that could kill her. A prince heard the story and told the emperor who the woman at the house had actually been. The emperor came for her with very little time left in which to do it. The misunderstandings between them were cleared up. Cecilia became empress and had her father's conviction overturned, and he then asked to leave the ministry and go back to the village he came from. The emperor travelled there with Cecilia, unannounced and in plain clothes. The relatives waiting in the village took the old man's return for a second disgrace and turned on all three of them.