Our story begins in Vienna, 1892. The streets were paved with opera gloves and sexual repression, and everyone's grandmother had strong opinions about the proper way to embroider a pheasant onto literally anything that stood still long enough.

Enter young Leopold von Hapsburg (not THAT von Hapsburg, the OTHER one – the one with the spring cottage he kept insisting was a palace while aggressively rearranging the servant quarters). Leopold had a SECRET. He wasn't interested in the ladies of the court – no, he was too busy making eyes at Franz, his riding instructor who had thighs like two Austrian hams wrapped in jodhpurs and a unique talent for finding reasons to demonstrate proper mounting technique.

But Leopold's mother, the NOTORIOUS Countess Gertrude von Hapsburg (who once slapped a man with her own dentures at the opera because he suggested Strauss was "a bit much"), was DETERMINED to see her son married. "Leopold," she'd screech while stress-embroidering yet another pheasant onto a settee, "Why haven't you found a WIFE? Is it because you spend all your time doing STRETCHES with Franz in the conservatory?"

Meanwhile, across Vienna, young Helene von Winterbottom was carrying on a torrid affair with her ladies' maid, Greta, who had arms like a blacksmith from all that corset-lacing. Helene's mother, Lady Winterbottom, was becoming increasingly suspicious of why her daughter needed her corset adjusted SEVEN times a day, especially since Greta had mysteriously developed the upper body strength of a professional strongman.

When Leopold and Helene's eyes met across a particularly tedious ball (aren't they all?), they recognized that look of mutual panic – the look that said "I would rather die than marry someone of the opposite sex, but also my mother has embroidered SEVENTEEN pheasants onto my bedsheets this week in a threatening manner."

Their arrangement was perfect: Leopold pretending to court Helene, Helene pretending to be courted, Franz pretending he needed to demonstrate proper riding form SEVEN times a day, and Greta pretending that corset-lacing required olympic-level strength training. It was like a game of romantic chess, except everyone was actually playing checkers with their hearts.

The whole charade worked beautifully until that fateful garden party when everyone's secrets came tumbling out like badly packed steamer trunks. It happened when both mothers simultaneously caught their children engaged in what was supposedly a "demonstration of proper ballroom frame" with their respective servants (there wasn't a dance floor within MILES of that party, and nobody had ever seen Franz actually dance except for that one time he was "teaching proper waltz posture" in the stables).

The silence that followed was broken only by the sound of a decorative pheasant falling off its perch.

Then, in a moment of unexpected clarity, Lady Winterbottom threw back her head and LAUGHED. "Oh, my dear," she said, wiping tears from her eyes, "you've been growing a BEARD!" When met with confused stares, she gestured between Leopold and Helene. "You know, like those false beards in the theater - something artificial to hide what's really underneath. You've been each other's BEARDS!"

And thus the term was born, though between us, some of these beards were about as convincing as Leopold's excuse that he needed SEVEN consecutive hours of riding lessons every Sunday. In the RAIN. In the CONSERVATORY. With mysteriously missing riding boots.