Congress of Secrets

by Stephanie Burgis

  “Vaçlav Grünemann.”

  “Aha. Another Bohemian, then.” Peter leaned one arm against the table. Through the inn door, the smells of roasting meat floated temptingly. Should he—could he—pay for Grünemann’s meal as well as his own? He had watched Périgord feast the reviewers and theater managers in Prague so many times. If Peter thought of it as an investment …

  “Originally Bohemian,” Grünemann said. “But my family moved to Vienna a long time ago.”

  “I understand.” A plump waitress arrived at the table, bringing a jug of wine and two cups, and Peter smiled at her as he spoke. “My family has been in Prague three generations now, but we’re of Austrian stock.”

  “I wondered, actually …” As the waitress moved away, Grünemann leaned closer, still smiling. “I thought I might have recognized an old friend, when you first arrived.”

  “Sir?”

  “Another man rode with you, did he not? A man who wasn’t a member of your excellent troupe.”

  “Ah …” Peter blinked. Michael had slipped away almost the moment they’d arrived in the busy inn yard, too worried about being sighted by one of his scheming brother’s acquaintances to linger. Grünemann didn’t look the sort to spread rumors, and yet … “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Peter lied smoothly.

  “No? I could have sworn I saw you help another man from your carriage—and not from any of the usual seats.” Grünemann sat back and began to pour wine. He handed Peter a full glass. “I only ask because he looked so familiar. I thought it might have been a game with him, to ride undetected through the city gates.”

  “Mm.” Peter accepted his wine glass, thinking furiously. If Grünemann really wanted to know, what damage could it do? Yet, they’d sworn secrecy to their illicit guest, and Michael had seemed a good fellow. Moreover, if word came out that the Riesenbeck company had thwarted the customs checkpoint, even as a game …

  No, continued secrecy was the best, as well as the most honorable, option. And after all, no matter how influential a friend he might be, Grünemann would hardly take offense at that. It couldn’t mean so much to him just to learn the truth of one small adventure.

  “I’m afraid it must have been a trick of the light, my friend,” Peter said. “Only members of my own troupe traveled with me. We do cram ourselves within the carriages, you know, to save on space. Perhaps you saw me helping Karl.”

  Grünemann’s gray eyes remained disconcertingly intent upon his face for a long moment. The guests around them continued their deafening hum of talk, and brassy music sounded from inside the inn, yet Grünemann was ominously silent.

  “I do apologize for any confusion,” Peter said. “Is he a good friend of yours, this man you thought you saw?”

  “Not particularly,” Grünemann said. “Ah well.” He toasted Peter with his wine glass. “Your health, sir.” He smiled again, yet Peter thought the smile had taken a wry turn. “You may be certain that we shall meet again.”

  Twenty blocks away, Michael turned into a crowded tavern in the sixteenth district, smiling and confident but careful not to make eye contact with any of the other guests. His satchel swung in his hand as he strode through the haze of smoke and laughter to the back door. Two outhouses stood hidden behind the tavern. He ducked into the first, holding his satchel high above the filth.

  Five minutes later, he stepped out remade. He’d removed the close black wig to reveal his own short, thick brown hair, styled with his fingers into waving disorder—last year’s style, alas, but still the only fashion he could manage acceptably on his own, without the aid of a mirror.

  Far better, he’d changed his plain, dark-colored overgarments for a deep blue tailcoat and tight, fawn-colored breeches in the fashionable, English style. A carefully tied cravat around his throat, gleaming silver buttons on his butter-yellow waistcoat, a walking stick beneath his arm, top boots on his feet, and a great seal ring on his left hand completed the picture of a wealthy European royal in search of expensive amusement.

  Not just the picture, Michael thought, as he slipped on the ring. The man himself. He closed his eyes and arranged his features, letting them gradually slide into the expression that felt most natural in this outfit, this new cloak of identity. The man who wore these clothes—the prince who wore these clothes—would wear them without a thought as to their cost, or to the reactions of those around him. When he walked through these familiar streets, he would expect others to make way for him.

  He must look as far removed from a grimy printmaker’s apprentice as any creature on Earth could be. If anyone from Michael’s past saw him now …

  But there was no one left to recognize, or to mourn. His beloved first master was gone. That much was certain. And the only other person who had ever known him well enough to recognize him in any disguise, the only person he had ever been foolish enough to let himself care too much for …

  Michael took a deep, steadying breath. It had been twenty-four years, and he would never know what had happened to Karolina, for good or for ill. There was no purpose in torturing himself over possibilities, even as he walked the streets of the city that he’d shared with her.

  The man he played now would never even speak to anyone from her class of society, let alone care about her fate. And in the gamble that lay ahead, that truth was all that Michael could allow to matter.

  He set his shoulders and drew a deep breath.

  His satchel, abandoned, sat in the back corner of the outhouse as Michael strode briskly back through the tavern, gratified at the careful berth the other men drew around him, now. A beggar approached him on the street—one of the few, perhaps, who had escaped the police purges during preparations for the Congress—and Michael flipped the man one of his few spare coins with an expansive gesture.

  He couldn’t change the past and save the people he had once loved. But he could do his best now with what he had.

  Why not be generous, after all? He was about to play the greatest gamble of his life, to win a fortune, a title, and a future. He could hardly quibble at mere florins now.

  Caroline was still shaking as the crowd around her, freed from paralysis, rose to their feet and broke into a German hymn of thanks. Thank Heaven for her disguise; she wasn’t meant to be able to speak German. It had been a sensible precaution: French, the official language of the Vienna Congress, was a language she’d only learned after moving to England, so her French, at least, was inflected with a suitably British accent. Whereas her German …

  Even if Caroline had been willing to admit to speaking Austrian German, one airing of her native accent—the Viennese inner-city tones of a printmaker’s daughter—would have ruined her disguise forever.

  Now, though, the ruse served a different purpose. As the men and women around her, even the cynical Prince de Ligne himself, raised their voices in the German prayer, she gained a breathing space to calm herself in near-private. She clenched the thin skirts of her muslin dress as she waited for her hands to stop shaking. Steeling herself, she endured the chills that flooded her body, chills that felt only too familiar: she’d been eleven years of age the first time she’d felt this aftereffect.

  Eleven and terrified, in a windowless room. And even after it had happened, leaving her shivering and weeping, she’d still begged the man who’d done it: Where is my father? When is he coming back? Worse yet, she’d even believed his promises: Soon. Only be a good girl …

  Caroline’s teeth nearly pierced her bottom lip. She forced her lips open and made her shivering fingers relax their grip on her dress.

  She was Lady Wyndham now, not helpless Karolina. She wouldn’t let herself break down in fear before her plots had even begun. She would not give her old jailers that satisfaction.

  The ceremony came to a close with the ending of the hymn. As the archbishop signed a perfunctory blessing before the restive crowd of royals, the Prince de Ligne turned to Caroline.

  “Well, my dear. Now that you’ve seen the Au
strian way of celebrating peace, what do you think of it?”

  Caroline’s smile cut like a knife through her face. “I found it most … enlightening, sir.”

  “An interesting choice of words.” He cocked one eyebrow at her. “I must admit, I found it surprisingly moving at the end. It may have been my first taste of true religious fervor since, oh … 1752, perhaps?”

  “And what happened then?”

  “Oh, that was when I first read Voltaire. We were all very enlightened back then, you know. Even you might have been startled by our salons, I think—each of us trying to outdo the others in our heresy and freethinking. Not like these modern days.” The prince sighed faintly as he looked across the crowd. “It’s become fashionable now to act terribly moral. I fear I find it rather tiring.”

  He did look tired, although Caroline would not insult him by pointing it out. No, more than tired … drained. Earlier, in his sparkling company, Caroline had nearly forgotten that the Prince de Ligne was eighty years of age already. But it could not be healthy to have so much energy sucked out of him now. And for such an object …

  “But I’d almost forgotten—you desired an introduction to the emperor,” said the prince. “Will you take my arm?”

  “Of course,” Caroline said.

  The prince held out his thin arm and Caroline took it, careful not to lean any of her own weight on it. She felt it taut with suppressed exhaustion under her hand, but the prince’s face was clear and good-humored.

  “I must warn you, my dear, that I am no favorite of the emperor these days. I made the mistake of publishing a series of letters a few years ago that debated some few points of public policy … forgetting, you see, that over the last few decades the criticism of the emperor’s peers has turned into a crime.”

  “A brave move indeed,” Caroline murmured.

  “I’m afraid our admired emperor did not find it so. I am too much of a public figure, even these days, to be openly punished for such an act, and yet …” The prince shrugged. “The atmosphere at court turned notably cold for quite some time.”

  “A loss indeed. And yet …” Caroline aimed a slanted smile at her escort. “Might I hazard an impudent guess, Your Highness? When you attended the court functions anyway, did not you gather more friends and admirers around you than the emperor himself? And were not at least a few of them drawn by the scandal you’d provoked?”

  The Prince de Ligne broke into laughter as infectious as that of a boy. “You are far too perceptive, my dear. And, of course, you are entirely correct. I could have eaten ten suppers a day for the next six months if I’d accepted a quarter of the invitations that suddenly came flooding in upon me.” He shook his head, his eyes gleaming with amusement. “But now that you’ve guessed so much, I have another riddle for you to solve.

  “You remember how we spoke earlier of our new Robinson Crusoe out on his island Elba? Well, perhaps you may guess my secret name for our honored emperor, too, once we’ve spoken to him.”

  Caroline laughed and answered and tried, as they walked across the field, to subtly support the prince’s weight herself as much as possible, without embarrassing him. As she saw the new lines on his cheeks and the fever-bright gleam of his blue eyes, though, rage seethed inside her. She forced it down. Not now, she told herself. But soon …

  Silently, she added one more point to the list of misdeeds that needed accounting before she left Vienna.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The emperor of Austria, Hungary, and much of Italy and the Balkans stood surrounded by his fellow rulers in the royal tent, chatting and laughing. From a distance, at the beginning of the ceremony, Caroline had thought his long, thin, sunken face looked hard and wary—closed off from those around him, as if suspicious of all the world. Now, though, he positively glowed with good humor. Even his normally stooped posture had straightened with the influx of energy.

  She hadn’t thought it possible to hate him more than she already did.

  “Your Majesty,” said the Prince de Ligne, bowing. “May I present a charming English visitor? Caroline, Countess of Wyndham, of Sussex.”

  Caroline swept a deep curtsy. Breathe in … out … She timed her breaths, using them to control her anger. Be charming, she told herself. Be British. And remember he holds your father’s life in his hands.

  “Lady Wyndham.”

  Emperor Francis lifted her hand to his mouth. His lips felt moist and cool, brushing against her skin. Caroline repressed a shiver.

  “Your Majesty,” she murmured. “A great honor.”

  “Is this your first time in Vienna?”

  “It is.” She rose from her curtsy, leaving her hand in his narrow grip. The scent of incense still drifted through the tent, mingling with the fragrances of freshly cut grass and flowers. “You rule a beautiful nation.”

  “That I do.” His thin lips compressed into a smile. “And your countrymen seem finally to have realized as much. We have many English visitors this year.”

  “Vienna is the center of the world just now.” Enough pleasantries. She’d planned this meeting for days, yet now she found she could hardly bear it.

  Francis had taken his place as emperor in 1792, when Caroline was thirteen years old and had already been a prisoner for two years. Even under the reign of his first, enthusiastic patron, Emperor Joseph II, Pergen had never dared keep Caroline and the others in so official a prison as the underground cells used by the secret police. Until 1792, Pergen had kept Caroline and the others hidden in his own house on the outskirts of Vienna, secret even from Austria’s highest rulers—and as minister of the secret police under both Joseph and Francis, he had had the power to keep as many secrets as he chose.

  Upon Francis’s ascension, though, Pergen had brought his private prisoners into the Hofburg Palace itself. Caroline still remembered the young emperor’s first visit of inspection and the fascination on his face as he had studied her from all angles and then stayed to watch the alchemical ritual.

  “Amazing,” he had said afterward as Caroline had wept, furious at herself for her lack of control. She would have done anything to restrain the humiliating tears, but the new emperor never even noticed them. “You must show me how to do this,” he’d said.

  And, “Certainly, Your Majesty,” Count Pergen had replied.

  Caroline wasn’t surprised that Emperor Francis did not recognize her now. How could he? The pale, weakened girl with the tangle of black hair and an orphan’s clothes had become a grown woman in the height of fashion.

  Unexpectedly, though, she found that she had to bite down on her tongue to keep herself from reminding him. She should have been triumphant at the success of her disguise. Instead, she wanted to tell him exactly who she was and see the light of horrified recognition dawn on his face. She wanted to tell everyone who stood around him, fawning over him, who and what he really was, and which master he followed.

  Instead, she forced herself to say her prepared lines. “These are truly magnificent festivities, Your Majesty. No wonder all Europe flocks to see them.” Lowering her eyelashes demurely, she added in a near-whisper, “The cost must be truly staggering.”

  “Well …” His grip tightened—involuntarily, she hoped—around her hand. “No more than we all deserve after twenty years of the Corsican Monster, eh? And certainly no more than the chancellery can stand.”

  And that, she knew, was an outright lie. Austria’s treasury was nearly empty from the long decades of war, and Francis’s festival of self-congratulation—it was an open secret—cost fifty thousand florins per royal visitor every day. The head of the treasury, she’d heard, was in none-too-secret agonies about the cost and the question of how the poverty-stricken empire could ever meet it. And yet …

  “I wonder—could I help?” She looked up, blinking innocently, into the emperor’s hard blue gaze. “We are all so very grateful for the part Austria played in the late war, you know. We all saw how you stood as buffer against the Monster for the rest of Europe. Th
e sacrifices you made …” The words tasted like poison on her tongue, but she saw the emperor’s smirk deepen. “I would so love to do what I could to support the Congress,” she finished in a rush.

  “My dear Lady Wyndham …” The emperor considered her narrowly for a moment. “We must speak further.”

  “Oh, yes,” Caroline murmured. Not now. She would have to play the very image of a proper lady and pretend to swoon from the heat if she were held here in conversation with him much longer.

  “Will you be at the masked ball tonight, in the Hofburg?”

  “I hadn’t received an invitation …”

  “Nonsense.” The emperor squeezed her fingers and, finally, released them. “I look forward to meeting you there, Lady Wyndham.”

  “Then I shall not disguise myself too carefully,” she said.

  He turned away, and she had to stop herself from sagging with relief. She looked up at the Prince de Ligne, whose expression was quite blank beneath his watchful gaze.

  “Your pardon, Highness. I fear the heat has been too much for me. I believe I must retire for an hour or two, to rest.”

  “I’ll escort you to your carriage, then.” As they walked across the grass, away from the incense and the emperor, the Prince de Ligne breathed his next words into her ear. “I do look forward, dear lady, to finding out exactly what you are intending. I don’t believe for an instant that you feel any romantic loyalty to the Habsburg emperor.”

  “My dear sir …” Caroline let herself, for just a moment, lean against his arm as belated reaction made her legs weak. “I hope you would never think so badly of me as that.” She risked a mischievous grin as she glanced up at him. “But would you force me to disclose all my secrets to you on first acquaintance?”

  “I should never be so ungallant.” The prince smiled back, but wariness mingled with the amusement in his eyes. “I shall look forward to watching events develop. I have a feeling, Lady Wyndham, that life at this Congress will become more intriguing by the day.”