Congress of Secrets

by Stephanie Burgis

  The emperor of Austria waited until Lady Wyndham and the elderly Prince de Ligne had disappeared from view before he beckoned to his former minister of the secret police.

  “Your Majesty?” Count Pergen slid through the crowd on the field and slipped into position at his side.

  In his seventy-ninth year, shadows seemed to leak from the lines in Pergen’s face. And his eyes …

  The emperor winced and looked away from the vast chasms of emptiness in his most trusted minister’s eyes. He kept his expression cheerful for the sake of the guests around him as he spoke under his breath.

  “One of our latest visitors to Vienna, Pergen. Caroline, Countess of Wyndham, from England.”

  “Your Majesty?” Pergen stepped closer. He carried a chill with him these days, seeping through the warm air. It brushed against the emperor’s skin, making him shiver.

  It will not happen to me, Francis told himself, not for the first time.

  Pergen had consulted dark powers for decades before Francis had ever taken the throne. Pergen stood as buffer for his emperor, loyal protection against the powers that Francis himself drew upon.

  Lately, the physical effects of Pergen’s work had become all too obvious. Francis had given him honorable official retirement that he might not be exposed to public notice. In private, though, Pergen ruled the secret police as he ever had and served his emperor … as he always had.

  The taint, he’d promised, would not spread to his master.

  “Find out who she is,” the emperor said. “What she does here, what her resources are …” He took a deep breath, fighting the irrational impulse to run. That had been growing lately, every time Pergen approached him. Childish fears, truly, and yet …

  He tipped his face back to absorb the warm, reassuring sunlight. Still, his shoulders would not relax.

  “My men will look into it,” Pergen promised smoothly. “As shall I.”

  “Do,” said the emperor. “She may be useful. And if she is not …” He shook his head tightly as he finally gave in and began to move away. “Discover it. I want to know everything about her.”

  He did not need to add the corollary.

  If Lady Wyndham had anything but an honest desire to aid the empire, Pergen would know exactly what to do about it.

  He always did.

  Michael was perspiring by the time he reached the inner city, after an hour of walking in the heat. But some sights, even after four-and-twenty years away, were worth the wait. Emerging from a narrow, winding side street onto the Graben itself—the main thoroughfare of Vienna’s first district—Michael let out a sigh of pure appreciation.

  Rising before him, a spiraling plague column swarmed with stone figures, all striving toward an upraised gold crucifix, a tribute to Vienna’s salvation from that historic horror. At the far end of the broad, curving, cobblestoned street, the colored roof slats of the great Stefansdom cathedral slanted high in the air, displaying the Habsburgs’ proud double-headed eagle in its triumph. And between those two points …

  Michael took a deep, ecstatic breath and stepped into it: the breath and life’s blood of the city, all packed into two crowded blocks of Vienna’s first district. Carriages were not permitted here; everyone on these streets traveled by foot and mixed shoulder-to-shoulder, from all branches of society. Scantily clad Graben-nymphen fluttered their eyelashes at packs of strolling gentlemen and uniformed soldiers; ladies of fashion walked arm-in-arm to the elegant Konditoreis that lined the street for cakes, window seats, and gossip; middle-class women in sober dress shooed their families in and out of the side doors that led to their own apartments above the busy shops, situated well below the upper-level apartments owned by the nobility; street children darted through the crowd, hawking newspapers or picking pockets.

  Michael had been one of those children once. He knew, if he closed his eyes, he could summon up the buzzing nerves and exhilaration of it as if he were six years old again: the smell of packed humanity all around him as he dove through groups of adults, his head at the level of their waists, his legs running too fast to ever be caught …

  Of course, if he did close his eyes, he’d undoubtedly have his own pockets picked by one of his honorary descendants. Grinning, Michael abandoned the lure of nostalgia and strode toward a familiar side street, swinging his walking stick nonchalantly.

  Ladies of fashion might go to the Konditoreis on the Graben for cakes and elegant conversation, but men of all classes went to the Kaffeehäuser on the branching side streets for newspapers and tobacco, billiards, wine and strong, dark coffee. In Michael’s early apprenticeship to a printmaker, he’d made a good living at the Kaffeehäuser of the first district, hawking political brochures of all stripes. The coffeehouse had been the home and heart of political debate then, and every new pamphlet had been seized upon with shouts of eager anticipation, all sides preparing delightedly for a new outrage.

  All that had changed, of course. Emperor Joseph II had instituted strict censorship laws when Michael was eleven years old; two years later, in 1789, when the hated Turkish war began, Michael’s employer had to circulate all his leaflets of protest in deepest secret. All debate had disappeared from the coffeehouses by then, with the onset of political informers. When any man beside you could be in the pay of Count Pergen’s secret police, only waiting to report your words, who would dare to speak of politics?

  But one thing had remained constant throughout: if a man wanted to know what was happening in the city, if he wanted to hear the latest gossip and keep abreast of the wagers and the news, there was only one place to go.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Café Rothmann took up two levels of a narrow, stone townhouse on the Dorotheergasse, one and a half blocks away from the Graben. Bright, merciless sunlight revealed the peeling of its sky-blue paint and the crumbling of the elaborate plastered curlicues that decorated the façade of the old building, but none of those ravages of time affected the crowd flowing in and out through its hallowed doors. Carriages rattled past on the Dorotheergasse, both local and foreign; from the dark opening to the coffeehouse, Michael heard fragments of French, Russian, and English mixed in with the local Wienerisch German. Dogs nosed around the street outside, searching for any remnants of food left on the cobblestones with the muck from the carriage horses and the refuse from the apartments overhead.

  Michael tucked his walking stick underneath his arm and stepped through the coffeehouse door into smoky darkness.

  “Sir!” An eager voice hailed him in German before his eyes even adjusted to the gloom. A hand grasped his elbow. “Tell me: was Tsar Alexander wearing fur at the ceremonies this morning or was he not?”

  Michael blinked and found a crowd of eager young men confronting him, their black university robes carelessly split open above more fashionable dress. Their cheeks were flushed with more than wine, and their eyes were fixed upon him. A wager, evidently, hung upon the question.

  “Alas, I cannot help you,” Michael said, and allowed a regal hauteur to reveal itself in his disapprovingly raised eyebrows, as well as in his faintly accented drawl. No prince, after all, took well to being imposed upon by strangers. “I have only just arrived in Vienna this day.”

  With an impatient sigh, his interrogator released his arm and turned away. “I’m telling you fellows, he always wears fur! It’s in the Russian blood. They can’t be warmed.”

  “Nonsense!” Across from him, another young man let out a derisive snort. “If you’d ever been further east than Pressburg, you would know …”

  Michael slipped past them, nodding, and scooped up one of the newspapers that hung from a rack by the door. In his day, the students had kept to their own cafés in the ninth district, but perhaps the arrival of so many foreign visitors had skewed the normal social balance. If Tsar Alexander himself walked into the café—or any of his aristocratic entourage—their wager would certainly be decided soon enough.

  He slid into an empty table and spread the newspaper before
him. The Wiener Diarium sat well under the imperial thumb, like every other newspaper in Vienna these past seventeen years, but it should be reliable enough for his purposes. In his day, at least, it had offered scintillating social gossip to offset its bland political reportage. Now he scanned the social pages for names and events. The English Lords Castlereagh and Kelvinhaugh had attended Princess Bagration’s salon two nights before … the king of Prussia had been observed there as well … another masked ball was planned for the royal entertainment at the Hofburg tonight, with only the most distinguished foreign visitors in attendance …

  Michael flipped through the pages with lessening interest. Discretion, it seemed, was the order of the journalistic day.

  Not so, however, for the group of students at the front of the Kaffeehaus. As Michael ordered a strong Melange from a stiff-backed waiter, he caught more and more fragments of the students’ wrangling conversation, which grew louder with every shouted boast. The other patrons, older, wealthier, and far better bred, shot glances of veiled dislike across the room.

  Discretion might well rule Vienna’s newspapers, but seated just a few feet away from him …

  Perhaps this prince could unbend himself, after all.

  Michael rose and crossed the distance, leaving his newspaper behind him.

  “Pardon me.” He tapped the closest student on the shoulder. “I couldn’t help overhearing …” As they all turned to stare at him, Michael smiled with gracious condescension. “Perhaps we ought to make our introductions.”

  As the waiter glided up with Michael’s drink balanced perfectly on a tiny porcelain saucer, Michael bowed politely to the group. “I am Prince Stefan Kalishnikoff and am myself half-Russian by blood,” he said, in the broadest, richest Eastern accent he could summon. “I would, of course, be more than happy to answer any questions about my countrymen. And perhaps in exchange …”

  Michael accepted his Melange from the waiter and paused just long enough to take a deep, appreciative sip of dark espresso and whipped cream. “… I can see that you are gentlemen of wit and experience,” he finished. “Might I have the honor of ordering more drinks for all of you? And then perhaps you can tell me a bit about your own city, as well, and what you know of my fellow visitors.”

  Caroline breathed a sigh of relief as her chaise finally reached Vienna’s inner city, after an hour of tooth-grindingly slow travel. The narrow streets were clogged to the brim with phaetons, chaises, and more exotic styles of carriages, all returning from the ceremony of thanksgiving, and her head was throbbing as much from the long, tedious trip as from reaction to the ritual itself.

  In the middle of the ninth district, she directed her coachman to stop and wait in front of a nondescript bookshop. A young man, bespectacled and dressed in plain, dark clothing, left the shop a moment later and swung himself into the chaise and onto the padded seat across from her.

  “I hope I didn’t try your patience by too long, Charles,” said Caroline, as he closed the door behind him. “The traffic was abominable.”

  Her secretary, now doubling as her man of affairs during their time in Vienna, shrugged her apology aside. “I was well-occupied, my lady.”

  “I see.” Caroline eyed his bulging satchel. “And did you find any books of interest today? Or is it foolish of me to even inquire?”

  “I did make one discovery,” he said. “But what of your ladyship’s own quest?” He drew a writing tablet and pencil from the inner pocket of his coat. “Did it succeed?”

  Caroline smiled wryly. “I am honored beyond measure. The emperor wishes to meet me tonight at the masked ball.”

  “You’ll need a disguise, then.” He made a note in the commonplace book.

  “Another one?”

  “Your ladyship?”

  “Never mind.” Caroline glanced through the glass windows, feeling the pressure in her aching head increase. The weather outside was only pleasantly warm, but inside the carriage, the mixture of bright sunlight and still, stale air had stultified over the past hour into unbearable stuffiness. “What I would give for a bit of fresh air …”

  She caught the infinitesimal blink of the man across from her and relaxed into a more natural smile. “Dear Charles. You are a gem among secretaries. Yes, I know I sat outside for two hours and more this morning, but the air was full of incense, perfume …” She paused. “And alchemy.”

  “Alchemy!” He sat forward, his gaze sharpening. “I had no inkling of that.”

  “How should you? None spread beyond the field itself.”

  “I should have attended the ceremony, or at least waited in the carriage.”

  “You would have been insufferably bored until then.”

  “Still …” He compressed his lips. “Of what sort was it?”

  “A transfer of energies.” She kept her face smooth as she said it, watching him. She’d never been certain how much he knew, or guessed …

  His expression gave away nothing but his frustration. “I would have given a great deal to see it. Theoretical knowledge is all very well, but … oh, next to a practical demonstration, my new book is nothing.”

  She raised her eyebrows as he showed her the book he’d bought. “Isaac Newton? Had you not read it before, back in England?”

  “One can still learn from an old book,” Charles said stiffly.

  “I’m certain of it. While we’re in Vienna, though, you may want to take advantage of the local knowledge. This city was a veritable hub for alchemists in the last century. Ignaz von Born, Count von Thun, Count Radamowsky, an entire nest of Rosicrucians …”

  And Count Pergen, Caroline added silently to herself. But she did not say the words out loud.

  She might have grown easy enough with her secretary, over the course of their long journey across the Continent, to address him with more familiarity than she had offered any other man in years. But she did not share all of her secrets with anyone, no matter how trusted an employee.

  “Of course,” Charles murmured. “I have much still to learn.”

  His voice was submissive, but Caroline saw the glint in his eyes, behind the round spectacles. She’d found him young, only at the beginning of his career. But was he still young enough?

  Caroline quelled her nerves with an effort. Better an alchemist in her employ than one working against her. Particularly in Vienna.

  “Do let me know if you need more funds for books while we’re here,” she said. “I should hate to let you lose any chances for advancement.”

  “Thank you, Lady Wyndham.” Charles’s pen hovered above his commonplace book. “Shall I procure a costume for you this afternoon, for tonight’s ball?”

  “If you would.”

  “And perhaps you might be so good as to give me more details, later, of the ritual you observed?” His tone was bland.

  Caroline’s breath caught in her throat. Her vision blurred. For a moment, she couldn’t see her secretary’s face in front of her. She was caught again, trapped in that tiny stone room that had held her for years, tied down by ropes and hemmed in by candles, and all she could see …

  Caroline blinked back into the present with an effort that left her breathing quickly. She met her secretary’s speculative gaze with an even stare.

  “Perhaps,” she murmured, as lightly as she could. “I shall do my best to remember it for you.”

  As if she could ever forget. The words were burned into her mind. They still haunted her dreams, even after all these years—the nightmares she could never escape, no matter how many miles she traveled away from Vienna.

  But if she truly needed to …

  Caroline took a deep breath as the chaise turned into the first district, rattling toward her apartment on the Dorotheergasse. If necessary, she would tell Charles exactly what she had seen. In detail, and with instructions.

  Her hands clenched with the repulsion that swept through her at the thought, but her resolve still held.

  She would do anything to save her father.

/>   “… And everyone knows that the Countess von Hedermann is already Tsar Alexander’s mistress,” the youngest student told Michael. As he leaned across the table to share the gossip, Herr Hüberl’s face glistened with a heady combination of excitement and wine. “Oh, he brought a few ladies with him, of course—besides the tsarina—but he’s been seen with the countess everywhere. I saw them myself, riding together in the Prater just the other day, and he had six different Russian soldiers in full uniform in his entourage!”

  “Well, the countess is very religious, just like him,” added a second student. “Everyone knows how devout the tsar is, and ever since they met, she’s been acting terribly mystical and holy, too, so it only makes sense that he would want her.”

  “And Countess von Hedermann’s husband is looking for advancement in the Russian court,” another student piped in, “so …”

  “If I were the tsar of all the Russias, I wouldn’t content myself with acquiring mistresses and attending Mass.” A fourth student, Herr Stultz, gave a sniff of disapproval. “When you consider that his grandmother was Catherine the Great …”

  “The Prince de Ligne is the greatest of the diplomats and soldiers here,” young Hüberl said worshipfully. “Do you know he refers to Bonaparte himself as ‘our Robinson Crusoe’? Every day he has thirty or forty guests at least, all gathered only to listen to his sayings and—”

  “And how many battles has he won recently?” Stultz demanded. “The Duke of Wellington—”

  “—Isn’t here for comparison,” Herr Hüberl said impatiently. “And as for the tsar of all the Russias—”

  “But you must know more about all that than we do,” said the oldest of the students. Herr von Alxinger raised his wine glass to Michael. “Do you know the tsar well, Prince Kalishnikoff?”

  “Not intimately,” Michael said, “but I may say that we are distantly related.”

  And why not? Surely every member of the human race was related in some fashion.

  The look in Von Alxinger’s eye, though, was distinctly wary. Michael leaned back in his chair and exerted himself to smile charmingly. “I may tell you, though,” he said, “of one particular incident …”