Congress of Secrets

by Stephanie Burgis

  Michael drew a deep breath and released it. He looked truly out of place in this neighborhood, and he knew it. If he stood unmoving for too much longer, the residents would start to worry.

  Warning bells sounded in his own head. He could still turn away, walk back …

  But he recognized no faces in the crowd around him, and it was far too late to give into faintheartedness.

  This gamble was all or nothing, after all.

  Michael pasted on his most charming smile and straightened his shoulders. He tipped his hat to the women he passed as he stepped into the dark, spicy confines of the shop.

  The shopkeeper rose from the stool at the back of the room. The man’s bow drew a shadowy, blurred arc in Michael’s vision as his eyes adjusted to the sudden darkness.

  “May I be of any assistance, your honor?”

  “I certainly hope so.” Michael shut off the voices of warning in his head, and spoke the code words Hüberl had given him: “I’d like to buy one of your imported fruits.”

  “Ah.” The shopkeeper stilled. As Michael’s vision sharpened, he saw a dark-skinned face prematurely lined by hard work and weariness, focusing now into sudden taut worry.

  It was a risk for the shopkeeper, too, of course. If Michael were a spy for the government, only waiting for evidence to take the man into custody or decree exile for him and his family …

  Michael reached into his pocket, holding the other man’s gaze, and gave a small, respectful nod. “I’ve come on a friend’s recommendation,” he said. “I have no ill intent, I promise.”

  He slipped a coin into the other man’s hand without breaking their held gaze.

  The shopkeeper sighed. “Yes, sir.” The expression on his face was bleak, but the coin disappeared into his broad trousers as he shrugged. “You’ll want to take the back stairs,” he said.

  “You won’t regret it,” Michael told him. I hope.

  A new group of women stepped into the shop, and the shopkeeper hurried forward to greet them, abandoning Michael with visible relief. Under cover of their conversation, Michael crossed the sanded shop floor and slipped through the curtain at the back of the shop. He found himself at the base of a set of narrow, rickety wooden stairs set beside a closed door. The warm, familiar smell of baking bread drifted through that door. But from upstairs …

  Michael sniffed the air. Aha. Now there was a smell far more familiar—and, in his youth, even more comforting: the distinctive smell of a printing press.

  It wasn’t comforting any more. It summoned up the memories of fire, smoke, screams …

  Too late now.

  Michael started up the stairs to play out the next move of the game.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Michael knocked on the door at the top of the stairs. A sudden paralyzed silence replaced the sounds of conversation and bustling activity within.

  He knocked again. Quick footsteps approached the door.

  “Who’s there?” It was a woman’s voice, sharp with tension.

  “A friend.”

  Michael stifled a sigh as the waiting pause continued. Surely even the rankest novice would know better than to expect visitors to shout out names and titles on command?

  Hissing whispers sounded faintly through the door as the occupants of the room engaged in some dispute. Finally, the lock rattled, the door swung open, and Michael stepped into one of the most crowded rooms he had ever seen.

  A giant printing press hulked in the back corner, filling at least a quarter of the tiny room, along with its assorted accoutrements—inky templates and boxes of replacement letters stacked on top of one another in untidy piles and spilling over onto the floor. Next to the boxes, a small table and three spindly legged chairs jostled for space under vast piles of uncut, printed broadsheets. More paper filled the air, as newly printed pages hung from half a dozen clotheslines attached to the ceiling, waiting for the ink to dry. As Michael stepped inside, a tall, painfully thin young man with a prominent hawk nose and a wild shock of brown hair rose from one of the chairs, interrupted in the task of cutting yet more papers into shape.

  Michael’s old master would never have countenanced the mess in the room. Half the uncut papers had already slid off the chairs and table onto the floor, where they mingled with the bound books and pamphlets that filled the rest of the room. Crooked shelves had been nailed to the walls by an amateur carpenter, but they could barely contain a small fraction of the literature that flooded the compressed space, rising as high as knee-level at some points.

  Where was the older and wiser mentor in this venture?

  Michael stepped carefully over the closest pile and closed the door behind him, glimpsing for the first time the young woman who had let him in.

  “My friends,” he said genially, and divided his nod between the pair.

  Brother and sister, he would guess; they were roughly of an age—nineteen and twenty, perhaps?—and they shared the same curling brown hair and dark eyes, although there was more determination in her face and greater fear in his.

  The young woman was the first to reply. She stepped forward, darting a reproving look at her brother.

  “Can we help you?” Her gaze passed over his outfit, and her eyebrows rose. “If you’re in search of literature to read …”

  “Not today,” Michael said gently. “But I thank you for the offer.” His eyes picked out a familiar spine in the shelves; he moved closer to confirm his guess. “Ah, you do have some old treasures here. I didn’t think that one would be in print any longer.”

  “On the Corruption in the Secret Police?” The young man spoke for the first time, his expression becoming eager. “It hasn’t lost its relevance, sir, I can assure you. Have you read it?”

  “You could say so.”

  Michael felt a sharp pang as he turned away. Had the pamphlet been reprinted by some brave soul, or was it really one of the original copies? All he had to do was pick it up to answer his own question—he would recognize his master’s typeface anywhere—but he found that he didn’t really want to know.

  “You could buy it for twenty florins,” the young woman said sharply, behind him. “But only if you’re not working for the police yourself.”

  “Me?” Michael turned with deliberate slowness to meet her fierce gaze. “Quite the contrary, I assure you. But I’m not here to buy your wares today.”

  “Then perhaps you ought to leave.”

  The young man coughed. “Aloysia—”

  “Shh.” She kept her gaze on Michael. “Well?”

  Michael sighed. “Forgive me. I’m not handling this as well as I ought.”

  It was true … and it was completely senseless. This could be the most important move in his entire game. He ought to be savoring it, charming them both, playing the idealistic émigré for all he was worth.

  But ever since he’d stepped inside, the past seemed to have risen like a dizzying fog around him. He had to concentrate to force himself to focus on their faces, in front of him here and now, instead of seeing faces from long ago and hearing the voices of people he had loved … people he had forced himself to forget.

  His old master, Caroline’s father, gently directing Michael’s hand with his own larger, ink-stained fingers, as he led Michael through the motions of using the printing press for the first time … He had seemed old to Michael in those days, though he’d likely been no more than five and thirty—younger than Michael himself was now. A sobering thought.

  Gerhard Vogl had been soft-spoken and reserved in person, despite the passion that had poured out in the pamphlets that he wrote and printed. One would never have guessed his radical politics from his sober appearance. He had dared take in a homeless young street-thief as his apprentice, though, for all the head-shaking and tutting that that had provoked among his more sensible friends. And his face had broken into a rare smile each time Michael had mastered a new challenge.

  That last night, when Michael had left with his friends for an evening’s pleas
ure, his master had clapped him on the back and folded a coin into his hand.

  “For your good work today, lad,” he’d said. “Enjoy yourself tonight. Tomorrow we’ll begin something new.”

  Tomorrow …

  Michael staggered, only half playacting. “Forgive me,” he repeated. “May I sit down?”

  “Of course,” the young man said. He tugged out one of the other chairs, scooping a pile of papers off it to make space. “Can I find you a drink? Beer, coffee—”

  “Kaspar!” Aloysia said.

  “No, thank you.” Michael ducked beneath one of the low-hanging clotheslines of papers and sat down. The chair legs were uneven beneath him. He had to rest his weight on his right leg to keep himself upright. He waved away the offers. “I only need to rest. I’ve had a difficult past few weeks, and now …”

  Kaspar sat down across from him, listening eagerly, while Aloysia stood watching from across the small room.

  “Who sent you here?” she demanded.

  “I don’t think he would wish me to use his name,” Michael said. “But he told me this was a place that would print honest truths.”

  “It’s what we do,” Kaspar said. He leaned forward. “What’s amiss?”

  Michael almost choked at the hopefulness in the younger man’s eyes. How old were these innocents? Young enough to be idealistic, even in this day and age, apparently. Young enough …

  Young enough to be fools, he told himself, and throttled guilt before it could properly form.

  He’d been innocent and idealistic once, too. It hadn’t lasted. He’d have to hope, for their sakes, that they received no ruder an awakening than he had.

  At least the girl had enough sense to be wary of strangers, if nothing else.

  “I was once the prince of Kernova,” Michael began, “until …”

  He told the story with all the passion and conviction he could muster, hoping that the exhaustion in his voice sounded only that of desperation.

  He’d been running from his past for twenty-four years. It felt bitterly appropriate now that he should have to return almost exactly to the site of his most painful memories in order to tell the tale of his most fantastic invented history yet.

  At the end of it, Kaspar shook his head. “But—all the countries were invited to the Congress! It was in all the treaties. And—”

  “But there were other, secret agreements,” Michael said wearily. “And, it appears, only the desires of the Great Powers are to be given any consideration. Bonaparte has been defeated, but the lands that he devoured are apparently never to be freed … only to be turned over in turn to his squabbling victors.”

  “Shocking,” Aloysia said. Even she had been drawn over to the table by his recitation; she sat now between Michael and Kaspar, watching Michael closely. “But not surprising,” she added, deliberately.

  “No?” Michael blinked. She was more discerning than he’d hoped—which, perhaps, might be the answer to how this little press had survived for any time at all. He raised his eyebrows. “I must admit, I was surprised. Foolishly, perhaps …”

  Aloysia sighed and wiped back a stray loop of brown, curling hair from her disordered chignon. Her hand left inky stains on her cheek. Kaspar’s own face was flushed with indignation, Michael noted, but the young man held his tongue while he waited for his sister to speak.

  A problem, that; Kaspar himself might be easily duped, but he was apparently sensible enough, at least, to put great store in his more practical sister’s opinions. Michael appreciated the wisdom of it, from an objective point of view, but found it a pity nonetheless. It would make matters more difficult, if nothing else … and he hadn’t the time, at this stage in the game, to waste time searching for easier prey.

  Prey. He swallowed a bitter taste at the truth of it. He’d never preyed on his own before. He’d lied and cheated his heart out, yes, but only to those who could afford their losses. What guilt could he feel over swindling a greedy merchant out of a smidgeon of his fortune, or tricking an avaricious baron eager to illicitly augment his own vast estates? Michael had never thought to put genuine innocents into danger.

  But Talleyrand’s orders had been more than clear. If Michael was not to abandon all of his own hopes for the future, he had no choice but to endanger theirs.

  “All they care about is power,” Aloysia said. “Their own and nothing else. It’s the way of the world.”

  Michael’s lips twisted. “You have a cynical eye, Fräulein.”

  “We wouldn’t have to sit hidden up here if it weren’t true,” she said. “Do you think we’d gladly put our lives in danger if we didn’t have to? If our emperor and his ministers cared for the good of the people, not only the security of the throne—if those who ruled cared ever tolisten to the voices of the poorest souls, instead of outlawing protest and refusing to take notice of hunger and misery! Did you know that the chancellery is pouring fifty thousand florins per royal guest into this infamous Congress every day?”

  “I … had heard that, yes.”

  “Fifty thousand florins!” Aloysia repeated, hammering on the table to give the words emphasis. “Fifty thousand apiece for balls and tableaux and mock tournaments, when half the men in this empire are dead and the lands wracked with misery from twenty years of war and the emperor’s war taxes!”

  “Twenty-six,” Michael corrected her, automatically.

  “Pardon?” She blinked.

  He sighed, cursing his own slip of the tongue. “Twenty-six years of war,” he murmured. “Emperor Joseph’s Turkish war began in 1789 and ended only just before the wars against France began.”

  “You’re a historian,” Kaspar said.

  Aloysia’s eyes narrowed with sudden suspicion.

  Michael shook his head. “I lived through it,” he said flatly. “Do you expect me to forget? There were hunger and high taxes in the war against the Turks, as well, and there were riots in Vienna over the cost of bread. News of it reached us even in Kernova. There were pamphleteers then, too, though they were already forbidden in the Habsburgs’ dominions.”

  It was time to take the upper hand. Michael let his voice sharpen into a whip. “Have you learned nothing from history, yourselves? Do you think it so virtuous to sit back and care nothing for the squabbling of the Great Powers over the powerless smaller nations?”

  Color flushed Aloysia’s cheeks, but she set her jaw. “What does it matter which Power gains control? They’re all the same.”

  “Not to the people who live there. Perhaps you’ve lived so long in the capital of a great empire that you’ve forgotten—or never even imagined—what it might be like to be a smaller state amalgamated by a Great Power that cares nothing for your history, your culture, your language, your religion … your future. Nothing but what it can wrest out of your land and your people’s resources to feed its own coffers, back in Vienna or St Petersburg.”

  “Sir,” Kaspar began. “That is, Your Highness …”

  Michael kept his gaze on Aloysia’s face. “Do you genuinely believe that the poor and the hungry of Kernova will be better served by governors who live two hundred miles away and have never set foot on the soil that they tax—for their balls, their tableaux, and their mock tournaments?”

  Aloysia bit her lip and looked down at her ink-stained fingers.

  “And will you outlaw pamphleteers in Kernova?” she asked, finally.

  Tension flooded out of Michael’s shoulders so quickly that he nearly lost his balance in the uneven chair. He looked from Aloysia to her brother and let triumph overwhelm his guilt.

  “Never,” he said sincerely. “I swear it.”

  Michael walked out the front door of the grocer’s half an hour later, armed with the sweet certainty of his own success.

  Within five days, pamphlets would spread across Vienna, deploring the hypocrisy and shamelessness of the Great Powers who planned only to turn tyrants in Bonaparte’s place … and using the case of Kernova as a prime example. Within a week and a ha
lf, if he worked hard, he could have copies of the pamphlets translated and slipped into the hands of the English Whig journalists in Vienna, who were all too eager to find evidence of their Tory ambassadors’ wrongdoings. Within two weeks, Michael might even be a cause celébrè on the streets of distant London, and the English—key financial players in all of the Great Powers’ decisions—would be forced to press for the opening of their private ruling circle.

  All he had to do was stay in the game for another two weeks, and he would be untouchable. The government and the police might be furious, but they would never dare touch a figure at the center of an international moral outcry.

  Two more weeks of balls, operas, tableaux, and mock tournaments …

  Michael shook his head with rueful chagrin and turned to glance into a nearby bakery window, seeking distraction from the twinge of guilt. Fresh pastries were stacked in steaming array in shelves just through the glass windows; Michael could vividly remember their glorious tastes from his childhood.

  And why not? Why shouldn’t he celebrate his success?

  He stepped inside and waited behind a stream of excited small boys, apprentices on their single morning off. They must have saved up all their pocket money for the past several weeks to afford that morning’s feast; the number of pastries each of them ordered could have choked an ox. Michael watched them with idle pleasure, remembering his own past, for once, with more affection than pain. When it was his turn at the counter, he ordered a juicy Krapfen for old times’ sake.

  It was still steaming from the oven. He bit into it as he stepped away from the counter, and powdered sugar scattered across his gleaming shirtfront. Just as well that it was still early morning—he would be safe from meeting any new acquaintances until he’d had a chance to change his clothes in the apartment. He tasted the sweet jam inside the Krapfen’s center and closed his eyes for a moment of pure appreciation.