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. The 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.”

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.