Chapter 03 Session 11 Wrap Up

What Happened — Narrative Recap

The morning of August 10th, 1814, found the investigators bruised and fractured in spirit, their sleep shattered by nightmares that clung like smoke. Emma had dreamed again of Thomas being shot, Adrien had been haunted by visions of Caroline being dissected, and Varrio was still being followed through his dreams by the broken-necked ghost of the man he had killed. Most unsettling of all, Georgiana woke to find the tuning fork pressed into her palm — the same tuning fork she had hidden beneath the floorboards before falling asleep. It had found its way back to her in the dark, as though it had a will of its own.

With the books retrieved through their lawyer Fischbein and Metternich’s permission slip secured, the party split to tend to the threads of their unraveling situation. Freddy and Adrien made for the Palais Kinsky to check on the Hartley family, where they were met at the door by a pale, disheveled Mr. Hartley and the sound of weeping from within. Caroline had not returned from the university, and no word had come. Mrs. Hartley rose from the couch in tears, and Lydia flung herself at Adrien in a fit of grief, clinging to him like a limpet until he gently steered her back to her mother. The family was desperate, and though Mr. Hartley was no fighting man, he offered everything material he had — money, carriages, anything — to help bring his daughter home.

Freddy took a moment to speak with Pemberton, his increasingly alarmed tutor, who had grown deeply unsettled by the bars now installed on the windows and the erratic hours his charge was keeping. Freddy urged him to stay put and keep watch over Charlotte, who was still recovering upstairs with her arm in a sling. Charlotte herself was glad for the company and eager for news, and she shared something important: word from London suggested that the Brotherhood kept their victims alive as long as they remained useful. While Caroline could sing, she was likely still breathing. Charlotte also pressed her personal armory into Adrien’s hands — pistols, throwing knives, skeleton keys, and a rifle — before they took their leave.

Back at the safe house, the rest of the party had barely settled when Nikolai and Sasha Volkonsky arrived at the door, demanding to know what had become of Adler. The news that he had been handed over to Prince Metternich landed hard, but Georgiana offered to accompany Nikolai to meet his uncle the following morning and explain everything in person. Varrio, running on nothing but determination and an alarming quantity of self-brewed espresso, found himself with a full pot and no takers, and announced with great dignity that he was not a beggar before considering throwing it out entirely. The Russians departed with a tentative plan in place, and the party set a watch rotation and tried, with limited success, to sleep.

Dawn on the 10th of August came grey and damp, the mist lying heavy on the grass outside the Linienwall gates. Two carriages were drawn up on the packed earth of the road — one Austrian, one French — and a surgeon in a dark coat was already laying out his instruments on the running board without being asked. Thomas Wyndham and Major von Sternberg stood at opposite ends of the meadow, their seconds negotiating the terms of the duel. Varrio, serving as Thomas’s second, confirmed the pistols were properly loaded and took his place at the ten-pace mark, while the rest of the party climbed out of the carriage to watch from a respectful distance.

The two men stood back to back, and the paces were called out one by one until the surgeon dropped his handkerchief. They turned and fired simultaneously. Thomas’s shot went wide, and Sternberg’s pistol gave only a dull click — a wet pan, the powder failing to catch in the damp morning air. Neither man was hit, and Sternberg’s second came striding over to ask whether honor had been satisfied. Thomas, jaw set, was already reloading. Sternberg followed suit. Varrio stepped between them and, with considerable charm, made the case that the damp conditions had made pistols unreliable and that sabers were the only honorable way to settle the matter. Both seconds agreed, and the weapons were exchanged.

The saber fight was brief and brutal. Sternberg pressed his advantage early, slashing aggressively while Thomas gave ground and waited. When Sternberg lunged into a riposte, Thomas was ready — he twisted under the blade, turned it aside, and drove his own saber up into Sternberg’s armpit and deep into his chest. Sternberg went to his knees, his face going grey, and a great gout of blood soaked through his coat. The surgeon rushed in immediately, and though the wound was severe — a collapsed lung — the bleeding was brought under control. Sternberg was loaded into a carriage and driven to hospital. Thomas cleaned his blade with a smile that could have lit the entire meadow. Afterward, Emma pulled him aside and told him, with a fury that barely concealed her relief, that if he ever did anything so reckless again, she would shoot him herself. Thomas responded by kissing her, and she kissed him back.

The party returned to the safe house to find a lean, sharp-eyed woman waiting in the parlor with a mug of Varrio’s espresso. Her name was Nell, and she had come from Southwark. She had tracked the party to their safe house over two days of careful listening in the right taverns — a woman buying medical supplies, a Russian officer seen coming and going, a carriage at an odd hour — and had recognized Catherine through a window. She had a bruise on her jaw from an encounter with one of the new enforcers near the university, a stocky man carrying a heavy, marked metal rod at his waist. More importantly, she had intelligence: the criminal underworld around the university had gone completely silent. Deliveries had stopped, local pickpockets and fencers had been pulled out entirely, and the guards had doubled with professional killers who were not hiring locals. Something was happening inside the university, and the underworld knew it even if it did not know what. Nell offered her services — a criminal map of the approaches, knowledge of Vienna’s back routes, and her skills as a thief — in exchange for payment, protection, and a clean exit when it was over. She and Catherine made plans to scout the university together that evening.

Meanwhile, Georgiana rode with Nikolai to the Palais Razumovsky, where the Russian delegation occupied a wing that smelled of boot polish and tobacco. Major Andre Volkonsky received her in a small, functional office with nothing on the desk but a map of Vienna weighted down with pistol balls. He was a compact, weathered man with close-cropped grey hair and pale eyes that did not move when he was listening — essentially the man Nikolai would become if he survived another twenty years and stopped drinking. He asked precise questions, listened to everything Georgiana did not say as much as what she did, and recognized the brooch Lord Harcourt had given her. Georgiana presented the writ from Metternich as evidence of their standing, explained the Brotherhood’s methods, and described the creature attacks with unflinching directness. The Major was impressed. He poured vodka, laughed for what Nikolai claimed was the first time in recent memory, and struck a deal: if the party could provide detailed intelligence on the university’s layout and guard routines, he would bring five Russian soldiers — including himself — to the assault. Nikolai would call upon Georgiana the following morning to arrange the strategy session.

That same afternoon, Varrio made his way to the Palais Thune-Hockenstein for a salon evening hosted by Countess von Thun. The gathering was small but well-connected, and Varrio wasted little time spreading the story of Thomas’s dawn duel to an eager audience, nearly causing a scandal when he suggested the fight had been over a chambermaid before frantically clarifying that the lady in question was of considerably higher standing. The gossip spread through the room like wildfire, and Thomas and Emma’s reputations were burnished rather than tarnished by the telling. More usefully, Countess von Thun introduced Varrio to Signor Morosi, an Italian diplomat from the Sardinian embassy with a magnificent mustache and an eye for opportunity. Morosi offered access to Capitano Ferrante and a company of Sardinian mercenaries — officially in Vienna as delegation security consultants — in exchange for either political intelligence on post-Napoleonic border negotiations or one hundred Austrian golden. Varrio agreed to a breakfast meeting the following morning to finalize the arrangement.

The evening took an unexpected turn when the other guests departed and Countess von Thun dismissed her servants, closed the doors, and made her intentions toward Varrio unmistakably clear. She crossed the room with her corset already loosening and proceeded to straddle him on the couch with considerable enthusiasm. Varrio, caught entirely off guard, claimed to be in love with another and made for the door with as much dignity as he could muster. The Countess was not gracious in her rejection — she was deeply offended and kicked him out of her apartments — but the arrangement with Morosi remained intact, and Varrio consoled himself that his honor, at least, was still his own.

While Varrio was navigating the perils of Viennese high society, Freddy, Adrien, and Thomas Wyndham paid a visit to the Black Bear, a dark and sour-smelling inn on Taborstraße where the Bauer brothers had been keeping rooms. The landlady was easily bribed into pointing them toward the second floor, last door on the left, and Thomas Wyndham kicked the door in without ceremony. The two brothers — Klaus and Werner, enormous and identical — were already on their feet. Klaus had a knife, Werner was lunging for a pistol on the table, and the room erupted into chaos. Adrien shot Klaus, wounding him badly and throwing him back onto a cot. Werner threw himself to the floor to avoid Freddy’s shot, which blew a chunk out of a table leg instead. Thomas tried to pin Werner to the ground and was yanked off his feet for his trouble. Adrien pistol-whipped Werner across the skull, and when Klaus staggered back up with his knife, Thomas ran him through with his saber. Werner was knocked unconscious when the table collapsed on top of him during the struggle.

With Werner bound and the room secured, the party searched the Bauer brothers’ belongings and found a canvas bag that was heavy, damp at the bottom, and smelled of lye and something sweetly rotten. Inside was a severed woman’s arm, preserved in rough salt and wrapped in waxed cloth, accompanied by a morgue receipt from the Allgemeines Krankenhaus made out for an anatomical specimen. Alongside it was a crude hand-drawn map of the university basement, showing corridors, doors, and a service entrance marked with an X. A lockbox under one of the cots held eighty Austrian golden. The party dragged the unconscious Werner out past the conspicuously incurious landlady — who was busy counting her bribe money — and loaded him into the carriage. The clock was ticking. Caroline Hartley’s fate remained unknown, the university was locked down tight, and the 15th of August was drawing closer with every hour.