Vienna

The Countess and the Salon

Varrio passed the night after Brenner’s death without sleep, hounded by the man’s confused face and the angle of his broken neck. When he finally drifted off near four, he dreamed of a room beneath the earth where brass pipes breathed with human lungs. The murder left its mark: from then on, a sudden sound or an unexpected touch could lock him rigid, staring at nothing, lost to the world for long seconds at a stretch.

In the morning, Emma and Thomas escorted a fretting Madame Delacroix to the Palais Thun Hohenstein to call upon the Countess Maria Wilhelmine von Thun. The Countess — a diminutive woman of seventy in dove-grey silk, with fierce, intelligent eyes — recognised Delacroix at once, mourned her mother, then turned her gaze on the strangers and demanded to know their business in a city where battles were fought with gossip and could prove every bit as deadly. Emma answered plainly that they were protecting someone, and the Countess pronounced that she liked honesty, rarer than diamonds in Vienna. She insisted Delacroix sit beside her at the salon that evening. Across the city, Colonel Moreau called on the French delegation, where Count de la Tour-du-Pin — initially sceptical, then convinced — confirmed that French musicians had also vanished from Vienna and provided a sealed introduction to Dorothea, Talleyrand’s niece. He named Herzfeld, Adler, Trautmannsdorff, and Baron von Kaunitz as men worth fearing, and warned of Metternich’s secret police.

Charlotte and Adrien spent the morning among the Venetian masters at the Belvedere, where Charlotte turned up a German newspaper notice: three months prior, Professor Herzfeld had been granted imperial funds for “acoustic research,” including the renovation of disused anatomical facilities in the medical wing. Near a painting of the crucifixion they overheard two men murmuring in low German of “the Professor” and “Brenner” — and when Charlotte stared too long, the elder noticed and the pair left briskly in a carriage marked with the University’s symbol. A brown-coated watcher folded his newspaper and departed a café as they passed. Back at the Palais Kinsky, Georgiana read the city’s history while Varrio quietly made her tea, and uncovered the bones of the matter: the old anatomical theatre, sealed in 1794 after the Josephine reforms but never demolished, joined to the medical wing by service corridors once used to carry cadavers from the hospital. A dropped tray in the corridor sent Varrio into his frozen state; he surfaced only by reciting an Italian love poem of crimson flowers and summer kisses, which charmed Georgiana as much as it steadied him.

That evening, Vienna’s intellectual and artistic set gathered in the Countess’s candlelit drawing rooms. Emma let slip that Georgiana was an excellent dancer, and the Russian attaché Count Volkonsky swept her into a waltz — which she fumbled spectacularly, treading on his foot and careening into another couple before the gracious count laughed it off and steered her clear. Baron von Kaunitz watched the disaster with amusement. Varrio danced with Madame Delacroix a deliberate half-step behind to put her at ease, and Adrien declined Lydia’s waltz only to take the floor with her sister Caroline, who loved the music for itself. Then Graf Maximilian von Sternberg arrived in full Hussar regalia, sought Emma out at once, held her hand a beat too long, and swept her into a waltz of perfect synchronisation while Thomas reddened with barely contained fury and Varrio talked him down before the aristocracy could see him crack.

The night yielded its intelligence in fragments. Volkonsky confided to Georgiana, over vodka, that three Russian musicians had vanished in the past year and his ambassador refused to look into it. The court composer Graf von Reichenbach — who wrote in secret under the name “Heinrich Schiller” — agreed to meet Moreau at his Hofburg office before nine the next morning. Caroline mentioned her father was talking investments with a portly count, very likely Trautmannsdorff. As the party walked home through the oil-lamp glow, a street urchin darted up to Varrio, muttered “Sie haben ihn gefunden” — they found him — and fled, leaving a pressed rose and a card for Emma whose feminine hand confirmed that someone knew of Brenner’s death. The party changed into discreet clothes and went straight to the University of Vienna near midnight, only to find the gates chained and a sour, sleep-deprived porter who scoffed at their clumsy bribe and sent them away — all the while a brown-coated agent of the Geheimpolizei watched from the dark. They returned to Palais Kinsky with the morning’s appointments ahead of them and the night’s one certainty behind: they were being watched, and they were known.