Read Vienna Waltz Online

Authors: Teresa Grant

Tags: #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Historical, #Romance, #Historical Romance, #Mystery & Suspense

Vienna Waltz

Vienna Waltz
TERESA GRANT
KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
For Nancy Yost, fabulous agent and friend
My business in this state
Made me a looker-on here in Vienna . . .
—Shakespeare,
Measure for Measure,
Act V, Scene i
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Any errors of research or plotting are entirely my responsibility, but I am grateful to a number of people for assistance, support, and inspiration in the writing of this book.
Profound and heartfelt thanks to my agent, Nancy Yost, and my editor, Audrey LaFehr, for believing in this project and helping me polish and shape it. To Kristine Mills-Noble and Judy York for a fabulous cover that beautifully evokes the mood of the book (and actually looks like Suzanne). To Tory Groshong for the careful copy editing. To Paula Reedy for shepherding the book through production. And to Martin Biro and everyone at Kensington Books for their support throughout the publication process.
Thank you to Monica Sevy for the gift of David King’s
Vienna 1814,
which inspired me to finally write a book set at the Congress of Vienna. To Tom Stone of the Cypress String Quartet and his children Daniel and Hannah for reminding me that Schubert was in Vienna during the Congress. To Maestro Nicholas McGegan of Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra for advice on Viennese theatres of the time and on Schubert research sources.
To Gregory Paris and jim saliba for creating and updating my Web site. To Greg for filming the wonderful video clips and to jim for the great interview questions.
To Jami Alden, Nyree Bellville, Barbara Freethy, Carol Grace, Anne Mallory, Monica McCarty, Penelope Williamson, and Veronica Wolff for writer lunches and e-mail brainstorming that remind me of what I love about being a writer. And to Veronica for productive (and fun!) writing dates during which large sections of
Vienna Waltz
were written, and to Penny for encouragement, support, and solving the problem of how Suzanne finds the locket.
To Lauren Willig for encouragement, friendship, and wonderful discussions of Napoleonic spies. To Kalen Hughes for answering questions on the intricacies of early-nineteenth-century clothing, and to Candice Hern for the wonderful fashion plates on her Web site. To Miranda Phipps for suggesting via Twitter that having someone get shot makes for a good diversion. To Jayne Davis for the grammar advice. To Melissa Majerol for conversations about Carême. To the History Hoydens for insights, fun, and for being a font of information on period detail. To Tasha Alexander, Deborah Crombie, Catherine Duthie, C. S. Harris, and Deanna Raybourn for their feedback and support.
And to CC, JW, and JJA for the inspiration.
D
RAMATIS PERSONAE
*indicates real historical figures
The British Delegation
Lord Castlereagh, British foreign secretary*
Lady Castlereagh, his wife*
Lord Stewart, British ambassador to Vienna, Lord Castlereagh’s
half brother*
Malcolm Rannoch, attaché
Suzanne Rannoch, his wife
Colin Rannoch, their son
Aline Dacre-Hammond, Malcolm’s cousin
Addison, Malcolm’s valet
Blanca, Suzanne’s maid
Lord Fitzwilliam Vaughn, attaché
Eithne (Lady Fitzwilliam Vaughn), his wife
The Hon. Thomas Belmont, attaché
Colonel Frederick Radley
Dr. Geoffrey Blackwell
The French Delegation
Prince Talleyrand, French foreign minister*
Dorothée de Talleyrand-Périgord, his hostess and his nephew’s
wife*
Carême, chef at the French embassy*
The Russian Delegation
Tsar Alexander of Russia*
Tsarina Elisabeth, his wife*
Prince Adam Czartoryski, Polish patriot and adviser to the tsar*
Count Otronsky, adviser to the tsar
Gregory Lindorff, military aide
Count Nesselrode, acting foreign minister*
Grand Duke Constantine, the tsar’s brother*
The Austrian Delegation
Prince Metternich, Austrian foreign minister*
Princess Metternich, his wife*
Marie Metternich, their daughter*
Emperor Francis of Austria*
Empress Maria Ludovica, his wife*
Baron Hager, Austrian chief of police*
Friedrich von Genz, Metternich’s assistant and secretary to the
Congress*
Others
Princess Tatiana Kirsanova, mistress to the tsar
Annina Barbera, her maid
Wilhelmine, Duchess of Sagan, Dorothée’s sister, former mistress
to Metternich*
Prince Alfred von Windischgrätz, her lover*
Princess Catherine Bagration, mistress to the tsar*
Count Karl Clam-Martinitz, Austrian war hero*
Countess Julie Zichy, Austrian noblewoman*
Baroness Fanny von Arnstein,
salonnière
*
Prince de Ligne, former field marshal*
Axel, waiter at the Empress Rose tavern
Heinrich, potboy at the Empress Rose tavern
Margot, his sister, kitchen maid at the Empress Rose tavern
PROLOGUE
Vienna
20 November 1814
P
rincess Tatiana Kirsanova picked up the tinderbox with fingers that were not quite steady. The flint cut into her palm. She scraped it against steel, harder than was necessary. The first of the three tapers sparked to life, revealing a bit of peeling silver gilt on the candelabrum. She lifted the taper and used it to light the other two. One taper tilted in its base. As she righted it, hot drops of wax spattered against her fingers.
She snatched back her hand, stung, cursing her carelessness. The smell of beeswax filled the room, drowning out the spice and cloves of the potpourri and her carefully applied tuberose perfume, custom blended by her favorite parfumerie in Paris. The trio of flames gleamed against the polished rosewood of the demilune table and was reflected in the curving glass of the bay window. Beyond the window, an autumn moon cast a wash of pale light over the cobbled Schenkengasse. Candlelight sparkled in the windows of the other houses that lined the street. Cool white columns and fanciful rococo balconies glowed in the shadows. She could just glimpse the chancellery where Prince Metternich, Austria’s foreign minister, could often be found working late. When he wasn’t visiting one of his mistresses. As Tatiana had cause to know.
She set down the tinderbox and stared out at the night sky. Vienna. The city of dreams. The city in which powerful men from the courts of Europe had gathered to carve up Napoleon Bonaparte’s empire. But while the official delegates to the Congress of Vienna were men, alongside those men a number of women had come to this glittering city. Women who were perhaps equally powerful, though they had to find more subtle ways to wield their power. The world was being remade in the council chambers and salons of Vienna. And in the bedchambers and boudoirs.
From her first, brutal lesson at the age of eleven, Tatiana had learned to understand and appreciate power. Through intelligence and artifice, deception, calculation, and sheer cunning, she had managed to scrape together a fair amount of it for herself. But tonight, in this city where, every day, borders were redrawn and lovers changed partners as lightly as if they were dancing the waltz, more power than she had ever dreamed possible was at her fingertips. She had only to reach out and grasp it, as she could grip the fluted edge of the table.
If everything fell out as she had designed.
Tatiana touched the cameos round her throat, making sure they still lay at the same precise angle. Then she fingered the thin gold chain of the locket that hung inside the crisscrossed satin bands of her bodice. The locket she always wore. The locket that was the source of everything she was.
She smoothed her shawl over her shoulders. The diamond on her right hand shimmered in the candlelight as her fingers trembled against the silk. It was paisley, a pattern made fashionable years ago when Napoleon had brought it back from Egypt for Josephine. The delicate fabric could slip through one’s fingers as easily as carefully laid plans, months in the making. To grasp power required a campaign as intricate as any Napoleon Bonaparte had conducted on the battlefields of Europe. To fall from power could be the matter of a simple misstep. Josephine had fallen. So had Napoleon.
Tatiana tugged the shawl smooth. A quarrel earlier in the evening had distressed her, but that was a minor skirmish, insignificant beside what lay ahead. This was the night that could make her or destroy her. And others along with her. But then she had always found risk headier than the finest champagne.
Beyond the window, a greatcoated, top-hatted figure came into view. Something about the quiet assurance in the way he carried himself was unmistakable. Tatiana’s blood quickened. She put a hand up to her hair, making sure the results of her maid’s dexterity with the curling tongs were still in place. A fatal mistake to go into battle without all one’s armor.
Head held at the angle Jacques-Louis David had immortalized in his portrait of her, she turned from the window and moved to the center of the room to await her visitor.
Elisabeth Alexeievna, Tsarina of Russia, eased open the heavy door. A torch-lit courtyard stretched before her, one of many in the alien maze that was the Hofburg Palace. She pulled the folds of her cloak tighter about her. The sable-lined blue velvet belonged to her lady-in-waiting, who had been seen wearing it going to and from the opera earlier in the evening. Borrowing her lady-in-waiting’s cloak was a ploy right out of a comic opera, but so far it had seemed to deceive the footmen and guards she’d passed. She could only hope it deceived any unseen watchers as well.
She waited a moment, but nothing moved in the flickering light. Holding her cloak close, she darted across the cold paving stones, through a door, and then another. The guards by the side door that led to the street were playing dice and sharing a flask. One cast a glance at her and murmured that he’d hate to interfere with a rendezvous. With any luck, it would only be said that one of the tsarina’s ladies had a lover. Hardly surprising.
At last she was free of the smothering confines of the Austrian imperial palace. A blast of wind greeted her. She nearly turned and ran back to the palace. But any safety the Hofburg’s brilliant splendor offered was merely an illusion. Even in the gleaming white and gold suite allotted to the Russian delegation she found scant refuge. There was no hiding from what she faced now. She pulled her sable-lined hood more firmly over her betraying ash blond hair and stepped into the night air.
As she rounded the side of the four-tower palace, she saw that a distressing amount of moonlight spilled over the street. She walked with her head tilted down, arms tight to her sides beneath the enveloping folds of the cloak. The cobblestones pressed through the kid soles of her ribboned slippers, just as she was sure any watching eyes could cut through the fabric of her cloak.
A carriage clattered by. Light flashed from the flambeaux carried by the footmen who perched behind, turning the pristine white walls beside her a molten orange. It took every ounce of her willpower not to dart into the mouth of the nearest lane. But this meeting had to take place away from the Hofburg.
She clung to the shadows and walked past the limestone and plaster of the palaces of Vienna’s elite. Every diamond-bright window seemed to hold unseen watchers. She reminded herself that the dangers in Vienna were more to be found in words whispered behind painted silk fans in candlelit salons than in the dark recesses of moonlit streets. One would think after one-and-twenty years as Alexander’s wife, she would have grown used to court intrigue. But she still felt like the wide-eyed girl who had come from Baden to marry the young Russian heir to the throne. Save that that girl, Princess Louise of Baden as she had then been called, had been filled with hope. Had believed that marriage and love went hand in glove. That her bridegroom’s dazzling smile held his soul. That vows of fidelity, spoken in a cathedral before the Russian court, rang sterling true. That she and Alexander would live happily ever after and rule over a grateful people. That foreign troops would never breach Russia’s borders.
The real language of diplomacy wasn’t French. It was lies.
She turned down a narrow side street, grateful for the protection of the close-set buildings, and then down another and another. Twice she was convinced she had lost her way, but at last she ducked beneath a low, crumbling archway into the appointed courtyard.
He was already there, as she had known he would be. In two decades, Adam Czartoryski had never failed her. He detached himself from the shadows and came toward her in three quick strides. The skirts of his greatcoat swirled about him. The moonlight fell on his well-cut features, so achingly familiar, and gleamed against his uncovered dark hair.
“Lisa.” He caught her hands in a strong clasp. As clearly as if she had been thrown back in time, she remembered him taking her hands to help her out of a sleigh, snow dusting his hair as it fell over his forehead.
“What is it?” He spoke not in his native Polish nor her German nor the Russian of the country in which they had both lived for so many years but in French, the language of lies and diplomacy and the Russian court. “What was so urgent that we had to meet tonight?”
The impulse to fling herself into his arms was almost overmastering. Were she still the girl who had fallen in love with him, so many years ago, she would have done so.
But she was no longer quite so naïve as the unhappy bride who had first tumbled into Adam’s arms. She returned the clasp of his hands and looked up into his eyes. His dark gaze steadied her, though at the same time it was the source of so much temptation. It always had been.
“I’ve been such a fool, Adam.”
He pushed back her hood. His ungloved fingers trembled against her skin for a moment, then slid along the line of her jaw. “You’re never foolish, Lisa. Whatever’s happened, I’m quite sure you had no choice.”
She shuddered, so hard she feared bone and muscle could not contain it. “I’ve destroyed myself. And I’m terrified I’ll destroy you, too.”
He reached beneath her hood and curled his hand round the nape of her neck. His touch sent a shiver through her. Though she had known the touch of other lovers since, the brush of his fingers could still affect her like no one else’s.
“It can’t be that bad, beloved,” he said in a steady voice. “Tell me.”
She shook her head. “All these years of Alexander’s infidelities. All these years of pretending to ignore them and then of trying to learn to play the game. And yet I never guessed she would be the one to destroy me. And everything I care about.”
“Who?” Adam’s gaze raked her face.
“My husband’s mistress.” Elisabeth drew a breath that scraped like a dagger against rock. “Tatiana Kirsanova.”
Prince Talleyrand eased his clubfoot out before him. He wore embroidered silk slippers rather than the diamond-buckled, red-heeled shoes that were part of his armor on public occasions. His velvet frock coat (a relic of the previous century, carefully reproduced by the Parisian tailor he had frequented through the Revolution, Directoire, Consulate, Empire, and now restored monarchy) lay abandoned over the back of his chair. He sat in his frilled shirt—another relic of a more civilized age—and tapestry waistcoat, though he had not gone so far as to loosen his starched satin cravat. Some standards must be upheld, even in deshabille.
Outside, the wind battered the walls of the Kaunitz Palace. Inside, the coals crackling in the porcelain stove lent a deceptive warmth.
Talleyrand took a sip of calvados, set down the glass, and tented his fingers. His mind was far beyond the red-damask confines of his temporary study. He pictured a Titian-haired woman, housed not so very far away in the Palm Palace. A woman who was here in Vienna partly owing to his design, though he began to think that for once he had dangerously miscalculated.
He had known from the first that Tatiana Kirsanova was a clever woman, with skills that could be molded. He had been sure she could prove useful. She had proved considerably cleverer than he had credited. And far, far more dangerous.
Talleyrand took another sip of calvados, going over his every action since his first meeting with Tatiana so many years ago, searching for where he had gone wrong. His enemies said he rarely admitted to a misstep. But the truth was, he rarely made one. And yet with Tatiana—
The door opened with the faintest stir against the Aubusson carpet. He turned his head nonetheless. He wouldn’t have survived this long if he could be approached unawares.
The person he had been expecting closed the door with the same quiet precision and advanced into the room.
“Well?” Talleyrand asked. His breath came more quickly than he would have liked.
“I fear it is as you suspected, m’sieur.”
Talleyrand took a sip of calvados. It sat bitter on his tongue. One could not live as many years as he had on the public stage without experiencing the tang of regret. One would think by now he’d have grown accustomed to it. “You’re sure?”
“Beyond doubt. It’s clear what Princess Tatiana intends. And it’s clear how much she knows.”
Talleyrand set his glass on the table beside him, careful to keep his hand steady. It was not as though he did not know how to cope with unwelcome developments. He was a survivor. His former protégé, the young general who had risen to rule the Continent, was exiled on the island of Elba, while he was here, helping shape the future of France. A future in which he could allow no interference. “She’ll have to be dealt with, then. It’s too dangerous to allow her to go on unchecked.”
Talleyrand stared down at his ringed fingers. Uncomfortable memories tugged at the edges of his brain. “It’s a pity. I’ve grown quite fond of her.”

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