She had built her practice on a simple belief: that a human heart, however wounded, however strange in its wounding, deserved to be understood rather than diagnosed away.
Men were so quick to name what they feared in a woman.
Hysteria.
Nerves.
A weakness of constitution.
She had spent years unlearning those names for her patients, sitting with them long enough to find what actually lived beneath the label, and she had never once found a heart that was simple enough to deserve the word it had been given.
People were not illnesses.
They were rooms with too many doors, and most physicians never bothered to open more than the first.
It was, she supposed, a naive kind of faith to carry into a new century.
She held it anyway.
It was the only thing that had ever made her useful.
She was still turning that thought over, half a habit by now, more meditation than conclusion, when the servant found her at the estate’s outer gate.
He was an older man, composed in the particular way of someone who had long ago stopped being surprised by his employer’s requests, and he greeted her with a bow precise enough to have been rehearsed.
“Fräulein Vingler, you are expected.”
He fell into step beside her as the gate closed behind them, the gravel path stretching long and pale toward the house.
“Forgive me, I am told to brief you before you are received, as is done with all who come regarding the position.”
“The position”
she repeated, mild.
“The Herr requires a personal physician of the mind.
One session weekly, conducted here, on the grounds.”
He recited it the way a man recites something he has said many times before and stopped hearing.
“In exchange, a room is provided within the estate, meals as required, and funding without limit, for research, for practice, for whatever purpose the physician deems necessary.
The arrangement is permanent, so long as both parties remain satisfied.”
“And the condition?”
Something in his composure thinned, briefly, before he smoothed it back into place.
“Only that the first session be endured with a calm mind.
Many who have come before you were not able to manage it.”
“I’ve heard as much.”
“Then you understand the terms better than most who arrive here.”
He did not elaborate further, and she did not ask him to.
There was a kind of mercy in what he chose not to say, and she suspected he knew it.
The grounds themselves gave her more to work with than he did.
It was late enough in the year that Vienna’s parks had gone brittle and gold, but the estate’s gardens held a green that seemed to have ignored the season entirely, hedges cut with a precision that felt less like a gardener’s pride and more like an insistence, as though something had decided the world would hold its shape here regardless of what month it believed itself to be.
She counted three fountains on the walk to the house, and all three stood dry, their basins clean of leaves in a way that no wind alone accomplished.
On the towers a clock struck an hour she did not think matched the sun, though she could not have said which of the two was wrong.
There were no birds.
She noticed that only because she went looking for the absence of them, the particular quality of quiet that isn’t peace so much as a held breath.
A groundskeeper trimming a hedge did not glance up as they passed, his shears opening and closing in a rhythm too even to have come from a hand that could ever be tired.
She passed more servants on the walk, and each time she found herself watching them a beat longer than courtesy required.
A maid crossing the lawn with a basket of linens walked in a perfectly straight line, as if the shortest path between two points were a rule rather than a convenience.
They moved correctly, every motion accounted for, a hand rising to open a door at precisely the moment a hand ought to rise, and yet there was something in the correctness itself that unsettled her more than clumsiness would have.
And all of them, without exception, were covered.
Gloves to the wrist even indoors, high collars buttoned to the throat despite the mildness of the day, wide brims or drawn hoods that kept their faces in a shadow no natural light seemed able to correct.
She caught herself trying to recall a single face from the walk to the house and found she could not, not because she hadn’t looked, but because there had been nothing there to look for.
It was, she thought, the sort of detail a less observant person might file away as eccentricity, an employer’s fondness for uniformity.
She did not file it away.
The house itself was grand, almost too grand compared to the forest it was surrounded with.
Nonetheless, it received her with the same wrongness dressed as ordinary.
The windows were tall and many, the kind that ought to have flooded a hallway with afternoon light, and yet the light that came through them felt thinner than it should have, as if it had been filtered through something on its way in.
A grandfather clock in the entrance hall kept perfect, silent time, its pendulum swinging without the tick she expected of it.
She noted that too.
The Herr received her in a room located far from the entrance, far from the light of the sun.
It was smaller than she’d expected of a man who owned this much land, a study rather than a parlor, with a desk kept so tidy it looked unused.
He rose when she entered.
That alone told her something; most men his age, with his supposed wealth and position, waited to be announced into.
“Fräulein Vingler.”
He said her name correctly, the accent placed where it belonged.
“I confess I didn’t expect the honor.”
“It is a pleasure to meet you Herr…?”
She let the pause do its work, an old interviewing habit.
“Crepus.”
He inclined his head, unhurried.
“Crepus T.
Mori.
The T is for Tenebris.
My mother had a fondness for old words that sounded grander than our circumstances.”
A small, self-deprecating smile, the kind practiced enough to be either entirely genuine or not genuine at all.
“I’m told it makes people uneasy.
Mori.
‘To die’, in the old tongue.
I’ve stopped apologizing for it.”
It was, she thought, almost insultingly simple.
A name that meant exactly what the murmuring man in the asylum had said, offered up without her even having to ask, as though the answer to a locked door had been resting on the welcome mat the entire time.
She filed the ease of it away rather than the explanation itself.
“Please, sit.
I understand this is meant to be a consultation before anything else, and I would rather not waste the hour we’ve been given for it.”
She sat.
He did not sit until she had.
“Then let us begin as I would with any patient.”
She drew a small notebook from her bag, more for the shape of the ritual than any real need of it; she rarely needed to write anything down to remember it later.
“How is your sleep, Herr Mori?”
“Adequate.
I keep late hours by habit rather than having any trouble finding rest.”
He flashed a faint, self-deprecating smile lampooning to himself.
“Business does not observe a decent bedtime, I’m afraid.”
“And your appetite?”
“Fine.
Though I eat alone more often than I’d like to admit, which I assume is the sort of confession you’re meant to draw out of me slowly rather than have handed to you in the first five minutes.”
She allowed herself a small, professional smile in return.
“I find most men are relieved to skip that part.”
“I imagine I’m not the first man to sit in a chair and say he’s lonely.”
“You are not.”
“Good.
I’d hate to be original in that respect.”
He put his hands on the desk and started tapping, an easy, unhurried gesture.
“I came into a great deal of money recently, Fräulein Vingler, more suddenly than I know what to do with gracefully.
I find myself trying to build a life to fit it, and discovering that the life doesn’t come as readily as the money did.
A house, certainly.
Staff.
A place among people who’ve spent generations deciding who belongs and who doesn’t.”
A small shrug, wry rather than bitter.
“I thought a physician might help me manage the trying.”
It was, she thought, an almost disarmingly ordinary answer.
The sort of thing she’d have heard from any number of newly wealthy men in this city, restless and unmoored, denying loneliness for a medical complaint because it was easier to describe it than to sit with what it actually is.
She asked him about his family, and he told her a mother he spoke of gently and briefly, a father he did not mention at all, and she let the omission pass unremarked, filing it rather than pressing it, exactly as she would have with any other patient in the first hour.
When the conversation had run its proper length and the contract was presented to her, she opened her handbag and drew out a mirror.
It was small enough to seem incidental, silver-backed, its glass slightly too dark, the kind of thing a woman might carry to check her hat in company.
She had used it on liars, on the cruel, on men who smiled at their wives in public and did worse behind closed doors, and it had never once failed to show her what waited beneath a person’s face.
She lifted it, angled toward him, and looked.
Nothing.
Not darkness.
Not a shape too vast for the glass to hold, not a horror flinching from the light, she had braced herself for something like that, had half expected the mirror to crack in her hand.
Instead there was simply nothing, the plain unremarkable reflection of a man sitting in a chair, waiting politely for her to finish whatever it was she was doing.
As if there were no depths to reveal at all.
As if the mirror had looked and found no heart to read.
Her own surprise must have shown, because he tilted his head.
“Is something the matter, Fräulein?”
“No.”
She lowered the mirror, and put it back in her handbag.
“Force of habit.”
“Ah.”
He accepted this without curiosity, which was itself its own kind of strange, and gestured toward the papers between them.
“Shall we continue?”
“…What is it you’re hoping this arrangement accomplishes?”
She asked,
“beyond the obvious comforts of it.”
He considered the question longer than she expected.
“…Someone who will still be here in a year,”
he said finally.
“That’s all, really.
Everyone except Hans so far has already left… and everyone will, including me”
She was confused for she had already seen the many servants that maintain this vast estate, but it was, she would think later, the single most honest thing he said to her all afternoon, and at the time she had no way of knowing that.
I decided to edit the chapters to make reading easier