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The roses at Konopiště are extraordinary. Austria knows this because he has been told so, at length and on multiple occasions, with the enthusiasm of someone who has discovered in horticulture something the rest of his life has not reliably provided: predictability.
You plant a thing. You tend it. It grows according to its nature, which cna be learned and does not change its mind in the night and present you with a different set of requirements by morning.
Franz Ferdinand has four thousand rose varieties and tends each one with focused attention like, as if at least in this one domain, the world will behave according to a logic he can understand.
He can understnad the impulse, the seductive nature of it.
Austria stands at the edge of the garden in the long June evening and watches the man move between the beds and feels something that is not quite relief and not quite grief but lives in the territory between them, the feeling of seeing someone in the context where they make the most sense.
Franz Ferdinand is happiest here.
This is a fact. He has watched him for a long time, longer than Franz Ferdinand knows - or perhaps exactly as long as Franz Ferdinand suspects, in the way that some people sense they are being watched over without being able to name the watcher. Austria has been many things to many people across the long accumulation of his centuries, but the particular attention he brings to this man is something he does not have a clean word for.
Not quite guardianship. Not quite pride. .
He has watched him grow.
That is, perhaps, the simplest way to say it.
"The Marchetti," Franz Ferdinand says, gesturing toward a cluster of deep red at the garden's edge. "Three seasons to establish. Come and see."
Austria comes and sees. The rose is, genuinely, remarkable: the colour has a depth to it that rewards looking, the kind of depth that takes time to develop and cannot be hurried. He says so. Franz Ferdinand receives the compliment pleased that his hard work is being recognized, a pleasure Austria has always found endearing in him in its absence of performance.
"And there," another gesture, toward the east wall, "The new climbers. They've come in better than I expected. The wall gets the morning sun and I wasn't certain the variety could tolerate the afternoon shade but-"
"Franz."
"They've adapted. Which suggests the root system is stronger than the nursery-"
"Franz."
He stops. Looks at Austria lile he just now has remembered that other people exist and have their own requirements and needs to be met: "Yes?"
"Show me later. Sit for a moment."
A pause. He finds a bench near the Marchetti rose and sits down, and Austria sits beside him; the evening settles around them with the generosity of June evenings.
From inside the castle, faintly: the children's voices. A door opening and closing. Sophie calling something in a tone that carries affection even at this distance, even filtered through stone walls and open windows.
Franz Ferdinand's face softewns at that, an expression so unguarded Austria always looks away from it slightly, too private to witness directly. He has been the morganatic husband, the man who threw away his dynastic potential for a woman the court found insufficient, has watched the court be wrong about this for twenty years with tired patience.
The children's voices subside. The evening continues.
"You've reviewed the proposal," Franz Ferdinand says. Not a question. He knows Austria has reviewed the proposal because he sent it three weeks ago with a note that said tell me honestly which is the kind of note Franz Ferdinand writes when he wants honesty and the kind of note Austrioa receives with the complicated feeling of someone who is going to provide it and is not sure it will be welcome.
"I have."
"And?"
He looks at the roses, at the four thousand varieties arranged with the precision by a man who believes that disorder, confronted with sufficient patience and method, will eventually submit.
"The federal structure is sound," he says, carefully, "The principle of it. Fifteen constituent states, each administered in its own language, each with its own parliament, the principle is sound."
"But?"
"I did not say but."
"You were about to say but."
He exhales: "The Hungarians."
"The Hungarians will resist. I know frau Hungary will resist." Franz Ferdinand's voice has the compressed energy of someone who has made his peace with an obstacle by deciding to go around it rather than through it, "They will resist until the structure exists, and then they will accommodate themselves to it as a fact. That is what the Hungarians do. They resist and then they accommodate."
"They have been resisting for fifty years. She has been resisting for fifty years."
"And they will accommodate for the next fifty, I am not in a hurry," he says,s erene like he has all the time in the world, "The southern Slavs are the beginning. If the Slavic question is answered within the federal structure, genuinely answered, not managed-"
"You cannot answer it without answering the Serb question."
"The Serb question answers itself if the southern Slavs have what they need within the empire. The agitation exists because there is a dream of something better outside. Provide the substance of it inside and the dream loses-"
"You are describing a very elegant solution."
Franz Ferdinand looks amused an exasperated: "You think it won't work."
"I think it is the most intelligent proposal for the empire's future that has been produced in my lifetime," Austria pauses, "Which is a long lifetime."
"That is not the same as thinking it will work."
"No, it isn't."
The honesty sits between them.
He has always given Franz Ferdinand honesty, has made it a point of the relationship - the one thing he can reliably offer that the court and the ministers and the yes-men of the imperial administration cannot, or will not. He does not know when this became the shape of what they are to each other, but he knows Franz Ferdinand values it and holds it close to his heart.
Franz Ferdinand is quiet for a moment. He looks at the garden. does some mental calculations with methodical patience.
"It will work," he says, at last, without heat, without defensiveness. Simply a statement of intention.
"Franz-"
"It needs time and it needs someone willing to spend the political capital and it needs-" He stops. Looks at his hands, large capable hands that tend four thousand roses and carry the reform proposals in their head and hold his wife's hand across a table with straightforward tenderness: "It needs the old man to step aside. And then it needs me to move quickly, before anyone can organise against it."
There are things Austria carries, being what he is, that he does not put down. He has learned, over centuries, to carry them without showing the weight - the knowledge of how things tend to go, the structural patterns he has watched repeat across enough history to recognise their shape in advance, the feeling of standing in a story whose ending he cannot see but whose genre he suspects.
The man is so full of plans. It is not a criticism, it is something closer to wonder: the wonder of watching a person who has retained, at fifty years old, the fundamental belief that the future is a place where things can be made better, that the work of improvement is worth undertaking, that the empire - the cracked, creaking, many-voiced, impossible empire, his empire, the one Austria has been for so long that he no longer knows where it ends and he begins - can be held together and made into something worth being held together.
He wants to believe this.
He has always wanted to believe this.
"Show me the climbers," Austria says, "On the east wall."
Franz Ferdinand looks surprised, perhaps, by the sudden capitulation, or perhaps simply reading the thing underneath it, the thing Austria is not saying. He stands, and they walk together along the garden path toward the east wall, through the warm evening, through the smell of roses which is the smell of sustained effort, of a man imposing his care on a piece of ground until the ground returns it.
The climbers are, as promised, extraordinary. They cover the old stone abundant, unstoppable, turning the wall into something that is no longer a wall but a declaration.
"Beautiful."
He means it.
Franz Ferdinand stands beside him with his hands in his pockets and looks at the climbers with satisfaction - not smugness nor triumphant, just the quiet pleasure of a gardener lookign at the fruits of his work.
"Three years," he says, "You have to give them time."
"Yes."
Inside the castle, Sophie calls Franz Ferdinand's name - warm, domestic, the call of a woman who knows where her husband is and is ready for him to come in. Franz Ferdinand's face lights up with delight and love.
"Come for dinner," he says to Austria. "Sophie has-"
"In a moment. Go."
He goes, back along the garden path toward the lit windows, toward his family, toward the warm interior of the life he built on his own terms in defiance of every court that told him his terms were insufficient.
Austria watches him go, stands for a while longer at the east wall with the climbers and the old stone and the last of the light, running his thumb along the stone looking for the crack, finding it, pressing at it, putting it down, finding it again. The mortar between the stones is old. In places it has crumbled. The wall stands, has stood for centuries, will stand.
But the mortar is old.
The light finishes.
The roses become shadows.
From inside: warmth, voices, the sound of a family at dinner, the ordinary extraordinary sound of people who love each other eating together at the end of a day.
Roderich takes one more moment with the wall and the dark and this unnamed feeling; he is very old and he has learned to take his moments when they are available. Then he smooths his coat and turns and walks back along the garden path toward the lit windows, toward the sound of his name being called in a voice that expects him, toward the dinner table where Franz Ferdinand is already seated and already talking and already full of plans for what comes next.
He goes inside.
The empire breathes around him.
It is still, this evening, undeniably whole.