By the first week of December 1884, the snow had climbed halfway up the lower windows of Schloss Falken.

The castle stood on a wooded rise west of Rosenheim, its oldest walls built when men still expected stone to outlive law. In winter the north tower disappeared for days behind sleet. Ice collected beneath the gargoyles. The chapel roof leaked over the second pew whenever the wind came from the Alps, though Graf Matthias von Falken had spent more money repairing the stables than the chapel in the previous five years.

That was the sort of detail his wife noticed, and he did not.

Eleanor had been born in Württemberg and married into Bavaria at twenty-two, carrying with her three trunks, a French maid, a collection of Schiller her mother considered unsuitable for a bride, and the conviction that marriage would give her a life larger than the one her family had arranged.

For several years, she had not been entirely wrong.

Matthias was eleven years older, impatient with small talk and surprisingly bad at cards. He disliked Munich society, preferred horses to ministers and had once driven six hours through rain because Eleanor had mentioned wanting to see Lake Chiemsee in winter.

He had also wanted a son with an intensity she had mistaken, at first, for tenderness.

Their first pregnancy ended in the fourth month.

The second lasted six.

The third nearly killed her.

Afterwards, Matthias stopped mentioning children in front of her, but she saw what happened whenever his cousin brought his two boys to the estate. Matthias became louder with them. Younger. He threw apples for them to strike with sticks in the orchard, lifted them onto horses and once returned from the pond with his coat torn because he had crawled across thin ice to retrieve a wooden boat.

That night, Eleanor found him alone in the nursery they had never used.

He had not heard her enter.

She left without speaking.

A year later, she became pregnant again.

Their son was born during a storm.

Three years afterwards, Matthias began to believe the boy belonged to another man.