William Monk 12 - Funeral in Blue

he had been then. But before he approached him, he would hear the same stories from other people, so he could judge the truth of Niemann’s account. What he needed was another member of that group from sixteen years ago, from Kristian’s list.
    He finally drifted off to sleep with a firmer plan in mind, and did not waken until it was broad daylight. He was extremely hungry.
    With much nodding and smiling, his hostess gave him an excellent breakfast with rather more rich, sweet pastry than he cared for, but the best coffee he had ever tasted. Repeating
Danke schön
over and over, he smiled back, and then set out with a freshly scrubbed and very eager Ferdi, who had spent all evening and a good part of the night reading accounts of the ’48 rising. He was full of a jumble of facts and stories that had gathered the patina and exaggeration of legend already. He relayed them with great enthusiasm as they walked along the street side by side towards the magnificence of the Parliament and the gardens beyond, now winter bare.
    “It actually sort of began in the middle of March,” Ferdi told him. “There was an uprising in Hungary already, and it spread here. Of course, Hungary is vast, you know? About six or seven times as big as Austria. All the nobles and senior clergy were due to meet in the Landhaus. That’s on the Herrengasse.” He pointed ahead of them. “That’s over there. I can take you if you want. Anyway, it seems they were asking for all sorts of reforms, particularly freedom of the press and to get rid of Prince Metternich. Students, artisans, and workers, mostly, forced their way into the building. About one o’clock a whole lot of Italian grenadiers shot into the crowd and killed thirty or more ordinary people—I mean, they weren’t criminals or the very poor, or lunatics like the French revolutionaries were in ’89, last century.”
    He stared at Monk as they came to the Auerstrasse and were obliged to wait several moments for a break in the traffic to cross.
    “That was the really big one,” he went on. “Ours was over within the year.” He smiled almost apologetically. “Pretty much everything is back as it was. Of course, Prince Metternich is gone, but he was seventy-four anyway, and he’d been around since before Waterloo!” His voice rose in incredulity as if he could barely grasp anyone having been alive so long.
    Monk hid a smile.
    “Then the barricades went up all over the city,” Ferdi went on, matching his stride to Monk’s. “But it was killing the people that really drove them to send Metternich into exile.” A flash of pity lit his young face. “I suppose that’s a bit hard, when you’re that old. Anyway,” he resumed, “in May they drove the whole court out of Vienna, Emperor Ferdinand and everyone. They all went to Innsbruck. Actually, you know, there was trouble just about everywhere that year.” He checked to make sure Monk was listening. “In Milan and Venice, too, which gave us a lot of bother. They are ours as well, even though they’re Italian. Did you know that?”
    “Yes,” Monk answered, remembering his own trip to Venice, and how the proud Venetians had hated the Austrian yoke on their shoulders. “Yes, I did know.”
    “We’ve sort of got the German Empire to the northwest, and the Russian Empire to the northeast, and us in the middle,” Ferdi went on, increasing his pace to keep up with Monk’s longer legs. “Anyway, in May they formed a committee of public safety—sounds just like the French, doesn’t it? But we didn’t have a guillotine, and we didn’t kill many people at all.”
    Monk was not certain if that was pride or a slight sense of anticlimax.
    “You must have killed some,” he responded.
    Ferdi nodded. “Oh, we did! We made rather a good job of it, actually, in October. They hanged the war minister, Count Baillat de Latour—from a lamppost. The mob did. Then they forced the government and the Parliament to go to Olmutz, which is in Moravia—that’s north of here, in Hungary.” He heaved a great sigh. “But it all came to nothing. The aristocracy and the middle classes—which is us, I suppose—supported Field Marshal Prince Windischgrätz, and it was all put down. I expect that was when your friends were very brave, and did whatever it was you need to find out about.”
    “Yes,” Monk agreed, looking about him at the busy, prosperous streets with their magnificent architecture, and trying to imagine Kristian here,