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“That would be very unfortunate,” Ferdi agreed gravely. “I gather what we are about to do is a trifle dangerous.”
It was completely idiotic. Monk was foundering out of his depth and trying very hard not to let despair drown him.
Ferdi looked keen and attentive. “What would you like me to ask someone, sir? What is it you really need to know, other than who killed this poor lady?”
There was nothing to lose. “Say that I am an English novelist, writing a book about the uprising in ’48,” he began, the ideas forming in his head as he spoke. “Ask for as many firsthand stories as you can find. The names I am concerned with are Max Niemann, Kristian Beck and Elissa von Leibnitz.”
“Absolutely!” Ferdi said fervently, his eyes bright with admiration.
The rest of that day was largely a matter of asking people tentatively and being more or less dismissed. By the time Monk went to bed in his new lodgings, saying thank-you in some approximation of German, he felt lost and inadequate. He lay in the dark, acutely conscious that Hester was not beside him. She was in London, trusting that he would bring back weapons of truth to defend Kristian. And Kristian would be lying awake in a narrow prison cot. Was he also trusting Monk to find some element which would be a key to make sense of tragedy? Or did he know it already, and trusted with just as much passion that Monk would wander pointlessly around a strange city where all speech was a jumble of noise, everybody else was rushing about their business, or strolling in fashionable idleness, but belonging, understanding?
Damn them! He would seek out the past! He would find it, whether it meant anything or not. If nothing else, Max Niemann would be able to tell him about Kristian as 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 schon 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 upris
ing 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 Windischgratz, 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, and Elissa, battling for reform of such a vast, seemingly untouchable force of government. He had seen in every direction the superb facades of the state and government buildings, the mansions and theaters, museums, opera houses and galleries. What fire of reform had burned inside them that they dared attempt to overthrow such power? They must have cared passionately, more than most people care about anything. Where would you ever begin to shake the foundations of such monolithic control?
He could see in Ferdi’s young face that something of it had caught him also.
“I need to find the people on my list,” he said aloud. “The people who were there then, and knew my friends.”
“Right-oh!” Ferdi answered, blushing with happiness and enthusiasm, striding out even more rapidly so Monk was now obliged to lengthen his own step to keep up. “Have you got money for a carriage?”
That afternoon they saw streets where the barricades had been, even chips out of stone walls where bullets had struck and ricocheted. They had supper in one of the cafes in which young men and women had sat huddled over the same tables, planning revolution by candlelight, a new world of liberty on the horizon, or mourned the loss of friends, perhaps in silence but for the rain on the windows and the occasional tramp of passing feet on the pavement outside.
Monk and Ferdi ate soup and bread in silence, each lost in thoughts which might have been surprisingly similar. Monk wondered about the bond between people who shared the hope and the sacrifice of such times. Could anything that came in the pedestrian life afterwards break such a bonding? Could anyone who had not been in that danger and hope enter into the circle or be anything but an onlooker?
In the flickering candlelight, with the murmur of conversation at the little tables around them, it could have been thirteen years ago. Ferdi’s young face, flushed and lit golden by the candle in an upright wine bottle, could have been one of theirs. The smells of coffee and pastry and wet clothes from the rain outside would be the same, the water streaking the windows, wavering the reflecting street lamps, and as the door opened and closed, the splash of water, the brief hiss of carriage wheels. Except that the dreams were gone, the air was no longer one of excitement, danger and sacrifice; it was comfortable, rigidly set prosperity and law in the old way, with the old rules and the old exclusions. The powerful were still powerful, and the poor were still voiceless.
In spite of the defeat, Monk envied Kristian and Max their past. He had no memory of belonging, of being part of a great drive for his own people, any cause fought for or even believed in. He had no idea if he had ever cared about an issue passionately enough to fight for it, die for it, enough to bond him to others in that friendship that is the deepest trust, and goes through life and death in a unity greater than common birth and blood, education or ambition, and makes you one of a whole that outlasts all its parts.
The closest he had ever come to that was fighting a cause for justice, with Hester, and then with Oliver Rathbone and Callandra. That was the same feeling, the will to succeed because it mattered beyond individual pain or cost, exhaustion or pride. It was a kind of love that enlarged them all.
How could it possibly be that Kristian or Max Niemann could have murdered Elissa, no matter how she had changed in the years since?
