A Matter of Breeding by J. Sydney Jones Read Free Book Online

he had never heard of you, of any of us. Interesting, don’t you think?’
    Werthen glanced at Gross who seemed to be ruminating on this observation. Perhaps, Werthen thought, our friend Stoker is not as slow-witted as he makes out.

Seven
    Very little in his ten years of life had gone right for Franz Josef Hruda.
    It started with his name.
    While the Hungarians were great fans of the Emperor’s wife, Elisabeth, they did not much care for her husband, the Emperor Franz Josef. It was Franz Josef, very much a boy himself when he became emperor, who helped to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1849. Franzl’s parents, simple farmers from near the town of Szegedin, did not understand this dynamic. For them, 1849 was ancient history. They only wanted their first born to have a chance in life.
    Instead, this name worked against Franzl. Even if his parents had not died when he was six, he would not have continued school. The schoolmaster and the other boys ridiculed him and teased him mercilessly because of the seeming pretension of his given name and because in all schools teachers and students must have someone to pick on, someone to be the last chosen or the one to blame for poor grades.
    The death of his parents from diphtheria came as almost a pleasant release for Franzl, bundled off to Vienna to live with an aunt, his mother’s sister.
    Thereafter he was known only as Franzl Hruda.
    This aunt was much older than Franzl’s mother, and she had never married. She took in sewing and kept a simple one-room apartment in a tenement in the district of Favoriten. Franzl was put to work for a local butcher, sweeping offal and taking care of the butcher’s workhorse.
    But at least there were no teachers or students to taunt and torment him.
    It was at the butcher’s he learned to love horses. The butcher kept a cart and an old horse in a shed in the back of the shop. It was a dray animal that had served its entire life in harness and had never been named.
    Franzl called it Star because of the five-pointed white mark above its eyes. It was as if that horse understood him, knew him better than anyone else in the whole world. Franzl would steal apples from the nearby fruit shop to feed to Star; would brush the old beast till his tattered coat began to glow.
    Franzl came to work early one day to find the stall empty.
    The butcher had sold the old horse to a rendering plant and gotten rid of the cart.
    Franzl ruined the butcher’s favorite knife that afternoon before leaving work. He never returned.
    He went to where the horses were in Vienna, at the Stallburg. Here the famed Lipizzaner were housed from the Fall through early spring before returning to the greener pastures of Lipizza, home of the stud in rolling hills near the Adriatic. He would wait hours by the entrance just to catch a glimpse of one of these beautiful animals or of the young military men in their brown tailcoats, white buckskin breeches, black riding boots, and bicorn hats. The best time to see the horses was just before or after the morning training, when the grooms would lead the grey-white Lipizzaners between the stables on Stallburggasse and the elegant Winter Riding School on Josefsplatz.
    Franzl felt his heart soar each time he saw one of these beautiful animals.
    His aunt alternately threatened and cajoled, but Franzl would not find another position. He had his work, waiting for the horses. He dreamt of becoming one of those riders.
    One day after a month of waiting and watching, one of the riders in his magnificent bicorn came up to the young boy and asked him if he would like a tour of the stables. That was the best moment of his entire life. He and the rider, Captain Wilhelm Putter, would form an odd sort of friendship, for it turned out that Putter too had grown up in poverty, but was fortunate enough to rise to be chief rider at the Spanish Court Riding School. Franzl was soon doing odd jobs for Putter, helping the regular grooms polish the gold-plated