"Looks like you have the current hot spot, Vince," Steve Salatto remarked. "Or, at least, the hottest one."
Vince Marcantonio stretched. "Spots."
"Plural? I rode up because of a report of threats to the lives of priests, nuns, and monks by ravening hordes of perverted and monstrous peasants."
"Threats," his chief of staff Georg Rodolf Weckherlin added, "which are being reported in numerous illustrated pamphlets, but which nobody around Würzburg has been able to confirm."
Vince yawned. "I've no doubt that there have been threats. Mostly made in taverns by people who are drunk and who don't have any force to back them up." He stretched again. "Sometimes I wish that I could just lie down and sleep for a week.
"Anyway, there was one threat that Stew Hawker thought was credible, but it was being made by a merchant in Nürnberg against a little convent with six old nuns in it. He has some kind of reversionary right when the last of them dies. He—the merchant, that is—bought it up about twenty years ago. It's based on an agreement that was made sixty or more years ago between the convent and some noble who was secularizing church property in his lands after he turned Protestant, that they wouldn't accept any new novices and he got the land after the last one died. The ones who were already in it have been frustrating the merchant by living on and on and on. I think all six are well over eighty now. Stew thought that he was planning to hire a batch of bullies, burn them out, and blame it on the ram rebellion."
Vince stretched again. "I've brought the little old ladies into Bamberg and parked them with the nuns who patched up Johnnie F. and Willard after the beating last fall. If the rapacious mercantile bandit tries anything, he'll find the convent occupied by several guys who are willing to shoot back."
"If that's under control," Steve asked, "what are your other hot spots?"
"Well, there's the city council election here in Bamberg. After their little revolution last fall, the new council threw out all the guys who were convicted of being in on the conspiracy to try Willard Thornton. But they didn't replace them. It's just been running short-staffed, so to speak. Now election time has rolled around. We've already been through the question of `who gets to vote' and settled on `all adult citizens of Bamberg.' That doesn't get us very far, though, because a lot of the residents aren't citizens. They're citizens of Franconia in general, but not of the city, for purposes of local elections. So we have some candidates running on a platform of broadening out citizenship and others running on keeping the current laws. We have . . ." He paused.
"The ewe?" Weckherlin asked.
Vince nodded. "Frau Else Kronacher, herself, one embattled printer's widow amid the embattled farmers of the ram rebellion, running for the Bamberg city council. If nothing else, the guilds are so focused on fighting her that, I suspect, two or three other candidates they might otherwise be opposing will get elected. Which, if I read that daughter of hers right, may actually be the reason that Frau Kronacher is running."
"How old is she? The Kronacher girl, I mean?" Steve asked.
"Not a girl, quite," Vince answered. "There were two or three kids who died between her and the older boy. In her mid-twenties, I would guess. Maybe a little more."
"Well, then," Steve said, "back to the `ravening hordes of peasants.' If they aren't threatening the defenseless clergy, what are they actually doing? From your perspective."
"Cliff Priest, the military administrator in Bamberg, has ridden up to Lauenstein to talk to Margrave Christian of Bayreuth's Amtmann there. We've got to decide what to do about a castle at Mitwitz. Big old thing, with a moat. Belongs to a Freiherr—one of the ones who has taken up arms against the SoTF."
"Just what," Steve asked, "is the question?"
"Do we and the margrave want to try to bring it down, between us? Or do we let the ram's people do it?"
"Are there advantages, either way?" Weckherlin asked.
"If we take it, it should be a kinder, gentler, sort of conquest. For one thing, Margrave Christian has some cannon, which the ram rebellion doesn't. So he could set up a siege and tell everyone to come out. If he wanted to ally with us publicly. Which he doesn't, yet, no matter what his Amtmann at Lauenstein is trying to talk him into doing.
"Otherwise. The ram's people at Teuschnitz have some kind of major difference of opinion with the Freiherr at Mitwitz, who has a Halsgericht—the right to impose capital punishment. He seems to have used it rather freely and not always against people who fit the ordinary definition of `criminal.' If we, the SoTF or Margrave Christian, don't occupy the castle at Mitwitz, the ram will level it. Some way."
"Would it be a great loss to society if the ram did?" Steve asked.
"Not that I can tell," Vince answered. "But burning to death isn't a nice way to die. Not that there are many."
Steve sighed. "Scott thinks we ought to let the farmers do the dirty work."
"Scott would. He thinks like a military man. My deputy Wade Jackson thinks the same way. He's UMWA, and they've always been a hard-fisted bunch. You and I, on the other hand, are proper civil servants. Bureaucrats, when you come right down to it. Honest and capable ones, sure, but we're still pencil-pushers."
He looked out the window onto the streets of Bamberg. "The truth, Steve? At least in the here and now, I agree with them. I'm sick to death of these swaggering little lords. Let the farmers make a weenie roast of that knightly prick at Mitwitz. Maybe it'll encourage the others to learn some manners."
Melchior Kronacher was watching his sister, instead of listening to the sermon. Mutti wouldn't come to church any more. They had become Catholic under the bishop's pressure in the late 1620s. Mutti said that enough was enough. She said that she had been to church enough to last any reasonable person a lifetime and she wasn't going back again. Ever. To any church. Of any kind. Now that the uptimers said she didn't have to.
Martha, though, shortly after Pastor Meyfarth had brought things in to be printed last spring, started going to the Lutheran services. Mutti said that either Melchior or Otto had to go with her because the streets were not as safe as they should be. Mutti blamed that on the guilds.
This week was Melchior's turn to go to church with Martha. He wiggled.
Martha was paying close attention to the sermon. Or, more likely, to the sermonizer. Melchior couldn't think of anything in a learned disquisition on John 3:16 that would bring such a calculating expression to Martha's face. Sort of like she was bargaining with God.
Melchior shuddered. He thought that bargaining with God was probably a bad idea. He was pretty sure of it, in fact. Especially when Martha was doing the bargaining. God might end up with the short end of the stick.
"So," Eddie asked, "how's it going?" He looked out of the small room they were sitting in—just a very big pantry, really, with two stools—into the large kitchen beyond, to make sure that no one could overhear them.
Seeing his somewhat shifty-eyed glance, Noelle sniffed. "Stop acting like a B-movie spy, Eddie. There's nobody here, won't be for at least a half an hour—and even if there was, it wouldn't matter anyway." A bit smugly: "The whole kitchen staff is with the ram. By now, I'm sure of that."
Eddie's eyes widened. "All of them?"
Noelle gave him a level gaze. "Yes, all of them. Along with maybe one-third of the rest of the Schloss' staff. The ram is especially strong in the smithy and the stables. The maids . . . well, that's harder. They come and go a lot, since most of them don't have my status."
"I'm impressed."
Noelle's face got a little pinched. "It wasn't hard. Even by the standards of Franconian Freiherr, Fuchs von Bimbach is a pure son of a bitch." She nodded toward the kitchen. "He hung one of the cook's sons two years ago. Along with three other boys. None of them was older than nineteen."
Eddie grimaced. "Why?"
"Apparently the four of them got drunk one night in a local tavern and started mimicking his Bimboship. Just teenagers being disrespectful, the way teenagers will. But somebody reported them to von Bimbach, and he charged them with `petty treason.' That's a hanging offense, and he's got the legal right on his lands to apply capital punishment. Halsgericht they call it—the `neck court.'"
"What a bastard."
"Yup, he sure is. Two years before that, he had one of the blacksmith's apprentices hung for stealing some copper. His Bimboship jacked up the value of the stolen goods high enough to make it a capital offense, even though it didn't really come to much. The guy's mother was sick and he was just trying to get her some medicine. What passes for it, anyway, in the here and now."
Eddie wiped a thick hand over his face.
"The year before that—"
"Never mind. I understand." He dropped his hand and looked out of the narrow door onto the kitchen. This time, though, it was a simple and straightforward gaze.
"You're safe?"
Noelle shrugged. "As safe as you could expect, given that I live in a castle owned by a sociopath."
He grimaced again. Noelle chuckled.
"Relax, Eddie. It's really not that bad." She made a little gesture, indicating her outfit. "It worked just about the way we figured it would. Judith Neideckerin agreed to hire me as one of her maids. His Bimboship doesn't pay any attention to me at all, when he comes to visit her. Which he doesn't do all that often, anyway. I get the feeling he forced her to become his mistress more for the bragging rights among his Freiherr buddies, than anything else. Judith's good-looking, in a zaftig sort of way."
Eddie seemed to relax still more. Again, Noelle chuckled. "No, that's not a problem. I'm not having to fend off the lustful advances of the lord of the castle, if that's what you're worried about. He's never spoken so much as a single word to me, in the month I've been here. If you put me in a lineup wearing different clothes, I don't think he'd even recognize me."
She gestured, a bit impatiently. "And that's enough about that. What does the Ram want now?"
"Pretty much the same you've been providing him since you got established here. Information, mostly. The Ram shares your opinion that von Bimbach will probably wind up being the key to the whole thing. I can't say I really understand why the two of you seem so sure of that. From what you've told me—and what I've heard from others—he's too arrogant and cocksure to make a very effective political leader."
"That's neither here nor there, Eddie. First of all, there isn't a one of these little lords and knights that I think could win an election in the smallest county in West Virginia. Not for dog catcher. They're all pretty much cut from the same cloth. The big difference with His Bimboship is pure and simple geography."
She twisted her head, as if indicating the countryside beyond the walls of the Schloss. "His estates are nestled in among the lands controlled by Margrave Christian of Bayreuth. From a strategic point of view, looking at it from the ram's side of things, this is what you might call a safe enclave for the counterrevolution. His Bimboship can organize from here, and there's really not a damn thing the Ram can do about it. Neither can Steve Salatto and his people. If they send any troops in—much less if the Ram mobilized an army of farmers—the margrave would be almost sure to intervene. Just to keep the peace, if nothing else."
Eddie scratched his chin. "Well . . . yes. And he's an important ally of the USE's emperor, too, political speaking. So even if Margrave Christian couldn't handle it, he'd squawk to Gustavus Adolphus loudly enough that the Swedish army would come in. And wouldn't that be a mess, as unpopular as they are in Franconia?"
"A stinking mess," Noelle agreed. "Let's make sure it doesn't come to that. All right, Eddie, fire up that near-perfect memory of yours. Here's the latest . . ."