Eberhard was asleep. Rather, he had been asleep until the drumming started. "What in hell?"
Tata stood up on the bed and poked her head through the tiny third-story window of the Horn of Plenty. "Just some soldiers."
"They're not for me. I'm not late. The world may be full of sunshine, but it's my day off and I don't even have a hangover." He reached up for her wrist and pulled her back down.
She plopped onto his stocky body, wriggled, and told him to quit it right now because he might have the day off, but she didn't.
Reichard Donner's wife Justina also heard the drum. She looked out the front window of the main floor, more than a little warily. Her husband wasn't famous for his attention to submitting paperwork in multiple copies or keeping track of the details, so she thought that her wariness was fully justified. The Horn of Plenty had a record of too many times that its proprietor hadn't, quite, complied with those abundant city regulations designed to ensure good order and civic peace.
"What events do we have scheduled for the coming week?" Anything that will cause problems with the Polizeiordnungen?
"Nothing unusual," Reichard answered from behind the bar. "The two wedding parties are the largest functions. I have the written authorization from the city council for both of those. Well, it's almost approved. Everything will be ready by Thursday, certainly. Since both the groom and the bride's fathers for the Koster-Backe reception are local artisans, the families are bringing in a lot of the food and drink themselves, which is making a bit of trouble with the pastry shops and our regular sausage vendors. Fifty guests approved. Up to thirty guests permitted for the Biel-Braun wedding. I have the extra military paperwork for that, since Jost Biel is a soldier and so is the bride's father. It's . . ."
Reichard scrabbled around in his piles of paper. "Well, I did have it, right here, somewhere . . ."
Justina nodded. Marcus Pistor, Brahe's Hessian chaplain for the Calvinists in his garrison, would perform the Biel-Braun ceremony here at the inn, in the public room, since Mainz had no Calvinist church or chapel and they were all, in this family, good Calvinists from the Palatinate, subjects of the unfortunate Winter King's heir. May Elector Karl Ludwig's soul be preserved from the influence of those Spanish Papists in the Netherlands who took him prisoner, she thought. Chaplain Pistor will have made sure that Reichard received the permissions. Now, if he hasn't misplaced them . . .
Reichard, who hadn't even glanced up, was still talking while he sorted more paper into various piles. "Here it is. Right here, under the receipts. Everything's in order. Why? Is there a problem?"
"Lift up your head and listen. There are soldiers headed our way. That's what the noise is. Hear the noise?" She turned around, waving her hands at him. "There are four or so of them, Colonel von Zitzewitz's men from the uniforms, with a drummer. Also with a corporal and probably they're not just looking for a drink at this hour. What regulation have we offended now? Well, at least the children are at school, so I don't have to worry about having them mouth off and cause trouble. Except for Tata, of course; she's home. Anyway, four soldiers aren't enough to do too much damage, usually."
Kunigunde Treidelin, Justina's widowed sister and the tavern's main cook, came out of the kitchen, complaining as usual about a world in which a woman could live for half a century and still not be permitted by the authorities to finish out her waning days in peace and tranquility. "It's your fault entirely, Reichard, for getting involved with those Committee of Correspondence people and letting them meet here. The Swedes and the city council both keep a sharper eye on the Horn of Plenty than they would otherwise, just because of that. You know that as well as I do."
"I am the chairman of the Mainz CoC," Donner pointed out rather mildly. "It would be rather ridiculous if I didn't let the group meet here. According to the theories of Althusius, since—"
" 'The Mainz CoC'—as if that means anything. It's not as if you have anything like they do in Magdeburg, with toughs and enforcers. You get all the grief and what do you have to show for it? Nothing. It's not as if there's a CoC-raised regiment anywhere near Mainz. They're all up north with the emperor. We've got Swedish regulars, German mercenaries, and maybe a dozen soldiers scattered among them with even the slightest interest in politics. Hah!" Kunigunde turned her head. "Something's boiling over." She stomped back into the kitchen.
Tata, more formally known as their daughter Agathe, who had pulled on her clothes and come down instead of going back to bed, took her place at the window. "Pffft. That's Corporal Hertling. You know him. He's been here often enough. He's in Eberhard's company, so it shouldn't be a problem, whatever it is."
Walther Hertling motioned for his little troop to stop and rapped sharply on the door.
Tata waved her parents back, opened the door, glared at him, and asked, "Why are you bothering us?"
"Look, Tata, it isn't my fault."
Justina relaxed. Interventions by one's social superiors that were likely to lead to measures of harsh oppression were rarely accompanied by plaintive apologies or the use of nicknames.
"It may not be your fault, but you're here. With your goons."
"They aren't goons," Walther protested, looking as firm has he could. Which, considering that he was barely twenty, was not particularly firm. He had gotten his rank because his father had once upon a time been Duke Eberhard's father's bootblack. "They're . . ." He tried to think of some term more martial, impartial, and less embarrassing to his captain than babysitters. "They're, uh, the Captain Duke's personal Leibkompanie. Bodyguards, sort of."
Lorenz Bauer, Jacob Kolb, Ludwig Merckel, and Christoph Heisel strove mightily to look as un-goonlike as possible. Since all four were long-time mercenaries in their thirties, with the scars to show for it, this was not particularly easy. Still, if Corporal Hertling, otherwise known as the immediate conduit to their now-reliable paymaster, urged them to look harmless, the least they could do was try.
"Eberhard says that he's off today."
"That's not the problem. At least, the problem isn't about anything he's not done. It's about something he's supposed to do next. It's, uh, about Hartmann Simrock."
"Theobald's friend?"
"Yeah. Uh, Theobald Pistor took home a copy of some of the speeches that Simrock has been giving here at the CoC meetings."
"Ouch. Dumb, dumb, dumb, stupid. University student or no university student, Theo has no sense at all. I can't believe that he's Margarethe's brother."
"And, of course, he left them on the breakfast table where they're quartered. At least, that's what Margarethe told Lieutenant Duke Friedrich. He left them on the breakfast table where their father, Chaplain Pistor, found them. And read them. Especially the one about . . . well, you know. He is a military chaplain, after all, so he took it to someone on Brahe's staff. And we've been ordered to investigate."
Reichard swept up his various piles of receipts and stuck them into a cubbyhole under the bar. " 'We' being?"
"Uh, well, the captain's company. Him. Us. And his brothers."
Hertling wasn't worried about Donner, but he was a little intimidated by Frau Justina, so he turned around so he could talk directly to her. "Uh, that wasn't the brightest thing Simrock could have done, you know. Calling for the equivalent of a Ram Rebellion in Mainz and the Rhine Palatinate. Especially not criticizing General Brahe the way he did. Captain Duke Eberhard has the highest respect for the general's military talent and bravery. So it's just lucky that . . ." He stumbled, not quite sure how to phrase what was coming next in a manner that might be interpreted as mildly tactful.
Merckel was less concerned about tact. ". . . damned fucking lucky that the captain is actually fucking Tata here, or you'd all be in a deep pile of shit, you stupid assholes."
Justina winced. It wasn't that Reichard was unhappy about the attraction that led the young German officer on General Brahe's staff to regularly attend meetings of the Committee of Correspondence at the Horn of Plenty, in the company of his brothers and then spend the night, even though he had finally been allotted a much nicer room in the new unmarried officers' quarters. He was perfectly aware that Eberhard's interest did not lie entirely in the realm of radical political theory. Or even primarily in the realm of radical political theory.
No, Reichard was a practical man. His comment on the arrangement had been that this was the greatest stroke of luck the Donner family had ever had and was ever likely to have.
Still, there was such a thing as tact. Maybe not where Merckel was concerned, though.
Besides, with increasing exposure, Eberhard was gradually becoming more interested in the political portion of his evenings. Still, though, the Horn of Plenty's primary attraction for him had a neat figure rather than a lot of economic figures. Feminine cooperation rather than the need to establish a purchasing cooperative was the crucial element that led to the extension of the captain's regular presence at the inn and the protection that resulted from that presence.
It was protection that they needed, in Justina's opinion, as long as Reichard kept flirting with those radical CoC ideas. She intended to take full advantage of it as long as there was a window of opportunity. Which meant, in effect, as long as Eberhard remained interested in their daughter. Which would be long enough, she hoped, to get the protection in some way institutionalized and make the continued existence of the Horn of Plenty and the Mainz CoC somewhat less precarious.
"Uh," Hertling said. "The captain will have something to say about it, I suppose, once he talks to the boy."
The subject of their discussion, having dressed somewhat less hastily than Tata, wandered into the taproom. Duke Eberhard of Württemberg yawned. "Which one of the boys is in trouble this time? About what?
Hertling duly saluted the square-faced, brown-haired, slightly long-nosed young man. Personally, he thought that his noble captain looked more like most people's idea of a sturdy peasant than a dashing cavalier, no more aristocratic than anyone else on the streets of Stuttgart or Mainz, including, for what it was worth, himself. That wasn't an opinion he was given to sharing with other people, though. Der gute Walther was prudent for his years.
"Neither of your brothers, sir. Simrock. If you could come down to General Brahe's headquarters with us . . ."
"I suppose that's not a request?"
Tata's eyes followed their departing backs. "So much for the idea of taking a boat down the river to Bingen with Friedrich and Margarethe and looking at Castle Ehrenfels today."
"Castles," her father said. "Castles, bah!"
Reichard Donner surveyed the room. The view was depressing. Mainz just wasn't a hotbed of revolutionary fervor. Perhaps he would have been better advised to move to Heidelberg. However, to be practical, there hadn't been an inn for him to take over in Heidelberg, whereas, in Mainz—owing to a fortuitous series of childless marriages and deaths from smallpox and plague, not to mention dysentery and measles, running through several imperial cities and tying all the way back to his long-ago godfather, one Reichard Wackernagel, belt-maker in Frankfurt am Main, husband of Justina's Aunt Maria—the Horn of Plenty had become available.
Even so. In addition to the two students, Pistor and Simrock, the attendees were not politically promising.
Pistor's sister Margarethe only came because her brother and her boyfriend did.
Philipp Schaumann, perpetual belt-maker's journeyman, aged about sixty-five, the hapless and hopeless perpetual suitor of his sister-in-law Kunigunde, came because Kunigunde lived here as well as because he was the younger brother of Justina and Kunigunde's late uncle's equally deceased wife. Also, he had been an acquaintance of Reichard's own late godfather back when they were both journeymen.
Sybilla Binder, about fifty and never married, was a friend of Kunigunde and the unhappy daughter of a belt-maker. She faced being thrown out of work when her father retired or died—one of which was certain to happen soon—and had no wish to spend her declining years spinning in the municipal hospital.
Ursula Widder, about fifty, Sybilla's friend, also never married, was the equally unhappy daughter of a tanner who had died and left her no option but to go into service. So she was now Kunigunde's general maid-of-all-work in the kitchen of the Horn of Plenty. It wasn't as if she had to put forth much effort to attend the CoC meetings.
Plus four soldiers and a corporal who were definitely not from a CoC-raised regiment and who attended because they were tasked by Gustavus Adolphus's commander in Mainz to see what they could do to prevent problems with . . .
. . . three very young dukes of Württemberg, one of whom was sitting with his arm around Tata's shoulder and twirling her reddish-tawny hair and fondling the various bits and pieces of her rotund body that he could conveniently reach.
The rest of his children were already in bed, which was some comfort.
"It's not an up-time idea," Simrock was insisting. "It's in Montaigne's Essays and they've been around for, oh, at least fifty years." For Simrock, not quite twenty himself, fifty years was ancient history. "How did he put it? 'No matter that we may mount on stilts, we still must walk on our own legs. And on the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.' "
Theobald shook his head. "I don't think that Montaigne thought it up all by himself. He probably swiped it from the Greeks or Romans."
A revolutionary's lot in Mainz was not a happy one. Maybe he could trade the Horn of Plenty for an inn in Magdeburg.
"We simply can't do what you want us to," Walter Deveroux said. "You're out of your fucking mind."
This wasn't the most prudent thing to say to the personal confessor of the archbishop-elector of Cologne, said archbishop-elector, Ferdinand of Bavaria, brother of Duke Maximilian, being at the moment the man who was paying them. Walter Butler sighed. It was true, though. The idea that they should take their dragoons on a razzia through Hesse, or if that route would not work, past Mainz and Frankfurt-am-Main, up the Kinzig valley to Fulda, was ridiculous. Absurd. A recipe for disaster.
Now the Capuchin was suggesting that just the colonels go in. Some of the Buchenland imperial knights were far from being happy at being placed under the administration of the up-timers. Upstarts, it was more accurate to say. They could provide a couple hundred men. Ferdinand's confessor got up. "You're the professionals. The archbishop wants to damage the prestige of the USE administration in Fulda. Figure something out and let me know what you decide."
"The Irish colonels, after consulting with Franz von Hatzfeldt, have accepted his suggestion in regard to kidnapping the abbot of Fulda," the Capuchin said. "It will be attention-getting, the sort of thing that will bring a lot of bad publicity down on the up-timers, but still not wasteful of manpower if Your Eminence should need for their regiments to take the field any time this coming summer. They believe they can coordinate it fairly easily with the imperial knights in Buchenland, and manage the matter with only local, on the ground, assistance. It should be a fast 'in and out.' They'll pick up as many of the up-time administrators as they can, take Felix Gruyard along to question them, but only bring the abbot out—maximum disruption for minimum cost."
Ferdinand of Bavaria frowned. "What about Wamboldt von Umstadt? Fulda is really under the jurisdiction of the archbishop-elector of Mainz. He may have something to say about this plan."
The Capuchin shook his head. "He is a refugee in Cologne. Under those circumstances, I feel sure that he will allow himself to be guided by your wisdom, Your Eminence."
Johann Adolf von Hoheneck cleared his throat. "I am not so sure of that. Archbishop Anselm Casimir is close to the Jesuits. Closer than he is to you Capuchins. He's particularly close to Friedrich von Spee, who has been in Grantville. Even if he has taken refuge from the Swedes—even though he has been in Bonn since the winter of 1631—I'm afraid that his sympathies might not . . . Well. Additionally, as provost of St. Petersburg, on behalf of the Abbey of Fulda, I really must stipulate that whatever you do in the matter of the current abbot should not be construed as adversely affecting the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of the abbey itself."
"Your concern for your fellow Benedictines is admirable, I am sure," the Capuchin said. "It would be more so if you did not have hopes of becoming Schweinsberg's successor as abbot."
Ferdinand of Bavaria waved a hand. "Make it happen. But I want the questioning to be effective and efficient. It's all very well to say that since the Irish colonels speak English, they will be in a better position than any of my other subordinates to question the up-timers, but make sure that they take Felix Gruyard along."
"Father Taaffe and Father Carew are setting up for mass." Dislav stuck his head into the room. "Dislav" was the nickname of Ladislas Dusek, a servant who had been with Walter Butler's wife since her father assigned him as the footman to serve her nursery on the day she was born.
"Coming, coming." Butler stood up. "Thick-headed, impertinent Czech," he grumbled to Robert Geraldin. "I'd never let any other servant get away with being that rude. Once Dislav found out that I started as a common soldier, he got it in his head that I'm utterly unworthy of a noble Bohemian lady. He seems to think that I'm a wicked uncle and that he has to protect Anna Marie from me."
"You do have a temper," Deveroux pointed out. "And you did start out as a grunt, even if the commander of the Irish Legion was vaguely your relative. Besides, he thinks that you shouldn't have brought her with you on this drag all the way across southern and western Germany. Either one of her married sisters would have been happy to have her stay with them."
"How the hell am I supposed to get her pregnant if I'm in Bonn and she's in Vienna?"
"Touchy this morning, are we?"
"It's not that the news has been good all spring. God, but I loathe Swedes."
"Still feeling the pain after that little matter of Frankfurt-am-Oder? Lord, Butler, it's been three years."
"It was . . ."
"Yes, a trifle embarrassing to be taken prisoner. Look, it happens to all of us, just about, one time or another. In any case, we're all in this together, now. Since Wallenstein found out that all of us were involved in the plot to assassinate him—well, not just a plot, since we actually succeeded—in that other world, you have to admit that our career choices are limited. We're lucky to have been hired by the archbishop of Cologne." Deveroux stood up. "We're due at mass. MacDonald?"
"Leave him there," Geraldin said. "He's already drunk. Or still drunk. He was carousing with Borcke and Browne until all hours of the night. He's getting to be less than useless."
* * *
"When I married you two years ago," Anna Marie von Dohna said, "I did not bargain for becoming a camp follower. How does Father Taaffe describe this place? 'Several wagons and a large number of dragoons.' This tent is not exactly a well-designed country house. I have precisely two servants and am paying them from what little gold I managed to bring with me. I did not bargain for this. When I agreed to marry you, you had every prospect of promotion and estates from Ferdinand II, two excellent ones, Hirschberg and Neuperstein."
"They were also in Bohemia," Walter Butler said sourly. "We ran into a little problem the year after that. Remember Wallenstein? Remember that he found out that I was a rather prominent participant in his assassination-that-did-not-happen-in-this-new-universe?"
"I was better off as Bartolomeus's widow than I am with you. I would at least still be at home."
"You didn't think so at the time. You were greedy; you made your bed; now lie in it."
If Butler could have slammed the door, he would have. Unfortunately, the tent did not provide a door he could slam.
The morning and the evening of the second day
Mainz, March 1634
"So that's the status of the Mainz Committee of Correspondence headquartered at the Horn of Plenty tavern. Chaplain Pistor is not happy with the way Captain Duke Eberhard handled his complaint about Simrock."
"What would he have preferred?"
"A hanging for treason would have suited his mood nicely. Moving along to the next agenda item, we have yet another complaint from Georg Wulf von Wildenstein about the Americans—Thuringians—whatever one wants to call them—and their policies in Fulda." Johan Botvidsson shuffled the papers in front of him.
"The complaint concerns?" Nils Brahe asked. Gustavus Adolphus's chief administrator in Mainz was more than a little irritable.
"I believe the best description might be 'Catholic coddling,' " Botvidsson replied calmly.
"That's something von Wildenstein sees everywhere," Brahe retorted. "Everyone knows the man. When the king appointed him as chief administrator in Bamberg after Horn took the city in February 1632—that was months before he turned Franconia over to the Americans—almost the first thing that the man did was order the holding of Calvinist worship services in the Jesuit church. It was so egregious an offense against any kind of reasonable policy that even the Lutheran chaplains filed a formal protest. Why me, O Lord, why me?"
"Johan had me read the letter too," Mans Ulfsparre commented. "At the moment, he seems particularly outraged because the Franconians, Fulda included, have voted to become an integral part of the NUS complex, which will now be calling itself the 'State of Thuringia-Franconia.' That makes it now the largest province in the USE, in addition to having provided Stearns as prime minister—not only the largest province, but one with a significantly large Catholic population, whereas the king came into this war as the champion of Protestantism."
"He should be happy to have Stearns as prime minister. The man is, officially at least, a Presbyterian. A Calvinist." Erik Stenbock, the other junior member of the inner circle, like Ulfsparre all of age twenty-two, grinned. "The highest-ranking Calvinist in the new imperial administration. Even higher than the landgraves of Hesse, Wilhelm and Hermann."
"Ordinary common sense has very little to do with the way that von Wildenstein reacts to things." Brahe's mood remained sour.
"Why?" Ulfsparre asked.
"I'm not sure," Botvidsson admitted. One of the causes of his outstanding success as a quartermaster-cum-aide-de-camp was his willingness to admit what he did not know. "More and more, I'm coming to think . . ." He paused and looked at Brahe. "We have too many Swedes on this inner council and not enough Germans. Swedes are fine for setting and carrying out military policy, but when it comes to understanding why these people do some of the things they do—and how—we need more information. Or, at least—" He paused and looked at the stacks of paper on the table. "Different information."
"The same's true for the people in Fulda," Ulfsparre said. "One of Wildenstein's points really is valid. What do we really know about how they plan to handle the Ram Rebellion? Almost nothing. Their president in Grantville is in regular contact with Magdeburg, sure. But what about here? Should we be setting up a closer liaison with them? So far, we've almost ignored them."
Stenbock grinned again. "Why not solve two problems at once? Send the three young, most unfortunately radicalized, Württemberg dukes up to Fulda to spend some time under the supervision of their military administrator. That will get them out of your hair for a couple of months, at least. Letting them cool their heels for a while after this last confrontation can't hurt. Perhaps you could send Pistor—the chaplain, not the student—with them, as a response to Wildenstein. Not that it will help, given that he's a rabid Counter-Remonstrant and was right in the middle of things in 1619 when the Dutch exiled the Arminians, but it will get him out of your hair for a couple of months, too, with luck. Assure Wildenstein that he'll be monitoring the situation very closely. We don't have to tell him that right now, the main situation that Pistor is interested in keeping an eye on is the one developing between his daughter and young Lieutenant Duke Friedrich. Do we?"
Brahe actually smiled. "Use the radio. Ask for an immediate response."
"What did this man Jenkins in Fulda say?" Brahe asked several meetings later.
Botvidsson picked up a sheet of paper. "It is possible that you are not the only administrator who has young men who are difficult to control on his staff."
"Yes?"
"Jenkins's military administrator, a man named Derek Utt, writes that he will be happy to send a couple of his people down to Mainz to, and I quote, 'meet-and-greet your youthful delinquents and judge as to whether Fulda is prepared to host them or not.' "
Their drummer rattled his sticks in a "make way, make way" rhythm.
"That's one more thing," Lieutenant Duke Friedrich said. "Why do soldiers take drummers when they're just out on ordinary errands? I can see why they use the drums when a whole unit is marching through a town, to warn carters to move their teams and wagons, and vendors to pull their carts to the side. Otherwise, there wouldn't be room on the streets for six men abreast, row after row. But we're just walking. Why should the people of Mainz have to move apart for us on this particular morning?"
"If you're asking why we do it," Corporal Hertling said, "it's because all the other units do it. Do you really want to trip over—"
The rest of his answer came in the form of the body of a sturdy, middle-aged woman hurtling through the door of a shop, followed by a male voice screaming, "impudent bitch!"
". . . bodies," Hertling finished. He had intended "dogs and small children," but this seemed to preempt the rest of what he had planned to say.
"That one's not going to be moving out of our way any time soon," Friedrich said, "drum or no drum."
Ensign Duke Ulrich ran ahead of the others. "It's Sybilla," he said, leaning down. "One of the old ladies who come to the CoC meetings."
"Why?" Corporal Hertling started to ask.
He was interrupted by scowling man who followed the body through the door. "Talk to me like that, will you? We're legally quartered in this district. We're legally quartered in this house. What matter is it to you that we've taken the good bedroom and the good bed? Aren't we in the service of His Majesty of Sweden? Aren't we protecting you Germans from the Catholics? Ah, forgot, didn't I. You are Catholic, off to a papist mass every Sunday. Why should I care if sleeping in an unheated attic is making your father's lungs worse? Why?"
"I know you," Hertling said. "Sybilla's complained about you before. You're Rohrbach."
Captain Duke Eberhard made a gesture that everyone present understood. Bauer, Kolb, Merckel, and Heisel moved.
"We'll need a surgeon," Ulrich said. "She's broken something."
"Her neck, it looks like," Merckel had seen worse, but this was bad enough. "Not much point in paying a surgeon for that."
"Arrest him," Eberhard said to Hertling.
"Arrest me!" Rohrbach made a quarter-turn and boxed Kolb's ears. "Why arrest me? She's the one who was talking rebellion. She's the one who was saying that she shouldn't have to put up with having soldiers in her house. She's the one who was talking about Boston and the constitution of the United States of America, and that in a just world, soldiers would not be quartered on the civilian population, eating their food and dirtying their sheets, making work. She's the one—"
"Arrest him," Eberhard said again. Kolb, still shaking his head, pinned Rohrbach's arms behind him.
"What unit does he belong to?"
"Von Glasenapp's, I think."
"Hell." Ulrich stood up. "Another of the Pomeranians, as if our own darling Colonel von Zitzewitz and von Manteufel weren't bad enough."
"He's a Mecklenburger," Friedrich said. "Rohrbach, that is."
"Pomeranian, Mecklenburger, what's the difference?"
"We'll take it up with Brahe's headquarters," Eberhard said. "The Swedes are responsible for the behavior of regiments stationed in the city, even if the commanding officers are mostly German."
"Should I stay here," Ulrich asked. "Should I call Herr Donner? Should I, umm . . ." He waved at Sybilla's body. "Do something? Call the watch? We can't just leave her here in the street."
"The whole thing was disgusting. It was like von Glasenapp didn't even think that Sybilla was . . . well, like he didn't think that her death was worthy of any respect." Lieutenant Duke Friedrich was not happy. "He's not even going to have Rohrbach flogged."
"That's probably because he didn't think that her death was worthy of respect," Ulrich said. "He wouldn't even agree that his regiment should contribute toward her funeral expenses. He'd have been more upset if he'd had to put down a good horse."
"Who is going to pay for her funeral? Old Binder sure can't. He's more than half dead himself, the way he coughs and rasps and rattles."
"Simrock's going to take up a collection."
Ulrich spat on the floor. "Glasenapp. Von Glasenapp. What right does that stupid Pomeranian have to call himself a noble? He's just a provincial easterner. His ancestors were probably Slavs. He doesn't act nobly. When Montaigne is writing about the quality of mercy, he suggests that to avoid civil conflict, the nobility must become like the peasantry and submit to a higher authority. He said that roturier soldiers, from the middle classes, were often braver and more honorable than those from the nobility."
"Montaigne wasn't a real noble, either," Eberhard pointed out. "Not even by French standards, much less German ones. Not noblesse d'épée. He was a country gentleman, well-mannered and well-educated, certainly, but his great-grandfather made a fortune in commerce and bought the estate and the title. His mother's family were still in trade. And the quartering system isn't all bad. If we hadn't been quartered at the Horn of Plenty when we first arrived in Mainz, I'd probably never have met Tata."
"I'm not so sure that's a good idea." Ensign Duke Ulrich eyed his beer.
"Why shouldn't I renounce my title?" Lieutenant Duke Friedrich slapped his little brother's arm. "Look at me, not at that stein. It's not as if anyone pays attention to it any more. Brahe certainly doesn't. Between Horn and Bernhard, not to mention the emperor's dispositions in regard to our supposed welfare, we can't even stick our noses into our supposed duchy. Also, for heaven's sake, I've joined the CoC. I'm a flaming young radical, right in there with Spartacus. I'm not supposed to be a duke any more. And I certainly don't want people to think that I sympathize with people like von Glasenapp."
"Among other things," Captain Duke Eberhard pointed out, "under our house laws, you're not of age yet, so you can't. Not legally."
"There must be somewhere that I can. Remember the newspaper articles about that reception in Magdeburg last fall, when Gustavus appointed Stearns as prime minister? All those young aristocrats came up to him and said they were renouncing their titles."
"It was in November. There was a whole list of them in the paper. I only noticed one single duke among them. Below that, not even a Freiherr. A couple of fifth or sixth sons of imperial knights was about as high as it went. Practically all of them were untitled, mediatized, rural von This or von That, just like your much-admired Spartacus. He's the third son of some untitled Saxon Niederadel. What did younger sons of the lower nobility have to lose? Effectively, nothing. What did they have to gain? They got to speak with the new prime minister, which was possibly worth something. Maybe they can carve a career in the new government's bureaucracy somewhere, or get a chance to run for the new House of Commons and represent the interests of their fathers and older brothers there. They probably figured that the now-Wilhelm-Wettin knew something they didn't, but I haven't seen many Hochadel following his example. They're waiting to see if the 'prime minister comes from the House of Commons only' idea lasts."
Friedrich's expression brightened. "There's an idea. You give me permission to renounce my title and I'll run for the House of Commons for you, one of these days."
"I could scarcely have humiliated von Glasenapp front of a group of junior officers," Brahe said. "He would lose all of his authority and he doesn't command very much respect as it is. Most of his men despise him."
"True. But . . ." Botvidsson shook his head.
"I humiliated him in front of his fellow colonels. Sufficiently, I believe, that there's not likely to be an equivalent occurrence among the soldiers under him in the future. Or among the soldiers under the others, for that matter."
"I'm afraid that's not going to be enough."
"It isn't, but it has to be. Sometimes one finds oneself in such a situation."
"I wasn't about to have Rohrbach flogged publicly," von Glasenapp muttered. "Not when those infernal Württembergers and Donner were howling that I had to."
"Might have been better if you had," von Zitzewitz said. "I have to deal with them—Captain Duke Eberhard and his brothers. They're on my staff. Probably as retribution for my sins."
"I had him flogged privately. Hard. Not that Brahe left me any option. Don't tell those boys, though. I'm not willing to give the impression that I'm a man who caves in to public pressure. If I see an article in the newspaper even hinting that I had Rohrbach flogged, I'll be looking for the leak until the day I die and the leaker will be sorry."
"Might be better if I did tell them. Quietly, of course."
"I mean it, Zitzewitz. Don't tell them. Let junior officers think that they can influence you and that's the end of military discipline. That goes double and triple for junior officers who have a higher rank in the nobility and their own ways of getting the ear of General Brahe."
"What are you doing, Reichard?" Justina looked at the market order her husband had just drafted. "We won't need a lot of food for Sybilla's wake. She didn't have many friends. She was a whiny, unpleasant woman, even if she was a loyal daughter to old Hans and a CoC member."
Ursula Widder nodded. "She was only fourteen when her mother died. She took over keeping the house and assisting in the shop. Most of her parents' friends are dead. Her younger brothers and sisters are dead or gone. Married or not, she never had any children. Old Hans can't afford to hire mourners. There won't be many people."
Donner shook his head. "It will be a big funeral. Simrock and Theo are getting other students to come. Boys that age eat a lot."
"Reichard," Justina said direfully. "Reichard, what are you up to?"
"Recruiting, my darling treasure. Recruiting."
The newspaper came out early that morning, well before the funeral was due to begin.
Somehow, the lead story featured the brutal death of a native daughter of the city, an honorable and faithful daughter of the city, also the hard-working only caretaker of her aging, invalid father.
Yes, the brutal death of a native daughter of the city at the hands of an equally brutal soldier quartered upon its civilians. A brutal soldier from Mecklenburg, a province which was far distant from the Rhineland, not to mention full of brutal Lutheran heretics.
In passing, the reporter mentioned, just in case his reading public had forgotten, the Swedes were all Lutheran heretics, too—Lutheran heretics who had confiscated the historical Johanniskirche to use as their own.
"Damn you, Simrock," Reichard Donner exploded.
"I said I'd get a story in the paper for you," Simrock protested. "A story that would get the people aroused. Mainzers by and large just don't get very aroused by Spartacus's theories. Sorry about that. My cousin wrote what he thought would work. My uncle was delighted to publish it. You want a crowd, you get a crowd."
"Simrock, you have no common sense at all. The last thing we need is a religious riot. The Committees of Correspondence advocate religious toleration, remember. Repeat after me, twenty times, toleration. Have you gotten that word into your head?"
Simrock shrugged. "My uncle's not exactly a fan of the CoC. Sometimes you have to take what you can get."
". . . sorry we weren't here when you arrived." Reichard Donner distributed another round of beers. "We were all at the funeral." He waved toward Kunigunde and Ursula, who were sobbing at a corner table as they made quick work of the contents of their mugs.
"The riot," Eberhard added.
"Paying our respects to the dead and debating Montaigne," Theo added.
"Dodging flying rocks." Justina glared at the boys. "Evading the city watch. Running for our lives."
"You've read Montaigne, of course," Simrock said to their guests from Fulda.
Jeffie Garand's response was, "Errr . . ."
Joel Matowski, somewhat more articulately, replied, "I don't believe that I have."
Joel actually didn't believe that he had even heard of anyone named Montaigne, but didn't think that it would be tactful to say so right at the moment, since the author, whoever he might be, was clearly near and dear to the hearts of the Mainz CoC, who seemed to talk about him a lot more than they talked about Spartacus and the other people who were writing pamphlets for Gretchen Richter.
"But you're up-timers," Simrock protested. "You have all those books. Everyone's heard about your libraries. Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essais has been in print since 1603. That's thirty years. Longer than any of us have been alive."
He looked over at the senior Donners—parents, aunt, and the aunt's friends. "Longer than most of us have been alive. You must have read it."
Reichard Donner intercepted the glance. "Eat up, everybody. There's plenty of food left from the wake."
"The wake that didn't happen," Justina said. "The wake that didn't happen because somebody . . ." She glared at Simrock. ". . . somebody planted an article in the paper that caused a riot and the city council called out the watch and the soldiers to put it down and they wouldn't let anybody at all come to the Horn of Plenty afterwards."
Jeffie was still thinking about Montaigne. "I think the people who stuck with Mrs. Hawkins's French classes at high school until the fourth year read something by that guy. They read it in French, though."
"So you have read the Essais."
"Well, no, I didn't take French. I took Spanish. It was kind of complicated. My dad came from Baton Rouge and was Cajun and he and Mom were divorced, so she didn't want me to learn French."
Theo, sublime in not caring that he was no more familiar with the concepts "Baton Rouge" and "Cajun" than Jeffie Garand was familiar with the Essais, turned to his sister and whispered, "Montaigne also wrote, 'I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.' Maybe that's the variety of up-timer we've got here."
"Well," Simrock said, "it's still true whether you've read the book or not. Every person, no matter how high-born, is still what one of your up-time writers called a 'work in progress.' You're not finished until you're dead. As Montaigne wrote, 'How many valiant men we have seen to survive their own reputation!' In your world, Gustavus Adolphus seems to have acquired a remarkably bright and shiny reputation. It remains to be seen what he's going to end up with in this one."
Both Duke Eberhard and Corporal Hertling shifted a little uncomfortably and looked around. Aside from the two up-timers, though, only the regulars were in attendance. Reichard's recruiting scheme had proven to be a singular failure.
"Montaigne also says that ambition is not a vice of little people," Friedrich said. "Ambition isn't necessarily a bad thing. 'Since ambition may teach men valor, temperance, generosity, and justice . . . ' "
Eberhard hoped that his brother was just trying to be helpful, rather than to fan the flames. He himself found political debates a little unsettling, even though his tutors had, obviously, trained him, as a future ruler, to take part in them. And, of course, Montaigne himself had written, "There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees."
Jeffie Garand leaned over and whispered to Joel, "Remember that musical we did in high school about the English girl? The one where she sang about the two guys who talked all the time and finished up, 'I'm so sick of words?' I think these guys have got a words monopoly."
He picked up a stack of flyers that were lying on the table. "What are these?"
Corporal Hertling moved over to the up-timers and looked over Jeffie's shoulder.
"Cartoons by Crispijn van de Passe," Simrock said. "The older Crispijn, that is. He's famous. He's been working out of Utrecht for the past several years."
"He's also as old as the hills," Reichard griped. "He must be nearly seventy. Can't you kids ever talk about anyone modern?"
"I've heard of his daughter," Joel said. "Magdalena. She works for Markgraf and Smith Aviation, the ones who are building the Monster. She's Dutch, I think."
"Oh, yeah." Jeffie nodded. "I've heard about her, too. Never heard of her father, though." He frowned at the cluttered design and dark, heavily hatched background of the engraving. "Not exactly Doonesbury. Not even L'il Abner. I don't like it."
A declaration of Arminian principles at a conclave of Counter-Remonstrants could not have caused a more violent eruption of indignation. The up-timers learned far more than they had ever wanted to know about the scene that van de Passe had most recently depicted—the archbishop-elector of Mainz, the archbishop-elector's conflicts with Nils Brahe who was Gustavus Adolphus's military administrator, the archbishop-elector's attempts to mediate some kind of an ecumenical version of religious tolerance with a man named Georg Calixtus.
Theo, upon noting that neither Jeffie nor Joel had ever heard of Calixtus, was profoundly struck by the glaring gaps in their education. "He's a professor at Helmstedt, of course. For the last couple of years, he's been advocating religious discussion between representatives of the various confessions based on the Holy Scriptures and the proponents of Catholic doctrine. He seems to think that if people just went back to the early church, before Constantine, everything would work out and the world would be full of sweetness and light. He's even been to Jena, lobbying Gerhard and the other orthodox Lutheran theologians."
Chaplain Pistor would have been proud of the disgust dripping from his son's tongue.
"He's a Philippist," Simrock's voice was mild. "An extreme Philippist. The Flacians hate him."
"And Helmstedt is what and where?" The derisory tone of Jeffie's voice was designed to disguise the fact that he really didn't have the vaguest clue.
"I'm not so sure that Montaigne had the right of it about peasants," Theo whispered to Margarethe. "They just plain haven't been educated sufficiently at all."
Hertling looked over Joel's shoulder. "Who are the two guys so loaded down with olive branches that they're staggering under the weight?"
"Well, one of them's the count from Rudolstadt, over by Grantville." Jeffie grinned. "You can tell him because he's wearing a gimme cap with the bill turned backwards. I don't know the other one."
"Heinrich Friedrich von Hatzfeldt," Margarethe said. "He's the oldest brother of the prince-bishop of Würzburg. The Catholic bishop of Würzburg, in Franconia, where the people just voted to join the up-timers." Margarethe's voice was much calmer than her brother's had been. She was sitting in the taproom looking like a misplaced, very small, medieval Italian madonna, with dark brown eyes, straight dark brown hair, and a perfectly oval face.
Simrock interrupted. "Their mother's a von Sickingen. Their father worked here for the archbishop of Mainz most of his life in various kinds of administrative jobs. He's a canon at St. Alban's—you can look him up, if you want to, because he's right in town still. He didn't leave when the Swedes came in. Franz, the bishop, is in Bonn with the archbishop—this archbishop—and Ferdinand of Bavaria, that's the other archbishop, most of the time."
"They don't call this part of the Rhineland 'priests' alley' for nothing," Reichard Donner muttered.
Margarethe tossed her head. "This man, the bishop's brother, goes back and forth. People say he's trying to broker some agreement for Franz to go back to Würzberg and work along with the up-timers, sort of like the prince-abbot did in Fulda."
Walther Hertling grinned. "I don't suppose the archbishop—the Mainz archbishop, not the Bavarian in Cologne—would complain if the Swedes let him come back to Mainz, either."
Joel turned around and looked at Hertling. "Don't hold your breath. For the deals to get anywhere, they'd both have to do what the abbot did—drop the 'prince' part out of their titles."
"In that case," Duke Eberhard said, "I certainly won't hold mine."
"At least," Jeffie whispered, "the town's small enough that we can pretty much see it in one morning. Be grateful for small favors."
Simrock, assuming the duty of host since he was a local boy, had just explained as much as he knew—as much, that was, as his teachers at the Latin School in the city had known—about Mainz's "Roman stones," which turned out to be forty-seven still-standing columns from a long-gone nearly five-mile-long aqueduct, not to mention every other relic of antiquity he was aware of.
Jeffie proved to be only minimally enthusiastic about educational tourism. He kept whispering to Joel. "I could see some point if it was still carrying water, but a batch of rock pilings is a batch of rock pilings, no matter now old they are. I could have looked at pilings back home."
Reichard Donner, who had come along out of sheer curiosity, overheard him. "Yes. Too old, too old."
Ulrich hopped down from on top of one of the pilings, landing with a solid thunk. "Well, if this is too old, let's try the cathedral."
"It's Catholic," Theo said.
Ulrich swung himself into place next to Jeffie Garand, but looked at Theo. "You do 'glum' pretty well. 'Morose,' too. Fifty years from now, I'll be laughing at you because you're such a cantankerous old man."
The cathedral, which they had seen from a distance on their way into town, since it was far higher than any other landmark, proved on closer inspection to be, in Jeffie's whisper, "a great big pile of red brick with a lot of gingerbread." He looked at it critically. "It's not any prettier than St. Mary's in Grantville."
Joel snorted. "It's Romanesque. That's why St. Mary's looks the way it does. Mr. Piazza told us that back in CCD classes. St. Mary's is neo-Romanesque. American architects copied this stuff. St. Mary's is just smaller and the bricks are yellow instead of red."
"You need to look at the bronze doors," Simrock said. "They're old."
"As old as the rock piles under the aqueduct that's not there any more?" Jeffie grinned.
Simrock counted to twenty. "Not quite. About nine hundred years newer, but they're still old. They're about seven hundred years old."
"Too old," Reichard said. "What's remarkable is that they're still here, seeing that they're bronze. Over time, almost anything cast in bronze has gotten melted down in one war or another to make weapons. That's one of the perks that artillery companies have when they take a town. They get to confiscate the church bells to melt them into more cannon, so they can demolish more towns."
Simrock nodded. "It's really astonishing that the doors have survived."
"We should go inside and look at the stained glass," Joel said. "Colored windows with those Gothic pointy tops and curlicues worked into the glass are always cultural, as Ms. Mailey would say."
"As in, 'Don't you barbarians have any culture at all?' " Jeffie said to Ulrich. "I wish I hadn't grown too responsible to climb up on those pilings with you."
"Responsible?" Joel snorted. "You?"
"That's 'Sergeant Garand,' now, if you please."
"The windows are idolatrous," Theo protested. "Well, they are. Graven images."
Everyone else ignored him.
"Who is, or was, Ms. Mailey?" Simrock asked. To Eberhard, he whispered, "She may have had a point. I'm pretty sure she did."
The party inspected the stained glass windows. Joel cocked his head. "I think the ones in St. Mary's are prettier. Imported from Austria, you know. The coal barons really did our church up right."
"I thought there weren't any barons in America," Eberhard said.
They explained coal barons on their way to the party's next destination.
"The Johanniskirche," Simrock said. "St. John's. The Swedes have turned it into a Lutheran parish church for the city. The canons in the chapter at the cathedral are complaining, of course—not to mention the canons from what used to be the Johanniskirche. General Brahe told them that they should be happy that he took the smaller church and left the cathedral to the Catholics."
Theo inserted a mutter about the lack of a Calvinist parish church.
Reichard pointed with pride to the service being provided to the Calvinists of Mainz by the public room of the Horn of Plenty.
Simrock diverted them down another street over-built with half-timbered Fachwerk houses. "Now here, going through the Kirschgarten, and coming to the Leichhofstrasse . . ."
"You've got a 'Graveyard Street'?"
"Well, it does go to the cemetery." He shrugged. "And this is the hospital."
Jeffie cocked his head. "How on earth old is that?"
Simrock chewed his upper lip. "Four hundred years, I'd say. Give or take a few in either direction."
Jeffie cocked his head and whispered to Joel, "The accumulated germs would give Dr. Nichols nightmares, I bet."
"Where did Gutenberg invent the printing press?" Joel asked, masking that comment. On their way to that sacred spot, he asked again, "What's the big building site?"
Simrock shook his head. "They started on building a new electoral residence about six years ago, but it got interrupted by the war. Now it's just a muddy mess."
Jeffie shook his head. "The whole town doesn't look much like the pictures in the guidebook that was in Len Tanner's collection—the one Mary Kat saw."
Joel was getting tired. "Can it with acting like a brat, Jeffie. That's because all the stuff they built between now and then is missing. It's like Fulda, that way. Mainz hasn't gone Baroque yet."
"Where are Friedrich and Margarethe?"
"They said they had things to do."
Friedrich looked over his shoulder. "Shouldn't we be sneaking in at night, or something?"
Margarethe shook her head. "If it were night, Rohrbach would be here. He hasn't moved out of the room over the shop just because Sybilla is dead and old Binder has moved to the Horn of Plenty to cough the rest of his life away. If it were night, he would be right here, asleep. The whole point, Fritzi, is to come in the middle of the day while he is gone, carrying the key in my hand for everyone to see. Anyone who notices us will suppose that old man Binder sent us on a very proper and public errand." She looked at him, her dark eyes big and round. "That's something I learned when I was much younger. If you plan to disobey your father, it's tremendously important to look like such an idea would never cross your mind."
"Where did you get three dozen rotten eggs, anyway?" Friedrich was honestly curious. He had no idea how to go about procuring such an item.
"I have my methods."
"Where, my delightful little doe?"
"Don't call me that. I hate it. That's what Theo calls me."
"Where did you get the eggs?"
"It's spring, Fritzi."
"What does spring have to do with it?"
"Kunigunde's hens in the back courtyard of the Horn of Plenty have been setting, but she doesn't have a rooster and since she keeps them in coops no neighbor's rooster can get to them, so the eggs they lay are sterile. They're a nasty bunch of peckers." She held out her arm, demonstrating several small wounds. "She's left them alone, because they won't lay any more while they're broody, anyway. The eggs are nice and ripe."
She pulled the ticking back from the mattress very carefully. It wouldn't do to have feathers flying loose all over the room. Even a clod like Rohrbach might notice that. She situated the eggs among the feathers and replaced the ticking even more carefully.
"Hah."
"That's it?"
"No, of course not." She scowled at him. "Now we go up to the garret and pack up Sybilla's clothing. Everyone in the neighborhood will know that she would have wanted Kunigunde and Ursula to share it between them. We will carry it out. We will stop and talk to a few people in the street who will see us carrying it. We won't mention that we are carrying it, because they might wonder why we are talking about something so obvious, but we will answer if anyone asks how old man Binder is."
"We do? We will?"
"Of course we do. Don't they teach you anything practical in 'how to be a noble school'?"
The morning and the evening of the sixth day
Fulda, April 1634
"And the news from Mainz is?" Derek Utt contemplated his delegation.
"We spent quite a bit of time with them," Joel said.
Derek Utt raised one eyebrow. "Doing what?"
"Hanging out, sort of," Jeffie Garand said cheerfully. "Actually, they're a lot like us when we were their age, if our parents had been rich when we were born and sent us to fancy prep schools, that is. Not outstandingly smart or dumb. Not unusually ugly or handsome. Just regular guys. If they don't watch what they eat and keep up an exercise program, all three of them are going to be buying their clothes in the corner of the men's shop that has a sign hanging over it that says 'Portly Short' by the time they're thirty. By the time they're forty for sure."
"What we were doing was trying to find out what Wes wanted to know." Joel Matowski seriously tried to look helpful and conscientious. "Eberhard's nineteen. Friedrich's eighteen. Ulrich will be sixteen next month. The reason all three of them are on Nils Brahe's staff in Mainz is that they're supposed to be learning their trade in the army, so to speak. Eberhard thinks that Ulrich should still be under a tutor's guidance, but he wouldn't go to Strassburg with their sisters—he made a big fuss about it, apparently—so the older boys brought him along where they can keep an eye on him."
"Why Mainz, given all the problems in Swabia? And given that in theory they're dukes of a good chunk of the general geographical spot that's Swabia. Why not with Horn?"
"Well, if he sent them to Horn, it might make problems with the margraves of Baden. That's Swabia, too. Or remind the Württembergers that they do have their own dukes when other European countries aren't using their home turf as a battleground. I doubt that Gustav wants a self-determination movement on the Ram Rebellion model down in the southeast right about now."
Utt grimaced. "Damn, but I hate politics."
"They're all over the place," Joel said earnestly. "Politics, I mean. If it wasn't for the problems in the Netherlands, these kids would probably be with Frederik Hendrik. They can't very well be with Gustavus up north, given that they're first cousins to Christian IV of Denmark's sons—their moms were sisters. I gathered from Eberhard that it would be sort of touchy. Plus, on their mom's side, too, they're also some kind of cousins of George William over in Brandenburg, who's probably next on Gustav's tick-off list, once he deals with the Danes. So our illustrious emperor was sort of short on options about where to put them, I guess. Didn't want to offend them to the point that they would swing over to the other side. Didn't want to put them in the way of temptation, either. Actually, they haven't taken offense too bad. Eberhard's pretty realistic about the whole thing and the other two are following his lead."
"Is that the whole family?" Wes Jenkins asked.
"They've got three sisters hiding out from Horn and Bernhard in Strassburg." Jeffie grinned. "According to Eberhard, all three of them swear that they're going to grow up to be old maids. Antonia's older than the boys. According to their description, she was born to give Ms. Mailey a run for her money in the 'terrifying bluestocking' sweepstakes. For the time being, though, she's got the two little sisters on her hands, to finish bringing up in her image."
"So, if Brahe were to send them up here for a short course in Americanization—where are the potential pitfalls?"
"Eberhard doesn't racket around in whorehouses, if that's what you're asking," Joel said. "He's got one girl—Agathe Donner, they call her Tata—and he'll probably bring her along if he comes up to Fulda."
Derek swallowed. "Tata?"
"Yeah." Jeffie winked. "She's got quite a pair of tatas on her, really impressive, but that's not the reason for her nickname. It's just short for Agathe. One of her little brothers couldn't say her name right when he was learning to talk. I don't think it would be smart to tell them what it means in English."
"Really, Derek—ah, that is, sir," Joel said. "It's not as if she'd be the only informal alliance out at Barracktown. Sure, he sleeps with her, but otherwise, he pretty much keeps it zipped up, which is pretty fair behavior for a nineteen-year-old kid who was brought up to think the world ought to be his oyster and then got slapped in the face by real life the year after his dad died. Some 'grand tour' his mom could afford by the time the uncles got their claws into what was left after she dealt with their dad's debts—their Junior Dukeships got to go to Strassburg, Basel, Mömpelgard, Lyon, and Geneva. Then they came straight back home. I suppose you could stretch a point and say that Lyon counts as France, but . . . they didn't make it to Italy or Austria or England."
"Who's the girl?"
Jeffie grinned. "Would you believe the daughter of the head of Mainz's Committee of Correspondence? Such as it is."
"Ah," Derek Utt moaned. "No."
"Her dad's perfectly happy about it. He's a lot happier than the father of Lieutenant Duke Friedrich's girlfriend."
"Who is?"
"The chaplain for the Calvinists in Brahe's regiments."
"The father's the chaplain, not the girlfriend," Jeffie said deadpan.
"He's from Hesse—from Kassel, really. His name's Marcus Pistor. A real extremist, in a Calvinist sort of way. The way Eberhard put it was, 'He studied under Gomar himself and is fanatically anti-Vorstian,' as if that was supposed to mean something to me. Well, hell, it definitely means something to him, so I guess we ought to look it up." Joel sighed.
"Her name's Margarethe and believe me, her dad has really pissed her off, not to mention vice versa." Jeffie grinned. "She looks like Bambi's mother, but don't believe all that sweetness and light for a minute. Margarethe looks harmless, but it's deceptively harmless. Theo even calls her Rehgeißchen when he wants to make her mad."
" 'Little Doe," Joel nodded. "Like some made-up American Indian maiden in a movie."
"They don't like making it easy on themselves, do they?"
"Not really."
"Ensign Duke Ulrich doesn't have a steady girlfriend," Jeffie offered hopefully.
"He's only fifteen," Joel snorted.
Jeffie plowed on. "He's getting to that age, though. But I made it clear that if they do come up to Fulda, I have dibs on Gertrud Hartke."
"Does Gertrud agree to this condition?" Wes Jenkins asked.
"Oh, sure." Jeffie beamed confidently. "She absolutely adores me."
The morning and the evening of the seventh day
Essen, May 1634
Louis de Geer stood at the window, looking out at the ever-expanding industrial base of his new republic. It wasn't pretty, but neither was his copper mining franchise in Sweden. The beauty of industrialization lay in the money that arrived in an entrepreneur's bank account.
"The rumors seem to be," his informant was saying, "that the archbishop of Cologne has hired three, maybe four, Irish generals—well, colonels, at least—with their mercenary regiments, out of Austria. Supposedly, he made the down-payment the end of April. People seem to expect that they'll arrive in Bonn by the middle of May."
"Which ones?"
"Butler, Geraldin, and Deveroux, Deveroux, something like that. Dennis MacDonald is supposed to be with them, but none of my men have actually seen him. They managed to get their cavalry across Swabia somehow. Maximilian let them cross Bavaria, of course, since his brother wanted them. As for their route the rest of the way, I hear that Nasi is peering suspiciously at Egon von Fürstenberg. He is not at all happy about the proposal that the emperor is floating to unify Swabia and set a Lutheran margrave of Baden on top of him as administrator. Probably with a Lutheran military commander, too, if Sweden leaves Horn with the USE after this year's campaigns."
"We could have lived happily and successfully without the arrival of those three—without all four of them, really. Oh, well." De Geer turned to his secretary. "Send a memo to Nils Brahe in Mainz."
Ignoring the interruption, de Geer's informant continued on. "Also, our men have lost track of Felix Gruyard."
"Any idea where he may have gone?" the secretary asked, steno book in hand.
"Wherever the charming Ferdinand of Bavaria, archbishop and elector of Cologne and faithful minion of his elder brother Maximilian, chooses to send him—with uniformly undesirable results, from our perspective."
"Such sarcasm. Your Calvinism is showing, Louis. Ferdinand's not the only ruler who employs a full-time torturer."
"He's the only one who employs Gruyard."
"There is that."
"It's not that I don't have faith in God's providence," Louis de Geer said. "It's just that there are days when I suspect that He's resting again."
Morning prayers could be hard on one's conscience, if one went about the process of self-examination honestly.
Nils Brahe was inclined toward honesty, as much in judging himself as in judging others. As Montaigne had written, quoting Cicero, "to judge a man, we must for a long time follow and mark his steps, to see whether constancy of purpose is firm and well-founded within him." Cui vivendi via considerata atque provisa est. Not to mention that the Bible also contained more than a few well-chosen words on the topic of hypocrisy. So.
Ahrensbök.
Envy was not an admirable characteristic. Indeed, it was a sin. The Catholics classified it as a mortal sin. Although Lutheran theology insisted that all sins were equal in the sight of God, perhaps it was particularly sinful to envy Lennart Torstensson, who had just brought Gustavus Adolphus such a great victory. Even if the king had been heard to say that "after Torstensson," one was the prospective best strategic talent in the Swedish army.
Oh, but the word "after" did grate.
Envy of one's older brother was not an admirable characteristic. In anybody, at any time. Being a younger brother was a dispensation of divine providence. It was particularly un-admirable when one discovered it in oneself. Still, Per's political career in Sweden was taking off like one of the airplanes at the USE's landing field in Mainz.
Whereas one was more or less stuck in Mainz.
Or was one?
Nils Brahe, still a few months away from turning thirty years old, looked up from his daily Bible readings and folded his hands behind his head, shifting his thoughts from the impersonal mode to the personal.
According to his own close friend Erik Hand, the king had approved Johan Banér's project against Ingolstadt. Which was exasperating.
In spite of that grating word "after," he drew some consolation from knowing the king trusted him enough that there was no equivalent of Hand watching over his activities.
His sister Ebba was already married to Banér's brother Axel.
His sister Kerstin was still unmarried. She was only about fifteen years younger than Erik who was, after all, the king's cousin, even if his mother was illegitimate. Fifteen years wasn't bad. Even with the crippled arm, Erik was a handsome man. Almost everyone agreed on that. Opinion was as close to unanimous as it ever got.
He missed his wife. He would write her and ask her to come to Mainz, bringing Kerstin along. They could stay for a while—preferably until such time as Anna Margareta was expecting another child. Then she could go home again. After all, somebody had to run the estates while he was himself off contributing to the king's imperial dreams.
Anna Margareta could bring the children. He missed his children, too.
"Are you sure?"
"As sure as I can possibly be," Botvidsson answered. "My information is absolutely reliable. Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar has withdrawn his cavalry units to the south. Ohm, Caldenbach, and Rosen—all three of them. They should be south of Strassburg by the day after tomorrow, which is, in my best opinion, about where they will halt and set up a screen. Which means that he's not contemplating a Turenne-style raid up the Main into the State of Thuringia-Franconia, which makes me happy. Nor is Bernhard moving any of his infantry north from the Franche Comté, so it doesn't look like he plans to meet up with the cavalry and strike east against Württemberg again, which probably is making Gustav Horn a happy man, or at least as happy as he ever gets."
Nils Brahe smiled at his council. "True. Now he'll be worrying about what else Bernhard has in mind as far as Swabia is concerned. Or where else. If I were in the Breisgau, I would be nervous. But come, gentlemen, we have no time to waste."
"What?"
"Since Bernhard has been so kind as to make straight what long was crooked and the rougher places plain . . ."
Every man at the table grasped the reference to the fortieth chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah at once.
Botvidsson nodded. "A highway for our God into northern Alsace." His mouth quirked. "A highway to the oil fields at Pechelbronn, which should be of great value, given what has happened at Wietze."
Brahe nodded, his manner a little abstracted. "Of great value to us, or at least something we need to keep out of the hands of the French. Do we need to talk to the count of Hanau-Lichtenberg?"
"Already done. He's willing to agree to the same terms as the Brunswickers have done in regard to the exploitation at Wietze."
Brahe nodded again, this time with satisfaction. "Remind me. What's the place called now?"
"Merkwiller. Or Merckweiler, if you prefer the German spelling."
"Are we getting any support from Fulda?" Stenbock asked.
Botvidsson shook his head. "Jenkins only has the one regiment there. He'll try to send a few 'observers' with us, for at least part of the campaign. Major Utt himself and a couple of the other up-timers, for a month or so. They're already on their way. I don't think we can reasonably ask or expect any more from him. It's not as if he doesn't have problems of his own."
The only additional question anyone asked was, "When?"
"Tomorrow," Brahe answered. "I have plans in place, of course."
Which he did. Of course. Envy might be a sin, but honest ambition and a desire to serve one's king well were not.
And an unexpected window of opportunity had opened up. He had planned for the contingency.
The other men scrambled out of the room. The next twenty-four hours would be very busy. Brahe smiled as he watched them go.
Envy was a sin. But perhaps one could reverse the king's estimate of one's abilities in comparison to those demonstrated by Lennart Torstensson, in which case envy would no longer be an immediate problem, there being no cause for it.
Jeffie Garand squirmed into a somewhat more comfortable position on a rock that had never been designed as a stool. Leaning over, he whispered to Eberhard, " 'Every dog has his day?' I can't believe that some down-timer said that."
"Montaigne did. General Brahe was just quoting him."
"Why do General Brahe and Major Utt sound like my high school history teacher?"
"They're trying to understand each other," Joel Matowski said. "Anyway, Major Utt's sister teaches English at the high school, so maybe he caught that teacherish attitude from her."
"Major Utt was a coach over in Fairmont before the Ring of Fire. He only got caught in the Ring because he was at the bait store with Allan Dailey that afternoon. Coaches shouldn't talk like Ms. Mailey."
"He'd graduated from college," Joel said. "I hadn't finished when the Ring hit, but it's true what they say—just going to college does something to you, in the way you think. Lots of coaches teach social studies to fill in their schedules. Mr. Samuels is the head of the social studies department now and he was the football coach before the Ring of Fire. Now hush."
Utt was looking at his toes, which were stretched out toward the campfire. "There was a shift in politics, at least in the English-speaking world, some time between the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution."
At a question from Lieutenant Duke Friedrich, he stopped to briefly define each of those and give its dates in the Other Time Line.
"Where was I? There was a shift from politics as a blood sport to politics as a gentleman's game. Most European monarchs stopped beheading their opponents—omitting the way the Hanoverians handled the Scottish Jacobites."
Another pause for explanations and definitions.
"Why? Hell, I'm not sure why. Maybe because of the shift of the major source of wealth, power, and influence from land, which is essentially static, to commerce, which is far more flexible and less limited, far more elastic and less static."
"What's elastic?" Ensign Duke Ulrich asked. He was ignored.
"Maybe, partly, possibly, it was also because the shift meant that other types of connection among people became more important and influential than that of family and hereditary succession. I can't give you an answer. I'm not sure that a meeting of the entire American Historical Association could have given you an answer."
"That conversation didn't exactly come to a conclusion," Eberhard said as he rolled himself up into his blanket.
"I expect it was meant to make us ask questions," Friedrich answered. "That's the sneaky thing about tutors. They're always trying to make a person think. Sometimes my mind gets absolutely exhausted just thinking about all the things they want me to think about."
"All we did today was walk," Ulrich complained the next evening.
"That's good, Your Grace, sir," Merckel said. "That's obscenely good. This is your first time in the field. Up till now, you've just been learning drill and theory. When you're out on a campaign, a day when all you do is walk is a good day. A day you spend trying to unstick carts that are stuck in the mud is a worse day. A day that someone else starts shooting at you is the pits."
Ulrich shrugged and went back to unsaddling his horse.
Friedrich pulled a hand-drawn map out of the inner pocket of his leather doublet. "If my map is even close to right, we're making pretty good progress."
"That's because it's not raining, Your Grace, sir," Merckel said. "A couple of days of rain and we'll mire right down. The glop underfoot will suck horseshoes off. The farriers won't be able to get a decent fire going to heat up the metal because water will be dripping through their tent onto the forge. Just wait. You'll see. Before too long, you'll see."
"Thomas Jefferson, of course, considered the the yeoman farmer to be the basis of a healthy political community in a republican form of government."
Brahe nodded. "One presumes that was based upon the Roman model of the Gracchi."
"Probably. He had a pretty good classical education. Better than Washington's, but probably not as good as either George Mason or George Wythe."
Turning his head around, he grinned at Garand, Matowski, and the three Württemberg dukes. "Which may just go to demonstrate that a really good classical education will not necessarily lead to a man's being elected as president of the United States. Washington and Jefferson are in every American history textbook ever printed, but Wythe and Mason only made it into the required fourth-grade course in state history in Virginia."
"I don't understand Jefferson's logic," Brahe said. "Remember Montaigne's critique of the Parians who were sent to reform the Milesians. The Parians visited the island, surveyed it, observed which farms and estates were best managed and governed. Then they appointed the owners of those to be the new magistrates and council of Miletus, on the hypothesis that men who took good care of their own property would take good care of public affairs. However, I personally judge that a man may manage his own lands well because he is essentially selfish, and have very little sense of the civic duty that would lead him to be equally concerned about others."
"Sounds to me like the Parians were subscribing to the view that whatever was good for General Motors was good for the nation," Utt said.
This statement required quite a bit of explanation.
"Anyway, good for Montaigne. I'm glad the fellow didn't fall for that idea. That wasn't the basis for Jefferson's opinion, either. It was more that as many citizens of a country as possible should be stakeholders in it."
The discussion went on until the fire went out.
"Where to next?" Merckel asked the next morning.
"Landstuhl," Corporal Hertling answered. "Captain Ulfsparre told me so."
"Where's Landstuhl?" Jeffie asked.
"A few miles west of Kaiserslautern. See." Lieutenant Duke Friedrich dug into his pocket and pulled out his map.
Ulrich hefted the saddle onto his horse. "What's at Landstuhl? Why is it worth our while to capture whatever it is? I hate to be a nuisance, but nobody ever seems to explain anything on this campaign."
"We aren't supposed to understand. We're just supposed to do what they tell us."
Joel Matowski shook his head. "Ours not to reason why, Ours but to do or die struck me as a really bad idea back when they made us read it in high school."
"The villages belong to a branch of the Freiherren von Sickingen," Eberhard said.
"Any relation to Franz von Sickingen?" Joel asked. "The famous one?"
"Famous?" Ensign Duke Ulrich stuck out his tongue. "Do you have any idea what he did to our ancestor, the first Duke Ulrich, back in 1518?"
"It wasn't just him, brat," Friedrich said. "It was the whole Swabian League."
"He built a big fortress at Landstuhl, but it was destroyed by artillery. That wasn't much more than five years after he attacked our ancestor."
"Sounds like he lived in interesting times." Joel Matowski laughed.
"But the emperor restored his son, and the Sickingens built the fortress back," Friedrich said.
Hertling nodded.
"This is the Hohenburg sub-line of the Sickingens." That was the kind of information that any Swabian nobleman, Eberhard included, had received drilled into him by tutors from the time he could toddle. "Old Franz was a great leader of the imperial knights and a defender of the Reformation. This bunch, though, converted back to Catholicism in—hmm—I think it was 1627. About then. It was the year before our father died, wasn't it?" He looked at Friedrich.
"That sounds right. He was exploding about it at breakfast one morning. We were old enough to eat with our parents instead of in the nursery."
"They converted because they were offered a really advantageous marriage with the Kämmerer von Worms-Dalberg family on condition that they turned Catholic. Ever since then, they've been forcing a really assertive version of the Counter-Reformation in their lands."
"What Captain Ulfsparre said was that they might well decide to fort up and resist when they see General Brahe and the Lutherans coming."
"They're cousins of the von Hatzfeldts, too."
"Which ones? There are dozens of von Hatzfeldts."
"The important ones. The bishop of Würzburg, his brother the imperial general, and the canon who's still in Mainz looking out for their interests as best he can."
"Isn't that charming?"
"We're not going right at Landstuhl, today, though. This village we're headed for is some way to the south. A dinky little place called Krickenbach. They think we need to go there before Brahe can have a shot at Landstuhl. Something to do with the quarries and which of the villages are deserted and which aren't, but I'm not sure what. 'Need to know' and all that sort of thing, I suppose."
"Deserted?"
"Because of the war. The Ring of Fire may have calmed things down a lot in Thuringia and Franconia, but over here the mercenaries have just kept moving. For one thing, a lot of these little noble territories are, one way or the other, dependencies of the Elector Palatine, which means they've been right in the middle of the political mess from the start."
Hertling frowned at the map. "Once we secure that, then over to Linden, north to Queidersbach, through Bann . . . After that we'll hit Landstuhl and have to do something about Nannstein."
"I hate deserted villages." Merckel picked up his hat. "Too many sheds that ought to be empty but can hold really nasty surprises if the other side has thought to put them there. It's harder for them to do that when there are still people around to object."
"General Brahe's not going to try to besiege Nannstein, I hope," Sergeant Hartke said. "I hate sieges."
"No, I don't think so," Eberhard said. "This campaign is supposed to be moving fast. The Sickingens don't have much of a garrison there. The general will just surround it and cut it off. Once the we've taken the whole west bank of the Rhine down past Strassburg, they won't have many options left."
"Hey, Joel," Jeffie yelled. "Look at this. There's a place on this map called Frankenstein."
"That's not a defense point we have to worry about." Eberhard was quite serious. "It's not on our path and the walls were destroyed about seventy years ago. Nannstein's the one that might be a problem if it turns out to have more of a garrison than the general thinks it does."
He couldn't imagine why the two up-timers kept laughing.
Captain Duke Eberhard pulled up his horse. "As soon as we finish up here, Captain Ulfsparre said, we're to clear up and prepare to push south toward Pirmasens, then east to Weissenburg."
"I wish General Brahe hadn't taken most of the regiment west to Merkweiler," Friedrich said. "We're just one company."
Eberhard shook his head. "He's going to leave a good-sized garrison there to secure the Pechelbronn oil fields for the USE, since production is so far down at Wietze because of Turenne's raid. That's why he took Major Utt, Garand, and Matowski with him. He thinks the up-timers need to take a look at what's there so they can report to the technical people back in Magdeburg. It's so close to the borders of Lorraine that the French will be an ongoing problem if they keep mucking around in the politics of the Lorrainers. Then Brahe will secure Saarbrücken and head south himself. Since he'll be leaving the other regiments behind at Merkweiler, he wanted the rest of Colonel von Zitzewitz's men to be with him when he comes back toward us, just in case, even if all the information he has does indicate that Duke Bernhard has pulled back even farther, to the south of Colmar. Come on."
They came around a curve. Eberhard stopped again, the other men behind him.
"Captain, sir."
"Yes."
"I don't like the look of that village up ahead."
"Merckel, you haven't liked the look of any village we've seen these past three days."
"Are we sure we know where General Brahe's other regiments are?" Friedrich asked.
"The communications people are using the 'radio' sets. As of last night, when they strung up the antenna wire, if they really know where they are—which is by no means a sure thing in this uncertain world in which we live—then we know where they are. Manteufel is past Haguenau. Glasenapp is past Schlettstadt, nearly to Colmar. That's as far as we're going on this campaign. The general doesn't want to overextend his lines, Captain Ulfsparre said."
Hertling sighed. "So what you really mean, sir, is that we think we know where they thought they were yesterday. What's more, they say that they are doing well, which is as good as it's going to get." He looked down the valley at the village Merckel was worrying about.
"If Merckel doesn't like the look of it," Ulrich said, "maybe we ought to investigate. He was right about that shed yesterday morning."
Heisel clambered up on a boulder for a better look. "The farmers aren't all gone. I saw someone move—or maybe I saw something move—and there's smoke, just a little, every now and then, coming from that yellow-painted house behind the brown one."
"Is it safe to assume that it's just a few farmers?" Friedrich asked.
"Hell, no," Hertling answered.
"Bauer, do you like the way that we didn't run into problems over at Nannstein? From what you've heard over the years, would it be typical of the von Sickingens just to close the gates and let us go past without offering any resistance?"
"No, sir."
"Just, 'no, sir'?"
"Not at all, sir. I don't like it one damn bit better than Merckel, sir. Kolb, what do you think?" The four goons closed up around their captain, who was also, in a real sense, still their responsibility.
"I think the rest of you should stay here, and that Captain Duke Eberhard should tell Lieutenant von Damnitz, Heisel, and me to take a half dozen men to skirt around along that brook and come up behind the yellow house."
"Where is von Damnitz?" Ulrich looked around.
Hertling waved. "Somewhere back behind us, complaining about all these hills. What did Jeffie Garand call it?"
" 'Claustrophobia,' " Friedrich answered. "He can't help it, I guess. He's between Ulrich and me in age and this is the first time he's been out of Pomerania. He's a nephew of von Glasenapp, I think. He's only been in Mainz for two months. It's really pretty flat there, too. He just doesn't see enough sky to suit him down here in the Palatinate and Alsace. He told me one evening that he's going nearly nuts, not being able to see where he's going around the curves on the roads with all the trees looming over him. And what's worse, he looked down on his right, off the drop. Sergeant Beyschlag is back there with him, trying to buck him up a little. He should be all right once he catches up. The road has veered away from the ravine. Somebody ought to send him back up north where things are flat. Let him be a military hero somewhere around Wismar."
"Flat land—lots of it, anyhow—sounds like it would be weird." Ulrich turned to Merckel. "Have you ever seen any land that was absolutely flat?"
"When we were up north. That was ten years or so ago, maybe more. It's like a river bottom that just goes on and on and on."
"Yeah, but those usually have some hills or cliffs on each side, not so far away that you can't see them."
Hertling shuddered. "I think it would drive me nuts up north there, with the land just going on and on and on, like he says, no end to it until you meet the sea."
Ulrich shuddered. "The sea would be worse, I think. Just the reports of the sea battles this spring are enough to strike terror into the heart of a paladin. That's even leaving out that ships sink. In a boat, even in a big river like the Rhine, you've at least got a sporting chance to make it to shore."
"If you can swim," Merckel said. "I can't."
"I don't think we'd better wait for von Damnitz. He'll catch up with us in a few minutes. Merckel and Kolb are right—we should take a look at what's back there. Hertling, I'll take you and Friedrich with me. You, Friedrich . . ." Eberhard looked around. ". . . Kolb and Heisel. Pick a couple of others."
Hertling turned his horse to take a survey of the available resources. Nearly half the men were farther back with von Damnitz and Beyschlag.
"Uh, Captain . . ."
"Yes, Kolb."
"If I were you—not being you, of course—I'd wait for von Damnitz to show."
"It's coming on towards dusk. We haven't passed any place we can reasonably camp tonight, and anyway, I really don't want to camp too close to that village without knowing who or what is in it. It could be some of von Sickingen's garrison from Nannstein. It could be other soldiers, but if so, they won't be on our side, because we pretty much know where our side is. It could just be locals who don't like soldiers. Either way, they've probably been in this neighborhood long enough to know a lot more about it than we do. Things like which paths are best for sneaking up on someone else in the dark."
Kolb nodded. "That's a point, but . . ."
Eberhard dismounted. "Come on, with me." After a little rearranging of weaponry to accommodate progress on foot rather than horseback, they headed up the banks of the brook.
"There's someone in there, all right. What now?" Heisel began to pile his equipment on a stump in the coppice behind the yellow house.
"I don't want them heading down the road toward Ulrich," Eberhard said. "It's our job—one of our jobs, anyway—to take care of him. Among other things. Kolb, go make a noise, maybe ten yards that way, loud enough that whoever is in that house is sure to hear it. Make some kind of a noise that a deer thrashing through the underbrush wouldn't make. I want to spook them. Heisel, right after that, throw the first stink bomb. Use your own judgment about the best target."
"How about I just throw a good-sized rock at the shed? Then when they come out to see what that was, I hit the shed with one stink bomb and the back door of the house with another one?"
"Sounds like a good plan." Eberhard certainly hoped that it was a good plan, since he didn't have another one.
Ten yards away, Kolb utilized one of his few civilian talents, acquired some years before when he was attached to a unit of Swiss mercenaries. He yodeled.
Heisel threw the rock. He hit the shed, too. Baseball had extended to Mainz by 1634 and he was a pitcher. He didn't hit the shed because he was a pitcher. He had become a pitcher because he could hit almost any target with anything he threw. He regarded throwing strikes or balls over something as big as home plate as a mildly entertaining hobby that endeared him to the other men in the regiment.
At that point, unfortunately . . .
Two dozen men from von Sickingen's garrison at Nannstein were in the yellow house. So far, so good. Unfortunately for "the plan," nobody ran out at random to check the yodel or the shed. Following a previously practiced tactic, they left the house through the front door and slid into the trees on either side of the road.
"Clusterfuck," Heisel said. He just loved the sound of that up-time expression. "They're riflemen. Jäger. A couple of them will be behind us before you can fart."
"What the hell did you expect? We're in the middle of a goddamned forest. It's bound to be full of poachers. Where there are poachers, there are game wardens." Kolb cleared his throat and spat a puddle of phlegm on the ground.
"They're headed down toward where we left Ulrich." Friedrich didn't bother to keep his voice down. "We've got to get after them." He started to break ranks, only to be hauled back roughly by Heisel.
"Slowly," Eberhard said. "We've got to get behind them, but stay together and be careful." He turned around and pointed. "You, and you. Hide behind the shed and watch out for the ones Heisel thinks will come up behind us. He's probably right."
Ulrich sat on his horse in the middle of the narrow mud road, waiting. He couldn't see what was happening in the village, behind the houses. He even hadn't really intended to be in the middle, on the grass verge that was slightly elevated between the ruts made by the passage of farm carts back and forth, but his horse had a mind of its own. Given the least inattention upon his rider's part, the gelding would move off dust onto grass.
He had no idea where the first rifle shot came from. He looked around. Merckel's horse was down. Merckel had come off cleanly and was picking himself up. A second shot came out of the trees, perhaps five yards ahead of them, from the right. Ulrich opened his mouth to order the men down, but there were three more shots before he could say anything. One came directly from his left, he was pretty sure. One of the soldiers came off. His horse, grazed on the withers, ran straight down the road toward the village.
"They're all along, on both sides of us," one of the soldiers yelled.
Just then, von Damnitz and the men with him came up behind them on the road, riding too fast to stop before they had rounded the curve and come into sight of the riflemen. Von Damnitz was senior in rank to Ulrich. He was senior in rank to anyone else in the party on the road, so Ulrich turned to him for direction.
Instead of issuing orders, von Damnitz froze in place, yelling "Don't retreat." The men who were with him bunched up, making it impossible for Ulrich's small party to turn and head back down the narrow road, away from the village.
"Don't retreat" didn't last long. Von Damnitz went down. His horse, panicked, forced its way along the shoulder of the road and followed Merckel's horse toward the village.
Horses being horses, the rest of them, who were not trained cavalry mounts, since nobody had expected this little company to mount a cavalry action, concluded that since two horses were running away, they probably knew something that was bad for the herd. Ulrich managed to control his gelding, but six of the horses, with the men mounted on them, headed right into the line of fire.
Three of them made it through. The other three fell, blocking the road completely.
Beyschlag, Merckel, and Bauer tried to get the young duke out of the line of fire, but there wasn't really any single line of fire. The shots from the trees were coming at them from at various angles and from various directions up and down both sides of the road.
Ulrich yelled, "Since we can't go back, go forward. You'll have to jump." The group headed forward, in the direction of the village. His gelding jumped. Beyschlag's shied and plunged into the trees before it followed. Merckel, on foot, ran around the pile of dead horses, trying to catch up. Bauer went down; his horse followed Merckel and sideswiped him, knocking him into a tree.
Von Sickingen's Jäger kept up a steady rate of fire. It might not be as fast as it would have been if they were equipped with up-time weapons, but they had worked together for a long time—most of them for a decade, some for nearly two. In a situation like this, they could almost read each other's minds.
Eberhard's group stayed together and were careful. They did not expect to come to the edge of the village, start to move down toward the location of the gunfire, and suddenly be charged at by a half-dozen panicked horses. They dove toward the shoulders and trees, but not all of them fast enough. Friedrich got his head and shoulders out of the way, but a horseshoe, a sturdy iron horseshoe affixed to the hoof of the mixed breed part-draft horse that had been pressed into service to carry Bauer's weight, came down on his left foot.
A half-dozen men came out of the brown house.
Merckel, still running toward the village, howled, "Look out behind you." Eberhard, turning, was hit by another of the horses and knocked down.
One of the men coming out of the brown house yelled back at Merckel. "Don't shoot us. If you're fighting Sickingen's men, you're our friends."
Merckel's best guess, in the middle of the whole mess, was that either the von Sickingen family were not popular landlords or that the village was populated by poachers. Possibly both.
The village men, with their weapons, almost evaporated into the trees from which the firing was coming.
"My name is Didier Schultz," the farmer said an hour or so later. "This is my house, where we were hiding in the loft, waiting for enough of von Sickingen's Jäger to come into sight at once to make it worthwhile for us to shoot them. If we had just picked off one, they would have pinpointed our location right away. The women and children are up in the hills. The livestock, too. That's the best practice. When soldiers come your way, run away. We would have been gone, too, but we just weren't fast enough. It's so close to dark now that there's no point in giving them an all clear this evening. In the morning, I'll send my son Henri up to bring everyone down. For now, though, I offer my hospitality, such as it is."
"We took Duke Ulrich next door," Merckel said. "Where it's a little quieter. His brothers, too."
Schultz nodded. "That is the house of my brother-in-law, Heinz Hochban." He gestured toward another man. "My son Henri is named for him."
"We don't have one of the famous up-time trained medics," Beyshlag said. "We don't even have a down-time trained medic. We're just a company, not a regiment. The surgeon went with Colonel von Zitzewitz and General Brahe. Heisel has already set Duke Eberhard's arm and splinted it, but he's pretty sure he has a broken collarbone, too. He isn't up to setting that. Is there anyone in the village who can do something for Duke Ulrich?"
"The priest might," Schultz said, "but he's up in the hills with the women and children. He's the papist priest whom the von Sickingens have forced on us. We were all good Lutherans here." He thought a moment. "You're fighting for the Swedes, aren't you?"
"Yes," Beyschlag agreed. "Under General Nils Brahe."
"Good Lutherans," Schultz affirmed, "just like the Swedes. But the papist isn't bad at doing things for the sick. I do have to give him credit for that, and at least he's an old man who doesn't fool with our women and girls. He knows tinctures that can break a fever or dry up wet lungs. Sometimes, at least. It's all the will of God, really."
"I have opium," Hochban said. "The apothecary in Landstuhl gave it to me back when my mother was dying of the crab and screaming all night so no one could sleep. There was some left, but he wouldn't buy it back. It's only three years old, so probably it's still good." He paused, looking hopefully at Beyschlag. "Cost a fortune, too, it did."
"Give it to him," Hertling said. "We'll pay."
"The horses are in the lot," Schultz said, starting with what was, in his view, the most important question. "The live bodies of your soldiers are in the church. The live bodies of von Sickingen's men are locked up in the new granary. The dead ones of both are in the crypt where they won't bother anyone in this heat until you can send a messenger to find your commander. Tomorrow morning, when everyone else comes back down, we'll harvest whatever is usable from the bodies of the dead horses. Then we'll push the rest into the ravine."
"What do we do now?" Beyshlag asked.
"Wait for Captain Duke Eberhard to wake up, I guess," Hertling said. "That horse knocked him cold as well as breaking his arm."
"We need to send a messenger to General Brahe."
"Nobody's going tonight," Schultz said. "It's getting dark."
"We don't know where he is," Merckel said. "The captain knew where he was yesterday evening. 'Somewhere between Landstuhl and Merkweiler' isn't very helpful as far as directions go."
"No," Beyschlag said. "We have to use the radio. We have to stay here and call the general for help."
"Do you know how to use it?" Merckel could be trusted to get to the heart of any issue, at least if there was a discouraging word to be found.
"No, but I know where it is. At least, I know where it should be, the 'tuna tin transmitter' and the antenna. They were in the captain's saddle bags." Beyschlag stood up.
"So if that horse wasn't one of the dead ones, you can get it. If the horse didn't fall on it and smash it, that is."
Hertling pushed his hair back from his forehead. "Merckel . . ."
Beyschlag shook his head. "Even if you don't know how to use it, Hertling, you must have seen the captain use it. You're always standing right behind his shoulder."
"I've seen him use it. That's not quite the same thing."
"Does Lieutenant Duke Friedrich know how to use it?"
"I think so, but I'm not sure."
"He's with his brothers. They may die. He won't want to leave them."
"He won't be leaving them right now," Hochban said, opening the door. "I gave him some of the opium too, for his foot."
"I'm pretty sure the antenna plugs into this hole," Hertling said. "Heisel, tie the other end of this wire to a rock and throw it over the highest thing you can find in the village."
"Did I enlist in the army to spend my days throwing rocks over chimneys?"
"You enlisted to do what you're told. I'll hold on to this end of the wire. If I plug it in first, it might take the tuna tin with it, and we'd end up with the transmitter halfway up the roof of a house."
"How do you send the clicks?"
"You send them with this switch here. One way you send and the other way you receive what other units send you, but I'm not sure which way is which."
"Try it both ways. It won't hurt the machine."
"You hope," Merckel said.
"The only ones I know are for 'SOS.' What good will it do to send that if nobody at the other end knows who is sending it or where we are?"
"Beyschlag, was there a book with this thing?"
Beyschlag stood up again.
Heisel opened the book to a display of the letters of the alphabet, each with a combination of dots and dashes underneath it. Hertling checked the S and the O against his memory. "Yes, that's it."
"What do we need to tell them?"
"We're here, in a mess."
"Duke Ulrich is going to die."
"We're somewhere between Landstuhl and Pirmasens. But . . ." Beyschlag looked at the map he has fished out of Duke Friedrich's doublet. ". . . we don't know exactly how far we are from either one." He looked up at Schultz. "Where are we? What's the name of this village?"
"Weselberg," Hochban said.
"Sure. It would have been way too much to hope that the name would be short. At least it has an S in it."
"Radio operators like very short messages," Heisel said.
"Jeffie Garand has a word he likes. SNAFU. Look up those letters, Beyschlag, and write them out for me. Does anyone have any paper?"
"Use the back page of the Morse code book. It's blank. More to the point, does anyone have a pencil?"
"Schultz, do you have a lantern or a lamp? It's getting dark."
Schultz dug out an ancient clay oil lamp. "Tell them that they have to go past the old mill at Obernheim, because we're closer to Pirmasens than that. Everyone knows where the mill is. The burned-out village was Harsberg."
"It's actually good that it's getting dark. They like to send the radio messages out right before dark or right after dark."
"Beyschlag, write out a whole message. I'll start with the SOS. Here goes."
"Do you think we sent it often enough?"
"How do I know?"
"I tried it ten times each way, with the switch up and the switch down."
"I don't actually know how fast these radio messages travel," Beyschlag said. "Faster than a horse can gallop, I'm sure. And the radio can travel at night, when a horse can't unless he knows the road. Like Heisel said, the radio likes to travel at night."
"So what do we do now?"
"Wait and hope that General Brahe sends somebody for us."
". . . for the soul of our late brother in Christ, Ulrich, who was born a duke of Württemberg and died in the flower of his youth as a baptized and confirmed child of his savior, giving full faith to the forgiving grace of his God and acceptance of His righteousness."
"He was unconscious when he died," Merckel muttered. "He wasn't doing any believing at all."
"Hush, Lutz, the pastor isn't done."
"Man born of woman is of few days and full of trouble. He springs up like a flower and withers away; like a fleeting shadow, he does not endure (Job 14:1–2).
"As for man, his days are as grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more (Psalm 103:15–16)."
General Brahe's chaplain looked up from his prayer book. "Take comfort, however, from the promise that is associated with these words."
"For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: but the word of the Lord endureth for ever (1 Peter 1:24–25)."
* * *
Friedrich laid his crutches down next to the stool. "I just wish," he said, "that the Lord could have seen fit to let our brother flourish and endure a little longer."
"It was a good funeral sermon." Eberhard rearranged his sling. "But, sometimes, other words seem more appropriate. Montaigne quoted some older writer as saying, 'It is no marvel that hazard has such power over us, since we live by hazard.' We die by hazard, as well, it seems."
"I like the other passage better."
"For, whatsoever some say, valor is all alike, and not one thing in the street or town, and another in the camp or field. A man should bear an illness in his bed as courageously as he does an injury in the field, and fear death no more at home in his house than abroad in an assault."
"I hope he didn't have time to be afraid at all. I hope that it all happened so fast that he didn't even see what hit him."
"The campaign was a great success," Botvidsson reported with satisfaction. "General Brahe was expecting a short, victorious war and that's what he got. The king—the emperor, I mean—is delighted and has extended his congratulations on behalf of the USE. According to the best intelligence we have received, the Sickingen family is headed for Bonn to take refuge with the archbishop elector of Cologne."
"I'm sure," Erik Stenbock said, "that dear Ferdinand will be delighted to have even more guests battening on his hospitality."
"Who is this 'McDonnell' in the cartoon in the Mainz newspaper?" Geraldin asked. He threw it across the breakfast table in the castle of Karl von Schlitz, imperial knight of Buchenland.
"It's Dennis," Deveroux answered. "Drunk as a skunk. Some damned reporter must have heard about what happened last month. The Swedes can't tell the difference between 'Denis McDonnell' and 'Dennis MacDonald.' "
Geraldin examined his fingernails. "Neither can most Irishmen. He spells it 'McDonnell' sometimes himself."
Deveroux snorted. "We have a perfect right to misspell our own names. I'm sure I've signed mine a half-dozen different ways. Foreigners should be more considerate." He pointed across the table. "It's a pretty good likeness, don't you think, Dennis? The drool? The spittle? The vomit? The—"
"Arrrgh!"
"We miscalculated, back in March," Butler groused. "If we'd had any idea that Nils Brahe was going to take his forces haring off into the southern Palatinate and northern Alsace, we could have done a proper raid into Fulda. We wouldn't have run into any serious opposition. That Fulda Barracks Regiment is nothing but a bad joke."
"Spilt milk." Deveroux looked at von Schlitz. "You are sure, really sure, that the up-timers and Schweinsberg are wandering around this territory, with only minimal guards, trying to make the peasants happy?"
Von Schlitz had to do quite a bit of persuasion before the Irishmen were willing to believe it.
Butler shook his head. "If Taaffe and Carew were here, they would be trying to persuade me that this behavior by the up-timers is a dispensation of divine providence. It's almost enough to make me believe them."
Felix Gruyard smirked.
"So then they sent Duke Ulrich's body home." Derek Utt leaned against the window in the conference room, looking at the other up-timers in Fulda. "At least, they sent it as far as Belfort in Mömpelgard. That will be Montbéliard on the wall map there—that's the way the French spelled it, up-time. The family has a chapel there. It was too warm for them to try to get it across the Rhine to Stuttgart. If they want to bury it in the capital of the duchy, long-term, I guess the procedure is to wait a couple of years. Eberhard's feeling horrible about the whole thing, like it was his fault."
"Damn," Joel Matowski said. "He was just a kid. The youngest of them, I mean. And since we headed off west just a couple of days before the guys were supposed to come up to Fulda, he never did get a look at the American way of life, such as it is out here in the boondocks. He really wanted to do that. I was sort of hoping I'd be able to get some leave and take them on a tour of Grantville."
"Yeah," Jeffie Garand answered. "Too bad. You'd have had an excuse to see Alice again, too. I'm sure you weren't thinking about that. Not at all. On the other hand . . ."
"What?"
"Gertrud adores me. But she's still a down-timer, and Ulrich of Württemberg was a duke, even if he was only fifteen and it seemed likely that he'd develop the family pot belly if he lived long enough. If they had shown up here in Barracktown, it would've been like having a rock star competition back up-time. I'd have been real happy to see his backside if you'd taken him off to get a taste of West Virginia in Thuringia."
Nils Brahe rapped his genuine up-time souvenir gavel on the table. Since it was a gift from Thomas Price Riddle of Grantville via his granddaughter Mary Kat and then via Derek Utt, to celebrate the acquisition of the Province of the Upper Rhine by the USE, he followed the rapping with a stern, English "Order in the Court."
The rest of the council looked at him blankly.
"The immediate results of the Congress of Copenhagen that concern us today pertain to the Province of the Main and the new Province of the Upper Rhine. Some of the correspondence we've received refers to the latter as the Upper Rhenish Province, but it is the same entity. Basically, for us here in Mainz, there's not much change. The king—the emperor—is keeping the Province of the Main under direct imperial administration, from the Fulda border down to the Rhine. The only real difference is that Frankfurt-am-Main is getting new rights to self-administration. Or, more precisely, Frankfurt is getting back its old privileges as an imperial city and seats in the USE parliament, one each in the House of Lords and House of Commons. We also have some negotiations to complete concerning the status of the former possessions of the archdiocese of Mainz over around Erfurt that now lie in the State of Thuringia-Franconia, and—"
"We do have to be careful," Botvidsson said.
"About what?"
"Do we have any firm direction from Chancellor Oxenstierna about how to handle the traditional rights of the king's Protestant allies whom he has placed, willy-nilly, into the Province of the Main now that it's a new, permanent entity of the USE? It was one thing for him to set up a temporary military administration of occupied territories. It's a problem of a different dimension for it to become a permanent civil government. Especially, I would point out, since you are still an appointed administrator rather than a man selected or elected by the Estates of the new province. Which we still have to set up—the Estates, I mean. I suppose we need to call one of these 'constitutional conventions' and establish a governmental structure. One that doesn't infringe on the traditional rights of . . ."
Stenbock and Ulfsparre started to chant in unison, imitating Oxenstierna's voice at the Congress of Copenhagen, "Hesse-Darmstadt, Solms, Isenburg, Gelnhausen, Hanau, Usingen, and Rieneck."
"Not to mention," Ulfsparre continued in his normal voice, "the now ex-rulers of each of the above, who aren't going to be anything more than members of a provincial House of Lords, like the one over in the SoTF, with the former count of Isenburg having to share and share alike with the mayor of Gelnhausen. It won't go over very well, I predict."
Brahe frowned at him.
"Five hours," Eberhard said at the Horn of Plenty that evening. "We sat at that table for five whole damn hours."
Hartmann Simrock raised one eyebrow. "Was it information you need to know?"
"Eventually. Not necessarily right this minute. None of what Brahe covered today makes much difference to us, personally." He waved generally in the direction of his brother Friedrich, who was at a different table with Margarethe and Theobald.
"Does that leave some of it or even a little bit of it that makes a difference to you personally?"
"Coming out of the Congress of Copenhagen? Sure." Eberhard reached back and pulled a newspaper off the bar counter. Simrock grabbed it by one corner and waved it around the tap room in the Horn of Plenty.
"This issue has a new cartoon about the Congress of Copenhagen. I think it's one of van de Passe's best. You can identify everyone important easily enough."
Hertling got up and came across the room, leaving Merckel and the others to their dice.
"It's probably by one of his sons," Theo said. "Simon and the younger Crispijn have both been working in Copenhagen the last few years."
Margarethe stuck out her tongue. "Don't be pompous."
"Here's Gustavus with Princess Kristina, here's King Christian with Prince Ulrik, there are Mike Stearns and Rebecca Abrabanel. Oxenstierna's the one with the piles of note cards about to fall over and bury him. Don Fernando in the Netherlands is peeking through one window and the Holy Roman Emperor through the other one. That's the archbishop-elector of Cologne and Duke Maximilian of Bavaria under the table with horns in their ears, eavesdropping." Simrock paused for breath.
"What are they doing?" Tata asked.
"Putting together the pieces of one of the up-timer 'jigsaw puzzles.' It's van de Passe's commentary on the way the emperor and Stearns threw together the new USE provinces. The crowned heads of Europe are playing with the local jurisdictions. But if you look closely, they're forcing the pieces into place, even if they don't fit quite right."
Eberhard nodded. "Like their maybe-it'll-happen-someday Province of Swabia. The pieces that the Swedes and up-timers want to cram in don't really fit at all. Did any of the rest of you read what Oxenstierna said about their 'future Province of Swabia, once it is pacified'?"
Simrock nodded. "A big chunk of the map. All of southwest Germany on the right bank of the Rhine, really, except for whatever Duke Bernhard may manage to slice off in the Breisgau and Baden."
Eberhard raised an eyebrow. "Did you notice the new imperial administrator for Swabia?"
Reichard Donner snorted. "Georg Friedrich—the margrave of Baden-Durlach. He's an old man—past sixty. It's no wonder that van de Passe drew him with white hair and a beard that makes him look like the up-time Santa Claus. He's not exactly an honorary appointment. He'll show up in Augsburg and go through the motions, but everybody expects that for all practical purposes, he'll delegate most of the work. He'll have to."
Friedrich stuck out his mug for another beer. "His heir's busy running their government-in-exile in Basel. And Christoph, his second son, is one hundred percent a soldier who doesn't have the patience to do it—administration and diplomacy and stuff like that."
"Georg Friedrich has a competent son-in-law," Simrock protested. "Count Wilhelm Ludwig of Nassau-Saarbrücken. Picking him as backup would build another bridge over to Frederik Hendrick in the Netherlands, too, since the Dutch stadholders are from the Nassau family."
"I know. But damn. The single biggest chunk of land in the new proposed 'Province of Swabia' is Württemberg. We . . ." Eberhard waved at Friedrich again. "Not only weren't we there—it would have been hard for us to travel, that's true—we were not even invited. The Congress of Copenhagen didn't even acknowledge that we exist. They didn't even hold any kind of a memorial for Ulrich's death. Not so much as an eulogy. Sometimes I think that Gustavus Adolphus just stuck us down here in Mainz, forgot about us, and doesn't want to be reminded."
"There's not much you can do about it."
"But there is something else I can do." Eberhard stood up on the bench and waved his good arm for attention. The various conversations dwindled down.
"My friends and colleagues. I have an announcement to make."
Kunigunde Treidelin and Philipp Schaumann kept arguing over their card game.
Reichard Donner rapped on the table. "Attention."
"As you may have noticed, my brother Friedrich is in love with Margarethe Pistora."
There were various shouts, hoots, and squalls of, "We've noticed."
"The rest of you, except Theobald, of course, probably don't know that he's actually offered to marry Margarethe—spoken to her father and all that. Papa Pistor is not impressed—as far as he is concerned, being Lutheran is a negative that far outbalances being a duke."
Friedrich snorted. "Especially a duke with a squashed foot and no lands or income left."
Eberhard ignored him. "That's 'hardly any lands and not much income.' We're still getting some money from the bits and pieces of estates our ancestors picked up in Alsace, or we couldn't pay for our beer, much less the rent for our sisters' townhouse in Strassburg."
"Anyhow!" Friedrich had picked that up from Jeffie Garand and used it whenever he could. It was such a useful word for a teenager. Depending on the tone of voice, it was appropriate for any of a dozen different situations.
"What's left of what used to be the bureaucrats of the duchy of Württemberg are against it, of course. The prospect wasn't so much of a strain for them to swallow before Ulrich was killed, but now there's just one spare, aside from the uncles and cousins. Except . . ."
He paused for dramatic effect.
"There isn't any spare at all any more. I'm the head of the family. I have given Friedrich permission to renounce his title—that's done, by the way, with all the legal paperwork signed, sealed, and filed—and I say that Friedrich and Margarethe can go ahead and get married."
The Mainz Committee of Correspondence, what there was of it, since Ursula Widder had gone back to the kitchen to bank the fires for the night, mostly applauded. Reichard Donner muttered, "Then why don't you go ahead and give yourself permission to marry Tata, you randy little twerp," using a different descriptive adjective, but not loudly enough for anyone but Justina to hear.
Then he sighed. The new universe created by the Ring of Fire was not a world of dreams. What had the up-time book said? Some animals are more equal than others—that was it. Even in this new universe, the daughter of a university-educated clergyman was considerably more equal to a former duke than the daughter of a man who was not the world's most efficient innkeeper was to a still-a-duke. He looked back up. Eberhard was, with some difficulty and a hand from Tata, climbing down off the table.
"So now," Theobald was saying to Simrock, "it's just a matter of sorting out the Lutheran versus Calvinist thing, which is likely to take a while, given the honorable chaplain our father's prejudices."
Simrock was talking to Eberhard. "Very charitable of you. I don't suppose all this has anything to do with your conclusion that you're not very likely to ever get Württemberg back, so why not?"
Hartmann Simrock was even more of a cynic than Donner. A young cynic, but a cynic.
"Umm," Tata snuggled against Eberhard under the duvet in her bed on the third floor of the Horn of Plenty. "You're so nice and warm." It was June, true. This particular June night, though, was not rare, as the English playwright had described a warm, sunny, June day. It was just like most of the rest of them had been—chilly, with drizzle, and penetrating damp rising up off the river. "I like their Major Utt."
"Why?"
"Have you seen his hair?"
"What there is of it," Eberhard admitted. "He's going bald."
"But what there is of it is red. Red red. Really red. If I could go stand next to him, I would look blonde in comparison."
"I like your hair the way it is."
"It's not funny. All the way through school, the other children called me Füchsin."
"Foxy is good. I think you're really foxy."
Eberhard liked Agathe Donner because she told him the truth. She never swore that she adored him passionately. She never declared that he was a great lover, which he was fairly sure that he was not. She never claimed that he was handsome. If she had, he would have doubted her. Among other things, he had been standing near to Major Utt for a good part of the day. What standing next to the up-timer made him feel was "short and dumpy."
He'd spent quite a bit of his life listening to girls, high-born or low-born, say flattering things to him just because he had been born the oldest son of the duke of Württemberg. They lied. He knew he wasn't tall, dark, handsome, or romantic.
Warm, though? He was willing to accept as strictly factual that he was nice and warm. He snuggled against Tata in return.
"For another thing, although not directly as a consequence of the actions taken by the archbishop of Cologne in regard to Essen . . ." Brahe paused and took a deep breath before he continued. The various members of his inner council looked at one another. "I have received a formal request from the archbishop of Mainz that he be allowed to return from exile in Bonn to his see here in Mainz."
"He has persuaded the up-timer who is, since last month, the 'cardinal-protector of the United States of Europe,' to get the emperor to give him a salva guardia." Botvidsson's mouth pursed with distaste at the thought of a "cardinal protector" in any political entity of which the king of Sweden was emperor.
Brahe, suppressing his developing personal opinion that any Vasa with a practical interest in some day maybe ruling Poland had better, as Derek Utt would say, "get over it" as far as Catholics, Calvinists, and miscellaneous sectarians were concerned, continued serenely. "Wamboldt von Umstadt expresses that he is willing to reach an accommodation with the Province of the Main similar to that which the authorities of the State of Thuringia-Franconia have reached with Abbot Johann Bernhard Schenk von Schweinsberg in Fulda. This will involve our sending a delegation to Fulda to gather more detailed information in regard to precisely what that accommodation involves before we commit ourselves to an agreement."
He turned a page over and handed his notes to Botvidsson. "Cover the rest of this, will you, Johan. I have another meeting scheduled."
"The archbishop also indicates that Franz von Hatzfeldt is, or will be, or may be—his phrasing is a bit vague, here—proffering a similar offer to the SoTF authorities in regard to the Diocese of Würzburg."
Botvidsson stuck up one finger. "The emperor has also requested that his administrators in Mainz take a particular interest in the status of the city of Wetzlar, since the Imperial Supreme Court has settled there rather than in Magdeburg."
Everyone realized that this was polite phrasing for, "make sure that the landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, however valuable an ally he may be, doesn't get his claws into it."
Botvidsson stuck up a second finger. "And since the deaths of counts Wolfgang Wilhelm and Philipp Wilhelm of Pfalz-Neuburg in the Essen war, with regard to their status as dukes of Jülich-Berg-Cleves-Mark, the ongoing inheritance controversies with Brandenburg, and the new developments in regard to the Republic of Essen . . ."
Duke Eberhard of Württemberg, now seated at the council table in deference to both his own services in the Upper Rhine campaign and his youngest brother's death, asked, "That doesn't have anything directly to do with us here, does it?"
"Not directly. But . . . derivatively. The heir to Jülich and Berg is now an infant, whose mother, Katharina Charlotte of Zweibrücken . . ."
"That's part of the Palatinate family," Eberhard whispered to Ulfsparre. "The French call it Deux Ponts, like that one Württemberg exclave can be either Mömpelgard or Montebéliard, depending on who's talking."
"Damn," Ulfsparre whispered back. "I hate the Rhineland."
"If you hate the upper Rhine, just wait until you get transferred someplace that you have to learn about the lower Rhine."
Ulfsparre frowned. "I already hate Elsass. Alsace, the French call it. It's annoying of them, like calling Lüttich by Liège. The Frenchies even call this city Mayence. They call Aachen Aix-la-Chapelle. They call Köln Cologne."
"The Dutch call it Keulen," Eberhard interrupted. "I saw that in a letter."
"Damn. A man no sooner finishes learning one language than he has to pick up another."
Botvidsson ignored the whispers. ". . . is the half-sister of the wife of Count Palatine Christian of Birkenfeld-Bischweiler, who has just been appointed by the emperor as his administrator of the new Province of the Upper Rhine."
"Different mothers," Duke Eberhard whispered. "Christian's wife's mother was a sister of Duke Henri de Rohan, the French Huguenot leader. He's in exile. He was in Venice, but I think he's in Lausanne now—Rohan, I mean, not Count Christian."
"This half-French, half-German stuff drives me nuts," Ulfsparre whispered back. "You were still sedated when they brought you out, but Sergeant Beyshlag told me that the owner of that farmhouse where the men took your brother Ulrich after he was injured had a French baptismal name and a German family name. His brother-in-law had a German baptismal name and a French family name. I tell you, it's crazy."
Ulfsparre couldn't seem to let it go. "Crazy," he repeated to Erik Stenbock over their beer after the meeting. "The whole Rhineland. With all due respect to Gustavus, why does he even want to include these stupid little patchwork territories down here in the southwest in the USE?"
"Merckweiler-Pechelbronn," Stenbock suggested mildly. "Jeffie Garand taught me a song from a 'musical play' performed once in their high school. The diva sings, "Oil. Oil! OIL!" getting louder and louder and louder. Most of the play makes bad jokes about small European countries, though. His best guess was that 'Lichtenberg' was supposed to be a combination of a couple of real small duchies. He didn't know which ones."
Ulfsparre was not to be diverted from his main complaint. "Look at Duke Eberhard's little CoC whore. The Donners came to Mainz from somewhere in the Pfalz."
"That's 'Palatinate' to the up-timers, my friend."
"They spell her name 'Agathe' like the French, but they pronounce it 'Agata' as if it was German. She is German." He winked. "Oooh, what a build."
"I wouldn't let Eberhard hear you call her a whore," Stenbock warned. "Her father's a halfway respectable innkeeper. She's not just an 'available' and the duke is fond of her, I think."
"Not saying it in his hearing doesn't keep me from thinking it." Ulfsparre shook his head. "He could do a lot better. It's not as if he'll be able to escort her to any of the social events that General Brahe will host once his wife and sister join him. Almost any family of the Mainz patriciate would be happy and honored for one of their daughters to serve as the duke of Württemberg's favored companion for as long as he is stationed in the city."
Nils Brahe's other meeting featured wine rather than beer, and a sumptuous lunch that had stretched well into the afternoon.
The longer he lived in the Rhineland, the more he appreciated wine rather than beer.
Derek Utt leaned back. "What do you think of this business with Wamboldt von Umstadt and Calixtus, by the way? Is it anything we'll have to worry about up in Fulda, since we've already worked things out with Schweinsberg? Do I need to bring it up with Wes?"
Nils Brahe stretched his lanky legs out somewhat farther under the table. "As Duke Ernst explains it to me—we correspond extensively—you are all sectarians. You have embraced 'universal sectarianism' as a way of life, the Catholics and Calvinists as wholeheartedly as the sectarians themselves, there not being enough Lutherans or adherents of the Church of England among you to make a significant difference. And, yes, I have heard that your wife's grandmother is a most fervent adherent of the Church of England."
"So's Mary Kat, actually." Derek Utt laughed. "Not quite as gung-ho as her grandma, who is busily restoring the abandoned Episcopalian church building and recruiting for a priest, but definitely pretty much committed. There were more of them up-time. More of them in the United States of America, I mean, not just in the whole world. Millions of them, Lutherans and Episcopalians. Several million of each. Maybe four, five, six million of each."
"In an overall population that was how large?"
"Umm. About two hundred eighty million, I think. They were just starting to take the new census the year of the Ring of Fire, but that's somewhere in the range of what they were predicting."
"Sects," Nils Brahe said firmly. "They were sects. Our best estimate of the population of the USE now is somewhere between twelve and fifteen million. It should be toward the larger end since the emperor's campaigns of last month in the northwest. Using a fifteen-million population base for the USE, proportionally, that would mean that we would have . . ." He paused for mental calculations. ". . . somewhere between two hundred thousand and a quarter million Lutherans in the USE, rather than, probably, eight to nine million. Up-time, Lutherans and Episcopalians were sects as much as your Methodists and your Baptists just as much as your Mormons and your Pentecostals. Just as much as our Mennonites and Socinians. Muselius in Grantville sent Duke Ernst a fascinating book by an up-time German named Ernst Troeltsch, found in the library of the Baptist pastor named Green. It's being reprinted in Jena and Muselius managed to get an advance copy. I've ordered one myself. Troeltsch maintained . . ."
Derek cocked his head to one side. "Just exactly how has Duke Ernst come to define the concept of 'universal sectarianism'? It's not something I've ever heard of."
"I believe he formulated it himself, based on various comments by Troeltsch," Brahe admitted. "Also after multiple readings of the proceedings of the Rudolstadt Colloquy. It doesn't just involve your concepts of separation of church and state—though, as a good Swedish Lutheran myself, I have to say that's drastic enough. Rather, there is the ingrained cultural concept—cultural, not a matter of constitutional law—as the up-time Lutheran speaker Gary Lambert phrased it at one point in the discussions, that 'everybody has the right to go to hell in his own way.' Which seems to be the fundamental religious belief among you—that you bear no responsibility for the salvation of anyone beyond the bounds and borders of your own 'denomination.' Which defines you all as sectarians, from his perspective, and mine, and the emperor's, no matter how you think of yourselves."
"And we are talking about this because?"
Brahe refilled his wine glass. "It's terribly Mennonite, really—it's a quintessentially sectarian perspective. There is the question of what we are going to do about it. No one can doubt that it is arising in everyone's mind."
"Perhaps not everyone's," Derek said. "Only consider Sergeant Garand."
Brahe snorted. "In the mind of every aware politician, let us say then. No matter how influential Michael Stearns is at present, the fact remains—there are only about three thousand of you up-timers in the USE's new population of fifteen million or so, and your three thousand are divided into multiple sects. There are three or four million more people at the emperor's disposal if one adds in all of Scandinavia, which it is only reasonable to presume that we may do since Ahrensbök and the revived Union of Kalmar, all Lutheran, add weight to the several million in Germany. So. Given that Wettin, also, is Lutheran and may become prime minister after the upcoming election, what is to prevent the establishment of Lutheranism as a state church throughout the USE? Please do not say, 'Larry Mazzare.' "
Derek laughed and reached for the bottle. "Did someone say that? Stearns is willing to live with Gustav's insistence on some kind of a Lutheran state church in the USE, if it's nothing more than a bow in the direction of 'first among equals.' The sort of thing that the Church of England had turned into, up-time, or the Lutherans in Denmark. They're writing that into the constitution, knowing perfectly well that he handles it differently in Sweden and probably won't ever change the way he handles it in Sweden."
Brahe nodded. "As far as Sweden goes, and will continue to go for that matter, 'co-terminous church and society' might describe it quite well."
"It's not that anyone thinks that the Lutherans and the rest of them here in the USE are going to learn to 'love one another, right now.' You might say that religious intolerance falls into the category of an undoubted fact. It might be more reasonable for you to ask exactly what Stearns thinks is going to prevent that state church, once the constitution establishes it, from going ahead and persecuting the rest of the religions in the USE no matter what the written constitution says. Ask me what's likely to happen in a real world situation, so to speak. Did you read that book that Mary Kat sent?"
Brahe smiled. "What were the motives for persecution? Professor Roland H. Bainton, clearly a most learned man among the up-timers and a sectarian of the Quaker persuasion himself, gives three prerequisites: '(1) The persecutor must believe that he is right; (2) that the point in question is important; (3) that coercion will be effective.' Personally, I am inclined to think that the third point will turn out to be the USE's saving grace from the perspective of you up-timers. Not toleration as a matter of conviction, for most people, but rather as a matter of sheer practicality, as I have learned, sometimes rather painfully, during these last eighteen months of administering a Catholic archdiocese. Duke Ernst has made it quite clear, in his letters, that his analysis is taking him in that direction. Whether or not he can persuade his older brother is, or course, another question."
"I have admit to some curiosity as to why we're discussing the problem right at the moment."
"That goes back to your first question of this conversation—about whether your people in Fulda need to be concerned about Wamboldt von Umstadt."
Utt nodded. "Starting point. When the Swedes took Mainz in 1632, the archbishop of Mainz, Anselm Casimir Wamboldt von Umstadt, chose exile in Cologne."
"In Bonn, to be more precise. Under the protection of the archbishop-elector of Cologne, Or, in other words, under the protection of Ferdinand, the younger brother of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria. He is now reconsidering. I have a letter. Preliminary. Exploratory. Tentative, so to speak. Considering the circumstances under which he might be allowed to return to Mainz."
"Ah, considering, perhaps, such circumstances as those under which we permitted Schweinsberg to come back to Fulda? You might want to talk to Wes Jenkins. He was more in on the discussions between Piazza and Schweinsberg than I was. To be honest, I wasn't in on them at all. The army doesn't make policy. It just carries it out."
"If you say so." Nils Brahe was far from fully convinced on that point.
Botvidsson appeared at the door, giving the kind of wave that meant "your next appointment is waiting." They both stood up.
"Thanks for everything," Utt said. "I'll be heading back to Fulda tomorrow. I'll see you again one of these days, I guess."
"Taking those boys with you," Brahe stipulated.
"Taking them with me, not to mention their entourage. That was an interesting idea of yours, appointing Duke Eberhard to investigate Grantville's arrangement with Schweinsberg. I could have just had Ed Piazza send you a copy of the agreement, you know."
"Oh, yes. I know. I most definitely know."
"So the archbishop-elector of Mainz is really willing to drop the 'prince' part of his title in order to come back," Simrock announced. "At least, that's what the newspapers are reporting."
Eberhard knew perfectly well that it was true, since he had been at the council meeting at which General Brahe had discussed it, but he couldn't say that, since it hadn't been announced. "I guess," he said, "that I should have held my breath."
"I get confused every time I look at that picture of him," Joel Matowski grabbed the paper. "Wamboldt von Umstadt, I mean. See."
Reichard Donner looked across the bar at the Horn of Plenty. "Why?"
"I'm Catholic myself."
Theo Pistor opened his mouth; then closed it again after Eberhard and Tata both gave him a good glare.
Joel caught it though. "Didn't know that, did you? Thought I was human, maybe? What's your beef? Simrock's Catholic and you're friends with him. Jeffie doesn't belong to any church at all, if that makes you feel better."
From Theo's expression, it clearly didn't.
Jeffie yawned and looked at him. "I think the CoC still has quite a way to go with you, boy."
Joel made a "stuff it" motion at him and looked back at Reichard. "I guess I think of archbishops looking sort of like the pictures of John Paul II that were in our CCD classroom when Ed Piazza taught us. I don't think of them as looking like leprechauns."
"Leprechauns?"
"The little Irish critters. Finian's Rainbow. It's the little pointy face, the little pointy goatee. The little pointy points on his moustache. Really—I have trouble getting my mind around an archbishop with a moustache at all. The little pointy points on his collar. Most of all, the big widow's peak point where his hair is receding."
"CCD? Who was John Paul II?"
Joel decided that Herr Donner was likely to have a very informative evening. He opened his mouth.
Joel had a very informative evening, too. He had never heard of the synergistic controversy.
"Well, I hadn't either," Theo said cheerfully, "considering that it hasn't happened yet. But Papa has been collecting everything he can afford to buy about what will be happening—would have been happening—you know what I mean—in the churches for the next twenty-five years or so. For as long as he's likely to live. He wants to do whatever he can to make sure that things he doesn't like don't happen. Won't happen here. Does that make sense?"
Jeffie nodded. "Call in the cavalry and head them off at the pass."
"There's not a lot he'll be able to do about Calixtus, probably, considering that he's teaching at a Lutheran university in Brunswick, while Papa's a Calvinist. But he'll see if he can get Landgrave Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel to talk to the Brunswickers and see if they'll put pressure on the Helmstedt faculty to fire the man. If any of the dukes can be brought to see the dangers of this 'Pietism' movement that's going to develop . . . Calixtus is a natural target for the Flacians. Without a university base, he'll have a lot less prestige if he keeps going around spouting this stuff about ecumenism. Papa has written to his former teacher, Gomar, to see if he'll intervene with Fredrik Hendrik in the Netherlands."
"Gomar," Reichard muttered. "He's as old as the hills. He must be seventy if he's a day. Can't you deal with modern writers?"
"Donner, you're the one who keeps quoting Althusius at us. He's just as old." Jeffie grinned. "I looked him up. Wes spent some of Fulda's stingy budget on a set of reprint encyclopedias. Bet you weren't sure that I can read and write."
"More to the point," Theo said, "Gomar opposes toleration for Catholics. And for Jews. And for Protestants who don't follow Calvin. And for Calvinists who aren't supralapsarians."
"Papa's even right-wing for a Gomarist," Margarethe added, as cheerily as if she were saying that Chaplain Pistor liked ice cream.
"Papa sticks to his principles."
"Hey, Theo," Jeffie slapped him on the shoulder. "You're in the CoC. You're supposed to be in favor of religious tolerance. That sounds more like you agree with your father."
"Well, I do agree with Papa—at least about some things. I guess I can learn to tolerate toleration, if I have to, but that doesn't mean I'm going to compromise my own beliefs. I can put up with the fact that some people are obstinate in their errors, but I don't have to like it."
"Papa can't even put up with it," Margarethe said. "That's where he and Theo are different."
"The Flacians can't put up with it, either," Eberhard said, "when it comes to Lutherans. Württemberg has enough problems right now without another knockdown, drag out, theological battle over Calixtus and his ideas."
"Write to Count Ludwig Guenther," Joel recommended. "Maybe he can give you some pointers." He turned a page. "See the new cartoon?"
Sure enough, it was another van de Passe. This time, the scene involved a three-branched hall of mirrors showing endless past and potential future Lutheran theological colloquies in one direction, endless past and future Catholic councils in another, and endless to infinite ecumenical conversations in the middle. At the juncture stood Count Ludwig Guenther of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, wearing the backwards baseball cap that had become his trademark in the various illustrations, even though the dignified middle-aged nobleman had only donned the item upon one brief occasion in real life.
"He's a Mennonite, you know," Simrock said.
"Not Count Ludwig Guenther," Eberhard protested.
"No, not the count. Van de Passe is a Mennonite."
Jeffie perked up. "I thought they were all farmers who wear funny, flat hats."
"That was up-time, in the United States and Canada, after they'd been put through the wringer for another three hundred fifty years or so. Hey, the University of Mainz bought a reprint of the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, too." Simrock thought a minute. "Or maybe those were Amish. Anabaptist sectarians, anyway. In the here and now, the Mennonites are mostly pretty urban and pretty uppity."
Tata clapped. "Uppity like 'uppity women'?"
"You got it. Uppity. Van de Passe has moved around a lot. He left Antwerp when they expelled the Protestants. He left Aachen when they expelled the Protestants. He managed about twenty years in Cologne before they expelled the Protestants. He did engravings and his wife ran a book and print shop to help support the family."
Joel winced. "Expelled, expelled, expelled. That sounds like a liturgy. I apologize on behalf of my church."
"Why?" Theo wrinkled his forehead. "If the Calvinists had expelled him, I wouldn't apologize for it."
"I think you should," Margarethe said, "if they had. But as it happened, they didn't get a chance. The Catholics beat them to it."
Joel didn't feel exactly like leading a cheer for the Counter-Reformation. Thank God for the USE's newly hatched cardinal protector—once known as Father Mazzare.
Friedrich looked at the morning edition with delight. "It's the first time I've ever been in the newspaper," he exclaimed.
"Father saw it too," Margarethe said. "He went off to file a complaint with General Brahe."
Eberhard snatched it away. "The quality of the cartoon doesn't quite measure up to a van de Passe."
"Hey, a person has to be really influential, politically, to earn a van de Passe cartoon. How many people outside of our family will really care that I have renounced my title? Or that you let me?"
"More than you would dream," Theo predicted. "Papa had Georg Wulf von Wildenstein in tow. He intends to get the landgrave of Hesse-Kassel involved on the grounds that Margarethe is one of his subjects."
"How did the newspaper find out?" Justina asked. "That's a better question."
"I like it," Reichard said. "Good publicity for the Horn of Plenty. Good example in regard to the equality of all men. The image of Margarethe as leading Brillo on a leash is particularly good, given the current events in Franconia. But who drew the cartoon?"
Every head in the taproom turned toward Hartmann Simrock.
"If it will make you feel better, you may consider their transfer to the Fulda Barracks Regiment in the SoTF forces as a disciplinary measure," Brahe said. "It is my sincere belief that the newspapers will make less furor about the title renunciation and morganatic marriage if they appear to have taken place under the aegis of the up-timers."
Colonel von Zitzewitz had not enjoyed having the young dukes of Württemberg under his command, but losing them was a considerable blow to his prestige, so on balance he was not happy.
"Mainz will be more tranquil without their presence, right now. Fulda will do very well and Utt has agreed that he will take them." Since von Zitzewitz didn't know, Brahe saw no reason to mention that he had been trying to palm this particular simmering pot of trouble off on Fulda for three months.
Zitzewitz inclined his head.
"Just think," Botvidsson added. "There is some consolation. Their friends Simrock and Pistor have patriotically volunteered for the army also, as a gesture of solidarity with Friedrich the ex-duke, since neither of them has a title to renounce. You might have had two more radical CoC sympathizers among your junior officers."
The colonel began to perceive the benefits that would compensate for his losses. He inclined his head again and backed out of the room.
Botvidsson mentioned that he needed a draft memo for communicating the information about the transfer of the young dukes to the king. To the emperor, that was. They were, after all, dukes. Or, in one case, had been a duke just yesterday.
"Bury it," Brahe said. "Bury it somewhere between a list of statistics on how many improved latrines we have constructed and a report on how many of the draft horses have gone down with colic. In front of the latrine statistics, put a memo on the training of city gate guards. Behind the horse colic, attach a discussion of how we are handling the directive that we are to get rid of the train of camp followers when the army is moving. Do not include anything about the renunciation of titles, and I see no real reason to pester the king with Pistor's complaints about the marriage. The chaplain is a Calvinist, after all, and so is his daughter, so what concern is her marriage to Gustavus Adolphus?
"I understand."
"Make sure the communications center is aware that this information in these reports is not urgent and that far from having a courier ride hard, much less utilizing the radio or any other innovative modern technology, definitely not going to the expense of railways or planes, this is the type of material that best travels by way of what Major Utt calls 'a slow boat to China.' "
On the theory that he did not customarily bring every new recruit to Wes Jenkins's attention, Derek Utt determined that the transfers were a strictly regimental matter. He buried the names of his four new recruits—well, nine new recruits, counting Corporal Hertling and the four goons, er, bodyguards, er, experienced soldiers—in a list of quite a number of other new recruits, which he sent off attached to a non-urgent report to Scott Blackwell in Würzburg, from which destination it might eventually make its way to someone in Grantville. The only special note he made for Blackwell next to their names was "CoC."
"Papa won't give me permission to marry, and I can't get married in Mainz without it." Margarethe pouted while she pitted cherries.
"Not to mention that Friedrich is in Fulda. That really makes it more difficult for you to get married." Tata picked up another onion and started to dice it for the noonday stew.
"So you understand." Margarethe's tears might have been real. Equally well, they might have been the result of standing next to the onion board.
"Papa and Mama don't understand how much I miss Eberhard either," Tata sniffed. "It was very unsympathetic and unfeeling of Major Utt to refuse to take us along. Especially Margarethe, since she's going to get married. We hope. Doesn't he have any sympathy for romance?"
Since the question was rhetorical, no one answered it, but Kunigunde Treidelin and Ursula Widder made sympathetic noises. Both of them had succumbed to a spurt of unusual sentimentalism after Eberhard's dramatic announcement of the forthcoming marriage in the Horn of Plenty taproom.
"So it's obvious that we need to go to Fulda. Isn't it, Tante Kuni?"
"Maybe I could help." Kunigunde looked at Ursula. "I have a little money hidden away."
"In case of a rainy day," Ursula said.
"Don't be silly. There are a lot of rainy days, even in summer." Kunigunde had a literal mind. "In case the armies come again and we have to flee."
"Do you have a wedding dress?" Ursula asked.
Margarethe shook her head. "I don't have any money of my own, ever. Papa used to give Theo money and he would share it with me, but since Papa's been so annoyed with Theo recently, he won't give him anything. He even refused to pay for his tuition at the university for another term. He was going to send him to some awful Calvinist Hochshule. That's really the main reason he volunteered for the army. He was broke."
"Somehow I didn't think it was patriotism," Ursula said.
"Who would?" Tata picked up another onion. "Simrock volunteered because his uncle at the newspaper, who's also his guardian, told him it would be better for him to get out of Mainz, since somebody investigating the riot at Sybilla's funeral has figured out that he planted the article."
"I was going to be married once," Ursula said. "We lived in the Palatinate, then. We had waited so long, because my fiancé had to support his mother. Then the elector agreed to become king of Bohemia and my fiancé went to Prague as a wagoner in their glorious procession. He didn't come back and didn't come back. He died there, at the first Battle of White Mountain. I was going to be married in a red dress."
Tata dropped her onion and hugged Ursula. It might have been the onion juice on her hands that made the older woman's eyes water. Ursula hugged her back and turned to Margarethe. "I'll buy you a brand new dress to be married in. It will be cherry red and you will look quite lovely."
The dress cost more than they expected, which is the way of gorgeous dresses, even though Kunigunde got a good bargain on the fabric and Ursula knew a seamstress who didn't overcharge and so far had avoided the notice of the tailors' guild.
"We don't have enough money left," Kunigunde complained. "Not enough for a safe trip. We need to be able to trust the driver you ride with and make sure that there are some respectable families traveling in the same group. Trustworthy carters don't come cheap."
They dug into the monthly kitchen budget for the inn. The patrons of the Horn of Plenty were going to get rather meager fare for the rest of July.
The girls looked more than pleased with themselves when a freight wagon deposited them and their possessions in front of the Fulda Barracks a week later.
"Ah." Dagmar Nilsdotter was in tears as she held her husband's hand. "What a beautiful wedding, Helmuth. What a lovely bride. My heart is strangely moved. Strangely warmed."
Sergeant Hartke was not quite so volubly impressed, but he did admit that both Lieutenant Friedrich Württemberger and Margarethe Pistora appeared to be rather delighted with both themselves and the situation. They had just taken advantage of the SoTF's liberal citizenship policy, unusually low age of majority, and practice of "universal sectarianism" by getting married in the Barracktown sutlery in a ceremony presided over by the mayor of Barracktown, otherwise known as Sergeant Helmuth Hartke, who for this purpose was a duly licensed civilian celebrant.
"Not bad, as ceremonies go," Simrock said. "And Venus herself ministers resolution and hardiness unto tender youth as yet subject to the discipline of the rod, and teaches the ruthless soldier the soft and tenderly effeminate heart of women . . ."
"Montaigne again, I presume?" Jeffie Garand leaned back against the wall, looking toward the entrance. On one side of the door, Merckel and Kolb, on the other side Heisel and Bauer, were watching the room attentively while trying their best to look like casual wedding guests.
Simrock nodded.
"You're quoting out of context," Theo warned. "He ended that sentence with 'in their mothers laps.' He wasn't talking about weddings."
Dagmar turned to Duke Eberhard. "Your brother looks so handsome in his uniform, Captain Your Grace."
He smiled. "I was just thinking that Friedrich actually looks rather like a large salmon fillet in that orange-ish uniform, not to mention that he clashes badly with Margarethe's cherry red dress, but I'm not in any position to complain, since I'm was wearing an orange-ish uniform myself. But he does look handsome, even if he is still on crutches."
"Is the foot very bad?" someone behind them asked.
"Once General Brahe's people caught up to us at Weselberg, the medic prevented gangrene." Hertling snagged a piece of thin, folded and rolled dough filled with some sweet fruit off a passing tray. "The foot itself—he will always have to wear a very tight, heavy boot to protect it. The bones are not right. General Brahe's regiment had a medic, not an up-time miracle-making surgeon. When he is an old man, he will be predicting the weather on the basis of how much his foot aches."
"This food is great." Jeffie looked around. "Who cooked it? Who arranged all this?"
Simrock patted a nearby reddish head. "Tata arranged it. She's been helping with wedding receptions since she was a toddler, whenever her family wasn't on the run and had an inn to settle down in. She just snapped her fingers and it happened."
"It was a bit more complicated than that. You're right though. Riffa's mother is a terrific cook."
"Once upon a time," Jeffie said. "Once upon a time, long ago, for my high school graduation, to be precise, Mom took me and Justin to Las Vegas."
"Where is Las Vegas? What is Las Vegas?"
"It is, was, will be a city in Nevada. I'm just thinking. I do that sometimes." Jeffie turned around and called, "Frau Hartke."
"My name is Dagmar Nilsdotter. Hartke is my husband."
"Well, then, Ms. Nilsdotter. Sorry, but that just doesn't sound very respectful to say to Gertrud's mom. How many of these do they have in Fulda, now? These civil weddings, I mean?"
"Oh, many. Two or three a week, perhaps, because people come from many miles away to have Helmuth marry them, because many villages do not have civil celebrants licensed yet. Any mayor may become one, but they have to apply and be approved. Most priests and pastors will not marry young people without the consent of their parents, even if it is legal."
"Thanks a lot." He followed Simrock's example in patting the top of Tata's head. "I really ought to talk to you and Riffa's mom sometime this week. You could make a mint if you set up a Vegas-style wedding chapel here."
Gertrud kicked his ankle.
Eberhard put his arm around Tata's waist. "Hands off, guys." He sighed. "I wish that Ulrich could have been here."
The four goons were moving to block the entrance.
Theo turned around, peering out the window. "We have more company."
"I should never accepted Donner's offer." Marcus Pistor's voice shrilled into a register that an Italian castrato would have envied.
"What offer? It's not Donner who just married your daughter." Jeffie was enjoying himself.
"His offer to use the Horn of Plenty to hold services for the Calvinist civilians in Mainz." The shrill was now accompanied by tiny globules of spit. "If I had performed only my duties as a military chaplain, my son would never have been seduced by the doctrines of the Committee of Correspondence and my daughter would never have met this outrageous Swabian . . ."
He paused, at loss for a suitable epithet. "Who are you?"
"Sergeant Jeffrey Garand, at your service, Your Reverence. Or however a reverend is properly addressed. I'm a bit vague on churchly etiquette. You can call me Jeffie."
Pistor did not respond to this friendly overture.
Jeffie chatted on. "At home, 'Mr. Whoever-it-is' usually doesn't offend a preacher, no matter what church he's from. It wouldn't even have offended Father Mazzare, but I did know to use 'Father' when he came around."
"Mazzare," exploded from the man with Pistor.
"How may we introduce you, My Lord?" Sergeant Hartke, standing behind Jeffie, had read enough from the man's demeanor and clothing that he decided to ante the forms of address up a step, hoping that would be sufficient.
"Georg Wulf von Wildenstein, in the service of the landgrave of Hesse-Kassel."
Hartke bowed. "Presumably, you wish to meet with . . ." He raised his eyebrows.
"I demand to meet with Major Utt," Pistor shrieked.
"No, Jenkins," von Wildenstein contradicted him. "Jenkins is the administrator. We must meet with Jenkins."
"Either or both of them should know better than to permit the marriage of a minor daughter without the permission of her father to a suitor not of her faith who is an . . ." Pistor still couldn't produce the suitable epithet.
"Ex-duke," Jeffie said. "If Lieutenant Württemberger hadn't given up his title, he would outrank you both. His brother still does outrank you both. Maybe he even outranks a landgrave. I'm not sure of that, but I think so. Eberhard was best man, so someone's in charge here. Anyway, Margarethe was eighteen last month, so she's of age under SoTF law."
"That went pretty smoothly," Geraldin said. "One abbot, all neatly trussed up and loaded on a small hay cart. It's pretty fair hay, too. The horses should appreciate it."
"What about the other one?" MacDonald asked.
"Leave him down there. Get back to where you were supposed to meet the others. I'm on my way to Bonn."
MacDonald shrugged and headed back to meet Butler and Deveroux. They'd need to fetch Gruyard away from von Schlitz's and head back to Bonn right now. Not only was every country road and cow path in Fulda suddenly crawling with people searching for them, but once Geraldin delivered Schweinsberg into the custody of Ferdinand of Bavaria, the archbishop would be wanting the services of his torturer. Right now. Not the day after tomorrow, much less next week.
"Theobald will not be twenty years old until December. The army of the State of Thuringia-Franconia should not have accepted his enlistment without my authorization."
"They shouldn't have, but they did." Von Wildenstein was getting tired of this.
"How can they permit a child to do something as significant as change his citizenship? Children are young. Children stand in need of parental guidance. Children . . ."
". . . become adults at the age of eighteen in the SoTF. Unless you can persuade the USE parliament to pass a law overriding that, or persuade the Reichsgericht in Wetzlar to rule that people cannot change their citizenship from one state in the USE to another . . ."
Von Wildenstein's voice trailed off. His face brightened. "But these decisions about citizenship and the age of majority were placed by the up-timers in their constitution before the establishment of the USE—before November 1633. Since then, they are no longer an independent principality within a federation, but merely one of the provinces of the USE, even if they choose to call themselves a 'state' instead. I have been informed that in the up-time, some of the 'states' of the United States of America actually chose to call themselves 'commonwealths.' I don't know why, but essentially it made no difference. Their relation to the national government was the same. Thus, can the SoTF even offer its own citizenship any more?"
"Brilliant, absolutely brilliant." Pistor jumped up. "Most of the time, I am simply exhausted by trying to keep up with how quickly everything is changing in our world. This time, though, perhaps the changes will prove to be beneficial. I shall consult a lawyer right away and file a petition in Wetzlar. If you can persuade the landgrave of Hesse to take an interest, perhaps the imperial supreme court will expedite the consideration of my case."
"Perhaps it will." Von Wildenstein stood up. "In practice, however, that will mean that the justices will issue a decision twenty-five years from now rather than fifty years from now. For the time being, I am afraid, I cannot perceive any immediate way to reverse your children's . . . unfortunate actions." He turned around. "Let me make a purely practical comment. It is absolutely certain that you will not be able to retrieve your daughter Margarethe's virginity by means of a legal remedy."
"No one among the Catholic theologians, Lutheran theologians, Calvinist theologians, or sectarians, much less the small number of secularists who are becoming more vocal with every passing day, seems to be very enthusiastic about Wamboldt von Umstadt's initiatives. Few of them appear to be favorably impressed by Calixtus's ideas, either, not even when Wamboldt von Umstadt endorses them."
Nils Brahe yawned. "Botvidsson, there are moments when you display a positive genius for understatement." He rubbed his eyes. "Perhaps I should see about getting spectacles. Francisco Nasi told me that his have proved very helpful. Do you have the list I asked for?"
"The one delineating possible complications if we permit the archbishop of Mainz to return?"
"No, Johan, the one about the levels of likelihood that the cow may someday jump over the moon. Yes, please, that one."
Botvidsson shuffled some papers. "One item that I have not included here is that the new Residentz he began constructing in 1628 is a messy site full of holes and mud. It is an attractive nuisance to children, who endanger themselves by playing in it. It is an attractive nuisance to apprentices, who go there after dark and engage in entertainments of which their masters disapprove. It . . ."
". . . needs to be either flattened and turned into a public park, or completed. In the event that it is completed, the archbishop will no longer have any need of such a large combination of living quarters for himself and his staff and administrative offices, since the Province of the Main has assumed many of those duties—defense, the court system, real estate record administration for all property other than that directly owned by the archdiocese. Do you suppose Wamboldt von Umstadt would be open to considering an arrangement by which we take over the derelict site and construct our own badly-needed government center there, while assigning him . . ." Brahe frowned. ". . . something else. Think about what 'something else' might possibly be, would you, Johan. That's a nice central location."
Botvidsson made a note. "Now, as to the list. First, there's the problem concerning the Jewish community in Worms. I can provide you with details of that."
"Please do. In a separate memo. Can you make it short?"
"Unfortunately, no. It's complicated."
"Life is complicated. Next point."
"All of the imperial cities that haven't been acknowledged as independent city-states by the USE, not just Nürnberg, are worried about their status after what happened at the Congress of Copenhagen. It's entirely possible that a coalition of the smaller imperial cities may make common cause with dispossessed ecclesiastical princes to lobby for some arrangement similar to the one that the imperial knights and independent monasteries had in the defunct Reichstag, by which they did not hold individual seats, but elected one of their number to represent them and cast a vote on their behalf. Nürnberg is large enough, of course, that if it joined the USE, it would almost certainly be acknowledged as a city-province like Augsburg and Ulm, but . . ."
"Noted," Brahe said. "Prepare me a separate memo on that, will you. Let's get to the rest of the points. I've been at this desk for . . ." He peered outside into the gathering twilight. "The days are getting shorter, but it's safe to say that I've put in a fourteen-hour day so far."
Botvidsson moved on to the next sheet of paper. "To return to the topic we were discussing earlier. To borrow a colorful phrase from Major Utt, it appears that Cardinal-Protector Mazzare has 'told him to get on the stick and do something ecumenical real soon now.' It appears, in fact, that Mazzare has talked to Prime Minister Stearns. If the archbishop wants an imperial salva guardia for his return to Mainz, he first has to agree to work, not only with Calixtus, but to send a representative—possibly several representatives—as 'observers,' at the next Lutheran theological colloquy."
"Next Lutheran theological colloquy? They were at it from January through May. Count Ludwig Guenther of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt reported the results at the Congress of Copenhagen."
Botvidsson looked at his superior with some pity. "But, sir. Everybody pretty much believes that the king—the emperor—will move against Saxony and Brandenburg in the spring. Then it will all have to be done over again, factoring in the practical problem that the electoral family of Brandenburg is Calvinist and the heir is the nephew of Gustav's queen. The next Lutheran colloquy must face reality. Under the USE constitution, although it grants Lutheranism 'state church' status, it does so in such a way that the emperor must either formally abolish the 1555 Peace of Augsburg or somehow integrate the Calvinists and sects into it."
Brahe nodded. "Either way, Lutheranism will lose the privileged position it has held under it, ending up with—as our friend Major Utt might say, 'all of the flash and none of the cash.' "
"Correct," Botvidsson admitted. He smiled. "But, then, so will the Catholics, which is one reason, I'm sure, that Mazzare wants archiepiscopal representatives there to watch the Lutherans while it happens."
By September, the Barracktown CoC meetings had moved from the Hartke cabin to the main room of the sutlery. This was partly because they had quite a few more members than they had two months earlier. This was partly because Gertrud did, after all, have several younger half-siblings. Dagmar thought they had a right to do their lessons and play their games in peace. It was partly because the meetings sometimes became rather raucous. Mostly, however, it was because Riffa's mother was such a good cook.
"What I think," Tata began.
"What she thinks," Jeffie echoed.
"What they think," Joel Matowski said, pointing at Friedrich, Tata, and Margarethe.
"Is pretty much what the Committees of Correspondence think, at least as far as the Fulda Barracks Regiment is concerned." Eberhard laughed.
"Well, it is," Tata said. "We're the organizers here, just like my father is in Mainz. We keep our ears to the ground, our eyes on the prize, our fingers busy corresponding with the leaders of the Ram Rebellion in Franconia, our posters of Brillo and Ewegenia posted, and any other description you can think of to indicate that we are true sons and daughters of Gretchen Richter."
"Have you ever seen Henry Dreeson's house?" Joel shook his head. "No, don't answer that literally. I know that you haven't. It was a rhetorical question, Tata. You have an unfortunately literal mind. Gretchen doesn't need any more sons and daughters. She has a quiver full already, to borrow biblical language."
"Ideological sons and daughters," Tata answered with dignity. "Disciples. Followers."
"Pains in the . . ."
Margarethe slapped Jeffie's ear. "Watch your language. You are in the presence of a respectable married lady."
"I am? Where is she? Ow! Gertrud, she'd already swatted me. You didn't have to slap me, too."
"What I started to say was—"
"What she started to say was . . ."
"Jeffrey Garand, if you don't stop that, I swear that I will hang you."
"I apologize, teacher. I swear. Only pardon me this time and I promise to be good forevermore."
"It's not really a good idea to make promises that you can't keep," Eberhard commented.
"I might be good forevermore. Who knows?"
"Try, 'until Tuesday at noon.' It has a higher level of probability."
The door swung open.
"Hey," Jeffie said, "it's the mailman."
"With news, I'm sorry to say."
"Why?"
"It's just in from Mainz, by way of Frankfurt. Hoheneck, the Probst at the St. Petersburg estate of Fulda Abbey, arrived in Mainz. He says that Archbishop Ferdinand of Cologne had Schweinsberg tortured to death by a man named Gruyard. We took a casualty. There won't be another rescue. No legends like in your 'westerns.' The cavalry won't be riding out to bring him home."
For several minutes, the meeting lost whatever semblance of order it had ever possessed.
"Tata," Friedrich said. "What were you going to say before David came in?"
"We need a publicity campaign. We need to make everyone aware of the contribution of the common man—and woman, of course—and ordinary citizens of Buchenland to the rescue of the kidnapped administrators." She threw a kiss to Joel.
"We need newspaper articles." She pointed to Theo. "We need cartoons." She pointed at Simrock. "Actually, we need better cartoons than you draw, but beggars can't be choosers and you do have a knack for making the faces easy to recognize."
"But everyone knows that the Fulda Barracks Regiment marched out bravely, singing its anthem, and rescued Wes and Clara. That's already been in all the papers."
"Anthem, schmanthem," Riffa zur Sichel said. "They spend a lot more time singing naughty lyrics set to the theme song from the 'Bridge over the River Kwai' in every language any man in the barracks has ever heard of than they do to singing their anthem."
"It's all very well to give credit to the regiment, and they did go marching out, but so did a lot of civilians. We need a campaign to give credit to the housewives, to the farm boys, to the . . ."
Eberhard laughed. "Although it may be covetousness that settles in the mind of a shop apprentice, brought up in idleness and ease, and gives him so much assurance that he does not hesitate to leave his home-bred life, forego his place of education," he paused and waved to Theo and Simrock, "and enter into a small boat, yielding himself to the mercy of the blustering waves, merciless winds, and wrathful Neptune, yet it is also true that ambition teaches discretion and wisdom."
"Montaigne again, I assume?" Jeffie said.
"Yes."
David Kronberg, Riffa's husband, otherwise known as the mailman although he was actually a post office clerk, shook his head. "What Eberhard was hinting, Tata, is that even though we're willing to admit that a lot of the searchers volunteered just because they wanted to help, still—there was a reward out. Your publicity campaign is going to have to work around that."
She glared at them both. "We'll manage."
Derek Utt sat on his horse, watching, as Veronica—Gretchen's grandma, Henry Dreeson's wife, and terror of the known universe—disembarked onto the pier and greeted Henry, who was halfway through his goodwill tour of Buchenland County, SoTF, in preparation for the upcoming elections. While the crowd watched Veronica and Henry, he switched his eyes to the man dressed all in black in the back of the boat.
A couple of other passengers got off. Veronica, bless her miserly soul, had bought the cheapest possible ticket on a regular passenger barge—not, of course, that the barge captain didn't know who she was. He had made every effort to provide her with a comfortable trip up the Main.
According to one report, Duke Bernhard's man, Raudegen, who had accompanied the old terror on the Rhine portion of her journey back from Bavaria, had threatened, in the hearing of everyone on the Mainz pier, to break the fingers of all the barge's crewmen if they did one single thing that would cause him to receive one more complaint from Veronica Schusterin verw. Richter and verh. Dreeson.
The man in black slid out of the group, heading directly toward Utt, holding out a sheaf of paper. Credentials and more credentials, including a salva guardia from Nils Brahe in Mainz and another one from Wamboldt von Umstadt.
His credentials were much more impressive than his appearance. Personally signed safe conducts from Brahe and the archbishop of Mainz equaled "another VIP on hand."
Utt, who had to stay with Dreeson for the entire time he was scheduled to be in Frankfurt and then return to Fulda with Grantville's mayor safely in his charge, passed Johann Adolf von Hoheneck on to a junior officer with orders to take him up to Fulda with an escort. For the time being, Wes Jenkins could worry about him.
"Every cartoonist in the country must be about to fall dead with exhaustion this month." David Kronberg threw a stack of newspapers on the sutlery sales counter. "Look at this. Dreeson and Veronica leading the march against the taverns in Frankfurt where the anti-Semitic agitators were congregating. Here's another one showing the treaty between Gustavus and the king in the Netherlands."
Simrock grabbed it. "Hey, this is a van de Passe. Here are Fernando and Maria Anna, Mike and Rebecca, Frederik Hendrik."
Margarethe giggled. "And here, on the next page, are all the prominent fat nobles, wealthy fat merchants, and their wealthy fat wives in the Spanish Netherlands, fighting over invitations to Maria Anna's wedding."
Jeffie took a look. "He's lightening up on all those dark lines he used to have in the background. Opening up his spaces." He handed the folded newspaper across to Pierre Biehr, the Barracktown schoolteacher, who shared it with Theo Pistor.
"There was an article in the Jena university paper a while back," Theo said, "The student paper that publishes technical stuff. Someone in Grantville took a camera and photographed a bunch of 'plates' she found in art books and encyclopedias. Some were English, by a man named Hogarth. Some were French. The article mentioned a man named Daumier. She—the photographer in Grantville was a woman—sent a package of them to van de Passe in Utrecht."
Simrock nodded. "Even though he's about seventy, now, he's not afraid of changing his style some. The lines here are different from what he was doing last spring. Let me run back to the barracks and get my cartoon folder." He dashed out.
"Tonight's CoC meeting is hereby cancelled," Tata announced. "I can tell already that everyone's going to be reading the papers instead of paying attention."
Johann Adolf von Hoheneck talked. Then he talked some more.
Wes Jenkins kept taking his glasses off and polishing them. Andrea Hill kept pushing her pencil into her hair, pulling it back out, and sticking it in somewhere else. Harlan Stull looked at the table as if his life depended on finding some kind of a bad spot in the beeswax polish. Roy Copenhaver looked at the ceiling. Fred Pence chewed thoughtfully on his thumbnail.
About an hour into Hoheneck's presentation, Derek Utt got up, walked over to the window, and leaned against the sill.
"So," Hoheneck concluded, "I told the priest who had been in the torture chamber, the one observing Gruyard at his work, to mark Schweinsberg's grave. I left for Mainz the same evening." He bowed.
Wes thanked him solemnly.
He withdrew.
"Whew," Andrea said. "I think that falls into the general category of 'getting all the gory details.' "
"The monks here at the abbey—the ones who stayed when the Swedes came in—aren't happy that the ones who ran away to Bonn have elected Hoheneck as the new abbot. Some of them are planning to appeal to . . ." Wes stopped. "Who do Benedictines appeal to? Do they have anything like the Jesuits' 'Father-General' who's been in the news lately?"
Harlan shrugged. "We can ask. I can't say the question had occurred to me. We've just been dealing with this one bunch of Benedictines here. None of them ever mentioned a higher-up to me."
"They've got something like regions—I think. But they don't have one guy at the top who can tell the individual abbeys what to do until you get up to the pope."
Henry Dreeson, on his way back to Grantville, was sitting in on the meeting. "That's their business. Might be interesting for us to know the answer, but it's their problem—internal. This guy is our problem—external. The point is, how do you plan handle Hoheneck?"
Harlan frowned. "I can't say that I like it that he stuck with the brother of Evil Duke Max for so long. Which side is he really on? In my opinion, he's being very cagy about where he was and what he was doing while the archbishop was arranging to have Schweinsberg and the others kidnapped."
Dreeson shifted in his chair. "How does he know so much about how Schweinsberg died? If he wasn't right there, involved in it himself, then he must have managed to have a really long talk with that priest before he 'immediately' left for Mainz."
"No telling." Wes Jenkins took off his glasses and polished them. "He has offered to continue his 'insider' ties with some of the archbishop of Cologne's men, for the time being. Essentially, he's offered to act as a double agent."
"I should put him in touch with Francisco Nasi," Utt said. "Nasi's not likely to be overly trusting, and he has more contacts than we do, in a lot of different places. Louis de Geer in Essen has been feeding quite a bit of information to Nils Brahe in Mainz, but that's one other thing that I suspect Nasi knows more about than we do.
Dreeson nodded.
"Actually," Derek continued, "Hoheneck has gone farther than just the offer to continue his 'insider' ties. He's volunteered to General Brahe that he's willing to return to Archbishop Ferdinand's headquarters and gather further damning evidence against Gruyard and cohorts, since he thinks he'd better make a trip to Bonn and Cologne anyway, to talk the rest of the monks from the abbey into coming back to Fulda."
Harlan Stull tipped his chair back. "I have to say that I'm surprised."
"He made that offer to Brahe in Mainz, before he came up here to Fulda. It's not that he thinks up-timers are wonderful. I think we—right here in this room—are the first contact he's had with anyone who came back in the Ring of Fire. But he feels a most un-Christian need to obtain retribution for Schweinsberg's death, and it looks right now like Swedes and the USE and SoTF authorities are his only options."
"I radioed Magdeburg last night," Wes said. "I'd like to see the kidnappers get theirs. I'm grateful that Hoheneck has pinned names on the marauding Irishmen and told us something about this Gruyard fellow. In the long run, though, I agree with Brahe that the material that Hoheneck brought from Archbishop Anselm Casimir is more important for a peaceful long-run settlement among all the parties that have interests along the Rhine than doing something about Schweinsberg right now is. Since Fulda borders on the Province of the Main and that's on the Rhine, peace in the region is not something we can ignore. I'm going to send the man back to Mainz, no matter how many suspicions I may have at the back of my mind."
Roy Copenhaver said, "The newspaper editorials aren't happy that we haven't managed to catch the Irishmen. The radio commentators aren't either. Jen sent me transcripts of some of the VOA broadcasts."
Wes shook his head. "The general theme coming down from the central office, as far as Schweinsberg is concerned, is, 'we can't get them now, but just give us time and we'll get them eventually.' " He stood up. "I'm adjourning this meeting. There's a party tonight for Henry and Veronica. Clara and I will be heading off with them tomorrow morning for Grantville. We'll all benefit from a little nap this afternoon."
* * *
"Couldn't you have put this meeting off until tomorrow?" Andrea Hill yawned. "Last night was about the best party we've ever thrown."
"No. I have a proposal. As I see it, we have a window of opportunity." Derek Utt stretched his lanky frame up to its full not quite six feet and leaned his head against the window frame. The thin morning sun lit the top of his head, making it look almost as if it were on fire. When he moved away, into the shade of the room, his curly rust-colored hair reappeared. "No matter what Wes said, I can't just half-ignore the fact that they abducted the abbot of Fulda right out from under our nose and tortured him to death. And kidnapped a bunch of our own staff and held them prisoner."
Harlan Stull crossed his arms over his barrel chest. "Wes would never have approved this crazy idea."
"That's why I didn't bring it up until after Wes and Clara left. When he first arrived, I sure never thought that I'd be saying this, but in a way I agree with what Wes said in that farewell meeting. I sort of miss Schweinsberg."
"Why can't it wait until after Mel Springer gets here?" Harlan asked. "You know I have to go back myself, to brief him. He's been the man on the 'Fulda desk' in Grantville ever since Stearns reached his agreement with Gustavus Adolphus. That's not the same thing as having been here, living through it, but he's been assigned to replace Wes. Wes has to plunge right into his new job in the consular service, so he won't have time to give us any advice. Besides . . ."
"Besides, you're UMWA like Mike Stearns. Wes wasn't UMWA and Mel isn't UMWA, which really means that you're in charge of making sure that the civilian administrator in Fulda doesn't get all too bureaucratic and cautious and CYA."
Harlan jumped.
Derek lounged against the window frame again, grinning. "That's no skin off my nose. If we get it started before Mel arrives, it will be too late for him to reverse gears. We couldn't do it by ourselves, but with Brahe's help, and his men . . ."
"Why can't we do it by ourselves? Why involve him?"
"We're just too damned conspicuous, Harlan. Look around. Most up-timers stand out like sore thumbs in a crowd of down-timers, even when they're wearing down-time clothes and shoes, have their hair cut by a down-timer barber, and speak German. I'm not sure what it is. Body build, to some extent. Posture. Attitude. But we're just not inconspicuous. We glow like light bulbs. It's the same for the Swedes. Think what it would be like if Brahe showed up in Naples, for a comparison, or if young Wrangel had gone into Bavaria instead of Cavriani's son. Talk about easily identifiable. The only way we could chase them down is in a regular military operation. Gustavus isn't going to give us enough manpower for that. He has different priorities. If someone is going to go sneaking after the guys who took Schweinsburg and hope to succeed, then it isn't going to be us. For just one thing, we don't have the intelligence contacts inside Ferdinand of Bavaria's people."
"Does anyone?"
"Hoheneck does, if he's telling us the truth about being willing to cooperate, which I think he is. Not out of idealism, but because he thinks having abbots of Fulda, 'of which he now are one,' so to speak, tortured to death is a really bad idea. Especially when it's guys who are supposed to be on their own side who did the torturing. It seems to have made him rethink his position rather drastically."
"So you're really suggesting that we should just hand it over to Hoheneck and Brahe?"
"Nope. It will give the Fulda Barracks Regiment—at least the ones I select out and detail to be part of the project—something constructive to do this winter, looking for where the Irishmen have gotten to by now. The others will think of the search party—I guess we can go ahead and call it a posse comitatus—as representing the rest of them. They're still a bit upset because we didn't let them squelch the elements of the Ram Rebellion that made their way into Fulda's jurisdiction, so letting them in on something sneaky that has a prospect of glory at the other end will be all to the good. And there's quite a bit of public opinion back home in Grantville, I think, that we should have done more than we have so far, on the general grounds that Schweinsberg, however improbably, was one of us, now. I'm sure my commanding officer would agree."
Harlan Stull frowned. "Does Frank Jackson know about this?"
Derek Utt shook his head. "I doubt it. Nobody's told me to bring him in on it. He's not in my chain of command, any more. Not in anyone's chain of command, other than his own guys in Magdeburg. He's a staff officer for Torstensson now."
"Who is your commanding officer, then? Who am I supposed to talk to once I get to Grantville?"
"Beyond—above—Scott Blackwell in Würzburg? Scott's my boss. Mine and Cliff Priest's boss, as far as military things are concerned. Just as Steve Salatto is the boss for civilian stuff, as far as Wes is—was—and Vince Marcantonio is concerned. Actually, I'm pretty sure that Scott answers directly to Ed Piazza now."
"Ed's the president of the SoTF. He's not in the military at all, just sort of the same relationship as the governor of any state had to its National Guard up-time." Harlan frowned.
"Lane Grooms, the MP colonel, is sort of 'acting' head of the military as far as Grantville—well, the whole Ring of Fire, West Virginia County now—is concerned, because his training cadre is there and he was the highest-ranked guy left after Frank moved to Magdeburg with his people. But I've found out, and this is crucial, Grooms's authority doesn't extend to the whole SoTF. It's just for West Virginia County defense—the Ring of Fire and the annexations since then. So if something involves domestic policy, Scott takes it to Steve Salatto and then through Steve to George Chehab. It stops with Chehab if it's purely internal SoTF, unless it's really important. Then it goes up to Ed Piazza. Chehab also takes it to Ed if it's got international implications. Scott doesn't actually run into a lot of purely military decisions. They almost all have civilian ramifications or, really, are civilian matters that need some military input."
"Well, do you expect me to tell Lane Grooms about this while I'm in Grantville? Wait a minute. Who am I supposed to tell, anyway? Damn it, Derek. With all the ad-hoccing that's been going on . . ."
"Technically, I'm in the SoTF forces, but we don't exactly have our own army and foreign policy any more. We're a state, not a country. Scott knows what I'm planning. For the USE, the closest general is Brahe in Mainz. We get along. He's just turned thirty; a couple of years younger than I am. Pretty flexible. Gustav thinks that after Torstensson, he's the best general he has. Which, I'm inclined to say, the way he conducted that swoop all the way over to the Rhine last spring after Bernhard pulled back, makes me think that the emperor is right."
Harlan nodded. "Like this harebrained project you're asking me to approve."
"More like, 'look the other way.' We'll do it—get it started, at least—while you're gone briefing Springer." Derek grinned. "I don't suppose I could talk you into not telling anybody?"
First Harlan said, "No." Then—"We?"
"I'm only going as far as Mainz, with Hoheneck. I'll take Sergeant Hartke and the men he's picked out, plus a couple of our own guys, and leave them there for a few weeks. I want someone to be in the city to take charge of the culprits when the posse brings them back, if it manages to catch them, which I hope it does. I'd rather not see them assassinated in some back alley. That's revenge, not justice. I want a trial, Harlan. I want to see them sitting there in the dock, with a lot of newspaper coverage."
"What will Mary Kat say? Will the daughter of our honorable chief justice be thrilled to have her husband out scampering through the hills and valleys looking for kidnappers?"
"I'm not planning on doing any scampering myself—not unless something really unexpected comes up. I'll talk to Brahe in Mainz and then come back to Fulda and spend Christmas in Grantville. Anyway, unless you tell her, she won't find out until after it's all over. 'Need to know' and all that."
There were times when Harlan sort of wondered about the relationship between Derek and Mary Kat. The truth of the matter was that if he were going to go out and get in peril, he'd warn Eden, whether he was supposed to or not.
"If you have to tell anybody in Grantville, tell Ed Piazza. But not unless he asks."
"Can he do that?" Andrea Hill asked. "Can he just decide to do that?"
"I really don't know. It's way above my pay grade," Jeffie Garand pointed out. "It's more to the point that he's going to do it anyway, it looks like."
"Who is Derek's boss, anyway?" Roy Copenhaver asked. "Aside from Wes, who's gone, and Mel Springer, who hasn't arrived, that is. They're his civilian superiors in any case. Who's his military commander?"
Joel Matowski rubbed his forehead. "Well, when we came out here, we were NUS military with Frank Jackson in overall military command, Mike Stearns as president, and some loose obligation to GA as Captain Gars."
"I'm with you."
"Then in the fall of 1633, it changed. There's a SoTF now instead of a NUS, and it's a state in the USE. Since last spring, Frank's gone off to be a colonel on Torstensson's staff. He's a kind of aide-de-camp and isn't really commanding anybody, any more. The Grantville guys who are with him up in Magdeburg are sure part of the USE military, but nobody has told us that we're under Torstensson. Not directly."
"My closest guess," Jeffie Garand said, "is that the Fulda Barracks Regiment didn't get transferred into the USE army. I think we're what they're calling SoTF forces, sort of a state militia."
"But it's not that simple." Joel frowned.
Harlan Stull waved a hand. "Nothing's ever simple. There are still the Swedes in Mainz, and the Swedes around Grantville. Most people don't seem to notice that the way Kagg set up the barracks, he popped his Swedes down right between the Ring of Fire and the Saxon border. At best, these guys are sort of hybrids between being the Swedish army and the USE army—they're not straight USE, even if most of the men in the regiments are Germans. Gustavus has three or four of his best Swedish commanders protecting us, really. They're protecting his interests, sure, but they're protecting us, too. That's above and beyond Torstensson and the regiments up north, not to mention Banér in the Upper Palatinate dealing with Duke Maximilian. He has Horn down in Swabia, running all round Baden and Württemberg, keeping Duke Bernhard pinned down and also dealing with Duke Maximilian."
"I hadn't really thought of it that way," Joel admitted. "So Gustavus, all this time, has had Kagg and the Yellow Regiment right outside Grantville, really making sure that while he was tied up in the north himself, John George of Saxony didn't get any silly ideas about invading Thuringia, while he took a batch of way less experienced CoC regiments to deal with the League of Ostend. I guess nobody can say that he hasn't carried out what he promised when he agreed to the 'Captain General' bit."
Jeffie looked at Andrea. "What Harlan says is right. But the real question you're asking, I think, is, what about us—the NUS Army guys who were already in Franconia and Fulda when they made the switchover? Mike's off being prime minister. I know that the military administrators have discussed it with each other—Scott Blackwell in Würzburg and Cliff Priest in Bamberg and Derek. As best they can figure, we're not subordinate to Kagg. At least, Kagg doesn't think so, and the way Anse Hatfield handled the mess in Suhl made that pretty clear."
Joel interrupted him. "Like I said, nobody's had time to formalize anything, but we think we're probably equivalent to a SoTF National Guard now—thinking in up-time terms—and we answer to Ed Piazza, who's the president. He'd be the governor if we were a state up-time, so . . . He's appointed Lane Grooms to command the SoTF forces formally, but Grooms is a nearly hundred percent administrative type and none of us ever knew him very well. He's sitting in Grantville, shuffling paper. Derek figures that he and Cliff Priest answer to Scott Blackwell. Scott can worry about Grooms. Who's above Grooms? Right now, just Ed Piazza, I guess. But like Harlan said, nothing's ever simple."
"Short form, though," Jeffie said. "If Scott doesn't veto it and Brahe goes along—yeah, I think Derek can just decide to do it. Somebody may yell at him afterwards if it doesn't work, but that would happen even if they approved everything first."
"You can see my point," Derek Utt said to Brahe. "You know more—a lot more—about what is going on along the Rhine than Lane Grooms does back home in Grantville or even Scott Blackwell in Würzburg, not to mention that Scott and Steve Salatto are still mopping up remnants of Franconian imperial knights who opposed the Ram Rebellion and negotiating with Ableidinger and his supporters to stabilize the position of the Ram party in Franconian government. Nobody doubts that Ableidinger will be elected to the USE parliament from Franconia in the next election . . ."
Derek stopped and thought. His list of practical reasons for talking to Brahe at this much length went on for a page and a half. Really though . . . given the flair, élan, and dash that Brahe brought to grabbing what was now the USE's new Province of the Upper Rhine the previous May, it just seemed to him that Nils would be more sympathetic to the project than either Grooms or Blackwell. Partly—well, he wanted Nils to work with him on this because they had come to like each other. Brahe was the best friend he had made among the down-timers.
"I feel like I have to do something. It's not just that all of us somehow feel that we let Schweinsberg down. We do, though. He had put his eggs in our basket and we didn't manage to keep them from spilling out. One of our allies died in a torture chamber at the behest of Maximilian of Bavaria's brother. I suspect it's one of the reasons that Wes Jenkins asked for his transfer back to Grantville. He feels like he was responsible and he didn't measure up. None of the other up-timers in Fulda is happy about it. The soldiers in the Fulda Barracks regiment are extremely unhappy about it, even if they did perform well in locating all the rest of our people that the Irishmen picked up and getting them back home—well, back to Fulda. Plus, it's been a PR nightmare in the papers, not so much here on the Rhine, but home in Grantville. It seems like every blowhard in town wants to send out a posse."
His mind came back from its musing to hear Brahe saying that he thought it was a good idea to try to strike at the kidnappers, but . . . "Finding—simply locating—Butler and the other Irishmen will only be the start of it. In the nature of things, cavalry is mobile."
"Oh, I know. Like Grandma used to say, 'First, catch your hare.' Before that, though, we have to catch sight of him."
Nils Brahe kissed his wife as soon as she stepped off the gangplank of the barge, laughed at her wrinkled nose, and said, "Docks don't smell any better in the Germanies than they do in Finland, or in Sweden, for that matter."
Anna Margareta Bielke kissed him back. "I've smelled worse. At least it's chilly here in Mainz. The awful odor is a lot more awful in mid-summer, I'm sure." She had arrived at the very end of the decent traveling season. She brought the children to see him. She brought his sister Kerstin for . . . other reasons.
That evening, after supper and in bed—the only place they had a modicum of privacy, at least once they drew the hangings—she shook her head. One of the purposes of the trip was to find a husband for her sister-in-law, but she was not enthusiastic about Nils's idea of trying to match Kerstin with Hand.
"Erik Haakansson is in the Oberpfalz; so he is not a convenient option for a match. He is not here to be persuaded. I do not believe that we can get him to agree to it at a distance. Just like most of his brothers, he is a very elusive bachelor."
"It's getting to the point that we have to do something." Kerstin's frustrated older brother brushed his hair back from his forehead. "She's twenty-five, and it's not as if she has any desire to make a career as a scholar in some German Damenstift. She really expects us to find her a suitable husband and I've simply been too busy to worry about it. So have you."
"What about the oldest of the Württemberg dukes—Eberhard. You've had a chance to observe him. She's older, of course, but not by that much—only six years. She's really in prime breeding age. Moreover, a duke is a duke. At the rate the world is being turned upside down, who's to say that he won't end up in control again in a few years. Think of that encyclopedia article you sent me about what happened to the changes that the little Corsican, Bonaparte his name was, made all over the map of Europe, and how the Congress of Vienna reversed them."
"I'm not sure that she would be of equal birth under the Württemberg house laws."
Anna Margareta sniffed. "The German Hochadel has this insane passion for Ebenbürtigkeit. There's no doubt that Gustav would really have preferred to marry your cousin than the daughter of the Brandenburg elector. But, no, his mother, German that she is, didn't think a Brahe was of equal birth."
"As far as Gustav's mother was concerned, only the daughter of a ruling prince of some kind was equal to any other ruling prince. That's the way the Germans do it. But it wouldn't hurt to take a look at the prospect of Eberhard. Don't set your heart on it, though. We ought to be looking at other possibilities this winter. Ulfsparre is only three years younger than Kerstin; the same is true for Stenbock. They're both younger sons, of course, and shouldn't really be thinking of marriage until their careers are better established . . ."
"You are a younger son and you were only twenty-four when we married."
Brahe paused in his meditations. "And at least they're Swedish."
The posse left from Mainz. Hartke, from the Fulda Barracks Regiment, led them. Brahe based this on the theory that he both knew the up-timers and their concerns, and had been fighting across the Germanies for so long that he had a vague idea, at least, about most of the past campaigns. Not, of course, that most soldiers had a clear idea about the campaigns in which they had participated. Frequently, from one winter quarters to another, from one battle to the next, a private soldier had only the slightest idea where he was and how, if he had heard the name of the place, it might be spelled.
Hartke, being a Pomeranian, picked Hertling to go with them, because the boy had a keen ear for the Swabian dialect and, since the spring campaign, could make a fair stab at understanding German from the southern Palatinate and northern Alsace. Hertling had objected, being of the opinion that his proper place was "with his young dukes," until Eberhard and Friedrich ordered him to do what Sergeant Hartke told him. He obeyed with reasonably good cheer until Hartke also picked Bauer and Heisel. Once upon a time, they admitted, probably about the time of the Danish battle nearly ten years before (a description interpreted by the officers to signify Lutter am Bärenberg, or some clash that took place near to it in time), they had known a soldier who served under Geraldin. Additionally, of course, they looked the part of veteran mercenary soldiers looking for a new place.
Hartke's view was that Hertling's ensuing fit of the sulks only added to his plausibility in the role of a boy who had run from a company whose captain he disliked. Hertling took a radio, Eberhard and Friedrich having trained him in its use and taught him Morse code after the debacle at Weselberg the previous spring. As Eberhard had said, they didn't have much else to do while their injuries healed.
Brahe's regiments provided eight men, four of them as young as Hertling; the other four hardened veterans. Of the four youngsters, three, all of them from the Magdeburg region, Caspar Zeyler, Andreas Wincke, and Peter Schild, were trained radio operators. The fourth, Jacob Stettin, was a medic. Brahe also provided the posse with three of his precious tuna tin radio transmitters—precious because he only had a dozen or so to cover the entire Province of the Main and his temporary garrisons—still temporary, of course—at Merckweiler.
Not a single officer went with the party. Officers—the problem was that they tended to act like officers. Officers didn't usually turn up out of the blue near anybody's encampment asking for work. They relied on networks of relatives, godparents, and friends to obtain a new position when the prior one vanished under more or less normal circumstances such as the death of the colonel or disbandment by the employer. However, Sergeant Hartke was seconded by Sergeant Lubbert Nadermann from von Manteufel's regiment. According to Captain Hohenbach, who was a friend of Erik Stenbock's, he had acquitted himself very well in the fighting outside Hagenau and had a good head on his shoulders. His other main qualification was that he came from a village named Vettelhofen, near Bonn, and knew the area, at least on the right bank of the Rhine, fairly well. He additionally claimed to have cousins named Schurtz who lived—or at least had lived before the start of the war—across the Rhine, somewhat north of Bonn, at Dollendorf.
Brahe and Utt had debated at considerable length as to whether they should make a greater effort to locate someone from the region of Cologne itself to go along. Eventually, they decided that it was not worthwhile, if only because of the possibility that such a man in one of their regiments might have been planted by Ferdinand of Bavaria. Such suspiciousness might be interpreted as a lack of faith in the general goodness of mankind—Brahe admitted as much. It might, however, as Utt pointed out, contribute to the longevity of the other members of the posse.
Late October, almost into November, was an iffy time for anyone to start traveling. The river was still clear of ice, so to expedite matters, Brahe told them to take a boat as far as Koblenz. If things looked quiet there, they should split into two parties and take separate boats as far as Honnef and walk into Bonn divided into three different parties, of uneven numbers, but each of them having a radio. There they were to ask around in taverns and rooming houses—inconspicuously ask around in taverns and rooming houses—until they found someone who had an least an idea where the Irish colonels had gone. At that point, reunited by the divine, or up-time, boon of radio communications, they should follow the tracks of the four colonels. Nobody had the slightest hope of finding the tracks of Gruyard himself, but the pragmatic association was that he had been with one of them when they arrived in Bonn.
"At a minimum," Brahe said, "the plan has the advantage of simplicity."
"Well," Utt agreed, "its simple until we get to the point when they leave Bonn. After that, I can think of multiple possible ways for it to go wrong."
"It could go wrong well before Bonn," Botvidsson commented. "For example, the boat could sink between here and Koblenz. They could contract pneumonia and lose all the radios when it sank."
Brahe nodded. "Thank you, Johan. I think. Tell Sven to bring us some wine if you would be so kind. He may also ask Lady Anna Margareta and Lady Kerstin to join us for the remainder of the evening." He turned to Utt. "My wife has expressed great interest in the notion that your wife is a lawyer. She feels that legal training would be of immense assistance to women whose destiny it is to administer large estates while their husbands are away 'playing soldier.' "
Tata didn't really think that going with the posse would have been more fun than staying comfortably in Barracktown, but she had more sense than to express this opinion to Eberhard, Friedrich, Simrock, and Theo. Even though at some level they knew why they were not appropriate to the task of the posse, in a spectacular display of the theological principal that abstract knowledge of a principle is not the same thing as believing in it as an article of faith, all four of them had their noses somewhat out of joint.
The inhabitants of Euskirchen were not particularly happy, honored, delighted, or cheered by the decision of the archbishop of Cologne to reside in their town for the winter. "Miserable" and "depressed" would have been better terms to describe the prevailing mood. On good days, perhaps, at least as far as the city council was concerned, an observer could have used "resigned."
The city council would have been more resigned if he had not brought four regiments of Irish dragoons with him. These—the officers, rather, and the more privileged of the noncoms—were quartered in the town, as were the archbishop's administrative staff, personal servants, and assorted hangers-on, along with their staff, servants, and assorted hangers-on, if any. The remaining portion of the regiments were bivouacked outside the walls.
That wasn't equivalent to being besieged, of course. Quite. Peddlers with their wares, peasants with their produce and occasional pig or sheep for sale, and travelers moved in and out through the gates.
Unfortunately, so did the dragoons. Their ideas of what was entertaining did not necessarily agree with what the fathers and shopkeepers of Euskirchen considered to be an afternoon or evening's harmless amusement.
Even more unfortunately, the archbishop was suffering from financial reverses. More plainly, Ferdinand of Bavaria was flat broke. He was not able to pay his mercenaries (or his staff or his personal servants, but they tended to be less of a problem for the city watch).
Since he was not paying the dragoons, a distressing number of peasants with produce and livestock for sale never made it as far as the city gates. The items they were transporting were, as the current terminology went, "conscripted" before they got that far. Conscripted meant that the dragoons confiscated them—without pay, other than promissory notes. The dragoons interpreted the entire situation as equivalent to a license to forage without exerting themselves to go anywhere. They waited for the villagers to come to them.
The arrangement was satisfactory only from their perspective.
Occasionally, of course, the officers ventured out and made their men let food vendors into the town. This happened most frequently when the household cooks and landlords who provided food for the officers quartered upon them were running short of provisions. Otherwise? At other times? Well, after all, the men had to eat.
The unfortunate city councilman who dared to protest that the civilian population of Euskirchen also needed to eat was handled appropriately. They fed his tongue to the dogs.
That was a suitable punishment, of course, but not particularly visible. Public relations were always important, so they tacked his pickled ears to the front door of the city hall.
Walter Deveroux entertained himself by using the point of his dirk to drill a small hole in the arm of an expensive chair in the parlor of the house where Butler had taken rooms for the winter. "If you ask me, we need to talk to Johann Schweikhard von Sickingen. He's in town with the archbishop."
Butler looked toward the stairs leading to the upstairs rooms. "My wife"—he waved in that general direction—"ran into his wife at mass last Sunday. They had a long conversation, much to the annoyance of the priest."
Deveroux stayed on topic. "Sickingen's men—some of them at least—actually ran into a small company of Brahe's forces on his own lands, down by Nannstein. Some little village called Weselberg."
MacDonald looked up blearily. "Where's that?"
"Southern Palatinate region, generally. The Sickingen territories are intermixed with those of the Elector Palatine. What's important is that Brahe's men locked Sickingen's riflemen into a granary for several days. It was good and strong, but it had ventilation of course, being a granary, so they managed to watch what was going on."
"Wouldn't it make more sense to talk to those men rather than talk to von Sickingen?"
"Undoubtedly, if we knew where they were. Sickingen, probably, has some idea of where they are. The Swedes released them on parole."
"What's the point?" MacDonald slammed his stein down. "There are Hessians outside of Bonn, not Swedes from Mainz. If the archbishop sends us back to the Bonn region in the spring, we'll be fighting Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel, not Nils Brahe. The king in the Netherlands is looking over our other shoulder. If the archbishop sends us west in the spring, that would put us fighting the Dutch and any Spanish troops he still has, not Nils Brahe. Why worry about Brahe now?"
Geraldin slammed down his fist, harder than MacDonald had slammed the stein. "Think, Dennis. Think. Brahe's men had radio. Brahe was over by Merckweiler when the fight went down. He got a medic and part of another company to that small detachment inside of two days. Sickingen's men watched them. The Swedes—well, they were Germans, but in Brahe's regiment—threw a wire over trees. I've heard that much. We need to find out what else they saw. With Gustavus's treaty with Don Fernando and the fact that Hesse-Kassel is an ally . . . Think. I get very nervous thinking about facing opponents who pretty well always know where all their units are. If you don't, you're even drunker than you look."
MacDonald looked up. "It's thinking about that kind of thing that makes me drink."
* * *
"Ursula Kämmerer von Worms-Dalberg is one of the few noblewomen near my age in this godforsaken town, Walter. She is the wife of the Freiherr von Sickingen. I invited her for an afternoon visit. We used our host's parlor. You use it for your meetings with Deveroux and the others. Is that too much to ask, that I should have some female companionship? I sent Dislav with the invitation. I spent a little of my gold—which is my gold, I remind you, that I brought with me from Bohemia—to purchase a few refreshments."
"You spent enough on those 'few refreshments' to provide plain food for you, for me, and for your precious Dislav for the next month. Almonds. Coffee. Dates. Where in hell did you even find them?"
"Dislav has his ways. I believe he obtained them from the cook for one of the city councilmen. The household is in mourning, so will not be entertaining this winter. She was happy to get the money. The civilians here say that food is getting very expensive because so little is coming into the town through the camp."
"It's not just going to be expensive for the civilians, you little idiot. It's just going to be plain expensive. That goes for us. I may be able to skim off some of what the men procure in the camp, but by spring, there won't be much of that. There are nearly three thousand men out there, eating. That's as many people as normally live in godforsaken Euskirchen. Can't you get it through your silly head that even if the peasants sell just as much as they usually do, either everybody will end up eating half as much, or everybody will run out of food halfway through the winter."
"Surely," Anna Marie von Dohna said, "we can just buy it somewhere else."
Sergeant Helmuth Hartke perched on a bale of dried peat and shook his head. "We know where they are, sure. But we can't get hold of them. If the general and the colonel just wanted them killed, maybe we could risk it. It wouldn't be smart, if you ask me, but we could. Go into Euskirchen, hang around, use any window of opportunity that presents itself to cut a throat, garrote a neck, put a dagger into a spinal cord . . ." He sighed, thinking how many lovely chances for close-in mayhem the world offered a man in the course of a normal day.
"But." He shook his head again. "General Brahe and Major Utt want them alive. They were very specific about this. Precise. Clear. So damned fucking clear that I can't even pretend that I misunderstood their orders. They don't want them dead at all. No, that's not quite true. They want them dead, real bad. But they want to put them on trial first, with a lot of publicity. Then they want to hang them."
Sergeant Lubbert Nadermann shook his own head, just as dolefully. "Not very practical, if you ask me. I've never understood officers. Me, I say, if you want to be rid of someone, then go ahead and get rid of him."
"That's why they make policy and we don't." Hartke looked back at the rest of the posse. "Pay attention now. The real point is that if we went in and just picked them off, we could leave the bodies there. But Brahe and Utt want them alive. It's a very different thing to bring a live body, no matter how tied up and gagged, through a guarded city gate, and then out through the camp where the dragoons are. Somebody's bound to ask, 'What's that?' Now I know that there are classic ways to smuggle live bodies around. One night, I remember, years ago, some Scotsman was telling a great tale around the fire about an queen from ancient Egypt, or maybe it was an ancient gypsy queen, who was rolled up in a rug."
Heisel nodded. "I heard that story myself. She was being smuggled in, though, not out, so she had time to plan and make arrangements. In the real world, trust me, you can't ever count on finding the right size of rug handy, and when you're going after somebody, carrying a rug with you is a real encumbrance. Awkward. It takes a pretty big rug, not one you can just roll up under your arm."
The younger soldiers sat wide-eyed, soaking in these words of wisdom from their elders.
"I 'accidentally' ran into that paddy in Geraldin's regiment—the one I used to know. We had a couple of beers and congratulated each other on still being alive." Heisel did his best to pat himself on the back. "He's not done too well, though. Pegleg. He's learned to be a farrier. He's willing to take on a boy to learn the trade from him. Not village blacksmith—just horse-shoeing and harness work having to do with the metal bits. That should place one of you."
Schild, one of the radio operators, stuck up his hand. "My dad's a blacksmith. Well, he was before he died. I was eleven, but I used to hang around the forge. I know what the words they use mean, at least."
Hartke nodded. "Heisel, introduce them tomorrow. But don't give the tuna tin transmitter to the blacksmith's apprentice. The paddy will be too interested in machinery. Anyone else?"
Bauer stuck up his hand. "I did good."
"How?"
"Colonel Butler's wife has this footman. He hates Butler—thinks that he's mean to his lady. The way this guy, Dislav is his name, thinks about the lady, it's like she was his daughter. If we can leave someone behind doing anything in Euskirchen, just as long as he can get to the tavern where this Dislav goes when he has time off, he'll be able to hear a lot."
Sergeant Nadermann shifted restlessly. "Nobody in the town is hiring strangers, though. Everyone's short of money, but the food is more of a problem. If they need someone, they hire a nephew or a godson or their friend's cousin's stepbrother's former student—someone from Euskirchen who'll be eating there anyway."
"The general gave us some money," Hartke said. "Is anyone game just to go into Euskirchen and hang around, paying his own way?"
"I can try giving the impression, no matter who asks me, that I'm working for some other of the archbishop's out-of-town hangers-on." Caspar Zeyler grinned. "My mother always said that she'd never known such a natural-born liar in her life."
An hour later, they had things sorted out. Hartke, as a matter of caution, did not leave the tuna tin transmitter with the natural-born liar, either. He gave it to one of his own men, a seasoned veteran from the Fulda Barracks regiment, with orders to report back to Mainz whenever either the colonels or the dragoons showed signs of moving. "You and Heisel stick together. Don't use it unless they do move, though. No point in taking risks. Somebody might see you throwing the antenna. As far as I'm concerned, no news is just no news. No point in telling General Brahe that nothing has happened."
"You know, Sarge, what's weird, here in Euskirchen, compared to Fulda and Mainz?" Heisel asked.
"What?"
"I haven't seen a single newspaper reporter the whole time we've been here. I've hardly seen a newspaper."
Hartke nodded. "The Bavarian authorities, and this archbishop fellow is about as authoritarian a Bavarian as they come, are famous for having strong opinions concerning freedom of the press. They don't think there should be any. Censorship is big business in Bavaria."
The veteran grimaced. "Nor freedom of opinion either, I guess, considering those ears on the city hall door. Of course, I've seen heads on city gates, and bodies that have been up on the gallows for a couple of years, and a man pulled in pieces by four horses tied to his arms and legs. Once, up in Pomerania, we needed some information, so we tied a man to a board, tilted it so his head was down, and pissed into his nose and mouth until he broke. Lots of interesting stuff. Just losing a couple of ears really isn't so bad." The honorable holder of the tuna tin trotted off in the direction of his winter assignment, whistling.
The rest of the posse went back to Mainz.
"General?"
Nils Brahe slipped off the stool on which he was perched, moved away from his slanted desk-surface, and stretched his arms above his head. "Yes, Johan."
"There are some men here. They are Jews from Worms. They are requesting that you give them permission to talk to Wamboldt von Umstadt now that he has returned to the archdiocese."
"Why do they need my permission?"
"It has to do with imperial rights and prerogatives, I believe. In fact, their main concern seems to be whether or not Gustavus Adolphus is going to assume whatever authority the Holy Roman Emperor used to wield in the imperial cities, in regard to protection of the Jewish population. They are also submitting a petition for tax remissions, both because of the pestilence in 1632 and because of the heavy exactions to which their community has been subjected since the—ah—the problems in 1615."
"Problems?" Brahe pushed his hair back from his forehead and raised his eyebrows.
"Ah, yes. Problems. You became familiar with the history of the Fettmilch revolt in Frankfurt and the current anti-Jewish agitation there during the Dreeson tour this fall?"
"Yes."
"Similar, very similar. In Worms, there was forced emigration because of a guild-led revolution against the city council, demolition of the synagogue, laying waste to the cemetery, destruction of the tombstones. Just the usual things. The Elector Palatine—Frederick, the Winter King—put down the uprising and the emperor ordered that the Jews be readmitted and their imperial privileges reinstated. Now they wish to know if Gustavus plans to continue the imperial order now that the city is in the USE. If not, they would like to talk to the archbishop, in hopes that he will discuss the matter, firmly, with the bishop. They believe that his influence in the matter would be helpful. There has been a certain resurgence of anti-Semitic unrest in the wake of all the changes. The leaders of the artisans' guilds seem to think that they can take advantage . . ."
"Who are these men?"
One of them is named Salomon zur Trommel. The other, David Ballin, is traveling with him, but does not appear to be particularly happy about it. They are accompanied by another Jew, one from Frankfurt-am-Main, called Meier zum Schwan, who appears to have some connection to the up-timers in Fulda. They are here on behalf of two Worms Jews, a scholar named Eliyahu Baal Shem and prosperous merchant called Abraham Aberle Landau, who did not—or, perhaps, if I understood their accents—could not travel for this purpose. Ballin is some relation to Landau's wife."
"Tell them that, in case they haven't noticed, the USE constitution establishes freedom of religion. Then send them off to the archbishop with my full permission. They can tell him about all of their problems at length."
"Maybe having the archbishop back won't be all bad. All that practice in hearing confessions, you know. His extended-problem-listening skills should be pretty good."
He yawned.
"Come to think of it, Johan. If anything else comes along that you think I can safely palm off on the archbishop, let me know. 'The devil finds work for idle hands,' and all that. It will help keep him out of mischief."
Brahe returned to the pile of paperwork on his pedestal desk.
Melvin Springer had brought up-time office furniture to Fulda with him. He had brought a wagon-load of it. His office in what had once been the abbot's administration building now had a vinyl-covered swivel chair, a somewhat larger than standard size oblong desk with a very shiny varnished finish, a matched set of four chartreuse-green molded vinyl chairs for visitors, two steel filing cabinets, and a large framed portrait of Ronald Reagan on the wall.
He folded his hands across his chest. "If I had known about the 'posse' project in advance, Utt, I never would have sanctioned it."
Derek nodded solemnly. In the week since Melvin Springer's arrival in Fulda, he had heard this sort of thing a lot.
At the moment, he was standing near one of the windows of the conference room of the SoTF administrative headquarters, positioned in such a way that if he nodded in one direction, his head was in the sun and his hair was carrot-colored, but if he cocked his head in the other direction, it appeared more rusty in the shade. Andrea Hill had previously protested that this maneuver had a very distracting effect on anyone who had to watch it.
Not that he would deliberately do something to distract Springer, of course. Springer would probably be okay once he got settled in, he told himself firmly. Just because Springer wasn't Wes Jenkins . . .
He refrained from saying, "At least, now we know where the Irishmen are and Brahe has planted a couple of our men and a couple of his men as horse handlers in their camp. To me, that counts as 'ahead of the game.' " He pushed his attention back to Mel Springer.
"Prudence as a watchword . . . caution . . . all due deliberation . . . approval by the proper authorities . . . moderation . . . a temperate approach in the face of uncertainties . . ." Springer's lecture marched on.
"Is Hoheneck back from Mainz, yet?" Harlan Stull asked. "Or did we miscalculate when we let him leave?" The veterans of NUS/SoTF service in Fulda had fled to Andrea Hill's chaotic domain since Mel Springer's arrival. He was perched on one of the high three-legged stools that her clerks used when they were searching through land records.
"He's not back that I know of." Roy Copenhaver shook his head. "He hasn't run off to the Bavarians, though. The last I heard, Brahe had parked him with Wamboldt von Umstadt for temporary safekeeping."
"There's some good news." Andrea pulled a pencil out of her hair. "Neuhoff, another of the provosts for the abbey, showed up yesterday, with several wagons. He brought back the monks' archives—they took them along when they ran away, back when Gustavus came through here the first time. That makes me suspect that Hoheneck intends to settle in. Neuhoff also brought back whatever they haven't used up that was in the treasury that they took along when they absconded in 1631, but I hear there's not much left."
"When it comes to funding, something's better than nothing." Harlan slid off the stool. "That does make it seem more like Hoheneck isn't intending to scarper. Back to the old salt mines, I guess. Mel Springer has been talking to Derek. Now he wants another briefing from me."
"This makes how many?" Roy asked.
Harlan just rolled his eyes.
"There's a man out in the cathedral place with an easel set up." Simrock was talking way, way too fast.
Joel Matowski yawned. "He must like brisk weather. Other than that, there's almost always some artist wandering around town making sketches."
"But this one is sketching almost exactly like van de Passe engraves, and he's not doing it slowly and carefully, as if he were trying to imitate van de Passe's style. He does it quickly, offhand, as if the style is natural to him." Simrock bounced up and down on his toes.
"Well, go back and try to make friends. Chat a little. Find out if he'll open up."
"He's not likely to chat very freely with a guy wearing an orange uniform. Artists, especially if they're political cartoonists, tend to have a sort of antsy feeling about soldiers."
"You may have a point there. I'll go farther than that. You probably have a point there. Where are the girls?"
"They went into the stationery shop with Eberhard and Friedrich."
"You go in, tell Eberhard and Friedrich to stay right where they are, you stay with them, and ask the girls to come out on their own and go look over the guy's shoulder at what he's drawing. It's not as if Tata and Margarethe are ever at a loss for words."
It took the girls about fifteen minutes to make friends.
Friendship led to an invitation. The artist said he would be delighted to attend a Committee of Correspondence meeting held in a "wedding chapel" attached to the Fulda Barracks Regiment sutlery. In fact, he expressed the opinion that he had never imagined the existence of such an arrangement. He asked if the owners would be willing to let him sketch it. Tata said that she couldn't speak for Riffa's parents, but imagined that they certainly would be agreeable.
A half hour after first contact, peace had broken out all over.
"Van de Passe, yes. Your guess was correct. I am flattered, very flattered, to know that you recognize my family's style. That is my name. Willem van de Passe. I have been working in England since 1621, but this autumn I decided that it might be prudent to leave. My father has lived a charmed life—a checkered life, but a charmed one, taking into consideration that he is alive and well at the age of seventy. Those who despise him also, for some reason, merely expel him rather than arrest him or execute him. This has led to numerous sudden decisions to move all his belongings, but his life has not really been a dangerous one. The king of England, by contrast, has been arresting almost anyone who comes to his notice recently. I stopped in Utrecht to see my father and am on my way to Grantville to see my sister Magdalena."
"Why did you come by way of Fulda?"
"It's pretty much on my path. I came up the Rhine to Mainz, did some sketching there and picked up some ideas, and ran into Paul Moreau, who had been working up here in Fulda for a while."
"Will you be staying in Grantville?"
"I don't know. My brothers Crispijn the younger and Simon have been in Denmark for several years. They both say that Copenhagen is a good place to work, so I won't make my mind up until after I've talked with Magdalena."
"Did you see the cartoon that Hartmann made of Friedrich and me while you were there? The Mainz newspaper published it. Of course, the publisher is his uncle, but it's still exciting that he got something in the paper."
"It's really nice of you to let me look at your portfolio," Simrock said. "A lot of these are great. Is this all?"
"There's only this one folder more. When I left Utrecht, I headed down to the southeast, following some rumors. The rumors were right. Ferdinand of Bavaria is headquartered in Euskirchen for the winter. I didn't dare sketch in public, so these drawings are from memory."
Tata and Eberhard poked their heads over Simrock's shoulder.
"Sit down," Margarethe said. "I'll bring them all around and show you where you are sitting. One at a time. The least we can do is behave in a decent and orderly manner when the man is kind enough to show us his drawings."
"Yes, my dear would-be schoolmistress," her brother said.
"I would have been, if I hadn't met Friedrich."
"I know. I've heard it often enough." Friedrich grinned. "It's probably proof that there's no point in making plans for you Calvinists. Predestination will get to you every time."
"Friedrich." Theo frowned. "Don't be so irreverent." He picked up one of van de Passe's drawings and frowned again. "Who's this?"
"Didn't I label it?" Van de Passe took it back. "Ah. The Countess von Dohna—Colonel Walter Butler's wife—in full spate of a temper tantrum in the Euskirchen marketplace. She had just come from early weekday mass. Some girl selling cabbages from a wheelbarrow crossed her path and impeded her progress." He scribbled something in a corner. "Just to make sure I don't forget, as time goes by. Maybe I'll be able to use her."
"Butler?" Simrock asked. "Walter Butler? The Irish colonel? The one who kidnapped the abbot and Wes and the others in August?"
"In August," van de Passe said, "I was on the water, being very seasick during an interminable crossing on a boat that would have been over-ambitious if it called itself a decrepit tub. There was no hope of getting out on a short crossing, like Dover-Calais. King Charles's guards have too strict a watch up. I ended up having to do Bristol-Dublin on the tub and then book a separate passage to Amsterdam. Current events were my very lowest priority."
"You have the wife," Eberhard said thoughtfully. "Do you have Colonel Butler?"
"Oh, sure. All of them." Van de Passe shuffled around in his leather case. "Small scale—I couldn't very well try walking out of Euskirchen carrying an easel." He tossed a page on the table. "Deveroux." Another page, "Dislav, the countess's footman."
"We really ought to take these to the major, for him to look at, if you're willing," Friedrich said. "Maybe we should get them into the papers. That way, people all over the country can be on the lookout for the kidnappers, not just the posse. It's already back, anyway, so I guess they didn't find any of them."
Another page, "Just a hard case I spotted out on the edge of the dragoon camp."
"Good Lord!" Jeffie Garand screeched. "That's my future father-in-law."
"Did I get the wrong impression of him?"
"Hell, no. I guess the posse found something, after all."
"I'm not sure that I'm authorized to approve expenditure for such a purpose." Mel Springer pursed his mouth. "It's not a budget category. I'm willing to include a memorandum to George Chehab in the next despatch bag going to Grantville, but unless he's willing to approve a variation—"
"These guys killed Schweinsberg," Harlan Stull exploded. "Well, not them directly, but they kidnapped him and handed him over to the actual murderers. The guy who drew them is an engraver. There's equipment here in town—not what he's used to, but basic, at least. He's willing to stay and turning the drawings into etchings, but he has to eat while he does it. And you're not willing to pay him a piddling amount to get 'Wanted' posters printed up? That's . . . Wes would have . . ."
Andrea Hill put a hand on Harlan's elbow and tugged. On the other side, Roy Copenhaver kicked his ankle.
"I'm a what?" Willem van de Passe asked.
"You're a military contractor." Derek Utt nodded solemnly. "Count yourself lucky. I've arranged for you to have your own cabin out in Barracktown and meals on wheels delivered by Riffa's mom. The printer who had the engraving equipment in his back room, but no engraver, will have it carted out tomorrow."
"What are 'meals on wheels' and who is Riffa?"
* * *
After supper in the Hartkes' cabin was still the best time and place for general shooting of the breeze when there wasn't a full-scale CoC meeting.
"Why are we going to all this trouble for a Mennonite?" Theo Pistor asked. He had perched on the end of one of the picnic-style tables with his boots on the bench.
Sergeant Hartke frowned at the boots. "Put them down."
Theo moved. "Getting the administration to pay for publishing van de Passe's sketches, and all. They're heretics. Mennonites, I mean. He's a heretic."
"We're getting the caricatures, dimbulb. If he uses the equipment to engrave his other drawings after hours, as long as he pays for his own disposables, it's no skin off our noses." Jeffie leaned back. "Besides, I want a copy of the one of Hartke here to give to Gertrud's mother for Christmas. Three Kings. Whatever. Whenever. For the holidays."
"Where is Dagmar?"
"Over at the sutlery, plotting something with Mama," Riffa said.
Jeffie, his right thumb pointed at Theo, looked at Hartmann Simrock. "For a CoC member, I don't think that Theo is making much ideological progress."
"Ah, his politics are radical enough to satisfy almost anybody." Riffa came over from the other side of the room. "It's just when it comes to religion that he's not making much progress."
"Probably the best word is 'incremental,' " Simrock added. "Pretty small increments, too."
"Stop talking about me like I wasn't in the room." Theo shook his head so hard that both of his cowlicks stood straight up.
Joel Matowski ran through the front door, a panicked expression on his face. "Guess what just came in on the radio."
"Okay, I'll guess. What?"
"We're not going to have our Major Utt any more."
Everyone else in the common room jumped up with shrieks of horror.
"Was there an accident? Is he dead?"
"Did someone kill him?"
"Oh, God, please tell me that they aren't going to transfer him. The Fulda Barracks Regiment has established such a reputation for the overall worst military etiquette in the USE that anyone they send in his place will be trying to 'shape the men up.' "
"Tsk, tsk." Joel shook his head. "Such leaping to conclusions. You should all be ashamed of yourselves."
Gertrud took a swat at him. "Damn it, what?"
He struck a dramatic pose. "They gave him a promotion. We're going to get Colonel Utt back next month."
Gertrud looked at Jeffie. "You put him up to this, Jeffrey Garand. Didn't you? You had already heard, but if you had come running in like that, none of us would have believed it, you joker, so you got him to do it."
Hartke made a gesture that threatened to take off the head of his fellow sergeant. "For this, I should forbid you to marry my daughter next month."
His hands wrapped protectively around his neck, Jeffie ran out the door. Gertrud, pretending to be swinging a frying pan, followed him.
"Here we are, back in dear old Mainz." Eberhard sighed. After counting the cost, Tata had proclaimed that it would be cheaper for all of them to make the trip from Fulda and back again on a freight wagon instead of renting horses and then having to pay for their stabling for two weeks. Freight wagons did not deliver their passengers door-to-door. They were walking, slipping on the filthy, slushy, cobblestones.
"It's just for Christmas," Tata said. "General Brahe asked Major Utt if you and Friedrich could come. That was quite a while ago, a couple of months. Remember, that was when you ordered your new suit." Tata frowned suddenly. "How much did you pay for that suit? Margarethe says that Friedrich is just going to wear his Fulda Barracks Regiment dress orange whenever he has to go to some official function or unavoidable party. That's much thriftier."
"I get tired of the uniform. There's something to be said for dressing to match your status."
"Have you paid for it?" Tata put her hands on her hips. "Who loses when the forces of oppression fail to pay the hard-working people who supply their needs? How can a shoemaker feed his children when the tooled art objects that he creates for the feet of arrogant aristocrats result only in invoices that aren't paid for months, or sometimes for years? How . . ."
"Horn of Plenty in view," Friedrich called. "And none too soon. By the way, Tata, he paid for the suit."
Reichard and Justina, Kunigunde and Ursula, Philipp, and three youngsters with reddish hair came pouring out the door, all yelling, "Tata! It's Tata!"
"Veit, Lambert, Hans." Agathe did her best to hug all three of her younger brothers at once, but they, Veit in particular, were getting too big for her to accomplish the task. "Mama, Papa, Tante Kuni . . ."
The others went on in to the taproom, leaving the delirious jumping around of the family reunion to occur in the middle of the street.
"Good grief," Friedrich said. "She's only been gone for six months. We haven't seen our sisters for more than three years."
"Unless the political situation calms down, we may not see them for three more." Eberhard frowned. "When is the last time you wrote?"
"I am a virtuous brother. I write them regularly at least once a month." Friedrich stuck his nose up in the air.
Margarethe pinched it.
"Well, I've written them at least once a month ever since I got married. Before that, ja, it had been a while."
"Quite a while," Margarethe said. "More than a while."
"Margarethe makes me write them, so even though they've never met her, they already love her. Margarethe ordered ginger-flavored Kuchen from Nürnberg for the little ones and sent some of the treats that Riffa's mom bakes for Antonia. They should have it all by now, and love her even more. I thought maybe she should send them toys."
"Fritzi." Margarethe yanked on his hair. "Think how long it has been since you have seen them. The 'little ones' are fifteen and fourteen. They are growing up. You don't even know how tall they are. You don't know what colors they like. The sweets were all I could do. How can you know so little about your own family?"
Theo looked at Friedrich. "This isn't about you. This is about us. She misses Papa terribly, no matter how irritable he always has been a lot of the time." He gave her a quick hug. "We'll try, Margarethe. I'll go see him first. Maybe he'll be willing to reconcile."
"I really don't think so," she said. "He'll just be angry that we are celebrating Christmas with Tata's family. He thinks it's a papist holiday because the early popes matched it up to some pagan celebration. The Bible doesn't say exactly what day of the year Jesus was born."
It was a very fine new suit, Eberhard, thought, even if he was admiring himself. The extraordinarily large mirror that General Brahe's wife had installed in the vestibule of a house that had once been occupied by one of the more prosperous cathedral canons was impressive. The canon was now residing, in appropriate ecclesiastical poverty, in a small room in a boarding house near the cathedral.
He made another half-turn, admiring the effect of his hat.
He had bought the hat here in Mainz. It just wasn't possible to pack a hat with plumes for a trip from Fulda without crushing one of them.
Well, maybe it was possible for a professional valet, but he didn't have one. He was doing his own packing these days. He was not capable of packing a hat with plumes in such a way that one of them did not get crushed.
The receiving line moved again, perhaps four feet.
Brahe and his wife came into view.
He didn't take off the hat. As a duke, he outranked a Swedish nobleman. As an officer, Brahe was not in his direct chain of command. The hat stayed on.
Tata's father would not approve.
There was a place for "all men are created equal," but it wasn't at an official reception with the cream of Mainz's secular and ecclesiastical patriciate, not to mention miscellaneous diplomats and the like, in attendance.
He wasn't going to take off his hat for the archbishop, either. Say what you would, it simply wasn't right for a good Lutheran to doff his hat to a subordinate of the earthly manifestation of the anti-Christ, the specific example of the manifestation now alive being named Urban VIII.
He supposed that the papists had a right to go to hell in their own way, as long as they didn't interfere with other people. Lutherans especially. Subscribing to the principle of religious toleration did not mean that he had to take off his hat for Anselm Casimir Wamboldt von Umstadt who was, when one came right down to it, by birth of far lower rank than a duke of Württemberg.
He reached the receiving line.
Eberhard glanced cautiously to his left. Brahe's wife was walking toward him, a predatory gleam in her eye. He moved slightly to the right, behind Ulfsparre. He took off his hat. Without the plumes he would be, he hoped, effectively invisible.
Ulfsparre moved to the farther to the right.
"Stay," Eberhard said. "Please, Mans."
"They're set on marrying off Brahe's sister. I've been in their sights for weeks. The least you can do is vent some of the pressure, as the new club of 'steamheads' here in Mainz would say. You're going back to Fulda in two weeks. Before you leave, let me take you and your friends to see the new steam engine down by the docks." Ulfsparre slid between two substantial matrons and vanished into a gaggle of other young officers.
Eberhard sighed.
Anna Margareta Bielke tentatively floated some conversational gambits about the Lutheran view of matrimony as one of God's greatest gifts to mankind, far higher than the papist preference for celibacy.
Eberhard could hardly object. It was hard to contradict the Shorter Catechism.
She mentioned that the value of a good wife was above rubies.
Eberhard replied practically that given the current economic condition of the duchy, from which he was, in any case, exiled, rubies were pretty much out of the question, as were pearls, sapphires, emeralds, and diamonds.
She gestured at one of the display paintings on the wall.
Eberhard agreed solemnly that the story of Tobias and Susanna, although contained in the Apocrypha, was one of the most touching Biblical narratives.
She spoke of this. She prodded with reference to that.
Eberhard parried.
There was one consolation. Since he came through the reception line, he had not seen Lady Kerstin. She had politely offered her hand. She had not glanced at him flirtatiously. Presumably, she had danced, but not with him. She had disappeared.
The evening seemed interminable.
Toward the end, however, he had the satisfaction of not taking off his hat to the archbishop of Mainz. And several people complimented him on his new suit. It was in the up-time style. The tailor in Fulda had done a splendid job of reproducing the one shown in a magazine photograph of a man named "Liberace."
"You could do worse than Lady Kerstin," Erik Stenbock said. "Mans could do worse. I could do a lot worse. She's not ugly; she's not stupid; she's not silly. Silly and stupid aren't the same thing. A girl—Lady Kerstin is a grown woman, really—can be stupid and sensible, or smart and silly. Plus, the Brahes haven't lost their estates. She'll come to her husband with a great honking big dowry."
"Think of it as a compliment," Ulfsparre said. "I heard that they're even thinking about Erik Haakansson Hand as a possibility. They're looking as high as a cousin of the king. His mother was illegitimate, of course, but the Vasa blood is there."
"You didn't seem very complimented yesterday evening," Eberhard said. "You were ducking out of sight as fast as you could scamper."
"I'm here. Hand is not in the Upper Palatinate any more, I don't think, but he's somewhere other than here."
Stenbock laughed. "From what I heard, he'll be somewhere other than Mainz until they either marry Lady Kerstin off or take her back to Sweden."
"You're not holding off because of your little CoC . . ." Ulfsparre stopped. Stenbock had kicked him under the table. ". . . girl from the Horn of Plenty, are you?" he finished. "Depending on Lady Kerstin's attitude—or how much attitude you're willing to put up with—you could keep die Donnerin on as your mistress. Or just drop her, if that's what is required for you to enter into a suitable marriage. She's young enough to find someone else, not to mention her . . ."
Stenbock kicked him under the table again.
"The gossip is all over the city," Justina said. "They say that Brahe's wife wants to make a marriage between Eberhard and her sister-in-law."
"Ach." Ursula Widder put her handkerchief to her eyes. "Our poor, sweet Tata. Abandoned by her lover."
"At least," Reichard said, "the CoC is well enough established in Mainz by now that it can survive without his patronage."
Eberhard tossed his clothes on the stool and threw himself into the bed as fast as he could. There weren't any fireplaces on the third floor of the Horn of Plenty. The little bedroom felt almost like home. It didn't feel like "home" like the ducal palaces in Stuttgart or Mömpelgard, but he hadn't seen those for years. It felt a lot more like home than his cabin at Barracktown bei Fulda did.
"I'm not going to do it."
Tata was already under the duvet. "I'm not so sure that 'just say no' is the best idea right now." She rolled over. "It's not that I want you to marry her, but honestly, Brahe's in a position either to press your cause with Gustavus Adolphus or to just leave you dangling the way you've been the last couple of years. If you were his brother-in-law, it seems to me, he'd be a lot more likely to act as your advocate."
"So my little CoC lady would like to see me reinstated? Re-duked, if you would? Not that I've ever formally renounced my title the way Friedrich has."
"No!" Tata picked up her pillow and hit him with it. "If you get re-duked, you'll go back home. If you get married . . . I don't want to see you re-duked at all. But for you, it might be the best thing. For you and Friedrich and Margarethe and your sisters." She put the pillow back under her head. "She's pregnant, you know."
"Brahe's sister isn't pregnant. At least, not by me. Is that why they want to marry her off? Did some randy Swedish royal get under her skirts? Maybe they can marry her off to Gustav's bastard son. He's only about eighteen months younger than I am."
"Margarethe, you nitwit. Margarethe is pregnant. You're going to be an uncle."
"Okay, Brahe's sister isn't pregnant. You're not pregnant, either?"
Tata shook her head. "I'm too careful. It's okay for Margarethe. She and Friedrich are married. We aren't and we never will be."
"I wouldn't give you up if I married the Lady Kerstin."
"Yes, you would, if you get re-duked. You might not want to, but you would. I'd leave. I was never cut out to be any nobleman's official mistress. Not even yours. My mouth would get me in trouble all the time, and that would make trouble for you. I'm not cut out for court life.
"Mouth." Eberhard pulled her down. "Your mouth isn't trouble. Your mouth is pretty and pink and cute." He outlined it with one finger. "The rest of you is cute, too. Let's see, your ear is cute, your . . .
The next morning, the window was covered with frost crystals. Eberhard pulled the duvet under his chin, crunched up his pillow into a ball, and lay there for a while, just looking at them glitter in the sunshine.
I'm not going to do it, he thought. The gain is all contingent and not worth the gamble.
He stared at the bright, white window pane while Tata snored softly. There had to be some way to refuse the idea.
No, not refuse it. Just drag things out until it gets dropped, the way so many other things get dropped. Dilly-dally until Brahe forgets about it, the way Gustavus Adolphus forgot about us. It's Brahe's wife who's pushing it, anyway. String things out until she goes back to Sweden and the campaigning season opens.
He pushed his good arm under Tata's shoulder and tickled her ribs until she woke up.
"Package delivery," David Kronberg said cheerfully. He tossed a package onto the sutlery sales counter. "It came in just before closing time."
"What's that on the label?" Riffa asked.
"It says, 'Do not open until Three Kings.' "
"Three Kings?" She scrunched up her forehead. "What's that?"
"Presents day, presents day, presents day." Gertrud chanted as she pounced on it with enthusiasm. "Oh. It's not for me. It's for Jeffie and Joel. Maybe it's a lump of coal and some switches."
"Wrong shape."
"Who's it from?"
"A bookstore in Frankfurt."
"A bookstore wouldn't be sending them a present. Someone must have ordered it."
"Eberhard and Friedrich, I bet." Gertrud tossed it on the counter. "They'll be here later."
"Jeffie and Joel or Eberhard and Friedrich?"
"The first two. The others aren't back from Mainz, yet. If the river doesn't freeze hard and the roads aren't too bad, they should be here Thursday."
"What if the Main does freeze hard and the roads are awful?"
Gertrud grimaced. "Then Jeffie and I may have to postpone our wedding if we want them to be there. And we do."
"Postpone? How long?"
"A few days. Until they get here." Gertrud shrugged. "It's no big deal—not as if we were planning on dozens of guests. Jeffie's mom and brother are already here. Justin finished his EMT course for the Military Medical Department and hasn't been assigned yet. Callmemarsha says she hasn't had a vacation since the Ring of Fire and Stevenson's Groceries owes her one. They can both stay for at least two more weeks, so we can be flexible. It's not as if we're cutting it close. The baby isn't due 'til July."
Denver Caldwell, one of the other up-timers at Fulda Barracks, looked up. "That's just 'Marsha,' Gertrud. I know she runs it all together into 'Callmemarsha-becauseI'mnotoldenoughtobeanyone'smother-in-law.' Trust me, though. Her name is Marsha."
"We really appreciate the Montaigne translation, Eberhard," Joel said. "But I've got to tell you the truth. The only way I can make sense of Florio's 1603 English is to read it out loud. Take where he's talking about the sumptuary laws, for example.
"The manner wherewith our Lawes assay to moderate the foolish and vaine expences of table-cheare and apparell seemeth contrarie to its end. The best course were to beget in men a contempt of gold and silkwearinge as of vaine and non-profitable things, whereas we encrease their credit and price: a most indirect course to withdraw men from them. As, for example, to let none but Princes eat dainties, or weare velvets and clothes of Tissew, and interdict the people to doe it, what is it but to give reputation unto those things, and to encrease their longing to use them?
"When I look at 'encrease' or 'Tissew,' they don't seem to make sense, but when I read them out loud, they turn into 'increase' and 'tissue.' I did get really messed up by table-cheare. I thought at first it meant 'table chairs,' until I figured out that it meant good cheer at the table. Food, in other words."
Eberhard looked around. "The incredible variety of clothes here would have provided Montaigne with about as much good cheer as he could use if he could have seen them."
"Sweats. Lots of sweats. No tee-shirts, but then it's January. Up-time 'Sunday best.' Down-time 'Sunday best' or whatever you call it." Joel paused. "Andrea Hill in one of her weird combinations of up-time and down-time. That—really remarkable suit you have on."
"I had it made especially for Mainz, but I decided I might as well get some use out of it. Once the campaigning season starts . . . 'How soone doe plaine chamoy-jerkins and greasie canvase doublets creepe into fashion and credit amongst our souldiers if they lie in the field?' "
Jeffie wandered over. "Quoting Montaigne again, Eberhard? Thanks for that book you sent us. It has more antique English in one place than I've seen since Ms. Higham made us do Shakespeare in drama back in high school. I was the last one to the library, so I had to check out the Collected Works instead of just the one play."
"What's Willem doing over there?"
"Van de Passe? I didn't know he was still in Fulda. I thought he was heading for Grantville."
"He'll leave when my mom goes back," Jeffie said. "He got involved in doing some stuff for Derek out here at the barracks. He's not a bad guy. He drew a wedding portrait of us and signed it. Maybe it'll be worth something, someday. I'd better go. Gertrud beckons." He wandered across the room.
Behind Joel and Eberhard, someone went, "Pssst."
Eberhard looked around.
Gertrud's next-younger brother Johann, eyes gleaming, whispered "charivari."
Tata came prancing across the room. "Ja. I talked to Frau Hill before we went to Mainz. I brought back everything we need. A good, old-fashioned, West Virginia-German Rhineland shivaree-charivari."
Johann nodded enthusiastically. "I already put the ice in their bed. If it melts a little before the end of the reception, that's even better. If it stays frozen hard, she'll just shake it out of the sheets. Tata's little brothers sent a whole box of noisemakers. Rattles. Clappers. Whistles. Some lovely things that make a howl when you whirl them around in a circle. Erdmann has already made sure that very kid in Barracktown has one. Oh, how our big sister is going to suffer."
"Magnificent plates," Brahe said. "I've never seen such high-quality engravings from anything other than an artist's studio." He spread the prints out approvingly. "Butler, Deveroux, Geraldin, MacDonald. Who's this?"
"Felix Gruyard. That's why the project took a couple of weeks longer than we planned. Van de Passe had no idea who he was, but Paul Moreau, that crippled artist working at the St. Severi church in Fulda, finally agreed to go through van de Passe's sketches and see if he recognized anyone. Moreau's skittish. Well, given some of the things he's been through in his life, I don't blame him for being skittish. Useful, though. He's been rattling around through various studios and printing shops for nearly twenty years, ever since he was apprenticed. He also has the advantage of being completely reliable in his loyalty to the SoTF. Or, at least, completely reliable in his loyalty to Andrea Hill. He seems to think that she walks on water. I'm not sure whether he has any abstract loyalty to the USE at all."
"How come he recognized Gruyard? I've never heard that the Lorrainer is a habitué of art galleries."
"His specialty is the reason Moreau is crippled. On Ferdinand of Bavaria's behest."
"Oh. How many of these sets can we get smuggled onto the left bank of the Rhine?"
"Depends on how many we can afford to pay the freight, load onto the Monster, and have flown into Luxembourg. Under the table, Fernando and Maria Anna have given Nasi carte blanche to use Luxembourg as a basis for smuggling them in from the eastern border of Ferdinand's lair. Send some to the Hessians and they'll get them into Bonn. Get them to our friends in the USE city-state of Cologne and I guarantee they will trickle out. Send some to Essen and they'll drift south. Van de Passe himself will send batches of them in through a kind of underground network of Mennonites."
"Aren't they pacifists of some kind?"
"Ah, Nils. I ask you. How can the distribution of sketches possibly be construed as an act of violence?"
Ferdinand of Bavaria, archbishop of Cologne, assumed his most arrogant expression. "Without Werth and Mercy, my brother has been very handicapped in sponsoring anything that requires mobility for nearly a year. This has made him irritable. Dragoons are not cavalry, precisely." The archbishop looked down his ample nose. "Still, dragoons are better than nothing. Maximilian refuses to send me money with which to pay you . . ."
Walter Butler nodded. Rumors of Duke Maximilian's refusal had been current for the past couple of weeks.
"He is, however, willing to hire you. I have consented . . ."
However grudgingly, Butler thought, and only because you're scraping the very bottom of your strongbox. There's no way you'll be able to pay us for another quarter unless you can find additional revenues. He looked down, gauging the archbishop's mood. "If . . ." he began.
"I will pay you for the last quarter, the one ending last month, when you leave," his employer answered. "You and the other Irishmen."
Butler closed his mouth.
He had intended to say, "If you value your skin, you will scrape together the money to pay us from somewhere for this quarter and for the next quarter. If we leave, the king in the Netherlands will come, and by the end of March, you will find yourself as one more nationalized, mediatized, Spanish-style prelate, just as the archbishop of Liége had already found himself, with your left bank lands an integral part of those very Netherlands." He snorted. If the archbishop didn't want to listen to professional advice when he had a professional available—well, blast him to hell.
* * *
"We'll have to move out by late February," Deveroux said. "I loathe winter marches, but they can be done. At least, we'll be moving south rather than north. And if the old skinflint does actually pay us, we can buy provisions. Late winter and early spring are the worst times to forage."
"Moving to the south is no guarantee of better weather." Geraldin rubbed some frost crystals off the window pane.
"It improves the odds. If we prepare for a winter march and are blessed by an early spring, so much the better."
"Aside from the mud and the floods. We have to cross the Rhine somewhere if we're going to finally put an end to Horn's endless Fabian maneuvering. He's managed to keep Bernhard and Maximilian practically immobilized for nearly four years now, without ever hazarding a battle, playing a damned chess game across the map of southwest Germany. 'You move here and I'll move there.' Pray for winter until we're across and spring in Swabia. I do not want to cross the Rhine river bottoms in the mud. I do not want to ride through the Black Forest on icy roads."
Anna Marie von Dohna huddled as close to the Dutch-style ceramic stove as she could get. The stove was the best thing about the miserable, skimpy, low-ceilinged rooms that her husband had stuck them in for the winter. It managed to make some heat from even scanty amounts of damp peat—the only fuel available—and she idled away long hours of boredom by making up stories about the people in the designs on the tiles. Burning peat smelled like, well, burning peat, of course . . .
Her husband walked in and broke the news.
"Leaving?" she screeched. She stood up, throwing off her cloak. "Leaving in six weeks? Leaving before the end of winter? I'm not leaving. I'm staying right here."
"I am leaving and you are coming. You don't have a choice. I know for a certainty that you have nearly used up your gold. Frittered your gold away. Wasted it on luxuries over the holidays. I've come home almost every day since Epiphany to find you curled next to a fire with a bonbon in hand. Soon it will be 'peat gone, sweets gone.' Poor countess, reduced to eating stringy goat meat like the rest of us poor peasants."
"You only want me to come because I'm not pregnant yet. If I were breeding, you would find a way to leave me here. That's the only reason you keep dragging me from here to there to somewhere else."
"Why the hell else would I have married you, if I didn't want a son from the deal? What's the point if I don't get a son?"
In winter quarters, at least, he had a door to slam.
Dislav came in, carrying a blanket he had warmed in front of the kitchen fire downstairs.
Anna Marie, over twenty-five and childless now in two marriages, wrapped her cloak around the blanket to hold the heat in and went back to the stove.
That evening, Dislav spent an hour drinking with his new friend Lorenz Bauer. It wasn't much of a tavern. The floor boards were slick from recent spills or sometimes sticky from long-past spills. The tables were simply sticky. But the beer was cheap.
Bauer, the next day, made a short visit to the honorable holder of the tuna tin.
That evening, Nils Brahe's radio monitors in Mainz picked up the first message out of Euskirchen since Hartke had left the men behind nearly three months earlier.
"Did the men say when they are returning?" Sergeant Hartke asked.
"Not a word. Hertling is very disappointed." Eberhard reached his bowl across the table. Tata filled it with another helping of stew.
"Are you going to order your men out of Euskirchen, now?" Hoheneck asked.
Brahe shook his head. "They're not listening to receive orders from us. They can't keep the antenna up and spend time listening for signals. They're only to send. It's up to them how long they stay."
"Micromanagement," Utt said. "It's something we're not doing."
Hoheneck eyed him. "Micromanagement. When are you letting me come back to Fulda?"
"When I decide it's prudent."
"Herr Springer has no opinion on the matter?"
Utt hesitated. "No decisive opinion. No 'immovable object' sort of opinion." He wasn't about to tell Hoheneck that Mel Springer didn't seem to be able to muster a decisive opinion as to whether he preferred his breakfast toast to be light or dark.
"So," Brahe said, "what did you think of the election results?"
"As a professional soldier, I do not have an opinion on the election results." Utt grinned. "Would you be interested in my wife's opinion of the election results? If so, she was pretty disgusted by the newspaper reports of the Crown Loyalist party's celebration in Magdeburg, given that . . ."
"What concerns me more," Brahe said, "is that we have had another eruption from Georg Wulf von Wildenstein."
"Fulda—Buchenland County—has heard from him, too. There's always his underlying Calvinist dislike of the continued toleration of Catholics, but now he's gotten wind of the LDS mission in Barracktown. Not that the administration has ever tried to hide that Monroe and Betty Wilson are there and what they're trying to do, you understand, but we haven't exactly gone out and yelled to the four winds about it—much less that a bunch of the early materials for the Barracktown school, before we had any money to buy textbooks, were sent over by the Grantville branch."
"What concerns me is that von Wildenstein may use his long-standing ties to Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel to try to narrow the official USE policy of religious toleration." Brahe frowned. "He's not likely to focus on the Lutherans at first, given that the emperor is one and it's constitutionally the USE state church, but I can see his putting pressure on the government's handling of various minorities. That includes the Jews, by the way. Wamboldt von Umstadt is worried."
When Brahe's posse members met, they met in the evening around the still-warm forge of the farrier for whom Schild was working. Not many people in the encampment, dragoons or camp followers, still had decent fuel—many of them had no fuel—but almost everyone recognized, however reluctantly, that a good fire was necessary if the horses were to be kept well shod.
"I think that's about it," Heisel said. "We know that they're all leaving. Zeyler, here . . ." He pointed toward the natural-born liar. "Zeyler has managed to find out that they're taking this Gruyard that the major has his knickers tied in knots about with them."
"I'm good," Zeyler said. "I really am. I'm practically a fixture in the kitchen of the inn where MacDonald is staying. When we're done here, you can give me a letter of recommendation to the famous Francisco Nasi and I shall become a great spy. Not a famous one, since that would defeat the purpose, but great."
"If nothing else, you have the chutzpah," Heisel grumbled. "If you get to work for Nasi, you can ask him what the word means. I picked it up from an old Jew in Höchstädt, down south on the Danube, in 1632, when Gustavus's army was taking Donauwörth back from Duke Maximilian." He looked at Bauer. "What do you say?"
"I say we don't all go back to our own young dukes, yet. I say that I stay here, keeping an eye on Ferdinand of Bavaria, and you go with the Irishmen."
Bauer looked at Zeyler.
"I can stay with you. There will still be news here, about the archbishop. If you need a message run, my legs are younger."
"Honorable Tuna Tin?"
Hartke's veteran folded his scarred hands, leaning his chin on them, his elbows on his knees. "Once upon a time, my name was Julius Brandt. I have had several army names since I joined up, but that is what my parents had written down in the baptismal record. I come from Brunswick."
Heisel inclined his head. "Julius, my friend."
"I will send the message, Christoph. Then, like you, I will follow in the train of the Irish colonels' regiments. Who knows what we may yet find out." Brandt's smile was feral. "And I will keep the Honorable Tuna Tin, except between us. Of my army names, it's probably the best."
"Well, Julius, my friend?"
"I agree. This is something we should transmit—that the Irishmen are going south through Lorraine. Here, though, Christoph? Where am I to throw the wire? Not in the middle of the camp, certainly."
"No point in trying tonight."
"Nor tomorrow night, if this keeps up." Brandt was sitting cross-legged on top of an overturned feeding trough. Little trickles of water ran under the tent wall, under the trough, and out again.
"What hellish weather. Butler requisitions the best house in every damned village for his Bohemian countess. Nothing but the best. Featherbeds, even, sometimes. Still—whine, whine, whine, whine, whine."
Brandt looked around at the wagons. "There must be five times as many camp followers as there are dragoons in the regiments. At least, it seems so."
"The regiments are low. It was a hard winter in Euskirchen. Wet lungs. Hunger. Cold. Dysentery. Desertions. It didn't help that the ground was frozen hard much of the time, so we had to stack the dead, waiting for a thaw." Heisel started counting on his fingers. "Each of the colonels should, in theory, have eight hundred dragoons. Deveroux has done best. He has perhaps six hundred; Butler close to that. Geraldin possibly still has five hundred. If MacDonald has three hundred effectives, I would be surprised. Two thousand men. Maybe a little less."
Brandt smiled. "So sad. MacDonald is trying to hide the situation, even from his colleagues, by having boys from the stables and women in trousers ride some of his horses. I fear that Duke Maximilian will be gravely disappointed in what he is getting for his money."
"Where do I throw the wire? Not inside the camp with so many people around."
"We will have to creep outside of the sentry lines. I don't think we can do it tonight, yet. That freezing rain has stopped, but there are clouds and no moon. If you should lose hold of the wire when you throw it, we won't be able to find it again. I doubt very much that there is an equivalent length of good wire anywhere else in this camp. General Brahe will have to wait for better weather."
"Have you seen Gruyard? They want to know about Gruyard."
"He is traveling with the chaplains—Taaffe and Carew—in Butler's wife's wagon."
"Good, then we know where he is. We need to transmit that, too."
"When God permits, Julius, my friend. It is not for us to control the weather."
"Maybe tonight."
"Tonight, whether we lose the antenna or not. Dislav heard one of the colonels say that tomorrow we turn toward the east. They plan for Deveroux to break away. He will take his own men and Geraldin's. They hope that he can do to Merckweiler what Turenne did to Wietze and then quickly rejoin Butler."
"Don't forget to tell them about Gruyard."
"At least, since I'm attached to Geraldin's horses, I'll be able to follow along on the raid. But you will have the tuna tin, so what good will it do for me to be there?"
"Such things happen. Fate. Destiny. It is all part of the divine plan."
Heisel's face suddenly brightened. "The regiments that General Brahe left at Merckweiler last year have tuna tins. They should have two or three spare tuna tins, perhaps. Extras, in case of failure of working parts. Perhaps I can run away from Geraldin, ahead of the dragoons, go into Merckweiler, tell them who I am, tell them what I know, and get a tuna tin of my own as a reward. I love those words, 'down-time built with up-time parts.' They are like poetry."
Brandt smirked. "Your idea just goes to show that even divine plans can be improved on. I wouldn't count on getting the tuna tin, though."
"Ah, no. As Jeffie the up-timer says, 'The only reward you get for a job well done is another job.' "
"Now that's scarcely an inspiring thought."
"Have you gotten the antenna up? We have to finish this job, first."
"It just came in on the Post Office receiver," David Kronberg said. All we got was in Morse, but VOA is providing live coverage. Maybe Mel Springer's new setup in downtown Fulda is doing better. Our crystal set is nothing but static."
"Damn, but I'm sorry to hear that about Henry Dreeson," Jeffie Garand said. "I liked old Henry. I didn't even mind playing 'High Hopes' for him on that march we did against the anti-Semites down in Frankfurt. Do you suppose they're the ones who did him in?"
Joel Matowski stood up. "Enoch Wiley was an okay guy, too. Well, for a Presbyterian. If there's such a thing as a hardshell Presbyterian, he was one. We'd better get ourselves down to the barracks, just in case the regiment is called out for something."
The door of the sutlery banged open.
"Close the door," Riffa said. "It's sleeting sideways."
"Move out," Sergeant Hartke said. "Orders from Colonel Utt. All men to the barracks. We have a message via military radio from Mainz. Starting with even numbers, every other unit marches to join General Brahe at first daylight. Odd numbers stay here in the garrison. You know which unit you are." Under his breath, he added, "I hope."
"In this weather?" Margarethe asked.
Friedrich kissed her. "Sorry, sweetheart. In this weather, if that's what it takes."
"Margarethe," Theo said. "You're being unreasonable. You can't go, Rehgeißchen. You're pregnant."
"I've seen pregnant women in the camps."
"That's because they don't have anywhere else to be," her husband answered. "You are not supposed to even be in Mainz. You were not supposed to follow us. Did you see Dagmar Nilsdotter tramping out into this muck with a four-month-old baby? No. She stayed in her cabin at Barracktown like a mature, sensible army wife. Did Gertrud come with Jeffie? No, she stayed with her mother like a young, sensible, pregnant army wife. Which is what you are, except that you are not being sensible. What do I have to do? Tear out my hair?" Friedrich grabbed a handful and tugged on it.
Margarethe sobbed. "But Fritzi, even Papa is going with the army."
"He's the military chaplain for Brahe's Calvinist soldiers, my sweet sister." Theo slammed his fist on the table. "Of course he is going."
"But you," Friedrich said, "are not. I can't help it that you came this far, but no farther. You are going to wait right here at the Horn of Plenty until we come back."
"So, Nils, now you are a bachelor again, too." Derek Utt twirled his wine glass in his fingers. He didn't really want a drink right now. The night before you moved out always seemed to be the longest one in the year.
Brahe nodded. "Anna Margareta and the children left Wednesday. They are going up through Frankfurt and Fulda, then to Erfurt. From Erfurt to Magdeburg, and then as far north as the trains are still running, she, Elsa, and little Axel Petter will have the privilege of a railway ride. There was no reason for her to stay longer, once it was certain that I will be in the field during the summer. We will have another child in the autumn and there are projects to be accomplished on the estates in Finland. Money does not make itself."
"Mary Kat is expecting a baby, too. In August. Our first."
They congratulated one another on their husbandly prowess.
Utt thought a minute. "And your sister?"
Brahe gave him a wry smile. "It appears that while Erik Stenbock was last on my wife's list of prospective suitable husbands for her, Kerstin rated him as first. Confronted with the likelihood of being transported back to the northland, she took direct action in the form of simply telling me that she was going to marry him. She is twenty-five, of age by the strictest of standards, and I can only predict that once the mail arrives, my aunt, old Gustav Stenbock's widow, will be deliriously happy with her second son for snagging such an improbably prosperous bride. So there was no prospect of opposition there. My aunt still has three more children to marry off and, after all, Erik's sister Kristina is already married to my older brother Per, so . . . It's all in the family. It's not as if he's unsuitable. He just doesn't have much money, so he's seriously in need of a successful career—more than I can offer him here in Mainz. I gave them my blessing and arranged a promotion for him. They're off to work for Prince Frederik of Denmark in the Province of Westphalia, smug on her part and content on his."
"I'll send them my congratulations."
"I'm sure they'll be happy to accept."
Utt tipped his wine glass at a different angle, watching the candle flames dance through the liquid. "I hope you're satisfied with how I've been handling the Fulda Barracks Regiment's training. I realize it's pretty unconventional, no matter whether the standards are down-time or up-time."
"How does it differ from up-time?"
"Well, over in Grantville, they've really done their best to keep the model of 'bring the recruits in, gather them in one spot, put them through a routine called "basic training" a bunch at a time, and then assign them to units.' That's how I was trained, myself. It's just lucky that I stayed in the WVNG and kept my manuals. That's what Lane Grooms is doing now, even for the boys who are—if we are lucky—destined to be permanent reserves. He's thinking about defense against Saxony, of course, in a worst-case scenario."
Brahe nodded.
"Over here in Fulda, though . . . First of all, since our original contingent arrived in 1632, I haven't gotten a single new recruit sent out from Grantville, down-timer or up-timer. It's almost the same with the up-time civilian administrators, for that matter. The administration, first NUS and now SoTF, just plopped us down on what for them was the edge of known civilization and left us here. Except for the exchange of Springer for Jenkins, there hasn't been any new blood. Technically, I think, the proper word is 'marginalized.' "
Brahe nodded again. " 'Edge' . . . 'margin' . . . Etymologically speaking, that is quite appropriate."
"So even though we've been doing very well, medically speaking—the people at Barracktown are happily surprised at how many of them are still alive—I've still had vacancies to fill. I recruit locally, one man at a time or a few men at a time, and there's just no way I can afford to send them over to Grantville so Lane Grooms can put them through his basic training routines. Just the travel expense . . ." His voice trailed off. "So we train them ourselves. First it was just me and the other up-timers waving the pamphlets around. Now I have quite a few down-timers who can train others using the up-time manuals, but it's still closer to what Washington was doing during the Revolution than what happened during later American wars."
Brahe shrugged. "My regiments do it pretty much the same way. Drill, maneuvers."
Utt grinned. "Those things. On a lot of those things, we let Hartke and the other down-timers train us up-timers. I figured that until the whole regiment was equipped with modern guns, they probably knew more about how to handle the available weapons than I did. Two-way OJT—on the job training for the actual campaigning. Among other things, I've had all the infantry guys also taught to ride and got them horses, so they can double as dragoons at a pinch. It's not cavalry, but I have more mobility than I would have otherwise. That's a big consideration when your manpower is so limited. There's no point of dreaming of mechanization over here when the big campaigns will be on the eastern front."
Brahe nodded, this time thoughtfully.
"Then also . . . Well, other things started when we hired this boy named Pierre Biehr. He was a would-be university student who ran out of tuition. We hired him to teach school for the Barracktown kids, but then he started working with the regiment on music training. That went pretty well. I started to think about organizing other kinds of indoor training in the winter, during bad weather. Why let them laze around in the barracks just because it's sleeting out? And why does everyone who trains soldiers have to be one? Turns out young Pierre has two older brothers and two older married sisters, everybody looking for a job. The oldest sister's husband was an unemployed drawing-master in Frankfurt-am-Main. I brought him up for one winter. Now almost every man who was already in the regiment that winter can not only read a map decently—he can also draw a reasonably good one. Not like a surveyor would, but by counting his steps to estimate 'how far' and recording what his eyes see. Sure, topo and trigonometry and GPS would be better, ideally, but they fall into the category of the push for the perfect driving out the 'adequate for the immediate purpose' and leaving you with the 'nothing at all.' I could come up with a poster: 'Fulda Barracks: the home of it'll do for now.' "
He looked at Brahe. "Are we going to get any sleep tonight?"
"We should probably try." Brahe tossed his wine into a vase of dried flowers and corked the bottle.
"Margarethe is locked in," Tata said. "Friedrich hugged her and kissed her. Then he went with Sergeant Hartke, down to sleep at Colonel Utt's quarters in case he needs them during the night. Tante Kunigunde is sleeping in the room with her and Papa locked the door. Mama will see to it that she stays here. If she is completely unreasonable, Mama will take her back to Fulda by force and turn her over to Dagmar. That will settle the issue."
"It should." Eberhard laughed. "If it doesn't, Dagmar can always call on our dear but indomitable sister Antonia in Strassburg for reinforcements. Kiss me goodnight, sweetheart. This could be our last featherbed for quite some time."
"Our last featherbed, but not our last bed." She snuggled down under the duvet. "I'm coming with you."
Eberhard yawned. "I know."
"Thank God that we're finally indoors for a change." Deveroux looked around the comfortable inn in Sarreguemines. "How much farther?
Butler spread his best, now rather tattered and water-stained, map on their unwilling hostess's dining room hutch. "We've come probably close to three-fourths of the way to Merckweiler. There should be about fifty miles to go. It's fairly easy riding as far as Bitche, not too bad to Niederbronn, but from there on east . . ."
"Merckweiler has a lot more defenses than Wietze did." Geraldin twirled his dagger. He had become attached to it. In that other world, without the Ring of Fire, he would have used it to stab Wallenstein. "I'd feel a lot more comfortable if we had better information."
"Of course they do." Butler scowled with disgust. "The USE was complacent at Wietze. Over here, they aren't worrying about us, specifically, in regard to the Pechelbronn oil fields, but they're damned well worrying about Bernhard. Worrying about the French. Worrying about whether Duke Charles of Lorraine will do something stupid. Worrying and doing something about it."
Geraldin stuck the point of the dagger into the table. "Brahe left two regiments behind when he took the Province of the Upper Rhine last year. They've had time to build some decent fortifications."
"They shouldn't have any up-time weapons, though. I haven't even caught rumors of up-time supplies coming across the Palatinate to them."
"Where and how would we hear rumors? No one can understand a word that the local people say. What a godforsaken dialect." Dennis MacDonald helped himself liberally to their hostess's wine. "Not even our guide can understand the peasants."
"Two regiments are what Brahe left. How many men will still be in the garrison after winter quarters? I haven't heard that they've sent any reinforcements across, either." Geraldin pulled the dagger out again. "If he's lost as many men as we have . . ."
"The regiments were at full strength when he left them. Infantry, and they spent the winter indoors, so . . ." Deveroux started to doodle calculations on the paper in front of him. "If we distribute our available men this way . . ."
Anna Marie von Dohna looked up from her embroidery. "Before we left Euskirchen, the mayor's wife said something to von Sickingen's wife Ursula who passed it on to me. The mayor still gets the newspapers from Cologne smuggled in."
Butler looked at her with annoyance. "We're not interested in the society columns."
She shrugged and went back to what she had been doing. She had made the gesture. For once, she had tried to be a sturdy prop, as the book of Proverbs said that a wife should be to her husband. Ferdinand of Bavaria's obsession with censorship did not strike her as intelligent. Maybe he even censored himself. In any case, he had not told her husband. If Walter and the others really did not want to know that the count of Hanau-Lichtenberg was scheduled to make a ceremonial inspection of the new industries associated with his Pechelbronn oil fields, and that it seemed likely that he might arrive there accompanied by a significant escort before Deveroux could reach Merckweiler, who was she to insist?
"The crucial thing, if this is going to work, is that after the raid, we have to arrive at Germersheim at the same time. Nearly the same time, anyway—not a week apart, much less two weeks." Butler grabbed the paper on which Deveroux was scribbling. "Then across and toward Bruchsal. Damn, but I wish Bernhard's cavalry wasn't sitting there south of Strassburg going 'Nyah, nyah, nyah.' It would be so damned much easier to go south in the Rhine bottoms on the left bank."
"Germersheim? That was taken by the imperials in 1622. The last I heard, there weren't a dozen families left, huddling in half-rebuilt sheds and shacks. Have they built Bruchsal back? In 1622, it was destroyed completely."
"No. That's why I want to cross into Swabia there, if we can. No major, entrenched opposition on the either side of the river. This part of the Palatinate was thoroughly scoured and the USE hasn't had it long enough to rebuild much. We'll be going through wasted landscapes—no forage. No hay. Some new grass, maybe, in fields that get sun, but mixed with weeds and a lot of underbrush. No peasants who have been hoarding food through the winter. That's why losing the baggage train—such as it is—would be a disaster."
"Why not Speyer?"
"The garrison's too strong. Could Brahe possibly have grabbed the left bank for the USE at a more inconvenient time? Coming west last year wasn't half this bad."
"If we don't get across at Germersheim, then we will have to go south looking for a ford. Probably as far as Hagenbach."
"I sure wish we could cross on a bridge. Wouldn't that be nice?"
"If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. There's no such thing as an undefended Rhine bridge. There's hardly any such thing as a Rhine bridge at all—the channels are too unreliable. There's no such thing as an undefended Rhine ferry. There's probably no such thing as a decent undefended Rhine ford, especially not in the spring when the water is rising and the channels are realigning themselves. You never can predict where a new channel is going to cut through."
"Stop complaining."
"Look, Deveroux. You and Geraldin are taking more than half of our fighting strength. Dennis and I will have the whole supply train and support personnel to move with us. If we get stranded at the Rhine crossing, we'll be sitting ducks for any USE garrison forces that peek out of Speyer or Landau long enough to spot us. Coordination, that's the key. If, in that other world, Ferdinand coming from Austria and Fernando coming from Italy managed it over far greater distances to triumph at Nördlingen, then in this world, over far shorter distances, we can pull off a coordinated operation, too."
MacDonald lifted his head. "If you say 'coordination' one more time, I'm going to puke."
"You look like you're going to puke anyway."
"We'd better write this out," Heisel said.
"Use as few words as possible." Brandt shook the little transmitter. "I think the 'battery' they put in this 'tuna tin' is dying. How can something that is not alive die?"
"They just mean that it stops working." Heisel printed carefully:
Irish dragoons east to Merckweiler.
Intend kill oil Pechelbronn.
Deveroux. Geraldin. Horses.
Five days food saddlebags.
Small arms only.
Then Germersheim.
He frowned. "That's as short as I can make it."
"Do we need another line? Gruyard is going with them, along with Taaffe and Carew, the other chaplains. They're expecting to take enough casualties out of this project that their men will be needing confession and last rites. The general and Utt are greatly concerned with Gruyard."
Heisel shook his head. "Better save the battery."
"For a girl who has never followed an army before, you've done great, Tata." Eberhard patted her bottom appreciatively.
"Ooooh, not there. I feel like there's nothing left between my skin and the bones I use for sitting. If I have to ride in that wagon much longer, even with a cushion between me and the board, the skin will be gone, too."
He peeked over her shoulder. "There's still a reasonable amount of you left."
"That's very reassuring. It wasn't so bad until we got to Kaiserslautern, but when the general heard that we were too late to prevent the raid on Pechelbronn, the pace he's kept up ever since has been insane. Wahnsinnig. Why is he going so fast? Didn't the reports say that there was some damage, but the garrison and the count of Hanau-Lichtenberg's bodyguard are 'mopping things up'?"
"They're mopping locally, collecting the wounded and taking them prisoner, interrogating, and the like. Most of the garrison at Merckweiler isn't mounted, though. Those are infantry regiments. Brahe hadn't taught them to ride and mounted them, the way Colonel Utt has done for us at Fulda Barracks. Hanau-Lichtenberg's men were on pretty horses suitable for going on a leisurely trip with parties at the other end, not for extended hard riding. Deveroux is on the run, trying to rejoin Butler, wherever he may be. Our guy with the radio—assuming that he's still alive—is with Deveroux, so all we know about Butler is that he's probably somewhere between southeastern Lorraine and Germersheim."
"Which means that we are going somewhere fast?"
"Southeast, toward the Rhine, all the while praying that someone shows up with better intelligence."
"Lieutenant Friedrich Württemberger, Fulda Barracks Regiment mounted scouts, reporting back."
Passwords and other formalities accomplished, which took a while, Friedrich finally made it to his brother and Colonel Utt. The condensed version of his information was that there were a hell of a lot of people cluttering up the road ahead of them, about seven miles farther on.
"Wagons stuck in the mud on the road. Wagons that pulled out onto the verge to try to pass those—stuck in the mud. Wagons that pulled out into the abandoned fields to try to pass those—stuck in the mud even worse, some of them up to the beds. Horses unhitched and being held by small children, occasionally getting spooked by all the noise and mess. Horses that didn't get unhitched in time, also stuck in the mud, some of them squealing, which is no help for the people trying to hold the unhitched horses."
Brahe winced.
"I went around—as close as I could get and still keep out of sight. I'd say that the whole mess is nearly three miles long and close to a half-mile wide."
Jeffie Garand laughed. "A genuine down-time traffic jam, in other words."
"What about the dragoons?" Sergeant Hartke asked.
"The dragoons are up ahead of the mess, heading southeast as a rapid pace. That's mainly what churned up the road to the point that the first wagons got stuck, I think. In my opinion, sir, there is no place for our forces to go around the baggage train and overtake the dragoons. Just me—one man and one horse—I got off and led him part of the time. There's no hard surface out there. Just old, uncultivated stubble fields that this spring weather has turned to muck."
The combined Swedish/SoTF camp was finally settling down for the evening. As soon as he escaped what appeared to be the perpetual staff meeting in Brahe's tent, Derek Utt started the final paragraph of his long-neglected letter to Mary Kat. "So we 'captured' Butler's camp followers." He dipped his metal-nibbed pen into the inkwell once more.
What we really did was leave a small unit of soldiers, just to keep order, and several medics behind with Butler's camp followers. There's sickness among them. Pestilence. According to them, they didn't have it when they left Euskirchen, but picked it up while passing through Lorraine. One of the down-time medics believes that it's plague. He was very loud-mouthed about thinking that it's plague. If he was wrong, it was bad for him to panic people like that. If he was right, it's worse. We left almost all our chloram behind with them. We radioed. Fulda is sending plague fighters. Pray for us all.
In Brahe's tent, the meeting was still, to some extent, going on, in spite of the official adjournment. Brahe, still, occasionally wanted a "Swedes only" consultation.
"This time last year," Botvidsson pointed out, "Horn wouldn't have dared to come far enough north to meet us in Württemberg. He was much too preoccupied with Bernhard. Now . . . With any luck, Bernhard has granted us the luxury of doing a pincers movement on the Irishmen. Seems peculiar to have him on our side, though. Not exactly on our side, but . . ."
"If I have a choice," Brahe said, "a choice of having Bernhard the grand duke of the county of Burgundy or whatever grandiose title he may be giving himself by now as my ally, even sort-of, and Bernhard once duke of Saxe-Weimar as my enemy, I will not dither. I will take him as my ally any day, on any terms."
"Presumably, the king has reached the same conclusion."
"The enemy of my enemy . . ."
The palace, which had been used as a retirement home for dowager duchesses, probably had not been in the best of condition even before the war. Now, twenty years after the last permanent resident died, it was in a wretched state. The most recent widow had been left with small children, so had stayed in Stuttgart before the war drove her away. Now she was dead and her daughters lived in Strassburg.
Moritz Klott, aide-de-camp, secretary, and, as he had learned from the up-timers, gofer, thought that General Horn should make the best of it. At least they had a roof over their heads, even if it did leak. However . . .
"I knew it," Gustav Horn ranted. "For as long as I have been assigned to this theater of operations, which is now nearly three years, Konrad Widerhold, with all the remains of the Württemberg forces he could gather, has been operating as an integral part of my army. Now, although we have not met up with Brahe and Utt yet, just because he knows that they are bringing the young dukes of Württemberg down into Swabia, what do I have?"
"I don't know, General." The liaison Bernhard had sent to work with Horn, an uncouth Lower Austrian who called himself Raudegen and had been promoted to colonel by Bernhard simply on the grounds of his ruthless efficiency, shook his head.
"That was a rhetorical question." Horn waved a piece of paper. "I have a petition from Widerhold to be permitted to place himself under Duke Eberhard's command."
He beckoned to Klott. "Take a letter. To Nils Brahe, administrator, general, et cetera. You know the titles and forms of address. Dear Nils:
Read this damned petition from Widerhold (attached). Do you really want a captain in the forces of the State of Thuringia-Franconia to have what amounts to a full regiment and part of a second under his direct command, Nils? Is that what you want? For that matter, is it what Colonel Utt wants—to have one of his captains in charge of a force larger than his own? What were you thinking to bring those boys back into Swabia?
"Continue with the 'yours sincerely' and all that at the end." He waved the secretary out and looked back at Raudegen. "What's next?"
"There is plague to the southeast, coming up from Marseilles, moving toward this region. The grand duke is instituting all possible preventive measures. The three Paduan physicians . . ."
Raudegen's voice went on, floating past Horn's ears. "Instituting strict quarantine at the borders . . . the up-time nurse . . . small capacity for manufacture of chloramphenicol will probably not prove to be sufficient . . . universities of Basel and Strassburg . . . all possible resources . . ."
Horn rested his forehead on his hands. "May God preserve us all."
"Damn," Deveroux said. "We have to get south. We have Brahe on our tail. South and east. Every scout I send out says that Horn is blocking us. Pforzheim is blocked. Leonberg is blocked. He's turned the whole Stuttgart area into a garrison. The damned Swede seems to have thrown every man in his regiments into the screen. What's he trying to do?"
"Herd us north," Geraldin said pragmatically. "Keep us from passing across into Bavaria. Push us north, right into the Franconian border, if he can. Then let the USE troops take us."
Butler slammed his fist on the table. "Let's try to swing around to his north, by way of Bietigheim and Backnang. Maybe we can get on a southeast track from there."
"Nice monastery," Jeffie Garand said. "I thought that Protestants had given those up."
"The first Duke Ulrich secularized it when he turned Lutheran—took it away from the Cistercians," Friedrich said. "He kept the name 'monastery' for it, but it's been a boys' school ever since. Well, that is, it was up until the wars came. I was surprised to find anyone here at all. God knows, there's hardly anyone in Mühlacker. Before the war started, it had over a thousand people."
Johan Botvidsson appeared on their horizon, a letter in hand. "Do you know this man?"
Eberhard took the letter. "Konrad Widerhold? From Ziegenhain, up in Hesse? Of course I know him. I've known him since I was a child. He came into Württemberg military service in 1622, after Margrave Georg Friedrich of Baden lost that disastrous battle at Wimpfen to the imperials. Our father respected him immensely. When it comes to siege craft, nobody in this part of the Germanies is his equal."
"I know him, too," Sergeant Hartke said unexpectedly. "At least, Dagmar knows his wife."
Everybody in the room turned around.
"Widerhold is married to Anna Armgard. Her father used to be the commandant of Helgoland. It's a pretty small island. Dagmar's father was—still is, for that matter—the schoolteacher there. He—Dagmar's dad, his name is Niels Pedersen Menius—is something of an antiquarian, too, which is why he gave Dagmar and her sisters such peculiar names."
"Back to the topic," Derek Utt said.
"Anna, Wiederhold's wife, and Dagmar are the same age. They went to school together—all the years they went to school."
Utt smirked at Brahe. "Shall we tell Horn?"
"Only if we want to watch his hair turn white before he goes entirely bald."
Nils Brahe and Derek Utt were sharing a copy of the latest Frankfurt paper. The latest to reach them, at any rate.
"To be honest," Brahe said, I'm more relieved than anything else. The king may not be overjoyed by this latest joint behind-our-backs maneuver of Bernhard and the king in the Netherlands, but it turns Lorraine into a shield, albeit a very thin and narrow one, between the USE and France."
"By which you mean that if Turenne raids again, at least he'll have to go through somebody else's army first."
"Basically. Also, Fernando has conveniently swallowed up a very large number of Catholics. If those territories had been folded into the Province of Westphalia, they would have seriously changed the complexion of the region that Frederik of Denmark is administering. I can't quite see Wettin and Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel, or, for that matter, Gustavus, wanting to add another province with a predominantly Catholic population to the USE. Either way, it would have turned into a huge bone of contention in parliament, right in the middle of the campaigning in the east."
"Which way next?" Derek Utt asked.
"Horn's block succeeded." Brahe gave one of his first genuine smiles in days. "So far, at least. How I love radios. His scouts say that the Irishmen are headed due east. If they keep going east, they'll hit Backnang, but the terrain isn't easy. Horn is moving his regiments east, south of Stuttgart, generally toward Schwäbisch-Gmünd. His cavalry's moving ahead. If they get there fast enough, before Butler gets past, the infantry are following in a forced march. Once they are there to hold the southern screen, the cavalry will start a screen to the north. He'll have a line between the dragoons and Bavaria."
"Well, then. Onward and upward, I suppose."
"General," Ulfsparre said. "General Brahe, sir, it's Duke Friedrich. Er, that is, it's Lieutenant Württemberger. He's back from our latest scout. What he saw doesn't match with what we were getting from General Horn."
Springtime at the Horn of Plenty meant spring cleaning at the Horn of Plenty. Kunigunde and Ursula, with a fleet of temporarily hired maids, were turning the inn upside down and inside out. Bedding fluttered from the window sills. Sweeps shook soot down from the chimneys.
There was one resident for whom spring had no charms. "I wish I could have gone with Fritzi," Margarethe wailed. "I should have gone with Fritzi."
"Look at the cartoon, Margarethe," Justina said. "It's lovely. Another van de Passe, with the archbishop of Cologne cowering in a tent somewhere out in the dreary countryside."
"I don't want to look at cartoons. I just want Friedrich to come home."
Kunigunde and Ursula each handed her a handkerchief.
"If this weren't our own taproom," Reichard Donner said, "I would go out for a beer. Your wailing may drive me to it yet. Girl, if you don't stop sniveling, you are going to damage the child you are carrying. It will be born with the marks of teardrops running down its cheeks, not to mention snot dripping out of its nose."
"At least the plague doesn't seem to have advanced east beyond Lorraine. Thus far. Except for the little pocket that our people stopped at the Rhine." Reichard Donner looked out at the meeting of the Mainz Committee of Correspondence. It could not be considered one of the larger or more effective CoC groups in the USE, but it no longer fit into the taproom at the Horn of Plenty. They had to rent space at the Freedom Arches. The holder of the Mainz franchise was of the opinion that business was business.
"Unless, of course, some of the dragoons had already contracted it and carried it into Swabia when the Irishmen managed to cross ahead of Brahe and Utt."
"You are a pessimist, Philipp Schaumann," Kunigunde said.
"It has stood me in good stead throughout my life."
"Does that mean," Margarethe asked, "that if Friedrich and Papa and Theo do capture the Irishmen, they might get the plague?"
Ursula handed her a handkerchief.
Justina sighed. "Pregnancy takes some girls this way. They weep from beginning to end."
"If I had to choose between that and morning sickness," Kunigunde observed, "I think I'd rather cry."
At the podium, Reichard was saying, "In regard to our campaign against the anti-Semitic agitators in response to the dastardly assassinations of Mayor Henry Dreeson of Grantville and the Reverend Enoch Wiley . . ."
"No," Wamboldt von Umstadt said to Johann Adolf von Hoheneck. "No, I do not approve of riots, or of mobs taking the law into their own hands. When it comes to my obligations in connection with protection of the Jewish population in the archdiocese of Mainz, however . . . Suffice it to say that I believe that the actions of the Committees of Correspondence have greatly lightened my burden for the next few years. That isn't to say, of course, that the organization won't be taking other positions and actions in the future that will make other aspects of my burden heavier."
Hoheneck pantomimed weighing items on the scales of justitia.
"A pagan goddess, if there ever was one," the archbishop said. "It's amazing how thoroughly we have managed to incorporate her into our supposedly Christian ideas about life."
"I have to give Butler credit," Brahe said. "I'd have thought it over ten times, and then ten times more, before bringing even mounted dragoons that close to Stuttgart, given how heavily Horn has it garrisoned."
"We're just lucky that our scouts caught them turning south. Horn's infantry—most of it—has stopped at Göppingen. He reports that he is prepared to turn them. The cavalry is going on north, in case the Irishmen head east again.
"He's drunk," Dennis MacDonald's batman said, his face impassive.
"Since when hasn't he been drunk?" Geraldin turned around.
"He was possibly sober for about two hours, late Sunday morning. Father Taaffe conducted a field mass, with homily, that went on for ages and the colonel didn't remember to bring a flask."
The batman's answer was completely deadpan.
"So he's drunk. Old news."
"This time, he's drunk and riding a horse. He's gone outside the camp. When the sentry tried to stop him, the colonel cut him with his riding whip."
"Damn and blast. Send someone after him."
"Butler and Deveroux are riding ahead. They want to get into Schorndorf before the city council realizes we are coming. You're the only person here of the same rank as Colonel MacDonald. If you just send people after him . . ."
The batman didn't say it, for which Geraldin was grateful.
If Dennis was drunk enough to fight and sober enough to remember, he would have every member of the party sent to retrieve him up on charges of insubordination. Striking a superior officer. Who knew what. Floggings would ensue. Floggings at a minimum.
He sighed. "Order my horse saddled. Tell Shea to order his company mounted. I'll go after him."
"There's some guy cantering down the middle of the road down there around the bend, singing," Theo Pistor reported.
"So the local farmers are happy," Simrock said.
"He on a really expensive horse and he's not singing in German."
"Let's go see." Simrock shook his horse into a trot.
"Come back here, you two idiots." Lieutenant Friedrich Württemberger admitted to himself that he had just issued an order that was not in the official book.
Either they didn't hear him, or . . .
Chaplain Pistor suddenly showed up next to him. "What do those two young idiots think they are doing?"
For the first time since they met, Friedrich and his father-in-law were in harmony. Unfortunately, that was not enough to make Theo and Simrock rein in their mounts.
Pistor rode after them, screaming fatherly admonitions.
Friedrich looked at Hartke. "Move out. Catch up with them."
By the time they came around the bend, Theo and Simrock had stopped the singing man. Theo had hold of the horse's head.
A group of mounted dragoons appeared from around the next bend.
From that point, it was hack and slash, with a counterpoint of pistol shots.
"We won," Hartke pointed out a couple of hours later. "It wasn't exactly a by-the-book fracas, but we won. Sometimes these spontaneous skirmishes are the nastiest. In a set battle, the plan may not survive contact with the enemy, but at least you start with some kind of a plan. Sometimes you even have, 'if X, then Y, but if Q, then P and run like hell out."
"All logic would have indicated that the dragoons should have been moving in the other direction out of Waiblingen. East, not west." Simrock frowned.
"Human nature interfered with logic," Theo said. "The singing colonel was as drunk as a skunk."
"If Captain Duke Eberhard loses another brother," Hertling said. "If he does . . ."
"We were supposed to be watching out for them," Merckel said. "Two of us aren't even here. You left Bauer up at Euskirchen. I guess Heisel is still in the Irishmen's camp."
"We won," Brahe said. "Lieutenant Württemberger's small detachment delivered two of the four Irish colonels to you, too. I understand that to mean that you are halfway to your goal."
"You are perfectly correct," Derek Utt said. "We won."
"Who is on the next cot?" Chaplain Pistor asked. "Who is on the other side of you?"
Theo didn't have to twist around on his stool in the lazarette tent. He knew. "It's Friedrich."
Pistor didn't reply.
"Forgive them, Papa. Margarethe is expecting your first grandchild. 'Children's children are a crown to the aged.' Let me write and say that you forgive her, before it is too late. Remember, 'The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin.' "
Pistor snorted. "I am not so close to dead yet that you can get away with quoting scripture at me selectively. I taught you better than that, I hope, whether you learned the lesson or not. The next line from your first quotation is, 'And parents are the pride of their children.' Of your other one, the remainder of the verse reads, 'Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.' Nor should you try to bludgeon my tired mind with the parable of the wastrel son. The point of that is that the son repented. He realized he would be better off as the lowliest of his father's hired men. Can you tell me that Margarethe has repented this rebellious marriage? Can you assure me that she realizes she would be better off as a scullery maid in my kitchen than as the wife of that . . . ?"
He found no word adequate to describe his opinion of Friedrich Württemberger.
"Give her peace of heart, Papa. Please. 'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.' and 'First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.' "
Pistor shook his head. "No, the Word of God is not soft. Jesus said, 'All men will hate you because of me, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved.' Matthew reads also, 'I did not come to bring peace, but a sword . . . a man's enemies will be the members of his own household . . . anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me . . ."
"Papa . . ."
" 'For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.' Do not plague me further, Theo. The daughter I love chose a worldly treasure and until she repents, she has stored up for herself 'treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.' "
"Forgive them before it is too late, Papa. Too late for Friedrich. Too late for you. Before you cry with the teacher in Ecclesiastes, 'In vain, in vain. Everything is utterly in vain.' "
Chaplain Pistor turned his head to the other side of the cot.
Derek Utt was tired of staff meetings. Still . . . he was holding one. Another one. "Brahe has to get back to Mainz to deal with the anti-Semitic movement in the Rhineland. Mostly it's been fairly orderly, but in places, it is getting out of hand."
Joel Matowski stood at as close to attention as he ever managed to get.
"You're going back to Fulda, Joel. You're in charge of the detachment returning MacDonald and Geraldin for trial. Kidnaping. Complicity to murder in connection with Schweinsberg's death. Have Hartke tell off twenty five men to go with you. He knows what I want, so he won't assign anyone who would get the idea of 'doing us a favor' by cutting their throats some dark night."
"Envy may be a sin, so color me green. I wish we had gotten that duty," Simrock said in disgust the next morning. "We don't get to take them back and see them hang. We get to sort through all the debris they abandoned in their tents."
"Yes, oh, whee." Theo picked up an oblong box that looked like a portable camp desk and unlatched it, unfolding the various parts. "This looks promising . . . what the hell?"
Simrock shook his head. "It's not a desk. It's a field altar, with a little chalice and a tiny bottle of wine and some hosts—everything a priest needs to say mass."
"Here's a book in the drawer underneath. It's by some guy named 'Carve' who says that he's Butler's chaplain, right on the front page," Jeffie said. "Maybe he's a friend of Gruyard and they go around carving up people together."
"His name isn't 'Carve,' " Theo said with disgust. You're looking at capital letters, in Latin. There isn't any letter "U" the way there is in German—or in English, for that matter. The name's 'Carue' on the title page. In English, it ought to be "Carew,' I suppose, but if you printed that in Germany, almost everyone would want to say, 'Carev.' Stick with 'Carue.' Let me look."
Jeffie tossed it to him.
"This isn't a printed book. It's just a manuscript. He's just drawn the front to look as much like an engraved title page as he can. I guess he plans to publish it and wants the printer to have some idea of how he would like it to look, with family crests and stuff."
"What's it about?"
Simrock started paging through it. "God damn it, Jeffie. Run. Stop Matowski and the other the guys who are leaving with the Irishmen, right now."
Jeffie ran.
"Theo, get Colonel Utt."
"See," Simrock said to Derek Utt. "He's labeled it a 'book of travels.' Reisebüchlein, that is. Just the front page of it has the Latin-shaped letters. The rest of it's in German. My dictionary says that Reisebüchlein means a 'guide for travelers,' but . . ."
"It's a journal of the travels he's already done," Theo said. We read parts of it while Jeffie was chasing after you. It has notes on everywhere he's been, and where he's been is with Walter Butler as he ravaged his way across Europe these last ten years or so. He's been back to Ireland to visit his family a couple of times, but the rest of it, he's been with the Irish regiments—either with Butler or, if he wasn't in the field, with Deveroux."
"He's written down everywhere they have been," Simrock added. "And everything they've done. Talk about evidence . . ."
Jeffie shook his head. "He wasn't in Fulda with them when they kidnapped Schweinsberg, though. They left him behind with MacDonald."
Derek Utt looked at him sharply.
"Yeah, so we peeked."
"But he does say when they caught up with their regiments again, chasing after Archbishop Ferdinand after he retreated from Bonn."
"Simrock, take it to Joel," Utt said. "I'm sure the prosecutors will be happy to have it. Just let me write him a memo. Donner, you and Garand go with Sergeant Hartke to re-interview the rest of our prisoners. We're looking for someone named Thomas Carue, who may or may not be owning up to his name right now. Whatever he knows, we need to know it. Hartke, find me someone reliable in the middle of this mess. I need to send a memo on this over to General Brahe."
"You can ignore all the young prisoners, Sergeant Hartke," Simrock said on his way out the door, adding "sir" at the last minute, "unless you just want them to point him out to you if you can't find him any other way. This Carue has to be somewhere in his forties. The book says he's been a priest for a long time now. If you have anyone with you who can sort out different Irish accents, take him with you." Again, he tagged on, "sir," barely in time.
"Why?"
"The introduction says that he's from Tipperary." Simrock disappeared out the door.
"He's lucky that Brahe put him in the Fulda Barracks Regiment," Hartke commented. "In any other unit, he'd have been flogged to death by now. But he's really sort of useful, in his own way. Not as a soldier, exactly, but in his own way."
Utt smiled his agreement. Not that the Fulda Barracks Regiment had ever been, precisely, famous for its strict attention to military protocol. He was pretty sure that not even the most wildly radical CoC regiment could be worse at that.
"There's something I did notice," Hartke said. "Gruyard wasn't with the bunch we routed. That means he has to be with the batch that made it into Schorndorf."
"Both of them are dead," Theo said. "Papa and Friedrich. During the night."
"It wasn't unexpected." Eberhard stared at his boots. "Did he forgive them?"
"No," Theo said. "But he will."
Tata raised her eyebrows. "How can a dead man forgive?"
" 'Like a fluttering sparrow or a darting swallow an undeserved curse does not come to rest.' That is part of the wisdom of Solomon. I am not going to leave Margarethe to live under an undeserved curse." Theo straightened his shoulders. "She's going to get a letter from me, saying that they died in the same hospital tent, on neighboring cots. Which is perfectly true. The letter will also say that I exercised my persuasive powers to the utmost to bring Papa to a change of heart. That is also true. If she concludes that I succeeded . . . I'm not going to feel the slightest obligation to correct her assumption and I certainly hope . . ." He looked directly at Simrock, "that no one else ever will, either."
"Stuttgart," Eberhard said. "It isn't far from here to Stuttgart. Friedrich can be buried with our parents."
Tata put her head on his shoulder.
"I don't have the money to send Papa's body back to Hesse," Theo said. "He'll have to be buried here, like the other casualties, in unconsecrated ground."
Eberhard made a negative gesture. "Send him to Stuttgart with Friedrich. Bury him with our family. It's a Lutheran church and he's a Calvinist minister, but we own the crypt and for all practical purposes, we appoint the pastor. Pistor may turn over and over in the grave I give him, but it will probably make Margarethe feel better, so I decree that it will happen. Occasionally, there are advantages to simply being the boss."
"Eberhard," Tata said.
"What?"
"They shouldn't radio this to Mainz. They shouldn't radio this or put in a newspaper. Margarethe shouldn't find out that way. At the very least, they should let Theo send her a letter first."
He sighed. "It doesn't work that way. Whoever gets the news first will plaster it all over."
"Up-time," Joel said, "the army notified the next of kin. I've seen pictures, from the second world war. Two soldiers, walking up to a house, to tell the wife or mother."
"That was then. Now . . ." Eberhard looked out at the camp. "For half our men, probably, we don't even know who they really are, or where they come from."
"We know for Friedrich," Tata said stubbornly. "We know for Chaplain Pistor. Make them let me use the radio. I'll send a message to Papa. Someone in the CoC can tell her—not just some headline or broadcast. I'll make sure to say that Theo is alive and will be writing to her right away."
"That was an outright catastrophe," Butler proclaimed. "We've lost nearly half the effectives we had when we left Euskirchen, two colonels, and a half-dozen other officers, before we have even reached Bavaria. Duke Maximilian is not going to be a happy man."
"And when Maximilian is unhappy, everybody is unhappy." Deveroux looked up. "Where did that phrase come from? It's been making the rounds for months."
"I greatly fear," Anna Marie von Dohna said, "that it originates from a comedy routine that is performed on the Voice of America."
Deveroux subsided.
"Where did you hear the Voice of America, O charming spouse of mine?"
"Dislav told me."
"At least we made it into Schorndorf."
"Barely."
"Once more," Brandt said. "The tuna tin is very weak, but I want to try just once more."
"Where am I going to throw the antenna, here inside a town?" Heisel asked.
"We are in the garrets, on the top floor of the castle. If you can lean out the window, after dark, and swing the wire with the rock on the end out a little and then up, over the roof tiles . . ."
"I don't think it's a good idea. What can be so important? Brahe has to know that the Irishmen are in here. He's right outside the walls. With a lot of new friends."
"One more time, with where the various units are quartered and how much ammunition they have. Our commanders do not know about the gunpowder in the city armory. Once more, only."
"I guess we might as well try it. This opening isn't very big, though."
Heisel tossed out the rock tied to the end of the wire and started to swing it, aiming for enough momentum to get it over the roof. Ten feet or so below the window, the wire caught on a spike that someone, at an unknown date, for a long-forgotten reason, had pounded partway into the mortar about six inches above the window on the floor below. The rock jerked back, breaking the window.
The window happened to belong to the room assigned to Father Taaffe, who called a guard. That guard called some more guards, one of whom had a clever idea. He went outdoors and looked up while father Taaffe signaled from the window. Then he counted from the end of the building and identified the window above the priest's chamber. He identified the ones on either side of it, too, just to be on the safe side.
"Go," Brandt said. "My quarters are in this room. Yours are not. Go."
Heisel, a sensible man, went.
A group of guards caught Brandt, and hauled him in front of Butler, who turned him over to Gruyard for questioning. After some time, under extreme stress, he revealed Heisel's name.
Heisel's reaction to his own arrest was, "Well, tough shit."
Butler concluded that much of the "bad luck" that plagued him throughout this entire campaign had really been caused by these men and their tuna tin. He demanded information on when they were embedded with him, by whom, why, and what they were doing all along."
Gruyard went contentedly back to work.
Butler was truly astonished to hear that all this trouble and fuss was being made about the death of Schweinsberg and the raid into Fulda the autumn before.
"Talk about ancient history," he complained to Deveroux.
"Keep at them," he said to Gruyard.
The answers the two men reluctantly provided during the next session directed the interviewers toward Countess Anna Marie von Dohna's favored servant Dislav.
There was considerable discussion among those present in the torture chamber about whether or not Colonel Butler would really want to know this.
The conclusion was that even though he might not want to, he really needed to.
This was followed by considerably more discussion on the general topic of belling the cat.
Eventually they bucked it up the chain of command to Deveroux.
Butler was furious.
Butler's wife was even more furious when the guards came to arrest Dislav and transport him to the torture chamber.
Two of Deveroux's more mechanically inclined aides stared at the tuna tin.
"I am not an engineer, nor did I ever wish to be one," Turlough O'Brien said.
Ned Callaghan shook it. "The man whom Gruyard is questioning told the truth about one thing, at least. The object is dead."
"It certainly seems to be. It should be safe to open it, I guess."
An hour later, they stared at numerous small, oddly shaped, pieces of . . . unidentifiable stuff.
"Perhaps we shouldn't have taken it apart after all," Callaghan said. "Or, at least, maybe we should have taken notes and drawn a picture of how it looked when we first opened it."
"Maybe we should try to put it back together."
"Let's at least put it all back in the tin. After all, Colonel Butler doesn't have any idea what it looked like inside before we removed the lid."
Neither of them connected the tuna tin with the rock on a wire that had broken Father Taffe's window. Irish dragoon regiments in the service of Bavarian dukes were not exactly hotbeds of cutting edge technology.
Then it occurred to O'Brien to take the tuna tin to Geraldin's farrier, who was known to have a mechanical turn of mind. "Maybe he can figure it out," he said.
The farrier was in the middle of shoeing a horse, so they left it with his apprentice. Peter Schild realized right away that something really bad must have happened to Heisel and Brandt.
"I don't have the slightest idea what it is," he said. "You'll have to wait until Master Nugent can look at it." His bewilderment seemed very sincere. Caspar Zeyler might be a natural-born liar, but Schild was no slouch. What's more, he had been practicing the skill for months, now.
"Does this strike you as sort of, 'meanwhile, back at the ranch'?" Jeffie asked Hertling. "Just camping here and staring at a set of walls after we've been chasing all over the map?"
"We can only hope the ones you call 'the high mucky-mucks' are plotting something good. Something outstanding or excellent, even. I thought you enjoyed talking to your friends who came with you in the Ring of Fire."
"Old home week, high school reunion, and a beanfest, all in one. I haven't seen some of these Grantville guys who are with Horn for two or three years. Yeah, it's been nice to catch up. The local news columns in the Grantville paper tell me who's getting hatched, matched, and dispatched, but they don't usually say who was hitting on whose wife at someone else's wedding. Not unless it ends up in the 'Arrests' column."
"Those walls are fairly new, aren't they?" Jeffie asked.
Eberhard nodded. "They were built by the first Duke Ulrich close to a century ago, when people were just beginning to use the new designs. The old curtain walls were already irregular in shape. He rebuilt and added the bastions at the angles."
"What's the circumference?"
"About a mile. The ditching complicates things, of course. In some places, it's a good forty yards wide."
"Even so, once we get Horn's artillery up here," Hertling said, "we can make a fine mess." He was perched on a rock up on the Ottilienberg that overlooked the city.
"Ja. It's going to take a great deal of heaving and hauling, though. Damn," Hartke said, leaning over. "Look at the town. Something's on fire."
"Sure is," Hertling agreed. "Not good. Not on a windy day like this. Do you suppose anyone inside the walls has noticed?"
"If they had, they'd be running around like ants."
"They're starting to."
"By the bowels of Christ!"
"For shame, Gutzler. For shame to blaspheme so. If anyone hears you, the magistrate will fine you a stiff one." Barbara Mahlin shook her fist over her cart of well-picked-over second-hand clothing.
"My hat. Look at it blow. It's only for work—not worth much more than those rags you sell. Some damned Irishman took my good one right off my head last market day, though, so now it's the only one I have. I want it back." Gutzler went dashing down the side of the square.
"Sure looks stupid, doesn't he, bouncing along like that with his pot belly flopping?" Johann Leylins guffawed. Then, "Great God Almighty! What was that? It looked like Gutzler's been swallowed by a ball of hellfire blowing out of the cook shop doorway."
Inside the cook shop, a fourteen-year-old apprentice, his hair singed off, picked himself up from against the back wall and looked in horror at the torch that, less than a minute before, had been his master. For less than half a half minute, he froze in place, remembering. The gust of wind, causing a blow-back down the chimney, scattering coals and sparks at old Master Steiss, who had just been putting the poker to the green wood. He'd jumped back and tripped. He'd tripped over . . . that cauldron of hot lard where they had just finished cooking funnel cakes, and the lard had gone flooding into the fireplace.
If nothing else, the apprentice was agile on his feet. He dived over the closed bottom half of the double door, out into the alley, landed with a somersault, stood up, and screamed "Fire!" at the top of his lungs.
"Who's that yelling?" Hans Frinck called from next door.
"That no-good young Michael Haug who works in the cook shop."
"Somebody should teach that boy not to cry 'wolf.' "
"He's . . ." Frinck's wife Agnes poked her head out the door. "Fire!" she shrieked. "Fire on a windy day. Fire!"
Frinck ran for his buckets.
Young Haug was running down the street calling "Fire watch! Fire watch!"
Melchior Schiffer had the fire watch functioning in ten minutes. They drilled for this. Bregenzer at the well pump, with Leylins's younger son trading off with him. A chain of women to pass the filled buckets. He counted. Here came Greiners, dashing toward him from the square, calling that Minder would have to take Gutzler's place, because Gutzler was dead. Reisch. Kapffer. Ensslin. They went to work in a practiced rhythm.
"Schiffer." The apprentice was jumping up and down. "Schiffer!"
"Get out of our way, boy."
"Schiffer, I have to go back in."
"Nobody goes back into a burning building. Get out of our way. We have to wet down the ones on each side. More, in this wind."
"But, Schiffer—"
He found himself flat on his back in the street.
"What I was going to say, if you'd have let me," Michael Haug said, "was that Master Steiss had an open barrel of flour in there. From the funnel cakes."
Ensslin was picking himself up. Reisch never would again.
Hess and Hirschman rounded the corner and slid to a stop.
Barbara Mahlin ran, abandoning her cart of old clothes in the middle of the square.
"Wet the farther buildings," Schiffer yelled. "Haug, you're nimble. Get up on Kunkel's roof and look for sparks. Hirschmann, you go up too. We'll throw you the bucket rope and you can pulley up some water."
They all worked together, just as they were supposed to, but just then the wind whipped around, first from due south and then for a few minutes from due west, before settling back to its original direction. Frinck's pewter shop caught, but luckily Haug and Hirschmann made it down the ladder before Kunkel's did. Then the potter's shop next beyond it. Schiffer stepped back as he watched the flames jump the alley. Kugler's, Burckhardt's, Weisser's, Reitter's, Palm's, Aichmann's. The saddlery. The cook shop just had to be in the southwest quadrant. The wind was blowing the fires toward all the rest of the town.
"Give it up," he called. "Give it up. Evacuate."
Jakob Breidner, the night watchman, came running. "They won't let us out. The gate guards. The cursed Irishmen. They say there's a siege on. They won't open the gates to let the women and children out."
"Get a couple of barrels of gunpowder, light fuses, and roll them to the damned gates. They'll open them then, I bet. Then . . ."
"Then get the rest of the gunpowder out through the gates," Breidner screamed. "As soon as you get a gate open, roll the barrels of gunpowder out, upwind, through the south gate. We've enough in store to do more damage to ourselves than the Swedes can possibly manage with no more than the few guns that Horn brought."
Schiffer was thinking. What was flammable? Wood, of course—the timber in the Fachwerk houses. Flour, as they had just had cause to observe. Wheat, oats, hay, linen, bedding, clothing, paper . . . and there went the apothecary's shop.
And, of course, it couldn't be helped that lot of people were trying to rescue possessions from their own houses that were in the path of the flames rather than contributing to stopping the fire overall. That always happened.
Neuhauser and Besserer. Members of the city council at last. Where were the four Bürgermeisters? Given how firmly the town's patricians excluded its ordinary people from a role in its government, the least they could do was belly up to the bar themselves when they were needed.
"We've been up at the castle, talking to the Irish officers," Besserer panted. Volz is still there. They don't understand about the wind at this season. Steinbock says . . ."
Schiffer never heard what Steinbock, the appointed ducal administrator of the city and district of Schorndorf, said. A muffled roar told him that one of the townsmen had managed to get a barrel of gunpowder up against the south gate before the fuse died.
"Open it," he screamed. "Open it with your bodies. If the guards shoot, die for your city. The rest of you, if someone falls, you keep going. Die a hero instead of just dying in the fire. That's what we'll all do if they keep us packed in here like chickens roasting on a spit. Go!"
The fire wasn't crackling any more. It was starting to roar.
The master of the Latin school had his boys organized, their arms full of books, and was herding them towards the south gate.
Here came Volz, down from the castle with two of the Irish officers.
He heard the ominous sound of a stone cracking from the heat and added to his list of things that would burn. Plaster, whitewash, lime mortar.
"The church roof has caught," someone called. "We need to try to save the vestments, the altar cloth. The chalice and patens."
"There's no way we can save the building. Just the height of it makes it impossible. We simply can't get up there." Schiffer turned around. "What are the Irishmen doing?"
"Opening the gates—finally opening the gates—and trying to get their horses out. They won't let us Schorndorf people near them, except for the south gate that we blew. One of them shot Barbara Mahlin when she tried to push her way through with their horses."
"Their horses," someone said. "And our money. All the 'contributions' we have paid to keep them from plundering through the town. Controlled robbery instead of uncontrolled robbery, systematic instead of random. The officers are taking out the money chests."
"Go to the jail," Besserer called. "Let the prisoners loose—the ones the Irish locked up. Maybe they'll be grateful enough to help us fight the fire, but even if they aren't, we can't just let them broil there if the wind turns."
"It was good of them to bring the keys, but I'm not certain that I can walk." Julius Brandt tried to stand, but stumbled. "Leave me here and find Gruyard. He was in the jail when the fire broke out. You must take him to your Colonel Utt."
"No, Julius, my friend. Come. Walk. I will not leave you to the fire. I will support you." Heisel pulled one of Brandt's arms over his shoulders.
"You must forgive me. I betrayed you. I gave them your name."
"There is nothing to forgive. Anyone would have done the same. I gave them Dislav's name. I find that it is far easier to make proclamations about being stoic under torture when you are not being tortured right at that moment. I have seen unpleasant things before. Even experienced them. In his own way, though, Gruyard is an artist." Heisel turned his head. "What is happening down the hall?"
"The man with the keys let some other prisoners out. He was offering clemency if they would come fight the fire."
"Scarcely feasible for us, I fear. I am not in shape to fight a field mouse."
"If we can only get to the Swedish lines . . ."
"The horses," Timothy Nugent screamed. "The horses. I can't hold them."
"I'll take a couple," Caspar said. He grabbed for the reins.
"Not that way."
"I'll come after you as soon as I can. I need to help a couple of old friends."
Zeyler headed for the jail.
The noise at the other end of the hall got louder. Letting Brandt down on the floor, Heisel limped toward the source of the disturbance."
"Dislav? What?"
"Maybe you promised to bring this human slime to the up-timers for a fair trial as they see it," Dislav said. "I did not. See the pretty thumbscrews? I thought this was a quite original way to use them."
Heisel gagged.
Dislav shook his head. "The colonel beat my dear young lady when he found out that I was your friend. That was neither fair nor just."
"Uh. Dislav. Maybe we should get out of here. Shorndorf is burning."
The Czech shook his head. "The wind's blowing the other way. The castle will be all right, and the countess is in her quarters upstairs. I can't leave without her. Besides, I'm busy right now."
Schiffer had found a bullhorn. "The Swedes are coming in, some of them, at least. They're helping fight the fire. Look for orange uniforms and work with them. Otherwise, the Swedes still outside are picking off the Irish, one by one, as they come out with their mounts."
"What was that last noise we heard?"
"The church roof. The heat weakened the beams so much that it plunged right down into the sanctuary."
"This is going to have to be the last load."
The old man nodded his head. "But, wait. I still don't have the portable baptistry." He headed toward the sacristy.
"Aus! Jetzt! The roof is about to fall."
"I am the pastor of this parish, the Dekan of the parish of Schorndorf. Who are you to say 'Out! Now!' to me or order me around?"
The stocky young man in the orange uniform grabbed the Dekan by the waist and threw him down the church steps, followed by a clatter of miscellaneous silver plated vessels on the stone steps.
"By my authority as a called servant of God . . ."
The roof fell.
"We'll never get out," Heisel said. "Look what's happening. Our men outside figure that anyone on a horse is an Irishman trying to escape. But Julius can't walk—the wounds on his legs just keep bleeding and his legs shake so. Maybe Gruyard got in a hurry and cut more muscle than he intended to. I don't think I can walk, either, even though Gruyard didn't slice me up quite so badly. At least, I didn't think so right after he finished the last session. I thought he was holding back, saving something for the next time."
"Leave it to me," Zeyler answered. "I'll think of something. Maybe some of Brahe's men who have come inside the walls will recognize us."
"It's getting dark." Merckel wiped the sweat from his forehead.
"We'll be watching the fire all night."
"Why doesn't it ever rain when you could use it? All that mud over by Germersheim, and now this dry wind. It's enough to make a man believe in hell."
"What it reminds me of," Jeffie Garand said, "is that Jerry Lee Lewis song. 'Great Balls of Fire.' " He went back to scooping earth on smouldering embers.
"Merckel," someone called. "Ludwig Merckel. Over here."
"Heisel," he said. "God be praised."
"So far, the walls have contained the fire, Colonel Utt. I wouldn't count on it for tomorrow, though. It could still jump them if the wind really picks up." Moritz Klott, one of Horn's aides-de-camp eyed the embers of Schorndorf with a wary expression. "We know that your men are exhausted, but better keep them on alert."
"What's left? Anything more than I can see from here, that is?" Utt asked. They were standing at the south gate.
"Outside of the walls, there's a little suburb to the north—maybe three hundred people live there and it has a couple of inns." Klott checked his stack of paperwork. "We're using that for emergency housing for the survivors. The cemetery is outside the walls and has a little chapel. We'll hold the funerals there. Butler had given orders to have all that leveled so his men would have a clear view from the walls, but they hadn't gotten it done yet. We're lucky, in a way, that we were so close behind them. If they'd had a couple of weeks to dig in . . ."
"There are a lot of 'ifs.' If they had artillery, if, if, if. We have to deal with what is." Derek shook his head, looking at the young officers who were awaiting further instructions.
"Overall, though," Simrock said, "that was quite a roundup. Butler and Deveroux are in custody."
"Do we have Gruyard?" Derek was far from forgetting Schweinsberg's death and the popular reaction to it in Fulda and Grantville.
"We have what we are told is his body," Klott said. "Or the remnants of it. Searchers found it in the prison. It will be turned over to you."
"What else do I need to know?"
"Butler's wife is demanding to be allowed to leave. She rode out the fire on the far side of the castle and has her own staff, including a big, tough footman who seems to have been badly injured. Rather than accompany her husband to Fulda and stand by him during the trial, she wants to go back to Bohemia."
"Using what for money?"
"Some of Butler's accumulated loot, probably." Klott looked at Utt. "Have you dealt with her?"
"Not personally, no."
"General Horn has. She was demanding to be assigned one of the houses in the little suburb for her own personal use on the grounds that her chambers in the castle are all sooty. He's reached the conclusion that whatever she makes off with, it will be money well spent just to get rid of her."
"There sure isn't much of it left," Merckel said. "Great buildings turned into heaps of stones, into dust and ashes."
"The back part of the church. What's it called? Where the priests pray." Kolb sucked on his pipe. "That's still standing."
"The chancel. That back part is called a chancel. The front part is called a nave."
"Where'd you ever learn all that stuff, Lutz?"
Merckel looked away. "My father was a pastor. Back in Saxe-Weimar."
Kolb drew on his pipe again. "There are two complete houses standing. Count 'em. Two, both over against the wall, on the side the wind was coming from. Quite a few partials on the west side of town. Maybe some of them can be shored up."
"We're using the standing ones for infirmaries. After dark last night, we ran into a little old man in a black robe, standing by one of them and hugging a batch of old records. He is—was—the clerk at the Holy Spirit Hospital. That's all he managed to save—he said the whole civil archives, with people's wills and such, went up in smoke."
"Captain Duke Eberhard got the marriage and baptism records out of the church. That's what he was doing when . . ." Kolb looked down at his feet.
"And the castle. It's still there. Ugly clunker, with those big round towers at each end. If nobody had ever built a castle here to start with . . ."
Kolb shook his head. "In this location, right on the east border of the duchy? Nah. If it hadn't been our dukes, it would have been somebody else. It's a place that just begs for someone to plunk a fort down in it."
"It was a pretty enough town. Do you suppose they'll ever be able to build it all back?"
"Our duke!" the Dekan exclaimed in horror. "The young man who was so severely injured in saving me is truly our duke?"
"You got it in one, man," Jeffie Garand answered. "Eberhard saved your stinking hide." Then he switched to German. "The medics say they won't be able to save him. If he hadn't breathed in so much smoke that his lungs are bad, he might have a chance to get over the trauma of a double above-the-knee amputation. If his legs hadn't been crushed by that beam, he might have survived the smoke inhalation. He'd have had serious long-term lung damage, but he would have lived. As things stand, though . . ." Jeffie gave the Dekan a hard look. "If I were you, I'd go back, sort through all the things you swore absolutely had to be gotten out of your church building, and hope you have your funeral book."
The Dekan rose.
"Even better, if I were you," Jeffie added, "I'd make myself scarce before Hertling, Merckel, Kolb, and Heisel find you. Not to mention Colonel Utt. I wouldn't describe anyone in the Fulda Barracks regiment as being real happy right now."
"It's odd," Eberhard rasped. "Even after von Sickingen's men killed Ulrich, even after the Irishmen killed Friedrich, I didn't really expect to die. Not yet. Not now. Not so soon."
Tata nodded.
"Do you have my Montaigne? Where were we in the reading?"
"In the middle of the essay about cannibals."
He nodded.
Tata smiled. "Ah, yes. 'Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of the courage and the soul; it does not lie in the quality of our horse or our weapons, but in our own. He that falls obstinate in his courage—' " Her voice trailed away. She looked down toward the far end of the cot. " 'Si succiderit, de genu pugnat.'—I learned that much Seneca from you in this last year. Sometimes, I think you love Seneca even more than you do Montaigne. Maybe even more than the Bible, though you shouldn't."
" 'If his legs fail him, he fights on his knees.' That presumes, of course, that he has knees left. I feel weirdly calm about this whole thing, not that I ever expected to be a philosopher. Maybe I'm not entirely in this universe the theologians think the Ring of Fire created. Maybe some essential part of me was left behind, with that other Eberhard, in the universe where we were born. Maybe we're only echoes of what we would have been."
He tried to push himself up against the pillows, wincing when Tata put her hands under his armpits to help him.
"No, don't give me any more of the opium. I need to have my mind clear enough that nobody can deny that I know what I'm doing. What are those next lines?
". . . he who, for any danger of imminent death, abates nothing of his assurance; who, dying, yet darts at his enemy a fierce and disdainful look, is overcome not by us, but by fortune; he is killed, not conquered; the most valiant are sometimes the most unfortunate. There are defeats more triumphant than victories."
"It wasn't a defeat, though," Tata said. "Not even a triumphant defeat like that of Leonidas and the Spartans. We won."
"At the expense of the destruction of one of my towns and most of its people. What's left of the people? Less than a hundred men, I'd guess. More women and children, but it's still in the hundreds rather than the thousands. How are they going to live? What kind of a Landesvater have I been to my children to bring this fate down on them?"
"Victory is victory. At least, since the Irishmen had quartered themselves here, they didn't destroy everything in the fields. The people who still live will eat next winter."
Eberhard shook his head.
Tata stood up and shook her fist at him. "It would have been a lot worse to let four cavalry regiments owing their allegiance to Maximilian have free range to raid through Swabia with the USE people chasing after them. That would have been right back to the bad old days, before the Ring of Fire came. That's what kind of a father you have been to your country. That's what Papa used to say to me when I was a naughty child and he whipped me—that it would be worse for me in the long run if he didn't use the rod when I needed it."
"All right. It's a victory. I won't be enjoying it, though. Has that damned clerk finished writing up the clean copies?"
"Almost."
"I wish I'd been able to see Friedrich and Margarethe's baby."
"Your sister will take care of them. She has gone from Strassburg to Mainz since Friedrich was killed. Papa radioed to us. She took your little sisters with her. From what I've heard of Antonia, anybody who tries to keep her from taking care of them will be very, very sorry."
"General Horn will make the emperor understand, won't he? Everything that was personally Friedrich's is to go to Margarethe and the baby, no matter what our uncles try to grab?"
"He was here when you dictated the will. He'll be back to witness when you sign it. Colonel Utt is here, and Duke Bernhard's man, the colonel they call Raudegen."
"Given under Our hand and seal at Schorndorf in Our duchy of Württemberg this twenty-eighth day of May in the year of our Lord 1635." Widerhold finished his reading.
Horn looked at Utt.
"You are certain that this is your will and testament?" Horn asked.
"Yes." Eberhard grinned. "All five copies."
"You are fully aware of the complications that may ensue—no, that certainly will ensue?"
"As our friend Colonel Utt here would be likely to say," Duke Eberhard grinned again. Every time, it looked more like a skull smiling. ". . . quoting his lawyerly wife, 'to the best of my knowledge and belief,' I am aware. Am I the omniscient deity to say that I am fully aware? Just let me sign."
"Your personal properties to be divided in four shares, one each to your sisters and one to Agathe Donner, here present, as life incomes. Absolutely to any heirs of their bodies, should they have such; in default of heirs of their bodies, to your brother Friedrich's child; in case such child should die without heirs of his or her body . . ."
"Yes, yes, yes. The quill, please."
"The duchy itself . . ."
Since Horn's clerk was still delaying, Tata dipped the quill and passed it to him. She turned to the quartermaster and other witnesses. "You heard him. All of you heard him."
Eberhard signed.
Widerhold's voice went on:
"The duchy of Württemberg itself, independent and separate from any arbitrary provisions that were made at the Congress of Copenhagen in June of the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred and thirty-four, in regard to the establishment of a Province of Swabia as one of the component political divisions of the United States of Europe under the governance of Gustavus II Adolphus, king of Sweden and emperor of said United States of Europe, said provisions having been made without regard to or consultation with the will of the people of said duchy—"
Eberhard interrupted him. "I leave the duchy with all its parts and dependencies, rights and responsibilities to its people. My people. I leave to the people of the duchy, now its citizens rather than its subjects, the right to govern themselves and not be disposed of, willy-nilly, by emperors or prime ministers or diplomatic congresses. With a lot of legal language to ensure that I've done everything I can to make it happen. And copies not just to the official representatives of Gustavus Adolphus, but also . . ."
Tata handed one of the signed copies to Derek Utt and another to Widerhold. "All hail Johannes Althusius and the sovereignty of the people."
In the silence of the room, Utt laughed.
Tata joined in the laughter.
At last, so did Eberhard. "The king of Sweden can make what he wants of it. I wish him joy. I wish the prime minister of the United States of Europe joy. I wish my greedy uncles joy. I wish Margrave Georg Friedrich of Baden, supposed imperial administrator of a united Province of Swabia joy, and advise him to worry about Augsburg and the Bavarians, Tyrol and the Breisgau, with particular attention to Egon von Fürstenberg, instead of Württemberg." His voice weakened, grating. "Hell, Tata, I even wish your father joy. Hail to Reichard Donner, to the Horn of Plenty, and the hapless, hopeless, helpless Mainz Committee of Correspondence. Ave atque vale."
The others went back to the things they had to do. Agathe stayed.
"Lift me, Tata. I'm sliding down."
She put her hands under his armpits again and pushed up.
"There's no window in here."
"I can open the tent flap."
"Do. Go stand in the sunshine."
She stood there a few minutes, looking out at the movement and listening to the noise of an army in camp.
"Joy, Tata. I wish you joy."
She waited a few minutes more before she called the chaplain.