"3. 'If I have to live through a revolution I would rather make it than suffer from it.' What did Bismarck mean by this statement and what was the character of the revolution he helped make?"
—Matt Trelli's vague recollection of an essay exam question
once formulated by Miss Mailey.
Bozen, Tirol
October 1633
"Tell me again. Why I should send the three best plague doctors in the pay of the government of Tyrol and Upper Austria to Franconia? One of whom is the personal physician for my children and myself? And keep on paying them while they are there? Our budget . . ."
Claudia de Medici, twenty-nine years old and twice widowed, regent for her five-year-old son of the particular, specific, and independent-from-Austria-proper Habsburg duchy called Tirol, leaned back in her chair and looked at the board of medical consultants, gently tapping the end of the wonderful new fountain pen that the merchant Vignelli had brought back from his latest trip into the United States of Europe against her bracelet.
Vignelli had purchased a dozen. He had given one to her and one to the chancellor, Dr. Bienner. A half dozen to his most important business contacts in Bozen and Venice. The others, presumably, were being taken apart by the artisans in his employ, with a plan to expand the profits that were rolling in from his "duplicating machines" by adding "mechanical pens" to his product line. Already, he had changed the name of his enterprise to "Vignelli's European Office Supplies." All of which was good for Tirol's tax base, of course. It would be even better if Vignelli's people could make a better typewriter and adding machine than the ones coming out of Magdeburg. The man had spent an exorbitant amount to obtain prototypes. Still . . .
She returned her attention to the three men standing at the other end of the conference table.
Paul Weinhart, the personal physician in question, had been watching his ruler. Her auburn curls were threatening to burst out of the clips and pins that were supposed to be restraining them. Her brown eyes were snapping. On mornings such as this, it was best to proceed carefully. He cleared his throat. "We all do have practical experience in controlling plague outbreaks . . ." he began. For twenty minutes, he continued. "Of course, my lady, you may say that it is absurd of us to undertake such a thing at our ages," he finished.
"I have not said so."
"If I had a qualified son . . ." Weinhart's voice trailed off. "But my wife and the boys born in my first marriage all died in the plague of 1610–1611 in Innsbruck. Perhaps if we had these up-time devices then, the DDT, the medicaments . . . But that is irrelevant. The children of my second marriage are still young. Ignaz, the oldest boy, is only seventeen. Franz sixteen. Paul and Caspar are just starting Latin school."
"Do you need to go now?"
Weinhart shook his head. "The up-timers have quarantined Kronach, of course. In addition to the fact that the commander has closed the city gates from the inside. Quarantine is really the only way to control spread of plague. Total quarantine. But it's hard on the people inside the lines if there's no decent hospital and no enforcement of destroying the bedding and clothing. If it were summer, it would be a public health emergency already, but winter is coming. The plague almost always becomes less fierce in cold weather. Kronach should survive the winter."
Guarinoni intervened. His early education by the Jesuits was never very far from his mind. Next to medicine, perhaps even above medicine, returning the lapsed peoples of Europe to the Catholic faith was his passion. "If we don't go, there won't be any Catholics left in Kronach for us to assist. In the spring and summer of 1634, if they have not opened the walls, a Catholic city, the fiercest Catholic city in Franconia, may die. There is time to prepare. Time for us to learn more about Grantville and time for them to learn more about our capabilities. We can assist these up-timers in Bamberg with the outbreak at Kronach, Your Grace, but we can also learn from them at the same time. While serving God and the Church. But it must be soon."
Claudia de Medici continued to tap her fountain pen on her bracelet for quite some time after she dismissed them. Then she pulled the written proposal toward her and started to read. After a few moments, she picked it up and walked to the window.
Wilhelm Bienner, watching the regent, wondered if Dr. Weinhart, also, had noted the restlessness that the regent's self-discipline was barely keeping leashed these last few months. The duchess was tired of merely sending an occasional merchant who could double as a researcher to Grantville, no matter how fascinating the music and other information they brought back. Was Weinhart perceptive enough to be offering a route by which she could take a larger part on the stage of Europe? He untied a packet of the unending paperwork that made government function, rolled up the red tape that had tied it neatly, and started to scribble marginal comments.
Two hours later, Duchess Claudia returned to the table. He looked up, waiting.
"Let's send them to Franconia. But not only them and not only to Franconia. There must be something to toss to Leopold's brother in Vienna, as one tosses a bone to a dog. Let Vienna have the musicians. And the music. Ferdinand's spirits are in need of cheering, I hear. So. A harmless distraction. What trouble can this sentimental play about a pious up-time Austrian girl who married a baron possibly cause?"
Outside the Walls of Kronach, Franconia
October 1633
Winter was setting in hard, already. It had snowed five or six inches overnight—hard to tell exactly how much, with the wind whipping it around—but cleared off at dawn. Matt Trelli stood with his binoculars fixed on the Rosenberg fortress at Kronach.
The old commander must have died. Or be sick, at least. He hadn't been out on the walls for—Matt thought a minute—not for a couple of weeks now.
A gust whipped around the corner of his lookout. up-time, Matt Trelli figured, he'd been as pious as most Catholics. At least, as pious as most Catholics with divorced parents and a remarried father with whom he wanted to stay on reasonably good terms. Mr. Piazza had never complained in CCD classes.
Here, though, down-time . . . he remembered to thank God for some of the weirdest things. This morning, the topic was "thermal underwear, sincere gratitude for." With a postscript concerning "down parkas, sincere gratitude for." So he wasn't in uniform. What the hell? He was warm. And he had a uniform around somewhere if Cliff Priest or Scott Blackwell should happen to show up.
No real way to tell who had succeeded Neustetter in command. There were two choices.
The first possibility was Francesco de Melon, the Bavarian officer—military adviser Matt thought—whom Maximilian of Bavaria had sent to assist old Neustetter when the war moved into Franconia in 1631. Really, given that any practical assistance was far more likely to come from Maximilian of Bavaria than from the Austrians, Melon had probably been Neustetter's boss, for all practical purposes.
Or the new commander might turn out to be one of the bishop's relatives, a canon in the Bamberg cathedral chapter: Wolf Philipp Fuchs von Dornheim.
Matt hoped it was de Melon. He'd sent off a request to the Research Center in Grantville for anything they could find out about either of the men. Nothing had turned up about Dornheim. Melon, though . . .
It had taken them a long time. Finally they'd figured out they were supposed to be looking for a Portuguese name instead of the French-sounding one that Vince's informants had given the NUS people in Bamberg. All they had finally come up with was some stuff in a Spanish history book that Mrs. Hernandez at the high school had. Spanish as in—written in Spanish. That's what Mrs. Hernandez taught. Mr. Hernandez too, for that matter. The guy was in the book because he wrote poetry and history. It just mentioned as a sort of afterthought that he'd won some pretty important battles. But lost the last one, which was what military historians seemed to think counted most. Those were a real bunch of "what have you done for me lately" guys. Not that Gustavus Adolphus wasn't.
Don Francisco Manuel de Mello, count of Azumar and marques of Torrelaguna. Not an old guy. He was born in 1611, in Lisbon. Hell—he was five years younger than Matt. But only eighteen months younger than the cardinal-infante up in the Netherlands, and being young hadn't exactly stopped that guy.
Plus. In that other world, when the time came . . . This kid had succeeded Don Fernando as Spanish regent in the Netherlands. Succeeded the brother of the king of Spain. Preceded the brother of the Holy Roman Emperor. Compared to them, a Portuguese count was just an ordinary guy. So he was likely no nincompoop. It would be . . . well, it ought to be . . . easier to negotiate with someone who had smarts than with a dope. Easier to negotiate with someone who didn't want to die by being cooped up in a city suffering from the plague. Not if someone else could somehow get the news across the wall that he had a great career ahead of him.
Assuming that the bishop's relative hadn't come out ahead in the politicking, of course.
Matt swung his binoculars slowly. As the sun rose higher, the light reflecting off the new snow was practically blinding, but it was hard to use the things in combination with sunglasses. There . . . he focused.
A man on the wall where the old commander used to stand. Magnify. Matt adjusted the lenses.
Young. Straight black hair, dark eyes. Not overweight, but a little jowly. Heavy eyebrows, prominent nose, mustache. Melon, then. Matt grinned. Hi, Bro! He'd fit right in at a Trelli family reunion.
Which cousin are you? He could almost hear Marcie's old maid great-aunts quizzing the guy. What a pair they'd been. Too bad they were up-time if they were still alive. They hadn't been spring chickens, either of them.
Impulsively, he stepped out of the blind and waved.
After only a short pause, the man on the walls of Rosenberg waved back.
Because the great-aunts had wandered through his mind, Matt added another postscript to his prayers. "Abruzzo, Laura Marcella, gratitude for." Marcie was loyal right down to her bone marrow. Whatever other problems he might have, a "Dear John" letter from his fiancee wouldn't ever be one of them.
Marcie was stubborn, maybe. Well, she was stubborn, definitely. But that had its okay side. Once she made up her mind about something, she stuck with it, right to the bitter end.
Bozen, Tirol
November 1633
"So the duchess-regent has approved our proposal." Guarinoni was nearly incoherent with joy.
"How can we get there?" Gatterer asked practically. "Not all of us are as enthusiastic about mountain climbing as you are, Hippolyt."
Weinhart stroked his beard. "It still remains to be seen whether or not the Swede's administrators will accept our presence."
Bamberg, Franconia
December 1633
Vince Marcantonio shook his head. "The duchess-regent of Tyrol is offering the services of these physicians as a free gift. She's paying them herself. It's a matter of hospitality, she says in the letter. It's only gracious for hosts to welcome their guests and thus far seventeenth-century Europe has been remiss in making Grantville properly welcome."
"Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes."
Wade Jackson scowled. "Can the Latin, Janie."
"Virgil said it because it was a wise thing to say."
Stewart Hawker was sharpening his pencil with a knife. "What does it say?"
"I fear the Greeks, even when they come bearing gifts."
"What was that about?"
"The Trojan horse."
"Oh."
Vince rapped on the table. "What do we know about the duchess?"
Janie Kacere nodded at her husband, who was the economic liaison. He grinned. "Mainly, that as nobles go, she's a savvy businesswoman with an eye to the bottom line. Hell, as corporate sharks go, she's a savvy businesswoman with an eye to the bottom line."
Wade Jackson scowled again. "That Virgil of Janie's could have had a point."
Bamberg, Franconia
February 1634
"Do we know anything about these guys?" Vince Marcantonio asked. "The only thing they seem to have in common is that they all studied medicine at Padua."
"Out of up-time books? Not one damned word about any of them anywhere in Grantville, according to the Research Center."
"So it looks like we'll have to rely on their letters of introduction."
"With a grain of salt."
"A shovel full of rock salt would probably be better. According to the duchess-regent, they practically walk on water. There's something else in common, maybe, which is some connection to the Fugger. Weinhart was born in Augsburg and Gatterer's medical education was partly paid for by a guy in the Tyrol government who married into those bankers. And Guarinoni is a physician for the mines in Schwaz, among a lot of other things."
Janie Kacere picked up the letter. "Guarinoni—that's Guarinonius in Latin—got a job as physician for the royal Damenstift in Hall in Tyrol in 1598." She looked up. "I thought they only had Damenstifte in places like Quedlinburg, where the ladies are Lutherans. Shouldn't they still be nuns in Catholic countries? Anyway . . ." She kept going. ". . . he's still got that job. He's also the city physician for Hall, and the physician for the salt springs—I guess that's a kind of health spa—there. Schwaz—that's pretty close to Hall. He also has what looks like a half dozen various honorary memberships. What's the Order of the Golden Fleece? He's set up a specialized botanical garden for Alpine plants. He's a member of the duchess' board of medical consultants—he's been on it since 1617, which is well before the time of the duchess. And he's interested in 'practical hygiene,' whatever they understand by that. She's also sent a couple of his books along for us to read."
"Just a couple."
"There are more than a couple?"
"Quite a few more. Not just Latin, but German, too. Apparently, he's something of a popularizer. One of them is practical advice on dealing with plague, published in Ingolstadt in 1612, Pestilentz Guardien, für allerley Stands Personen, which would be "Plague Guardian for People of all Ranks," I guess. There's a vernacular book by Weinhart in the pile, too. Short but Comprehensive Instructions on What to Do in the Current Difficult Times. Published in Innsbruck in 1611, so I guess that's on dealing with plague, too. I haven't had time to look at it yet. She's got a lot less to say about Gatterer."
"Okay," Vince said. "Stew, you have your Hearts and Minds people take a look at these books, will you, ASAP. And get a summary back to me."
Bozen, Tirol
February 1634
"Look." Paul Weinhart was waving a newspaper over his head. "The USE has sent its greatest chemist to Venice to teach their secrets to those capable of understanding them. Stone, his name is. The pharmaceuticals man. To Venice, the paper says. Which, of course, means Padua. Perhaps they have some sense after all, these up-timers, to know that Padua is the greatest medical school on the continent."
Gatterer poured each of them a glass of wine. It was rewarding to see proper recognition given to one's alma mater.
Bamberg, Franconia
March 1634
Stewart Hawker winked. "Guarinoni is opposed to premature death. His motto is, "Let's all be gesondt." He wrote a book about it. The title's Grewel der Verwüstung Menschlichen Geschlechts. That's something like The Horror of the Decay of the Human Race, if you translate it into English. It's been in print for a quarter-century or more, I think. Not very systematic. We've used bits and pieces of it for the Hearts and Minds pamphlets, some of them. Yeah, that's plagiarism by up-time standards, but whatever works. He's the one who came up with GESONDT." He tossed a Hearts and Minds pamphlet on the table.
"What in hell does that acronym mean, anyway?" Wade Jackson looked at his colleagues in annoyance.
"Well, gesondt is gesund in modern German. Healthy. I've tried to put it into English. Some lines use the same letters in both languages and some don't. For the ones that do, I've got:
"God as the source of all good;
"Eating and drinking—moderately, that is;
"Sleeping and waking—at the proper times and a proper amount of each;
"The next couple don't use the same letters. Or at least, I can't think of any English words that will work, like:
"O—that's Oede, or leisure time, and he talks about avoidance of excess during it. It's a sort of 'you ought not to pig out on junk food or get drunk' for the seventeenth century;
"N—that's Nutzung, or use and exercise of the body. Maybe I could use 'Nuts about exercise,' because he really is.
"Then we're back to something I got English for:
"D—daily fresh air; and
"T—trustful attitude. That seems to involve being up-beat.
"Or maybe, I guess, for that last, an up-timer would be more likely to say 'optimism' or 'confidence.' But for Guarinoni, it really comes back to Trost—'consolation' or 'relying on God,' so he's back where he started."
Janie made a face. "I could have gotten that out of just about any women's magazine on the grocery store shelves up-time."
Stew nodded. "Yup. High school health classes, too. Except that he thinks that being healthy and being holy are pretty much interchangeable, so it's closer to the stuff that the Fellowship of Christian Athletes used to hand out on campus. The body is the temple of the holy spirit and all that stuff. On the other hand, the health advice can't hurt anyone. Good diet, regular exercise, plenty of fresh air. He wrote a whole book on the importance of watering down your wine. Given how drunk people get around here, watering down your wine is probably a good idea."
Stew shuffled through the pile of books the duchess had sent. "And he's absolutely convinced that premarital chastity and post-marital fidelity prevent VD and thus produce healthier children. Which a person has got to admit is perfectly true in a world that doesn't have much in the way of antibiotics. Hey, here's his manual of advice for Christian married couples. The Joy of Sex for the here and now. Right down your alley, Janie." He slid it down the table.
"I took a look at it. It's more on the order of a pre-Cana manual."
"Ah. Well, too bad."
Vince got the meeting back on track. Or tried, at least. "What makes the duchess think that Kronach will let them in? Can we head them off?"
Cliff Priest shook his head. "Telling Duchess Claudia not to send them isn't an option. They're already on their way."
"Right through the middle of a peasant revolt?" Wade Jackson sounded skeptical.
"Well, it hasn't started yet, really. We're just expecting it. They'll probably get here before April."
"They've probably all been through peasant revolts before, anyhow," Stewart Hawker said mildly.
"Yeah. I sort of keep forgetting that they're all over the place."
"The doctors?"
"Naw. Peasant revolts."
Vince could hardly wait for Matt Trelli to arrive. He'd been to Grantville for his first R&R in over a year. They'd sent Tom O'Brien up to Kronach to sub for him. When he came through, he would escort the doctors up to Kronach so Tom could come back and contribute his bit to handling the peasant revolt. However a munitions specialist chose to do that.
Vince could hardly wait for the day that the three doctors departed hence into another place. Ever since they set foot in town, Dr. Guarinoni had treated the entire Bamberg administration, up-time and down-time, to large free helpings of his health advice. Bennett Norris would have called it "patented health advice" if they had patents.
He never stopped. Stacey O'Brien told Janie that if the man had been born up-time, he would have found his calling as a motivational speaker holding success seminars at the Holiday Inn for twenty-five dollars a head.
From Stacey, this didn't count as a compliment. She'd said it after Guarinoni gave a critique of her child-rearing methods.
He didn't limit his efforts to the administration, either. He got out and around in the streets of the city. He even—since he turned out to be really and truly pretty famous in this time and place—got an invitation to address the city council.
According to Else Kronacher, the Bamberg Committee of Correspondence had no particular objection to the health component of his message, but wasn't reacting well to the intransigence with which he wrapped it up in Catholic dogma.
As long as they avoided theology, though, he got along great with Willard and Emma Thornton. Most of his practical policies—applied health practices, Vince supposed—fit right in with Mormon ideas about what was good for you.
Weinhart and Gatterer spent their time following Matewski around, observing both his military medicine and his volunteer efforts at the orphanages and city hospital. He didn't seem to mind them. He might have minded Guarinoni, he said honestly to Wade Jackson, but that guy was too busy blowharding to hassle a man who had work to do.
Matt made pretty good time coming up from Würzburg. Vince sent him and the doctors on their way on a really fast turnaround. In spite of the tension, nobody bothered them, neither the peasants nor the imperial knights. That might be, Matt thought, because there were a lot more peasants than knights, and Vince had a kind of . . . understanding . . . with the Ram.
On the Road to Kronach, Franconia
April 1634
Gatterer turned out to be a chatterer. Matt was just as pleased. Kronach was more than a little out of the loop, so he hadn't seen anywhere near as much data on these guys as Vince's inner circle had gotten.
"Dr. Weinhart was a student of Mercurialis, you know."
"Of who? I mean, of whom?"
"A professor at Padua. He is dead, now, for a quarter century, but he was very famous for what up-time you call 'sports medicine.' He wrote De arte gymnastica which isn't about what you call gymnastics, though. It's about caring for the body during exercising it. Mostly, though, Dr. Weinhart writes about diseases of the eyes. He is mostly here because he is, as you say, committed to fighting the plague. And, of course, because he has enough influence with the duchess to get the project approved."
Matt wondered vaguely just how Gatterer had come to hear of sports medicine. Then he thought of various reports about the number of down-time researchers combing through Grantville's books and encyclopedias and pushed it off into the category of not a problem. Of course there was stuff about sports medicine in the high school library and even if there hadn't been, Dr. Daoud, the chiropractor, loved to give classes and seminars.
"Please try to be tactful with Dr. Guarinoni," Gatterer said.
"Why?"
"You must understand. His father, the late Dr. Bartolomeo Guarinoni, was the emperor's personal physician. Logically, one would assume, our Dr. Guarinoni would have started life in a position of advantage. Unfortunately, ah, his parents were not married to one another. Although his father acknowledged him and provided him with an excellent education . . ."
"Narrow-minded folks talk."
"Precisely. He accompanied his father to the imperial courts—that of Maximilian II and Vienna and that of Rudolf II in Prague. He studied at the University of Padua. Still, every now and then, there is a certain . . . condescension . . . that he must cope with. Therefore, if, sometimes, he seems a bit . . . excessive . . ."
"Excessive? How?"
"Not everyone appreciates the comedy skits with which he attempted to enliven his book on practical health. Many of them are taken from stage routines. Directly adapted from them, even. But when he tries to get people who have come to him for advice to stand up and act them out . . ."
"I always hated that when my teachers made us do it. Both when I had to do it myself and when I had to watch other kids."
"But it is a good technique for embedding a concept in the memory. Excellent." Gatterer nodded sagely.
Near the Walls of Kronach
May 1634
Matt pointed down at the figure on the walls of the Rosenberg. The three doctors were taking fascinated turns with his up-time binoculars. "That's de Melon. Actually, he's expecting you. Inside the city, I mean."
"How do you know?"
"Well, we've set up the drop point. We keep the quarantine hard. No meetings with their people. No letting parties outside the walls to bury the dead. But . . . I'll show you. Over there—see? We've got that table in the middle of this field outside the walls. It's where their militia drills in normal times. We leave things on it and back off about the length of a football field. They come out and pick them up. They leave things on it and go inside again. We come down and pick them up."
"Things?"
"Information, mostly. Negotiations over this and that. So they know you're coming. We gave them a copy of the letters that came from your Duchess Claudia. And both of your books, Dr. Guarinoni and Dr. Weinhart."
"De Melon will receive us?"
"That's not the problem."
Matt smiled at Dr. Weinhart, who shuddered.
"There are two sides to this, you know. Not just 'will he receive you' but 'will good old Matt here let you go.' "
"How can you make conditions? People's lives are at stake."
"They've been at stake here ever since we came down to Franconia. If I don't finally get some kind of cooperation out of these stiff-assed . . ."
"What conditions are you imposing on them?"
"That if the three of you come into the city, I come too."
Guarinoni gaped at him. Very few people, other than physicians and clergy, voluntarily walked into plague sites.
"And then the quarantine comes down again. My guys don't lift it until they get a plain signal from me that we have an 'all clear.' Or . . . Look, I'm a realist. A plain signal from someone. The instructions are in my wallet."
Bamberg, Franconia
May 1634
"Weinhart was right. Kronach let the doctors in." Vince Marcantonio's expression didn't match what should have been good news.
"There's a catch." Bennett Morris made the obvious diagnosis.
"Bound to be," Wade Jackson said. "What is it, Vince?"
"Matt went in with them. Turned the command at Kronach over to Bachhausen, the lieutenant from Coburg, and went in with them. Without so much as a 'by your leave' to Cliff Priest or to me."
"Well." Wade flipped his pencil around his thumb. "That much makes sense, at least. He must have known perfectly well that you wouldn't 'leave' him."
"Yeah, he knew. He admits it straight out in the letter he sent us. And points out that this way we're spared from having to court-martial him for disobeying an order."
"What got them in?"
"Matt softened up de Melon and the city council with a lot of propaganda. Guarinoni's an author, too, beyond being a health nut. And a real religious bigot. Poetry. Lives of saints, real and imaginary. Steve Salatto's tame printer down in Würzburg ordered some of his titles that the duchess-regent didn't send us so Stew Hawker's people could look at them. And an architect. He's designing and building a church dedicated to Saint Charles Borromeo. He's paying for it himself. Duchess Claudia was right about that much. The doctors are the kind of people who are heartily welcome in Kronach. Aside from this plague medicine stuff, all three of them are more Catholic than the pope."
Bamberg, Franconia
late June 1634
"Vince, remember what you said about those doctors we sent up to Kronach being more Catholic than the pope?"
"Yeah." Vince Marcantonio yawned. "God, I'm tired."
"Given some of the news that's come in this week, that might not be hard right now." Cliff Priest read out the latest bulletin that Scott Blackwell had just sent up from Würzburg.
The meeting paused a moment in honor of the disconcerting notion that Larry Mazzare, the parish priest of most of the members of the administration, was now, unexpectedly, Lawrence Cardinal Mazzare, Cardinal Protector of the United States of Europe.
Then, since there was nothing that any of them could do about it, they went back to work. Joe Matewski got together a batch of pamphlets and stuff to send up to Kronach. He looked at the latest arrival. In Amberg, down in the Upper Palatinate, Bill Hudson had been dealing with a diphtheria epidemic for the last six weeks or so. He'd sent an SOS to Grantville, where the doctors had said, basically, "chloramphenicol doesn't work." They'd also said, "we won't be making DPT vaccines or vaccines for any part of DPT for several years." So much for that, which took up the first two pages. The boiled-down message was that they didn't have anything to help a field medic who was faced with a diphtheria outbreak right now.
The rest of the pamphlet was full of information, mostly from the retired docs, old Sims and McDonnell, on stuff that might help during diphtheria outbreaks if only they had the tools to make tools. Lots of woodcuts and illustrations of syringes and hypodermic needles. Diagrams of just what the problems were. Irrelevant. Whoever might have the tools to make tools, it wasn't him and it wouldn't happen in Bamberg. The plague doctors handled other epidemics, too. Maybe they'd be interested. He could always get another copy if he needed one. He tossed it into the pile for Matt.
Kronach, Franconia
July-August 1634
Matt stopped just outside the door. It was one thing to have heard "sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind" as a proverb. Grandma Geraldine used to say it all the time before she died last winter.
It was another thing to watch it in action. The segregation of entire families, the healthy members with the infected. The closing of markets and trade, with the unemployment that came from that. Not that Kronach had been trading anyhow, since it was under siege. Burning the furnishings and goods when an infected house was finally opened up again. Dealing with the kind of people for whom reopening plague-infected houses and burning the contents was an economic and social step up in the world. Maintaining enough oversight to keep that kind of people from stealing the infected stuff and selling it on the black market, where it would start the cycle again.
The Pesthaus, the quarantine hospital for the sick, was obviously a good idea, if not exactly a new one. Pious Catholics didn't always think that something like requisitioning monasteries to serve as plague hospitals was such a wonderful idea, but as Weinhart had pointed out, one could hardly use the municipal hospital for plague victims, since it was, as usual, full of orphaned children, crippled people, various elderly who had no family members to care for them, the epileptic, the languid, and the lunatic.
The "languid" had turned out to be those mentally ill who just sat there. Who'dathunkit?
Getting DDT into all of Kronach's houses, rich and poor alike, hadn't been too much of a challenge, once the authorities swung into action. With the doctors from Padua there to direct things, the council had set up a Magistracy of Public Health on the Venetian model. Which didn't exactly involve separation of powers. The Health Board could legislate action to be taken, it could order the action carried out, and it was the judicial authority that heard noncompliance cases. Given the level of down-time medical knowledge, it was no surprise that, according to Dr. Guarinoni, the motto of plague doctors was, "prevention is much more noble and more necessary than therapy."
It wasn't hard to get enough DDT. Matt had brought some with him when he came back from Grantville. They'd found an ample supplementary supply at the drop point within two weeks of asking for it.
Yeah. While they were stuck in Kronach, the three doctors had absorbed the up-time medical knowledge about transmission vectors, so they'd directed a lot of their efforts toward persuading de Melon and the city council that the rats had to be eradicated. It hadn't been all that hard for Matewski to persuade them that the transmission vector was little bugs in the blood rather than nasty, sticky, bad-smelling, poisonous, atoms that emanated from infected sources such as stinking garbage in alleys and stuck to inanimate objects, animals, and people when the air was corrupted, or miasmic, rather than salubrious.
After all, a person couldn't see either one. Matewski had promised them that after this was over, he'd somehow get hold of an up-time microscope from Grantville and let them take a look at plague bacilli. They were looking forward to this, particularly since he told them that up-time science had confirmed the existence of atoms, even if they were too small to see through a microscope.
The doctors were particularly happy to hear that plague bacilli were made up of atoms, ultimately. Probably nasty, poisonous, ones. So maybe that wasn't the way Nichols or Adams or Shipley would have explained it to them, but Matewski had never claimed to be a doctor.
They were also happy to hear that almost the first enterprise of every Italian health board when the plague struck—namely, cleaning up the smelly garbage—had been a good idea, even if the underlying theory was inaccurate. So was the custom of having the men from lay sodalities visit all the poor houses in the town, clean them thoroughly, and give them a fresh coat of whitewash, inside and out.
At any rate, if Grantville had any luck at all, it was luck that it had made an ally of Venice. And not enemies, really, of Florence and Genoa. Those cities had developed plague-fighting as far as it could go with the knowledge and techniques that the seventeenth century had available. They'd had the organization, already. What they knew about medicine hadn't matched up to it, but . . . In Kronach, now, they were combining what Grantville knew about medicine with what plenty of Italians already knew about handling the, uh, bureaucracy of the thing. If it worked here, the new USE would put it into force in all the towns and cities.
What the USE really needed was some sort of . . . pipeline . . . for hiring more Italians. It really did.
Yeah, they'd gotten exemplary military and civilian cooperation on the rat eradication project.
Even if that meant that the fleas went looking for other hosts—human hosts—faster than would ordinarily have been the case. At least they hadn't done the old-fashioned thing of killing off the dogs and cats. Dogs and cats not only caught rats, but gave the fleas a few more options. And Kronach wasn't starving. He'd seen to that himself. So the Kronacher weren't eating the cats and dogs. Much less plague-infected rats.
The city had food. He was making the council pay for it, but it came in regular deliveries. He also made sure that the city council let the people know that the food was arriving because of his benevolent magnanimity. Or Vince's. Or Steve Salatto's. Or Grantville's. Or by sufferance of Mike Stearns and Gustavus Adolphus.
Think nice thoughts about us, folks. After all, one of my jobs is to incorporate this town into a happy, democratic, tolerant, Franconia when the time comes. Sure. That's gonna work. Kronach and Coburg. The ranchers and the farmers should be friends. Yippee.
He looked down at himself. In a world without latex, you did what you could, even if that meant that you swathed and robed yourself in waxed linen, with a breath mask over your face. The down-time theory was that it was harder for the nasty atoms to stick to waxed cloth. According to Gatterer, a slippery silk ought to work, too, but it cost too much. Guarinoni had admitted that he had never previously had much faith in the usefulness of the waxed linen robes, thinking that they were a Frenchified affectation and that all they really did was keep most of the fleas that tended to infest pest houses off the physicians. Then he'd thought again about transmission vectors and added, "Well . . . Maybe there is some point to them, after all."
They waxed the fabric on the stretchers that the attendants used to carry patients to the Pesthaus, too.
That brought his mind back to the current state of the Pesthaus. Bursting at the seams. Grandma Geraldine had another saying. "The hotter the battle, the shorter the war." She'd gotten that from her own mother. With the help of a set of twins, Great-Grandma Anna had managed to have seven children in eight years before she stopped cold at age thirty.
He hoped his great-grandmother was right.
So he opened the door and went in. It always took him a pause and some thought before he managed to walk up and open that door.
De Melon had become accustomed to the smoke. Something was always burning. When the Health Board had sent members of the council and the lay sodalities out to make a survey of the city, they had found many uninfected families sleeping on straw pallets that were filthy and fetid. That was scarcely surprising. That the poor had pallets at all was a sign of the comparative prosperity of the Germanies as compared to Spain.
The Health Board had ordered them all confiscated and burned. Ordinarily, that would have left the poor sleeping on the ground. Not that this was a terrible hardship in the summer. De Melon had slept on the ground more than once.
The order for a couple thousand clean, uninfected replacement pallets to be delivered to the drop-off point had put a big dent in his budget. Luckily, he hadn't had to pay cash. He had used bank drafts, duly countersigned by two members of the Magistracy for Health and payable in Würzburg. If fortune smiled, he would be reimbursed. By someone. Given the events of the summer, it no longer seemed probable that Duke Maximilian of Bavaria would reimburse him. He was far from sure that the duke was still his employer.
Maybe the bishop of Bamberg? Then, again, probably not, with Dornheim dead in Carinthia and the cathedral chapter not yet having elected a successor. It would be Hatzfeld, probably, but no telling how long it would take the pope to confirm him. It wasn't likely that a suffragan would be willing to authorize large, unexpected, expenditures.
The Health Board had given the fresh pallets to households that had already been cleaned and whitewashed, in return for a promise by the housewife that she would continue to use DDT.
It cost a lot. Probably less than burning corpses, though. Because of the siege, it was not feasible to establish a plague cemetery without continuing to reinfect the city. No way to make burials outside the walls. The church frowned on cremation except in the direst emergency. However . . . Surely the up-time understanding of atoms would lead to a change in policy. Logically, it should not be any more difficult for God to reassemble atoms dispersed in the air than those dispersed in the earth. So . . . Corpses were remarkably hard to burn, even if one saved on fuel by using old pallets and the rags and furnishings taken from infected houses as much as possible. One could regard the new pallets as a good use of limited funds. One would certainly interpret the new pallets as such a good use when reporting the condition of one's budget to one's employer.
There were other savings to be attributed to the siege, also. He did not have to deal with preventive quarantine of possibly infected individuals coming into the town from elsewhere. That tended to be expensive because of the need for posting guards outside the quarantine barracks. Merchants and other travelers often resented having their journeys interrupted, not to mention taking exception to being charged a reasonable amount for board and room during their period of isolation.
Of course, the siege also meant that the Health Board had not been able, thus far, to expel all transients, vagrants, mountebanks, and other undesirable elements who had been in the city when the plague broke out. So the authorities were having to feed them.
He would have to talk to Herr Trelli about that. Expulsion was pretty standard procedure. It was Herr Trelli who had forbidden the council to follow that procedure, on the grounds that they would starve to death between the city walls and the siege lines, or attempt to escape through the siege lines and possibly spread the plague into the countryside.
If Kronach offered to surrender in return for the SoTF's absorbing all the costs of coping with the plague as a starting point for negotiations . . . At the very least, by the time the negotiations ended, Herr Marcantonio in Bamberg should certainly reimburse de Melon for feeding those noncitizens all summer. That was only reasonable. This epidemic was eating up about forty percent of his budget and he wasn't really in the best position to float loans at the moment. No banker worth his salt was going to finance a military entrepreneur who was probably unemployed. Or if employed, employed by the wrong side.
He wonder how much ransom the USE would ask for him if he surrendered.
He was pretty sure that Duke Maximilian would not be in a mood to pay it.
Matt wasn't sure just how much he was in a position to promise, but de Melon was in a mood to dicker.
"Let me draw up a proposal. Everything we've talked about. I think that this is even way beyond Steve Salatto's pay grade, though."
They paused for an explanation of pay grades.
"Vince can radio it to him. He can radio it to the prime minister and emperor."
De Melon nodded agreement.
* * *
Matt spent the whole evening writing. He figured that he had an ace up his sleeve. Now he needed to finish up what he'd leave for Bachhausen at the drop-off point tomorrow morning—well, later this morning, given the time—in a thoroughly sealed envelope.
"So de Melon is worried about Duke Maximilian and pretty sure the Bavarians won't ransom him if he surrenders the city. We can open the gates. The plague has tapered off and the doctors from Padua did pretty good. They're congratulating themselves pretty hard that only a fifth of the people died instead of two thirds."
Which really was something for them to be proud of, all things considered. But anyway . . .
"Now what we know, and what de Melon doesn't, is this stuff about Don Fernando and what de Melon did later in the Netherlands."
He started a new page. "So I was sort of thinking, and I know it's no business of mine to be suggesting foreign policy, but still, I've been stuck here at Kronach a long time and I'd really like to see the end of the siege."
He crossed that out. Nobody up at the level of Stearns was going to care that one up-time lieutenant was to the point that he'd be happy to cast himself down on a sword if that would just finish up the siege of Kronach.
"My recommendation, based on the current local situation, is that the State Department ought to make a copy of what the Research Center found out about de Melon and send it to Don Fernando. It makes de Melon look like a good enough catch that maybe he'll reimburse him for his expenses here. I don't know whether the USE is doing ransoms or not. If it is, Don Fernando might even ransom him and ask to have him come to Belgium."
Matt crossed that out. Damn. I know it isn't Belgium down-time. I'm up way too late.
". . . to the Spanish Netherlands, which would get him out of Franconia."
Matt crossed that out, too.
". . . which would . . ." Well, what would it?
". . . to the Spanish Netherlands, where he might find a useful and constructive outlet for his undeniable talents."
Bingo! Mr. Piazza and Ms. Mailey would be proud of him. Mr. Piazza and Ms. Mailey had spent a lot of time talking to him about useful and constructive outlets back in his high school days.
He pulled out another sheet of paper and started on the clean copy.
Kronach, Franconia
September 1634
"There's not going to be any real fall-out from the Ram Rebellion for Kronach, one way or the other, directly," Matt pointed out to Cliff Priest. "Since the whole city was closed up by the quarantine for the crucial months, they weren't really involved on either side. Except . . .".
"Except?" Scott Blackwell raised his eyebrows. His expression said that the worst was yet to come. Just because it always was.
"They've come out to find out that their peasant 'subjects' in the hinterland have taken severe exception to being 'subjects' and have acted upon their convictions. Never mind. They'll just have to learn to live with it. I've told Bachhausen that if they try to use their militia to restore the old order, it's his job to stand up for the citizens of the State of Thuringia-Franconia."
"One could say that the Kronacher are SoTF citizens, too."
Matt grinned. "Not till they take the oath of allegiance, they aren't. Which they missed last winter because of the siege and this summer because of the quarantine. Which I somehow just haven't gotten around to administering yet. The farmers, on the other hand . . ."
"You didn't used to be like this," Stew Hawker said.
The grin turned a little bleak. "Let's just say that Kronach's been an educational experience and leave it at that. Okay?"
Cliff looked at his former high school student and said, "Okay."
Bamberg, Franconia
September 1634
Matt was sitting on the floor of the Real Estate Titles office. "So that's the plan. I'm going to Padua as soon as I finish up here in Franconia. Marcie and me . . ."
Janie winced.
"—okay, Marcie and I—are getting married in December. She's coming down to Würzburg and we'll leave from there."
"Padua? Why on earth?"
"First of all, Stoner's there. Stoner's what I'm looking for. I've got to learn everything the man knows. If Kronach taught me anything, it taught me that. I'm no boy genius or anything, but I did have basic chemistry and stuff at Fairmont State before I had to quit to save up some more money. I'd have gone back and finished up-time, so why not here?"
"There's always Jena. And the new med school. It's a lot closer to home."
"Well, yeah." Matt looked a little uncomfortable. "But it's still just a start-up, really. As the doctors put it to me, the only reason that Beulah MacDonald and her people have had any success at all getting their ideas across in Jena is that the med school dean, Rolfinck his name is, is a Padua man himself. Guarinoni said that if the dean there had been the product of a university like Wittenberg or Paris, the folks from Leahy would have been dead in the water. And Gatterer asked why should I get Padua second-hand when I can have the real thing. In a lot more words, but that's what it boiled down to."
Janie looked at him. She'd heard all about Steve Salatto's explosion at Johnnie F. Haun—that the point of Hearts and Minds was for Us to convert Them rather than vice versa. "It sounds sort of like you've swallowed their viewpoint."
Matt wriggled. "Well, I figure things this way. They have a lot more experience living in the seventeenth century than we do. It seems a little silly not to take advantage of it."
"I hate to be crass, but how are you planning to pay for it? Living in Padua and sitting at the foot of the master and all that?" Janie waved her hand vaguely. "That could be years. Do they take transfer credits? Universities in this day and age, I mean?"
"Our three doctors will write recommendations, since they're all alumni. And, yeah, they do accept transfer credits in a way. You can take your exams as soon as you're up to them. Nobody really cares where you took the courses as long as you can pass the exams. The Latin will be the big thing, but Weinhart has been tutoring me while we were in Kronach."
"Well, you show up at our place in the evenings and I'll keep on tutoring you here. Nothing like a head start, especially when it comes for free."
"We talked about it, Marcie and me. Well, we wrote letters about it. We haven't really talked much for two years. I've only gotten up to Grantville that one time since we came down here after the Gustavus/Stearns detente in '32. Her folks were so sure that talking wasn't what we had on our minds that we scarcely got to see each other at all. If you've ever got a job here that requires privacy minimization, consider hiring Rosemary."
"People have been reacting to the Ring of Fire in all sorts of ways. We have Father Mazzare—Cardinal Mazzare, now—pulling and tugging to bring the Church into a post-Vatican II frame of mind, and Catholics in Grantville like Rosemary who would just as soon sink back into a comfortable pre-Vatican II world." She tapped her toe on the footstool that she used to boost herself up to the pedestal desk. "Rosemary's close to five years older than I am. She probably was confirmed before Vatican II had any effect on the catechism or anything."
Matt leaned forward, his hand on his chin. "What the hell does Rosemary think we did back when we were dating in college? Or after we got engaged, before I got sent down to Franconia? Not that Marcie was in a mood to push it. We were almost like strangers again. We thought about putting off getting married indefinitely. Partly because of the money thing, but that's not most of it. We think we can make it, that way. She's a fully qualified engineer, now. She had three years of college before the Ring of Fire—one more than me because she didn't have to work so many hours—and she's trained at USE Steel ever since it started up. Stoner has the clout to get her a good job, even in the Most Serene Republic of Venice, where female engineers aren't exactly a dime a dozen. So she can support me. As long as she doesn't get pregnant. Which, as far as we're concerned, she won't."
"She's going to Padua with you?"
"Not much point in getting married and then having me in Padua and her in Grantville. That wouldn't be any different from the last couple of years. Why bother to get married at all, if we did it that way? Joe and Rosemary are having kittens, of course. She's their baby girl. Leaving home for foreign parts. Rosemary's being a drama queen."
Janie winced. "Your folks?"
"Well, Mom would just like me to come home, of course. Even after so many changes, she's not that crazy about the idea of my hanging around Stoner. She hoped that we'd settle down right in Grantville after I got out of the army. That Marcie would come be an engineer in town and I'd find a job of some kind and we'd provide grandchildren. It's hard for her, especially. Dad just ignored the church and got married again even before the Ring of Fire, so he has Abby and the little kids. But Mom's stuck in limbo, there at the Curl and Tan. She's sort of given up. First she was sure I'd get killed on this posting to Bamberg and now she's sure that I'll die of some awful disease in Italy."
Janie snorted. "If Rosemary's five years older than I am, then Amy's ten years younger. She doesn't have any excuse. It's a gumption issue with her, if you ask me. Pardon my French, since she's your mother and all."
"Herr Matewski, you do have it all?"
Joe Matewski looked up. "Yes, I have it all."
"The addresses of the professors in Padua, and the others who have been hearing the lectures of Professor Stone?"
"Yeah."
"The glassblowers whom we are recommending?"
"Yeah?"
"Our new addresses?"
"Yeah."
"Our letters to Dr. Sims and Dr. McDonnell."
"Yeah."
"I am most anxious to enter into correspondence with both of them."
"I'm sure."
"It is the gold that is important. Remember that. It is the gold. If indeed they can draw brass fine enough to make these hypodermic needles for drawing blood to make this 'serum-based antitoxin' and one of the main problems is that blood corrodes the needles so quickly, it is the gold that is important. They must coat these brass needles with gold."
"Yeah," Joe Matewski said. "I've got it. Really I do. I figure that this is really important to you. The medical types in Grantville and Jena will get the short version over the radio tonight and this"—he held up several hundred pages of closely written paper—"just as soon as I can get it there. A couple of weeks, at most."
Gatterer expressed profuse gratitude.
"I'll radio the short version to Venice for Stoner, too. Express-courier the second copy to him."
Gatterer grasped his head and kissed him on both cheeks.
Matewski thought that a friendly handshake would have been just plenty, but he managed to keep from backing off.
He didn't enjoy going to those Hearts and Minds lectures, but maybe they did some good, after all.
Bamberg, Franconia
October 1634
"What do you think, Vince?" Janie Kacere turned a couple of pieces of paper over and then turned them back again. "Were they a Trojan horse that we sent into Kronach? Successfully, I have to admit, the way Matt"—she waved toward him down at the end of the table—"pulled things off. Or . . ."
". . . were they a Trojan horse that the Duchess Claudia de Medici planted on us?" Cliff Priest finished her sentence. "And if she did, why?"
Vince Marcantonio shook his head. "I don't know which one. Not yet. Maybe we won't know for years." He grinned suddenly. "But she's damned determined that they're going to see Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar next, whether they want to or not, so I've gotten the better of Guarinoni's complaints that their 'old bones' wouldn't stand a trip over to Swabia at his age."
"Vince." Stewart Hawker looked apprehensive. "What have you done? They are over sixty, after all. Guarinoni and Weinhart both. And Gatterer's no spring chicken, either. He got his M.D. more than thirty years ago. They were pretty wiped out when they came in from Innsbruck last March, even though the duchess paid for a carriage so they didn't have to ride out in the weather. The trip from here up to Kronach wasn't easy for them, either. And the summer didn't exactly count as a vacation, either."
"I asked him if he was open to new experiences. Of course he's so full of himself that he had to say 'yes.' And what with the fact that there's a landing field at Rheinfelden now . . ."
"You got hold of a plane?" Stew spilled his coffee on the flagstone floor.
"Yep. A Gustav is coming to drop a couple of high-ranking diplomats off in Bayreuth. The pilot will transport the good doctors and deposit them right on Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar's doorstep. Bernhard isn't going to let our medical people from Fulda into his territory, I don't think. We have to live with that. But he seems to be willing to take these men from the Duchess Claudia. Don't know why. Maybe parts of the Catholic and Austrian territories that he's scooped up aren't as docile as he had hoped."
"Nobody's ever as docile as a person hopes." Bennett Norris spoke in the world-weary voice of anyone who has ever parented a teenager. Vince ignored him. Bennett was starting to succumb to short-timer-itis. As soon as the national election was over and done with, in February, Ed Piazza was transferring him and Marian to Mainz.
"They're the best that this time and place has to offer, and they can take some of our tricks with them. Maybe they can contain the plague that's scheduled to sweep up through Swabia and Wuerttemberg into the USE in the next couple of years. Maybe Bernhard's just self-interested enough not to want half the population of his new sandbox dead. God, I hope so. And even if they can't pull it off . . ."
It didn't look like Vince was going to finish the sentence.
Janie looked up at the cherubs on the ceiling. ". . . there's always the possibility that we've sent a secret weapon."
"What?"
"Guarinoni may bore Duke Bernhard to death with extended lectures on a healthful lifestyle. Replete with mnemonic tricks and pompous admonitions."
Together, most of the SoTF administrative staff in Bamberg chanted, "Let's all be gesondt."
Bozen, Tirol
October 1634
"God rest his soul," Duchess Claudia said. She was referring to her late brother-in-law Ferdinand, the Holy Roman Emperor.
Dr. Bienner crossed himself.
"Ferdinand was never seriously interested in the Austrian holdings in Swabia."
Bienner nodded cautiously.
"Our nephew Ferdinand is not likely to make them his primary concern, either. He worries about Hungary. And the Turks."
"As well he should."
"The Austro-Hungarian Empire?"
"Premature, perhaps. But not unreasonable, given the situation in the Germanies."
"Which leaves Tyrol to worry about Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. If, of course, the Swede does not manage to smash him." The duchess-regent smashed her hand down on the table. "I like that English word. It has such a satisfying sound."
"General Horn is not given to smashing."
"So I have heard. Duke Bernhard accepted Our physicians?"
"And, apparently, their advice. There is the whole winter to prepare for what we may, according to the up-timers' encyclopedias, expect next spring. They will work with the up-time 'nurse.' "
"Perhaps our agents in the Vorarlberg should initiate diplomatic relations with him?"
Dr. Bienner stroked his beard without replying.
Duchess Claudia walked to the window. "We are well matched in age. I am only thirty and proven fertile."
Dr. Bienner nodded. Her first marriage, little over a year in duration, had produced a child who still lived. Female, unfortunately. The second, five children in eight years, four of them still alive and healthy and two of them boys. Claudia de Medici was a woman to gladden any ambitious dynast's heart.
While his mind wandered, she had continued talking. "Perhaps it was prescient that Leopold and I chose to name our first daughter Isabella Clara. Two years before this 'Ring of Fire?' If the king in the Low Countries and Maria Anna have a son right away, the age gap will not be too great. A boy is old enough to beget years before a woman has matured enough to give birth with maximum safety. And the symbolism should appeal to them."
Dr. Bienner nodded silently.
"Duke Bernhard is a heretic, but that is no insuperable obstacle. After all, the pope granted a dispensation for the French king's sister to marry that stupid Englishman. Lutherans are no more heretical than Anglicans."
She tapped her fingernails, one by one, on the window pane. "I am scarcely in Vienna's confidence, of course. But if it should happen that Our cousins are too preoccupied to think seriously about the, um, 'challenges and opportunities' presented by the situation in Vorderoesterreich and the Breisgau . . . ah, not to mention Alsace and the Franche Comte . . ."
She turned around from the window, leaning forward.
"Tyrol is not."
Dr. Bienner nodded again. "May your generosity be rewarded, Your Grace."