Chapter 10
March, 1636
Turin
Just after Twelfth Night, Monsieur Gaston and his entourage had departed the Castello del Valentino. The duke and duchess were relieved—at least in private—and life returned to normal.
In the workshop, Baldaccio paid more attention to Terrye Jo than ever, trying to bring her his own peculiar brand of seventeenth-century science. The long winter nights turned his attention to the stars: a new telescope, with hand-ground lenses from a new glass factory in Magdeburg, had arrived during the second week in January, and the Dottore had arranged to have it mounted on the top of one of the corner towers. He would go up late at night wrapped in a ridiculous fur coat and peer through it, taking crabbed notes that he would transcribe onto astrological charts. There was a tussle when he pulled down a portion of the latticework supporting the antenna; whatever his professorial chops, his researches didn’t trump Terrye Jo’s radio. By the next evening it was up again. He had a personal interview with His Grace to clarify the matter and it was never repeated.
Undeterred, Baldaccio had shown her the horoscope he’d cast for her, explaining that the “imbalance in her humours” (or some other damn thing) resulted from having Venus in Scorpio or Jupiter in retrograde, and that she’d have to stop pining for Monsieur Gaston and find a proper man to bed with if she wanted to get everything back in balance.
She held back from strangling Baldaccio or dropping a heavy weight on his head. Meanwhile, Artemisio offered to slit his nose and ears.
“No one will know who did it, Donna,” he said. “And I shall console you in your misery.”
“Everyone will know you did it,” she answered. “And I won’t need consoling.”
He gave her a sad expression that he must have practiced. She was unmoved.
As the winter wore on Terrye Jo spent some time getting to know GJBF. He—she supposed it was a “he”: the sender communicated exclusively in French, so it probably wasn’t an up-timer—was slow at first and while he was accurate, he didn’t use most of the standard contractions and shortcuts all telegraphers knew. She worked with him and his speed and familiarity gradually improved.
The handle GJBF, it happened, stood for Gaston Jean-Baptiste de France—Monsieur Gaston himself had picked it out. GJBF called himself a créature, which Terrye Jo thought sounded very demeaning, as if he was the lowest kind of servant. But GJBF explained that it pointed at a particular kind of relationship, one in which responsibility went both ways: GJBF was completely loyal to his patron, and Monsieur Gaston owed his créature a certain kind of protective care when he “came into his inheritance.”
Terrye Jo came to realize more and more what that meant. Gaston’s “inheritance” was the throne of France. He had been exiled from his own country for conspiring against it, but instead of hanging him or beheading him or shooting him like a rabid dog, King Louis and Cardinal Richelieu had finally sent him into exile—four years ago, not long after the Ring of Fire. It didn’t make any sense to Terrye Jo. She asked GJBF why Monsieur Gaston was still alive and he seemed shocked that she’d even ask.
Gaston wasn’t her patron and his brother wasn’t her king. Duke Amadeus and Duchess Christina weren’t her duke and duchess either: the duke was her boss, no more and no less. But it still made her feel uneasy. This was political intrigue, maybe leading to treason, and it passed through her radio, SPAR to GJBF and back again. The queen of France was pregnant; she was hidden somewhere; and GJBF was trying frantically to find out where. If he found out he would tell her, and eventually that news would find its way back to Monsieur Gaston…and then something would happen.
She felt bad for the queen and told the duchess about it. Christina had given birth to a daughter in November. Amadeus had hoped for a son, of course, but was very happy that the duchess had made it through childbirth. Terrye Jo knew that a daughter meant that Christina would likely be pregnant again soon.
“Hm,” the duchess said to her when she expressed her concern about Queen Anne. “I don’t know why you’d feel that way. She’s been in danger from my brother Gaston for years.”
Terrye Jo had found her in the nursery. Most of the time the little princess—Margherita Violante—was in the care of nursemaids, but Christina was unusually affectionate for a seventeenth-century noblewoman. Terrye Jo wondered to herself if this was a result of the Ring of Fire, or whether she’d been this way with the other children. Whatever the case, the duchess was in the nursery quite often, not simply having the baby brought to her.
She had sent the nanny on an errand at once, as soon as Terrye Jo had mentioned the French queen’s name. Now she stood looking over the crib, where her infant daughter lay quietly sleeping.
“But now that she’s pregnant—”
“She’s been pregnant before. The poor thing has never carried to term. Why should this time be any different?”
Christina didn’t seem terribly worried or sympathetic. In a way she sounded like a mean girl from Grantville High.
“This is the first time since the Ring of Fire,” Terrye Jo said. “Maybe there’s an up-timer doctor.”
The duchess thought about this for a moment. “That’s possible, I suppose. Someone from your people might be able to help her—but again, some women simply can’t bring a child to term. It’s a defect in their bodies. There’s been so many problems, I wonder why Louis hasn’t just put her aside, sent her back to Spain.”
“I thought he couldn’t do that.”
“With God all things are possible,” she answered, crossing herself. “Without issue, the marriage could be considered unconsummated, and His Holiness could set it aside on petition. Lord knows he could have found a more suitable partner.”
“Suitable?”
“More…fertile. More able to draw him out. Though at the time we all thought…” she let the sentence hang.
“It seems pretty underhanded.”
“My dear.” Christina said. “You are so delightfully naïve. This sort of thing happens all the time. Anne has been unhappy in France; some is her own doing, some is Louis’—he never understood how to treat his queen. Some of her unhappiness is due to our mother: she couldn’t stand the idea that anyone would come between her and her son. And then there’s the cardinal.” She frowned. “I’m sure he’d rather that my brother have an heir, and it’s a positive wonder that he hasn’t arranged it somehow. But Louis was always…”
“Always what?”
She didn’t answer for several moments, as if she was trying to find the right word. The little princess whimpered very quietly, and Christina reached out a hand to touch her daughter’s forehead.
Terrye Jo had an idea what Christina wanted to say, but didn’t know what they called it in the seventeenth century.
“Sensitive,” the duchess finally decided.
Sensitive, Terrye Jo thought. That’s a good word.
“Sure. But maybe this time it’s different.”
“I doubt it. In fact, if there is issue, I would have to be convinced that Louis is the father. Some women are defective; some men are defective as well.”
“So…Monsieur Gaston—”
Christina held up her hand. “My dear Teresa. I shall give you a piece of advice, and I trust you will take it. It would be far better if you simply did the work that our duke or my royal brother has set you to do without question or concern, and let it go at that. Gaston will return this spring, I am sure of it, and things will take their course. It would be best for you not to oppose my brother…or my husband.”
“I never intended to oppose anyone.”
The duchess gave her a long, hard, appraising look, but it wasn’t any more fierce than a middling-scary drill sergeant.
“I shall take your word, Teresa. We will speak no more of this.”
* * *
Up-time, when she was little, Terrye Jo would journey far from Grantville in her mind with the help of the radio. Her dad had told her the usual stories about listening to Pirates games late at night with his little transistor—but this was the 1980s, and she had better equipment: a boom box that her uncle had bought her for Christmas. It could pick up Pittsburgh, and Wheeling, and even Detroit if the weather was right. Hearing the words The Great Voice of the Great Lakes coming out of the tubby little box late at night made her realize how big the world was and how small Grantville was.
It was still small, and in a way this world was even bigger—no airplanes, no superhighways, only a few coal-powered trains. Things were farther apart, and the radio spectrum was far more sparse. But it wasn’t empty: especially in the last year there had been more and more broadcasts of one sort or another—the messages were almost all in the clear, and mostly in German or Amideutsch, with some French and Italian mixed in. During her shifts in the radio room she found herself returning to her former diversion. She would start at the bottom of the dial and slowly move up, listening for some operator’s signal out in the dark, most often sending dots and dashes in short, fitful bursts with lots of errors and QSMs requesting a re-send.
It was boring stuff. Weather reports, gossip, sometimes the death of a nobleman or the birth of his child…no baseball games, no world news reports, no entertainment, just the steady and unsteady signals of Morse code sent out into the night. Here I am, the signals said. Here we are.
One cold spring night in late March she had gotten about a third of the way up the dial when she heard a clear, firm signal—a fist she hadn’t heard before, an operator who knew what he was doing. The other guy wasn’t too bad, but the first one was a real pro. She assumed it was an up-timer at first, someone who had learned to send before the Ring of Fire. But she realized that there was no reason to think that—anyone who spent a few months working at it could become proficient. Henri could already send and transcribe almost as fast as Terrye Jo, and most of the other operators weren’t far behind.
The messages were in French. They used expressions and phrases that she didn’t completely understand, but after listening for a half an hour she was able to start making sense of it. One of the senders was speaking for someone he called Le Maréchal; the other referred to Le Cardinal.
It was high-level stuff, and it was coming in the clear.
The idea that she was listening in on something that should have required a security clearance was a bit scary. She certainly knew who Le Cardinal must be—that had to be Richelieu, so that end of the conversation was in Paris. Le Maréchal was in Lyon, over the mountains; there was some sort of army there, a couple of hundred miles from Turin.
Were they getting ready to invade Savoy? She knew very well what Monsieur Gaston thought of Richelieu, and Gaston was on very friendly terms with the duke…
But Victor Amadeus would know if there was an army on his border, ready to invade, she thought. Of course, Lyon isn’t exactly on the border with Savoy.
Why were they there? France’s main war theater was Lorraine, and if anything they’d want troops in the field facing the Low Countries or the USE. What was the point of having an army hundreds of miles to the south?
In any case Le Maréchal, whoever he was, had a damn good telegraph operator working for him.
She noted the transmission frequency on her pad, intending to check in on it again the next night, and was about to sign off when she heard a snippet that made her sit up. The operator for Le Maréchal commented that the entraînement spécial—‘special training,’ whatever that was—had been going very well…and that Colonel Maddox had been an excellent investment.
Maddox, Terrye Jo thought to herself. There was no way to be sure, but…it couldn’t be Ms. Maddox—Sherrilyn Maddox, her old nemesis and P. E. teacher? It might almost make sense, though. Maddox had joined Harry Lefferts’ Wrecking Crew, so she was out there somewhere; why not with a French army? Did that mean that Harry and his posse were all there too, teaching Le Maréchal their own particular methods for raising hell?
She didn’t know what it meant, and wasn’t sure if it was relevant, and even if it was if she should tell Amadeus, or Monsieur Gaston, or someone in Magdeburg.
After moving the dial away from that frequency, she broke one of her own firm rules for the radio room. She took the top sheet from the note pad, and the two sheets underneath that might have an impression from her pencil, and tucked them away in an inner pocket. If she’d learned anything from history at Grantville High—or in the few years since the Ring of Fire—it was that wars sometimes got started by accident. One piece of information, overheard by someone or interpreted the wrong way, could lead to the worst kind of consequences.
When Sylvie came in at midnight to take her shift, Terrye Jo said nothing about it. The other did not seem to notice the missing pages…but as she made her way up to her quarters they felt like a leaden weight.