Chapter 4
November, 1635
Castello del Valentino, near Turin in Savoy
Terrye Jo Tillman had spent at least an hour sitting at the writing desk, leaning back in the chair and looking out across the beautiful mountain view outside her window. The blank letter paper lay stacked, the quill sharpened and the ink mixed, ready for her to start the letter; but it was hard to find the right way to begin.
Uncle Frank’s letter was nearby. She still wasn’t sure how he’d found out where to send it, but it had arrived that morning and was delivered to her apartment by a liveried footman on a silver platter as if she were royalty, or at least nobility. She’d managed a gracious thank you. Her French and Italian was much improved from when she’d arrived a year ago with the team hired to build Duke Victor Amadeus’ radio tower. It had to improve; the rest of the group had gone home or elsewhere, turning down the duke’s invitation to stay, but she’d remained to operate the shiny new up-time technology for Victor Amadeus.
For her part, Terrye Jo didn’t want to go back to Grantville, and didn’t really have anyplace else to go.
The letter’s not going to write itself, girl, she thought. Mooning out the window doesn’t help.
She hated it when she was right.
She sat up straight in the chair and pulled back her sleeves. It was a new blouse and it wouldn’t do to get ink-stains all over it. Then, with a sigh, she pulled a sheet of paper off the stack, took the quill and dipped it in the ink, and began to write.
Dear Dad,
I’m sorry that it’s taken me so long to write to you. I want to say it’s because it’s been so busy here, setting up the radio tower and getting everything settled, but you know it’s not a good enough excuse. I was angry when I left, and so were you, and maybe it’s time for that to end. I left you to take care of Mom without me—but you’d had to do that when I was in the army, and she didn’t recognize me anymore. There was nothing left to do but kiss you goodbye. Uncle Frank’s letter told me that she died in the spring. When I come home I’ll visit the grave with you, if you want.
She paused and put the quill down. For a moment she thought about crumpling up the paper and tossing it out the window. That was a terrible way to begin. It was worse than just being unable to find the words—it was as if there weren’t any right words.
Her mother was dead. Her doctor had called it Huntington’s chorea—the same thing that had taken her Aunt Gloria two years after the Ring of Fire. Both Mom and Gloria had been messed up even before the Ring, but there were medications and treatments. Dad and Uncle Jim took turns driving them up to Wheeling and they were both better for a while afterward.
Then Wheeling disappeared, along with the rest of the twenty-first century. They did the best they could after that, which wasn’t very good. Her aunt was already gone by the time Terrye Jo graduated. Dad came alone to see it, because Mom was having a bad week. He’d only gotten to eighth grade, and had been so proud of his daughter who made it through even though it happened back here in the seventeenth century.
By the time she came home to work for VOA, her mother didn’t even know her own daughter. That was when she knew it was time to leave. The invitation from the duke of Savoy came at just the right time.
Just a year or two, she’d thought. Then she’d come home with enough to live well. But she didn’t go home.
I’m living in the Castello del Valentino, which is the ducal palace. I have a room about the size of our old house and a workshop downstairs. The duke and duchess have been very kind to me. Duke Victor Amadeus is about your age and very handsome—he’s got one of those pointed beards and has turned-up moustaches, and has a huge wardrobe. Every day I see him wearing something new. His wife Christine—the duchess—is much younger. She’s the sister of the king of France, and has a temper worse than Gramma Dorothy. She mostly uses it on the servants—I think the duke told her not to scare the up-timer away. She did come to me before a ball and told me that my jeans and flannel shirts were quite unsuitable, and had her dressmaker fit me for a beautiful pale blue gown. The court artist did sketches of all the ladies. You wouldn’t be able to tell I was an infantry grunt in disguise.
A few weeks ago the court took a trip to a monastery, Hautemont Abbey, which is on a tall hill overlooking a lake. It’s a gorgeous place, like something out of a fairytale movie. A few dozen of the duke’s ancestors are buried there, and he and his wife expect that they’ll go there too, but hopefully not any time soon. They took all of their children along. They have three and the duchess is pregnant with another. She’s already lost two others—one stillborn, another when he was just six. They want to bring in an up-time doctor, and they hoped I was trained for that too. Even with nothing more than field medic training they’re glad to have me nearby.
She almost threw this sheet out the window too. Nice going. Focus on death—the place where the dukes of Savoy get buried and the number of kids the duchess has lost.
She set that thought aside and plowed ahead.
I want you to know that this is a great situation for me, even though it’s far from home. I miss you, and Uncle Frank and Aunt Lana and Uncle Jim and my grandmothers and Grampa Fogle too. But I can’t come home now, even though you want me to. I need—
She stopped and scratched out I need. She didn’t need anything. It was her Dad who needed what she was going to ask. She was almost to the bottom of a page, so she set the current one aside and started with a new sheet.
When Aunt Gloria died, you cursed the Ring of Fire, and you cursed fate, and a whole lot of other things. There was no medicine, no up-time clinic, nothing to help her get better. I’m pretty sure you did the same when Mom died. It’s all true, but even up-time neither of them were getting better—they were mostly staying the same, and not a lot of that. You can blame God and curse fate all you want, but not the Ring of Fire. They didn’t die because we’re back here. They died because there was something that killed them. In the Guard we lost people—up-timers—who survived coming back to this time only to be killed. It didn’t make sense, it wasn’t fair, but it happened all the same. I don’t know why we’re here in this time, but we’re here and we’re not going back.
Because of that, I need to ask you something important. I need to ask you to move on: from Mom, from the Ring of Fire, from wanting me to be in reach to lean on. Even Uncle Frank told me that I have to find my own way in this world and that I’ll be a better daughter because of it.
I hope you will love me anyway and that you’ll write back
With love, your daughter
Terrye Jo
She set the last sheet aside, making a neat stack, and laid the quill next to it. The window was still there, and she could throw it all away and start again. Or not.
After some dithering she sealed the letter, with no further corrections, and passed it to a courier. Dad would have it in a few weeks, and maybe it would make him feel better. In any case writing back to Grantville had lightened her mood.
* * *
Even before the radio team arrived, the Castello del Valentino had been regularly under construction since 1630. It had been the private home of the duchess of Savoy—Christina Maria, the sister of King Louis of France—and she kept carpenters, stonemasons and other craftsmen continually occupied with renovations. The Castello was an impressive building: square and roughly horseshoe-shaped, with four towers along the central edge and two each on each of the legs; an interior courtyard ended in a rounded arch with a gate tower in the center, taller than all the rest. Tree-lined avenues framed gardens beyond, leading off into the countryside, while the long side of the building faced the Po River. A river-gate in the middle of a palisaded wall led down a few steps to a dock.
Despite the noise, Her Grace seemed very comfortable there. Whenever she was with child—which, as far as Terrye Jo could tell, was just about always—she had left Turin and come out into the country. A Grantville-trained doctor—really a down-timer with a few months’ education in up-time nursing techniques—had been hired out by the duke to attend her, and he had a permanent apartment in the north wing. His expertise was the first up-time knowledge that Duke Victor Amadeus had imported into his lands, and it was better than a chirurgeon who knew nothing other than bleeding and purging.
Late in 1634, the duke had decided that Savoy needed a radio transmission facility, and had paid handsomely to have it built. Along with the spiderwork of antenna wires that now draped it, stretching between the many parapets and towers of the Castello. Naturally, that meant more renovation and construction. It also meant that the duke himself spent more time in residence.
The duchess might have resented it, except that she considered Terrye Jo herself a project. Her Grace had one daughter, Luisa Christina, six years old but already court-wise and self-assured, but hardly someone who could be dressed and groomed quite yet. Terrye Jo was twenty-one, and gave no indication of interest in marrying or child-rearing. It was a challenge for both noblewoman and country girl, but it was a nice interruption from the workshop.
This morning, with her letter sent off, Terrye Jo made her way from her apartment in an upper floor of the south wing to the workshop, located in one of the towers that overlooked the Po. It was a big, airy place, originally designed for something else—a ballroom, maybe—but had been cleared out for work. The framework of the radio tower had been built above, and the hardware installed in the room. Long tables of planed timber had been placed there to hold equipment and parts and tools.
“Ah, Donna Teresa.” Artemisio Logiani, a local Torino who had graduated from castle handyman to junior radio tech, looked up from his work and offered her a bow she didn’t deserve. “You brighten up the morning.”
It would have been all too serious but for the wink and the grin.
“I doubt it.”
“Forgive me, Donna,” he answered. “I cannot help myself.” He smiled, showing not enough teeth. “I can scarcely focus my eyes in your presence.”
She ignored the compliment. It was a little dance she did with the down-timer every morning. She knew what he had in mind—there was really no question—but of the crew of radio operators she’d trained, he was the best. He could send almost as fast as she could. “How are you doing with the long-range antenna adjustment?”
“It goes slowly,” he said. “The materials are poor, especially now that there is war.” He gestured to a stretch of wire on the table behind him, painstakingly hand-twisted and mounted on an antenna strut. “I try to follow the book, but it is difficult.” He tapped the open book, a manuscript copy of a radio operator’s manual from the 1930s that the team had brought with them.
“I’m sure we’ll get it. We can reach Lyon now, but the duke said that he needed to get a further reach—someplace like…”
“Paris.”
They both looked across at the voice. Terrye Jo sighed. Artemisio made a face, but not so the newcomer could see it. The young assistant was no fan of Dottore Umberto Baldaccio—and to be honest neither was she.
“Might be,” Terrye Jo said. She put her hands on her hips. “Do you know something we don’t, Umberto?”
He scowled: he preferred his title to his Christian name, which was why Terrye Jo didn’t use it.
“I know nothing that you do not,” he said, walking across to his part of the workshop. He occupied roughly a quarter of the usable area with books and crates and jars full of who know what, and glassware and powders and strips of metal and all kinds of unidentifiable crap.
When they’d installed and tested the equipment for the radio facility, most of the team had declined Duke Victor Amadeus’ offer to remain in Turin on retainer. There wasn’t anything wrong with Turin—it just wasn’t Rome or Paris or London or Magdeburg. Only Terrye Jo had stayed behind, as much an expert radio operator as down-time Turin had ever seen. The duke had assigned her this workshop but Baldaccio had already moved in, taking up from a third to a half of the available space. She’d gone to the duke herself and complained. He was a fraud, he was an alchemist, for Christ’s sake—but it turned out he was a well-established and well-connected fraud with the full confidence of the duke, who brushed off her protests. She’d gone away dissatisfied.
Then she’d gone to the duchess.
Christina Maria had been in Savoy for twenty years as the wife of the prince of Piedmont, who had come into his inheritance as Duke of Savoy in 1630. She was still thought of a foreigner even so. After her first son had died stillborn and her second had died young, during her third pregnancy (when she was lying-in here at Castello del Valentino) the duke had sent Umberto Baldaccio to her. He was a loyal retainer who had saved the duke’s life in some fashion that was never discussed, and he used all of the standard practices available to a seventeenth-century physician: purging and bleeding and hocus pocus and astrology. The baby turned out to be a girl (apparently Baldaccio’s prediction that it was a boy was conveniently forgotten) and the experience was enough for her to want to keep him as far away as possible. Thus, she warmed to the task of helping the young up-timer against the old charlatan.
One morning, Baldaccio ambled into the workshop to find that Terrye Jo and a group of retainers had gotten there far earlier and had moved his equipment and tools and dusty books full of Latin gibberish into neat stacks in the draftiest corner of the big room, close enough to a window that he could point his telescope but far enough to keep from being underfoot. He had been furious—but when Terrye Jo had smiled sweetly and invoked the name of the duchess, he had gone quiet and set to work disorganizing his work area to his own satisfaction. A large metal crate part way down on the two closest work benches served as an effective barrier, preventing him from taking over any more territory.
“At least in regard to politics,” Terrye Jo said.
“Yes. Of course. As for the rest…” he settled himself in a creaky armchair and flipped a page in the book in front of him. “There is much I could teach you, signorina, if you would merely open your mind to science.”
It was an old argument, and she bit back a reply. Him chiding her about science was…typical, if absurd.
“Why do you think that the duke wants to contact Paris?”
“Haven’t you heard?”
“Heard what? I didn’t take breakfast this morning. Wasn’t hungry.”
“We have a guest. His Highness Gaston Jean-Baptiste de France, and his lovely wife Marguerite de Lorraine. Come to pay his sister a visit.”
“Gaston.” Terrye Jo knew the name, but wasn’t up on the politics. “Monsieur Gaston, except they always call him Monsieur Gaston. The king’s younger brother.”
“Estranged brother, I daresay,” Baldaccio said. “He is in exile from France for his intrigues. Yet, for all that, he is the heir to the throne, since the king appears…disinclined to produce one of his own.”
“So he’s the next king of France? What’s he doing here?”
“I would not venture to say. But I suspect that your—instruments—” he gestured toward the disassembled antenna strut in front of Artemisio. “They might have something to do with it. The prince is here to make use of them.”
“Huh. But…you said he was in exile.”
Baldaccio sighed. He leaned back, making the chair complain. “Foolish girl. Monsieur is in exile, but not all of his friends are so disadvantaged. He is here—but his friends are there.” He folded his hands over his ample belly, looking satisfied—like a snake that has just enjoyed a particularly filling meal.
She ignored the foolish girl, though she had an image in her mind of stuffing the words one letter at a time down his throat. “I got the impression that Duke Victor Amadeus is a friend of the king of France. You’re suggesting that he’s part of some intrigue with Monsieur Gaston.”
“I am not suggesting anything, signorina, and will deny any imputation of the sort. I am merely employing logic, which is a key to science, as—”
“As you’d teach me if I’d only listen. I understand.” She sat on the bench next to the antenna. Artemisio, who had remained silent through the entire exchange, joined her at once. “I’ve got work to do. Maybe later.”
* * *
Monsieur Gaston’s reasons for visiting his sister were made clear to Terrye Jo a few days later. She was in the operator’s room, a cubicle below the tower that was built into the ceiling above the workshop; it was accessible by a staircase made of new, unfinished wood.
It was dusk, the shadows from the mountains lengthening across the valley. She was trying to pick up a broadcast signal from Magdeburg when she felt, rather than heard, the tramp of boots. When they came into the cubicle, she had taken off her headphones and stood up to see who had come to visit.
“Mademoiselle Tillman.”
The man who addressed her was young—about Terrye Jo’s age—and richly dressed in the latest fashion. He had a piercing gaze with deep blue eyes and a smooth, clear voice. The four men with him were also well dressed, but were clearly no more than ornaments for the one who had spoken.
“Monsieur,” she said, standing. Her Italian was better than her French, and this man was a native speaker.
“No, please sit. I am Louis de Vendôme, at your service.” He offered a courtier’s bow. “And you are the most distinguished up-time…er, radio operator.”
“Yes. My lord,” she added, realizing it was appropriate and he’d be expecting it.
A tiny smile appeared on Louis de Vendôme’s face. “My father is César de Vendôme, Mademoiselle. I am in Monsieur Gaston’s company, and at his direction I have come to…inspect your facility. With the permission of His Grace the duke, we will require some extra work from you.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Terrye Jo said. She had decided to remain standing, rather than sit in the presence of this nobleman. “Extra work?”
“Yes. Some communications. Do not worry, you will be paid well for your trouble.”
On vous paiera bien de vos travaux. It sounded very nice in French. “I am always happy to hear that,” she said. “I would like assurance that it is with the permission of the duke.”
Louis looked over his shoulder at his companions, then back at her. “Do you have any doubts, Mademoiselle?”
“The…no, Monsieur. My lord, I do not doubt your intentions, but this equipment is in my care, and I am obligated to the duke as an employee. If anything were to happen it would be my responsibility, no matter who is operating it.”
“It would be you, surely?”
“Not necessarily. There are a dozen people qualified to run it at the moment,” she said. “But it’s me in charge regardless of who—”
“You are quite right to be cautious, Mademoiselle, but it would be His Highness’s wish that for his communications that it would be you, and only you, at the instrument.” He held up one hand, the lace cuff hanging limply at the wrist, as if to forestall any response. “Your ability at teaching the skills are not in question. I can assure you—”
“I am sure you can.”
“What do you want? Exactly?”
“I think written permission would be helpful. A note with Duke Victor Amadeus’ signature and seal would do, indicating that I should be selected to do what a dozen people at the Castello del Valentino can competently handle.”
The little smile disappeared. For a moment, Terrye Jo wasn’t sure whether she’d stepped across some line with the man. Then she decided that she didn’t care—this was her gear, and she was responsible. Getting bullied by some French prince, or duke, or whatever he was, wasn’t going to work.
“I assume that there won’t be any problem with that.”
“You are a very determined young woman, Mademoiselle. Is this a characteristic of all up-time females, like…trousers?”
She smiled. Her working clothes weren’t exactly what someone like Louis de Vendôme was used to.
“Only the tough ones.” She smiled, and Louis’ expression softened slightly. “I don’t know about the others.”
“In the instance that I obtain this permission I will expect that you will provide the service that Monsieur Gaston requires, and that you will keep all that you see—and send over your radio—in confidence. This is most important, Mademoiselle. Many things, and many people, depend on your care in this matter.”
“I know how to keep secrets, my lord,” Terrye Jo said. “You can ask the duke and duchess.”
“Yes,” he answered. “I already did. You are highly regarded. Particularly by the duchess.” He looked her up and down, from the fierce smile to the trousers and work boots. “Otherwise we would not be having this conversation.”