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Chapter 3

Nancy, capital of the Duchy of Lorraine
August 4, 1636


After she handed her jacket to the servant, who took it away to be hung somewhere, Anne Jefferson took a few seconds to examine the chamber she was in. Had she still been in Grantville, she would have thought it to be a modest-sized living room. Here, given that her hosts’ quarters were situated inside the palace of the dukes of Lorraine . . . 

“I swear, Missy, you and Ron somehow manage to turn frugality into ostentation.”

Missy Stone, who was in the process of pouring coffee into two cups at a sideboard, looked up with a frown on her face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re richer than anyone in Lorraine except maybe—maybe—the duchess herself, and you chose”—she waved her hand about, indicating the surroundings—“this barely-more-than-a-cubbyhole apartment to live in? I bet it was a servant’s quarters.”

Missy handed her one of the cups, into which she’d already spooned a bit of sugar. Despite the age spread—Anne was now in her mid-thirties, twelve years older than Missy—the two of them were half sisters so they knew each other quite well. Certainly well enough to know each other’s taste in coffee, given the expense of the beverage.

Before responding to Missy’s question, Anne took a long sip. Coffee was not to be treated casually. “Lord, that tastes good. At least you’re not stinting on the variety.”

“It’s Turkish. Ron can’t tell the difference between good coffee and garage swill, but I can. And what’s with the wisecrack about the apartment?”

Anne sat down in one of the armchairs, carefully, making sure she didn’t spill any coffee. “It wasn’t a wisecrack about the apartment. It was a wisecrack about you.”

Missy sat down on the divan across from her, balancing her own cup with care as she did so. The expression on her face was a bit defensive. “Look, it suits us fine. And, yes, it was a servant’s quarters—but she was one of the duchess’s dressmakers, so this apartment is just down the hall and around the corner from the Grand Old Lady’s suite. Which means—”

She waggled a finger in that direction. “We’re close to the one and only up-time-designed flush toilet in the whole damn palace. And we got visiting rights—I made sure of that before I agreed to this arrangement.”

She took a sip from her own cup, holding it in both hands, followed by a little shrug. “We only need one bedroom, since we sleep together.” A little grin flashed on her face. “And, boy, does that seem to scandalize people more than anything else we do.”

Anne chuckled. It was taken for granted in the here and now that lower class couples slept together—more often than not, sharing their bed with their children—but seventeenth-century upper-crusters were expected to maintain separate quarters. That made sense, of course, given that most noble and almost all royal marriages were practical matters involving wealth and politics. Often enough, a husband and wife slept together only infrequently, and then solely for the purpose of continuing the family lines. But although Ron and Missy Stone were wealthier than most aristocrats, theirs had been a marriage guided by American customs. They were undemonstrative about it, but it was a genuine love affair.

“Other than that, we’ve got a decent-sized kitchen for the cook, as good a bath arrangement as you can get until we bring in up-time-trained plumbers, and we don’t need much in the way of closet space since neither Ron nor I is a clothes horse.” Her expression was now firmly righteous. “Besides, we’re both busy as hell. We’re not here most of the time.”

“At least get some portraits up on the walls.” Anne got a sly look on her face. “How about your grandmothers? They’d be suitably somber even for down-timers.”

Missy sniffed. “Fat chance of that ever happening. I’d hang gargoyles on the walls before I’d put up any pictures of Vera and Eleanor, as nasty as they were when Ron and I got married. And as it happens, we have commissioned a couple of portraits. Artemisia Gentileschi’s doing one of my dad and Ron’s father is having one done by a painter named Francesco Albani.”

“Let me guess. You found Albani in one of the encyclopedias.”

“Well, he’s in them—I looked him up. But it was Tom who recommended him once we told him we wanted his portrait done.”

Missy finished her cup and set it down. “Okay, now you need to satisfy my curiosity. First, why’d you agree to go haring off to North America when you’ve got a booming medical practice in the Netherlands? Second, why’d you come all the way down here to have Ron provide you with pharmaceuticals—including a pharmacist? Can’t His Royal Muckety-Muck the King of—sorry, ‘in’—the Low Countries provide you what you need?”

“In answer to your first question, there are two reasons. One of them is as simple as it gets. I owed it to Adam. My husband has been completely supportive of me even though that meant he had to take a pretty big hit on his own career. Professional top-shelf diplomats are expected to, you know, relocate from time to time—and do it for extended periods, not just the short trips that Adam’s been able to do so long as I was fixed in Amsterdam. And now he was offered the governorship of the Netherlands’ major colony in the New World. You think I’d be dumb enough to say ‘no’?”

She shrugged. “And I was of two minds on the question anyway. Yes, my medical practice in Holland is going very well. But I can’t think of a greater challenge to a doctor or nurse in the year 1636 than doing what I can to alleviate—no way to stop it, but something can be done—the worst medical catastrophe to hit the human race since the Black Death of the Middle Ages.”

Missy made a face. “You’re talking about the epidemics that devastated the populations of the Americas after Europeans arrived, bringing diseases with them that New World people had never been exposed to. Anne, I did some studying on the issue after Ron told me what you were planning. Most of those deaths have already happened—happened quite a while back now. The worst epidemics—”

“—would have come in the first century or two after Columbus landed. Yes, I know. By now, the indigenous populations who survived will have built up some immunity. But the operative word is some, Missy. They’re still at greater risk than people of European stock.”

“True.” Missy extended her hand. “More coffee?”

“Please.”

As Missy went to the side table, Anne continued: “Which sort of sidles into my answer to your other question. The reason I want my own direct connection to you and Ron is because you’re Americans. We just don’t look at this issue—nor slavery—the way down-timers do.”

Missy paused as she was about to pour the coffee and looked over at her, her brow creased a little. “You don’t trust them to follow through on their promises?”

“It’s not a matter of ‘trust,’” said Anne. “I don’t think any of them are lying to me about their intentions. I’m quite sure my husband isn’t. It’s just . . . ”

She looked out of the window for a moment. There was nothing to see beyond the glass other than a drizzly day. Not quite bleak but close.

“Things will come up, other demands will arise, and when you get right down to it they don’t feel any sense of responsibility for the situation.”

“Neither do I—nor do you, being blunt about it. Neither one of us—nor our parents or grandparents or even our great-grandparents—bears any responsibility for that history. The Civil War and slavery ended a hundred and thirty-five years before the Ring of Fire. The massacre at Wounded Knee happened in . . . 1890, if I remember right.”

Anne shook her head. “It’s not a matter of individual responsibility. It was still our nation which committed those things. The United States of America, not Europe. The citizens of a free and democratic nation have responsibilities as well as rights and privileges—and the way I look at it, one of those responsibilities is to do what you can to prevent mistakes, screwups, and for sure downright crimes from being done again.”

Missy finished pouring the coffee and brought it over to her. “If you put it that way, I agree with you. And I know Ron does, from things he’s said to me.”

No matter how weighty the subject matter, coffee was coffee and naturally came first. After draining a good third of the cup, Anne sighed contentedly and set it down. “But there’s more to it than just a sense of responsibility. Down-timers are . . . well, down-timers. You know as well as I do that in some ways they just don’t see the world the way we do. They’re . . . I don’t know . . . ”

Missy was in her seat by then, and chuckled again. But the sound had no humor in it this time. “Callous? Even cruel? Cold-hearted? Wouldn’t cross the street to give some water to a man dying of thirst? Like that, you mean?”

Anne winced. “That’s putting it more harshly than I would. But . . . well, yeah.”

“It’s putting it more harshly than I would myself,” said Missy, “if I were being fair and judicious about it—which I’m damn well not, plenty of times. The seventeenth century and its inhabitants can really piss me off now and then. Like maybe every twenty minutes.”

She leaned back in her chair, sighing a little. “But if I’m more charitably inclined—which I am as a rule—I’d just say they were tough-minded. And then I find myself wondering just how tenderhearted and goody-two-shoes I’d be if half my brothers and sisters had died before they became teenagers, and I knew that any time I bore a child I was taking a significant risk of dying myself. And that if my father or brother or husband was a seaman that there wasn’t better than a fifty percent chance he’d survive to retire—and then he’d probably have suffered a major and possibly crippling injury.”

“Or that being a farmer is more dangerous than being a soldier,” Anne chimed in. “Or that if you live in any city big enough to be called one it’ll have to be protected by a star fortress.”

“Yeah, that too.” Missy smiled ruefully. “To think that you and I came from a time when the only reason people lived in gated residences was because they were rich snobs, not because they were worried about a siege.”

“Or keeping out desperate refugees during an epidemic or a famine. Oh, twentieth century! We barely knew ye!”

They shared a laugh, then, which lightened the atmosphere. Right on the heels of it, there were the sounds of people entering the apartment. A few seconds later, Ron Stone came into the chamber, followed by a young man whom Anne had never met.

“I’m glad to see you’re both in such good cheer,” said Ron.

“If only you knew,” said Missy. But she muttered it too softly for the men to hear.

Ron gestured at the fellow with him. “Anne, meet Bastien Dauvet. He’ll be going with you to New Amsterdam, although it’ll take a couple of weeks for me and him to assemble everything we can send with him. But he’ll get to your ship with the equipment and supplies before you set sail.”

He smiled. “I know he looks like he just turned nineteen—that’s because he did, last month—but he’s really good with pharmaceuticals and has a pretty decent grasp of medicine in general.”

Anne did her best not to look dubious. At a guess, she would have thought Dauvet had just turned seventeen. He really did look like a teenager.

Still, she was inclined to trust Ron’s judgment. The middle of the three Stone boys had turned out, against the odds and certainly most expectations, to be almost frighteningly competent—and he was only twenty-one himself.

Besides, she reminded herself, beggars can’t be choosers. Finding a good up-time-trained pharmacist willing to relocate on short notice across the Atlantic was almost impossible, given the need for them at home and the salaries they could demand.

Which brought up, though . . . 

“Why are you willing to come?” she asked. “You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to, but I’m curious.”

She’d asked the question in Amideutsch, not the idiomatic American English she’d been using with Anne and Ron. But Dauvet answered in the same English. His accent was pronounced—Walloon or Lorrain, she thought; maybe Alsatian—but his grasp of the idiom was excellent. Clearly, he’d been spending a lot of time with Americans.

“What can I say? It sounds like an adventure—which my home town of Namur certainly isn’t.”

Walloon, then. “Adventures have a way of getting out of control,” she said. “I’ll try my best to keep this one within reasonable bounds, but . . . you never know. When I come from, they didn’t call it the ‘Wild, Wild West’ for nothing.”

Of course, no one had referred to New York City that way in the late twentieth century that she’d actually come from, but they were now in a very different “when.” New Amsterdam—what would become New York in that other universe—had only been founded twelve years earlier. It was still very much a frontier town.

Dauvet just grinned. Clearly, the youngster was not given to fretfulness.

She turned back to Ron Stone. “How much help will you be able to give me?”

“Hard to say, at the moment. We’re just getting up and running here in Lorraine, and the situation’s not all that much better in Hesse-Kassel. And, obviously, we’ve got some major medical problems to deal with right here. But I’ll send you whatever I can, Anne—that’s a promise. We’re Americans, not down-timers. They’ve got a multitude of challenges and problems to deal with in the New World. So do we—but we’ve also got a debt to pay, on top of that. And since we can’t pay it back, we’re obligated to pay it forward.”

Anne was gratified but a bit surprised that his thoughts ran so closely parallel to her own. Some of that must have shown in her expression, judging from his next words.

Ron shook his head. “One Trail of Tears was enough.”


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Framed