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Chapter 15


Saxony

September 1635


Hedwig, dowager-electress of Saxony, suggested leaving by way of Torgau, by way of Mockrehna and Eilenburg, through Taucha and Schkeuditz, as a route for her departure, since the roads were better. Kleinitz discouraged the idea, citing the presence of units at Torgau whose officers he wasn’t acquainted with and who might not honor his letter of safe conduct. Not to mention unrest generally, along the rest of that way. So even if the Dübener Heide might be harboring bands of rebels . . . undoubtedly was harboring bands of rebels, he thought but did not say . . . it would be better if her party used the northern paths and went as directly as possible to Halle.

Yes, even if that did involve a ferry. She would not have any wagons to be hefted on and off the flimsy rope-and-pulley raft that counted as a ferry.

That was the partisan leader’s ultimatum. She and her people could go. Things, material possessions, beyond what they were wearing and the food they would need for the journey, they would leave behind. All the things in the Lichtenburg and its outbuildings; things he could use to induce his followers not to plunder the villages and villagers of which she seemed to be so solicitous.

All right, he granted, of her soldiers, she could take fifty riders. With their horses. The squadron of dragoons and mounting the infantry.

“With their weapons,” she persisted.

Overall, fifty fewer trained soldiers in and around Prettin, even if they did take their horses and guns, wasn’t a bad bargain. The old lady, if she took fifty men, would be leaving as many to fade in among the townsmen and villagers, stiffening the local militia, prepared to take offense at mistreatment of those they regarded as their charges.

Also enough horses, she argued, for those of the ladies and servants who could ride. Carrying the children, the old men, the feeble, double.

“Is the trouble of the extra horses worth it?” Kleinitz asked. “It’s only three miles or so to the Elbe ferry at Dommitzsch.”

She pointed out that it was a rare horse that was willing to get on a ferry if not trained to it. Her men would put as many of the horses on the ferry as they could persuade to get on the ferry. Possibly trading some of their military horses for civilian slugs in the process. They’d leave the rest behind; Kleinitz’s men could retrieve them and add them to the count of things.

Things with which she was ransoming her people.

“People,” Kleinitz countered, “you are so arrogant as to think of as yours.”

So she left.

Wondering what the partisans planned to do with the grand ceremonial clothing. What use did they have for a dress of foam green and sky blue silk, embroidered with gold and silver thread, ornamented with lace? Even she had only worn it once, to the wedding of John George and Magdalene Sybille. The dress of golden yellow silk; the one of salmon pink? Carefully preserved, but also hardly worn; a widow had no use for such sartorial gaiety.

What use did they have for the family portraits? The china figurines?

The weaponry, no matter how ornamental, she presumed that they could use.

Hopefully Kleinitz would persuade them to sell it rather than wantonly smash it in the storm of fury that sometimes followed conquests. Like a miniature sack of Magdeburg. She hadn’t forced them to mount a siege.

What, even, would they do with the buildings? The upkeep was not cheap. The annual bill for roof repairs . . . What use would the notorious Gretchen Richter have for them? A hospital? A school? A prison? If Lichtenburg went up in flames . . . she would regret the loss of a pleasant home.

But not as much as she would have regretted the loss of lives if she had not surrendered it. The men she had left behind to protect her dower villages, to protect the servants at the Schloß who were not accompanying her because they had family in the villages, would do what they could. Not that it will do much good, she thought sourly as the party straggled single-file along the walking path that led to Halle and sanctuary in the USE.

The walking path that Kleinitz had assured her would take her party two days, at most, to cover.

Two days at a brisk march by a healthy man, perhaps. It was close to fifty miles in a direct line; considerably more by the path. During which they were shadowed by partisans to make sure that they did not veer away. No detouring to nearby villages to replenish their supplies. After the first, horrible, night sleeping by the roadside, some relief at Düben, almost twenty miles along, where they were allowed to stay overnight, sleep indoors, and purchase more food. She had not been allowed to bring money; the captain of dragoons had some. She had no idea how he had managed it.

Düben, where four years earlier Gustav Adolf and John George had met to forge an alliance against Ferdinand II.

She had danced with Ferdinand once, before he became Holy Roman Emperor.

He was dead, as was John George, who with his wife and youngest son Moritz had been killed by partisans in the Vogtland a few days ago.

A second night sleeping by the path, children crying and old men grumbling. Then another night indoors at Delitzsch. Where, probably, children cried and old men grumbled, but at least she had a closed door between herself and them. She wrote out a voucher to the innkeeper, a promise to pay him when she could.

She hoped, a little viciously, that the shadowing partisans were having another uncomfortable night outdoors, on hard ground, tree roots under their ribcages and insects in their hair!

Followed by a final exhausting stretch to Halle, fifteen miles between dawn and dusk, with bedraggled people. They arrived south of the city as dark was settling in.


Halle an der Saale

September 1635


Sergeant Jim Allen looked up from the scribbled sheets of next week’s railroad schedule, now in its fourth revision. “What the hell?” He didn’t like his assignment. How did a member of the SoTF National Guard end up being detailed to work as a railway scheduler? He’d liked it better in the NUS Army the first two years after the Ring, when he got to do some fighting, at least. Then a year at Erfurt working in the supply depot on the railroad part of military procurement. That hadn’t been too bad; Dennis Stull was one of the good guys. Plus, it had a whole Grantville community now—Meaghan was still there with the kids. No place to billet dependents at Halle, yet; not many up-timers here, even if he could find a place for them to stay. Bill Plotz, his half-brother, laughed at him and said it served him right for even starting to go to college: learn to use a spreadsheet and they’ll make you do it. Even if you only had three semesters at a community college. “Retribution for getting above yourself, Jimmy my boy.” Bill only had a high school diploma—but he was a captain in the TacRail unit now; had been at Ingolstadt, had been at Regensburg, was moving east with Stearns. Seeing some action.

If the noise outside was any indication, some action was happening right here at the depot office. Right now.

Men yelling, mix of the local German and Amideutsch. “Get those shitball horses off of the tracks!” Dung, excrement, “Crap, crap, crap!” What the German soldiers avoided in the way of using God’s name in vain, they sure made up when it came to anything a human or animal ass could produce. Most of them were peasant boys, of course: they grew up with horse manure and cowpies. Lousy Krauts. Which he still thought in private, even if he wasn’t allowed to say it. Poop, poop, poop! All the time, like they were three years old. There was one private who went around saying, “Pigeon droppings.”

“Allen, get yourself out here!”

That was in English. Eric Hudson, old Willie Ray’s grandson. Sprig of the Grantville upper class, if you could say that Grantville had one. He’d graduated from high school in that first class after the Ring of Fire, straight into the army, then Erfurt under Stull; married Gena Kroll, Stull’s secretary, while they were there. Nothing like schmoozing up to the big boss. Now the kid was here as the other up-time scheduler.

They were supposed to be training a lot more schedulers. The railroads were expanding fast. Training down-timers; not enough up-timers to go around any more. He’d turned that part of it over to Eric, who got along with the Krauts better.

He got up and went out onto the platform. And weren’t there Krauts here right now? It looked like a couple of hundred of them. Riding, walking, all on the railroad right-of-way, coming up from the south.

Liveried soldiers who were not ours! Raid! Halle was unnervingly close to Saxony.

Companies scrambling out of the barracks over on the other side, carrying weapons, the corporals trying to get their squads to form up.

But what were their camp followers doing all mixed up with them, in the middle, almost as if the soldiers were bodyguards?

An old woman, riding out of the middle of the gaggle on a damned fine horse, keeping a damned fine seat, toward him. With the guy who appeared to be the captain of those soldiers behind her. And two steps to the left.

“I am Hedwig, sister of King Christian of Denmark, who is an ally of Emperor Gustav Adolf.”

“Sure, lady,” Jim said. “And I’m the Shah of Iran!”

* * *

“She’s not that old,” Eric wrote to Gena. “Probably around fifty, I’d guess. She just looks old, the way so many down-timers do, even the rich ones. Jim had more than a bit of trouble dealing with it all. She had a half-dozen very, very, upper class young ladies. The rest of the women were servants. Kids. Old people. And, let’s not forget, fifty armed men who had that ‘if you want to start trouble, be my guest’ look about them.

“I think it was them that finally got Jim to take her seriously. Plus that the down-time officers were ‘my-ladying’ her, but the whole thing was a mess and we sure didn’t have any place to tuck them in bed for the night.”

Eric chewed on the tip of his pen thoughtfully. They’d telegraphed for instructions; radioed for someone, anyone, from the SoTF government who might possess something that resembled diplomatic credentials to deal with this. Got Mark Early, who was the SoTF consul in Magdeburg.

Yeah, yeah, back home, when in the twentieth century and where in West Virginia, states didn’t have their own consulates in Washington, DC. But Grantvillers got in enough trouble in Magdeburg and environs, simply by being themselves, and considering themselves pretty independent, that Ed Piazza thought it was worthwhile to have someone available to talk them through the system. The consular services there had started when the SoTF had been the NUS and he’d left them to do their thing. Mark had been stationed in Germany for a couple of years, back up-time. His wife, she’d been Susan Reading before she got married, was on Stearns’ personal staff when he was prime minister. Lost her job, now that Stearns was a general, but she’d land on her feet. Work for Becky Abrabanel, maybe. She’d find something.

And Mark figured it out.

Honest to God, no matter how soldiers griped about them, sometimes the civil servant types came in handy. He put his pen to the paper again.

“So we ended up arranging for the lady and the gaggle to be shipped up to Magdeburg on a special train. One of the lady’s friends, who turned out to also know Mary Simpson, an abbess of somewhere or the other (though where a nun would get money, I have no idea) guaranteed the freight and Mark said she’d be good for it. It was the duke of Saxe-Altenburg who paid the invoice. I’ve got no idea, either, why he’d be paying a bill run up by a nun; I’m pretty sure that he’s Lutheran. And that nuns are Catholic ladies.

“I sort of doubt that she left Saxony voluntarily—probably pushed out by the uprising. But if she was a refugee, she had it easy compared to the ones who came into Grantville the first year after the Ring of Fire.”

Mark Early accompanied the train back to Magdeburg. Frau Hedwig’s little army would follow with the horses, watched, of course, but no longer with serious apprehension, by companies of the National Guard.


Magdeburg

September 1635


Mark Early collected a deeper understanding than Eric of the circumstances under which the dowager-electress left Prettin. “I was reminded,” he said to Susan, “of that movie Ms. Mailey used to quote from all the time. She was pretty fond of Dr. Strangelove. It must have come out about the time she was hitting her stride.”

“Oh, yeah. ‘or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.’ What quote were you thinking about?” Susan yawned.

“ . . . to choose between two admittedly regrettable yet nevertheless distinguishable alternatives.”

Dorothea Sophia, duchess of Saxe-Altenburg and abbess of Quedlinburg, was on the platform to meet the special train.

She didn’t have a house in Magdeburg, not even a rented one. Now that she was no longer a member of the Reichstag, it was an expense she could not justify to herself, much less to the committee that supervised the budget of the Stift. When she came to the capital, she stayed with friends. At present, Mary Simpson. As soon as she had escorted Veronica and Annalise to Quedlinburg and settled the girl into the designated Katharina von Bora College wing of the building, she had returned. There were still details concerning other schools to wrangle about.

Thankfully, the news of the impending arrival of Dowager-Electress Hedwig and gaggle had been welcomed by the imperial palace staff, who were a little bored because the emperor was in the east and Princess Kristina was out of town. They stashed her into a luxurious guest chamber, the ladies-in-waiting into slightly less luxurious chambers, and the gaggle into nooks and crannies here and there, dispatching her soldiers to be provided for at the barracks.

“ . . . going to stay with Frederik, of course.”

The abbess blinked.

“It’s obvious.” Hedwig cocked her head back and looked down her nose. “After all this time as governor there, he still does not have a hostess. He is completely ignoring that aspect of a regent’s duty. Who better than I? Although, of course, what he needs is a wife.”

“Who? Honestly, right now, there aren’t that many young women of ducal rank in the Hochadel who are available and suitable. And if you go below ducal rank, because of the principle of equal birth, Ebenbürtigkeit, his children won’t be eligible to succeed in Holstein, if it comes to that someday. Which it well may, if the Chosen Prince and his wife have no children.” The abbess tapped a finger on the table. “It’s not like we’re as sloppy as the English.”

“It’s disgusting,” Hedwig tapped her foot on the floor, echoing the rhythm. “An English king could marry a beggar maid and, under their laws, the couple’s child would still succeed to the throne.” She sniffed. “That Boleyn woman! And young Edward’s mother was no better born, certainly not royal. As if the lineage of the mother is not as important as that of the father!”

“And Lutheran. Or willing to convert.”

No options in Saxony. All of the late John George’s girls were married; Frederik’s brother Christian, the Chosen Prince, had nabbed the last of them. Saxe-Altenburg had only the one, who was betrothed to Duke Ernst. Saxe-Weimar?

“That family doesn’t even produce daughters. Not as a general rule.” The abbess laughed.

“The Brunswick girls are all too young. Their maternal aunts, the Hesse-Darmstadt girls, are all married. The Baden-Durlach girls, the two from Georg Friedrich’s second marriage, might be possible; they’re very well-educated, at least, but their mother was only a countess of Erbach. Friedrich’s daughters are all too young and of his full sisters, most are married, the next-to-youngest withered into the grave a couple of years ago and the youngest is said to be sickly. I really don’t want to get a nephew of mine involved with Ansbach or Bayreuth now that they have joined the State of Thuringia-Franconia.”

“Nor do you particularly like the Hohenzollerns, even if they hadn’t. As for Württemberg, although the ages are right, Eberhard left that ridiculous will when he died last May and his sisters have committed themselves to lives of scholarly celibacy.” The abbess laughed. “Not that I can fault them for making the choice. It’s too bad that the Lutheran principalities in the southwest didn’t maintain their Damenstifte after the Reformation. Those three would be ideal candidates.”

“Well,” Hedwig said, “the least I can do is try. Sound out some of the Calvinists, perhaps. But none of them are of ducal rank. Even Hesse-Kassel is only a Landgraf; the remainder Grafen, counts. Anhalt might do. When I was a young wife, newly married, I became a good friend of Dorothea Maria.”

The abbess nodded. “Wilhelm Wettin’s mother, Ernst’s.” She made a moue. “Bernhard’s.”

“She spent some time explaining to me how . . . touchy . . . it was that the ducal family of Saxe-Weimar did not classify the counts of Schwarzburg as ebenbürtig in spite of the antiquity of their title. She was from Anhalt, of course. If one of the Anhalt girls would convert from Calvinism? Who is available?”

“Eleonore Dorothea married Wilhelm, of course, and accepted Lutheranism. There’s Kunigunde, then Johanna. The youngest, Eva Katherine, would be best for Frederik in age, if she weren’t so scarred.”

The two of them kept a moment of silence memorializing the ravages of smallpox among even the highest of the nobility.

Ebenbürtigkeit may be loosening as a requirement, though. Amalia, the wife of Fredrik Hendrik, the Stadhouder in the Netherlands, is merely a countess of Solms.”

Hedwig sniffed. “The Netherlands can do as they may. That family may be ‘princes’ of Orange over there, but in Germany, they are merely counts of Nassau. Amalia is sufficiently ebenbürtig for him.”


Brunswick

September 1635


When Hedwig left Magdeburg, she had not only riders to escort her, but also a carriage and several wagons. An appeal to her brother had succeeded.

The tolls on traffic through the Sound were such a blessing in the matter of disposable income for the kings of Denmark. The nobles certainly were stingy in granting taxes from the land.

The procession headed, by way of Wolfenbüttel and Goslar, to Calenberg. Duke Georg of Brunswick had ambitious plans for a new capital of his enlarged province in the city of Hannover, but the war had interfered. His family and civilian staff were still cramped into inadequate quarters in the old castle. Most of them—some of the staff were in Hildesheim, eight miles or so to the east, and the three oldest boys were in school there with their tutors.

She had fostered Anna Eleanora of Hesse-Darmstadt for three years before the girl married Georg. Darmstadt was the Lutheran branch of the Hesse lineage, which was good. But still, like the Kassel branch, only landgraves by rank. No question that the girl had married up. What had been done about Ebenbürtigkeit in this instance? She hadn’t seen the marriage contracts herself.

With the Brunswick custom by which only one brother took a wife of rank and the others made morganatic marriages, there wouldn’t be competing claims when Anna Eleanora’s sons came to inherit, at least. It would have been worth investigating if she had an available sister, but she didn’t: all were married or dead.

Nine children, four of them boys. The oldest girl had died as a toddler, so eight now. Four little girls to play with for a week.

Worth the carriage ride on bad roads, the wheels plowing through sand and mud even though it had not rained recently, to an uncomfortable medieval structure, out in the middle of the country, originally built between two branches of the Leine river, converted from a water fortress to a Schloß over a century ago, but still damp from moats and badly damaged from the seven or eight years that Tilly’s troops had occupied it.

Why Anna Eleanora didn’t put her foot down and move to a decent-sized town like Neustadt . . .  Calenberg might be Georg’s fondly-regarded ancestral home, but . . . There were limits! Calenberg didn’t provide much more in the way of amenities around the Schloß than a mill and a gallows.

* * *

“I think everyone here was a little disappointed that she didn’t visit Quedlinburg,” Bethany Leek wrote to her mother, “even if all the excitement in the newspapers about her ‘daring escape’ is probably blown all out of proportion. But of course, it’s the abbess who is her friend and they met up in Magdeburg, so it wouldn’t have made sense.”



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