Chapter 36
Münster
January 1637
Frederik stayed at Quedlinburg long enough to talk to the abbess about the provisions of the founding documents; more amicably than bishops of Halberstadt had historically spoken to abbesses of Quedlinburg, but that was easy, given that he had never effectively had the Halberstadt office and now wasn’t likely ever to have it. They mulled over some options.
She pointed out that although eligibility for the canoness positions required that one be a member of the Hochadel, unlike many of the great Stifte, Quedlinburg had not been founded be a group of great families back then, seven hundred years previously, so there would not be so many different lines of descendants to consult in this day and age.
“Its prestige, primacy even among the Damenstifte, resulted from its being a direct imperial foundation by Heinrich I of Saxony and his wife, Saint Mathilda. A Reichsstift. In 936, to be precise. They had five children. After she was widowed, she headed it until her death in 968, at which time she was succeeded as abbess by her granddaughter; thereafter by a succession of women of the imperial house.
“The Liudolfing Dynasty has long since been replaced on the imperial throne, of course. Henry II died childless in 1024. That was the end of the male line; his elected successor was a Salian. Descendants in the female line . . . ” The abbess smiled wickedly. “Do you need the genealogies of the royal houses of France and England? Or the Habsburgs? Every noble family of Europe, including, of course, your own? And many that are not noble?”
Frederik swallowed. “The elective nature of the imperial office suggests other possibilities.”
She concurred.
He suggested bringing the issue up with the duke of Brunswick.
She concurred.
Then she asked why he was interesting himself in the matter (in light of your recent vote with the FoJP was the thought running through her head). He referred her to Annalise Richter’s expressed concern about how the matter affected the abbess’s eligibility to serve in the House of Commons.
The abbess leaned one elbow on the table, propping her chin on the heel of her hand. “Mathilda the Foundress was educated at Herford, of course, which is now in Westphalia. In addition to your tangential claim to have an interest by way of the diocese of Halberstadt, that might give you another reasonable interest, even if it would not be legally tenable.”
“My lawyers . . . ” Frederick responded.
“And mine.”
In Brunswick, some weeks later, Loring Schultz looked at the documents that had dropped on his desk, a two-inch thick brief with a three foot stack, more or less, of attachments, and asked the heavens, Why, why, why?
* * *
While the lawyers had been keeping busy, Frederik ordered the building of a proper gubernatorial Residenz.
“It’s amazing,” Andreas Bucholtz said. “He’s not been interested in publicity, even though he reads widely. He’s not been interested in horses, even though he rides well. He’s not shown interest in anything you might call representational. Even to give the architect a general idea of what he wanted for the exterior, he said that the man should go take a look at Thedinghausen in Stift Verden for the building and the Schloß where his aunt is residing in Bremervörde for the gardens. The orders are not to design anything larger than that. Nor more highly ornamented on the exterior. Brick and sandstone it shall be rather than marble. But when it comes to interior decoration . . . ”
Johann Rist nodded. “The townhouse has ceramic tile samples in the vestibule, fabric swatches tacked to the shelves of folders in the office, and shingles with various shades and colors of paint and wood finishes strewn all over the place. Vendt and the maids are going crazy, because he doesn’t want anything touched. He says he’s getting a sense of how it should all fit together.”
Construction started promptly and stayed on schedule to a remarkable extent.
And he had to decide, finally, what to do with Kerstin Brahe and Erik Stenbock. He couldn’t keep them more or less directly under his eyes forever, in case they were agents for her brother. He asked himself whether or not, in the final analysis, he trusted them. If he did . . . he needed a Statthalter in Holstein to keep an eye on all the new officials he’d hired there. Not to mention on the multitudinous relatives of unhappy equites ordinarii. On financiers in Kiel. On what Johann Friedrich was doing with that canal. Someone to do for him there what Aunt Hedwig was doing in the Stifte.
Someone who would get along reasonably well with his father’s administrative staff for royal Holstein in Segeberg. Which Erik had done last summer.
He needed someones, in this case, in the plural. He sent them to Holstein.
Bremen
February 1637
The best thing about Bremen was the bookstores. After duly inspecting what the Lutheran clergy had accomplished in the past two and a half years, with approbation where it was deserved and urges for accelerated effort where approbation was not deserved, sweetened with promises of a subsidy toward the commissioning of an equestrian statue of Gustav Adolf, Frederik had managed to escape, only because he was not officially here yet. Officially, as far as the city officials were concerned, he would arrive tomorrow. He’d come in on foot, with only Lieutenant Meyer, Rist, Jung, and a couple of bodyguards, by way of the Bishop’s Needle.
Then he dropped in on old Knaub.
A weary, beaten-down, Knaub.
“I must show you,” Knaub said, “what is going on here.” They exited the walls and ended up at a damp, cold, barn.
Knaub’s daughter and her band devoting an evening to Linda Ronstadt’s greatest hits did not bear any recognizable resemblance to the up-time music he had heard at Quedlinburg. Perhaps a couple of them. He rather liked “I Never Will Marry” and “The Sweetest Gift” was quite pretty. Otherwise . . . no thank you.
Then, as the waving light that was giving him such a headache focused on one of the back-up musicians . . .
“Tell me it isn’t so.”
Knaub shook his head dolefully. “It is so. A boat came up the river and he hopped off it. He says he doesn’t want to join the navy, even if your father will make him an admiral. ‘It makes me so dreadfully seasick,’ he said. ‘It even brings on one of my fits, sometimes!’ So he was living with Laurits Andersen Hammer and apprenticing in the Copenhagen shipyards last year, when he simply got on a ship. ‘I thought I’d come see the shipping yards in the USE. Starting here. And have some fun!’ I regret to have to tell you so, Your Grace, but he has been having a great deal of fun. Expensive fun.”
Frederik sighed. Hans Ulrik Gyldenløve. Another half-brother. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know the boy well: he’d been tagged along on his own study tour of France in 1629. Poor Knaub had been stuck, along with his other duties, helping the tutors supervise a fourteen-year-old whose natural liveliness tended to bring on his epileptic seizures.
Hans Ulrik Gyldenløve, sitting in the middle of pounding drums and flashing lights.
“How bad?” he asked.
“Sometimes more than once a week. But he will not stop being part of the band.”
What Frederik simply did not need, he thought, was another version of Gustafsson on his hands. If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.
“I have tried,” Knaub was saying, “to have Ebbe keep an eye on him; exert a good influence.”
And that would have worked how? Knaub’s priggish son was the last person to whom Hans Ulrik was likely to pay attention.
But he had to spend the next day conferring with the Bremen’s FoJP government. Emil Jauch had paved the way. In so far as anyone could pave the way for civil discourse with lividly furious men.
There were few tactful ways to convey the notion of: You lost; I won; live with it.
Frederik was prepared to convey the concept in ways that were not tactful if that became necessary.
While he spent the day in the conference room, several members of his entourage set out to inspect the radio installation being set up a few miles out of the city, beyond any imaginable expansion of a Bremen hinterland had it been the case that the city council had won, seceded from the province, and become an imperial city.
They invited Hans Ulrik, the young Knaubs, and several associated members of the band along, on the theory that musicians were likely to be interested in radio.
“This is fascinating,” Hans Ulrik said to the Techs from Grantville.
In the end, the expedition had to split up. Half of Frederik’s men went back to Bremen with the Knaubs and the band; the other half hunkered down for a long night of Hans Ulrik having fun.
Except . . . “We do not drink alcohol,” one of the Techs said firmly. “The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and should be cared for accordingly.”
This, when Hans Ulrik answered that he could have wine, was met by a firm, “There are no alcoholic beverages on the premises.”
But there was so much radio stuff on the premises that Hans Ulrik stayed overnight. The next day. And another night.
“Nobody’s going to miss me much,” he said cheerfully. “I’m just another bastard. Not that I don’t love my father and not that he isn’t generous. My mother was the king’s mistress between when the queen died and the appearance of Kirsten Munk on the scene. My sister died as a young child. Mama is still well and doing well for herself. As I said, the king is generous.”
This was far beyond the experience of a gunsmith’s son from Suhl who had been transformed into a radio technician in Grantville.
“How does a woman became a king’s mistress?” Cunz Hess asked with honest curiosity.
“Oh, she was engaged to a clergyman. They say that my father spotted her at a party, danced with her all night, whisked her away to the palace, and danced her right into his bed.”
“And the clergyman?
“Oh, he didn’t suffer.” Hans Ulrik grinned. “He married her sister, so he’s my uncle-by-marriage, and the king appointed him bishop of Christiania. Oslo, it used to be called, before the king re-named it for himself a few years ago. That’s in Norway. He’s done well in his duties. Firm on enforcing the moral order; strong in supporting the education of youth. Pretty much everything that a bishop should be.”
Hans Ulrik contemplated the nature of the universe for a moment. “Like I said, nobody will ever be able to say of my father that he is not generous-hearted to those who come within his orbit. Overwhelming, sometimes, but generous.” He looked down at the object in his hand. “Now what did you say this wire is for?”
Hektor Lobitz picked up a manual. His Grantville foster parents had hurriedly pulled him out of the University of Jena when this Westphalia opportunity came up. He wasn’t that much of a tech, which surprisingly enough made it easier for him to teach the basics to people who knew even less. Those being everyone else on the construction crew.
Hans Ulrik went a week without a seizure; then notified Knaub that he’d be staying out at the radio installation for a while.
Knaub breathed a sigh of relief.
Frederik had left town again by then. The Jesuit allegations about possible missionaries for heretical sects having been clandestinely inserted into Westphalia in the guise of radio technicians had slipped his mind.
* * *
Ted Warren was in Magdeburg again this week. Being with the USE Military Medical Department, he came and went. His job was recruitment and coordination with the programs at Leahy Medical Center, the tech college in Grantville, the medical school in Jena, and Magdeburg Memorial Hospital.
Incidentally, because he was LDS, he recruited and coordinated down-time converts. He’d been the one who picked most of the Westphalia radio team.
Now he shook his head at Ben Leek. “You’re being short-sighted. Yes, the governor over there has been slow to show any interest in up-time technology . . . ”
“Slow as molasses,” Bill Roberts interrupted. “Slower.”
“Look, Bill!” That was Pete Rush.
“Slow, not outright opposed,” Ted said. “According to Edgar Frost, there are practical reasons why . . . ”
“He’s a do-nothing,” Bill persisted.
“Don’t shoot yourself in the foot. Nolan Wilson was here in Magdeburg at Imperial Tech for a couple of years; now he’s with the forces in Hamburg. I had him get in touch with Hektor Lobitz—you may have met the boy. Willard and Emma Thornton fostered him for the first couple of years after he arrived in Grantville as a refugee; then when Willard and Emma went to Bamberg, Joel and Gigi Carstairs took him in.”
Ben frowned. “Don’t think I ever met him.”
“Hektor got a look at the governor’s office in Münster. He required them to stop there and talked to them before he sent them on up to where the installation’s going in near Bremen; explained what he wanted. He had no idea of how to get it, but apparently he figured that was why he’d hired them. The guy has reams of pocket folders; one of your own rolodex-style things; In and Out and a lot of other boxes. If he can see a reason for something up-time, he’s not going to turn it down just because it is up-time. Aren’t you in the business of selling office equipment? His money is as good as any other.”