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Chapter 12

Magdeburg

July 1636


In Magdeburg, Veronica Dreeson, still called Grandma Richter by half of the people who knew her, threw the daily paper down on the breakfast table of Jeff and Gretchen’s comfortable home. “How ridiculous can newspapers make themselves? The Ottomans are besieging Linz, the king of France has been assassinated and that ridiculous Gaston is on the throne, Cardinal Richelieu has disappeared, not that I’m mourning him, archduchesses—well, an archduchess and an archduke—are either dead or more likely in some Ottoman dungeon in Vienna, there’s chaos in Poland, and what is being covered by the USE newspapers? The possible fate of a cat in Paris!”

She glared. “Richelieu’s Siamese cat, on top of everything else. Just because it came from Grantville!”

Thea, her first husband’s niece, said, in her most conciliating tone of voice, “Now, Auntie.”

“Don’t ‘Auntie’ me!”

Thea’s husband Nicholas, who had obligingly transferred from the West Virginia County administration to the USE bureaucracy when the family in its collective wisdom decided that Grandma needs someone younger to keep an eye on her now that Jeff and Gretchen are never home, cleared his throat. “That’s the kind of story that increases circulation. Personal interest. It’s easier for a lot of people to think about something small, something of the size they can understand, than the big picture. Which, right now, is complicated to the point of being tortuous. They can understand the plight of a lost cat. I don’t think anyone, not even the most competent spymasters on the continent, can understand what Gaston may be up to or predict what he might do next.”

Grandma refused to be distracted. “It was bad enough during the Saxon uprising, when they whipped up that ridiculous letter-writing campaign to demand that General Torstensson should not attack the doors of the Castle Church in Wittenberg where Luther put up the Ninety-Five Theses. Why on earth would the general have chosen to attack a set of church doors in the first place?”

“It was symbolic. The doors, I mean, were symbolic for probably every Lutheran in the USE and beyond.” Moser frowned. “Probably the name, also. Before we moved I was talking to one of the teachers in Grantville. Avery, that was his name. Isaiah Avery. It’s symbolic for the up-timers, too. Before he was born, but not much before because his parents remembered it, a man named Martin Luther King, Jr., had nailed a list of demands about ‘civil rights’ to the doors of the city hall in a city named Chicago, which is the place that Dr. Nichols came from. A lot of up-timers have trouble telling the difference between Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Jr. So they got upset about the doors. ‘Emotionally invested,’ Avery said. He had studied something called psychology at the university. Up-time, that was not the study of the soul, but of the mind.” He pushed his chair back. “I have to get to work.”

Grandma, from the perspective of a woman who had spent several involuntary years as a camp follower in the bedraggled train of a mercenary regiment, picked up the paper again, looked at the headline, and snorted. “A cat.”


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Framed