Chapter 23
Besançon
December 1636
“Thank you, Bernhard.” Rohan watched the grand duke pace around the room, his hands clasped behind his back. “I know that it wasn’t convenient for you to send replacements to Lorraine or for the men I’ll need to come back here in this weather, for that matter. I only wish that Ruvigny and Bismarck were available to me again.”
Bernhard leaned against a window frame. “I have other tasks for those two once they report in. If the weather holds, their party will be here in a few days. You needn’t bother to thank me for the loan of Henry Gage and Lion Gardiner. It was simply fortuitous that I managed to catch them before someone decided to send them back to observe what is happening in Austria. I think your concerns about Ducos’ people are perfectly justified. He seems to have an astonishing number of followers.”
“There are a lot of Huguenots in France.” Rohan pursed his lips. “Several million of them.” He twisted his mouth wryly. “We can’t expect them all to be rational, particularly since many have lost family members, homes, employment, property, and the occasional body part to the policies of the crown since the death of Henri IV. If I had to guess, Ducos is drawing his few hundred from a pool of possibly a quarter of a million physically capable adult men. Along with an occasional woman.”
“So if they see a chance for what appears to be retaliation, they will take it.”
“That’s pretty much the case. Especially when they have found a leader who, no matter how undesirable we find his tactics to be, appears to have a great ability to attract and influence others. Charisma, Madame Calagna calls it.”
“She knows Greek?” Bernhard turned around. “Nobody told me that.”
“No, she just knows the word. Up-time English apparently had an eclectic approach to vocabulary.”
Bernhard’s secretary stuck his head through the door.
Rohan picked up his stack of red-tape-tied bundles for another day of paper-pushing.
* * *
At the Hôtel de Buyer, Marguerite dashed down the staircase into the hallway screaming, “Henri, nobody told me you were arriving today,” and threw herself into Ruvigny’s arms.
“You will note,” August von Bismarck said to Ruvigny’s astonished young wife, “that he braced himself firmly in anticipation of this event, one leg extended and slightly bent and the other held to the rear to provide support and balance. A perfect fencing stance. Experience has demonstrated that since the young duchess reached her full growth, although she is still quite small, she has enough weight to overbalance a man standing with his feet together, especially when she moves rapidly and then leaps.”
The expression on the face of Ruvigny’s Danish Sophia indicated that she was far from sure what to make of this. Whatever it might be, it was nothing good. She didn’t like it.
Hamilton, following Marguerite down the stairs, protested volubly that he didn’t like it.
Shae spotted the pout on his face and gave Dominique a perfectly demonic grin. This could be fun.
* * *
“You young people entertain yourselves in the dining room, since it has a fire going,” Rohan said that evening. “Play cards or something. Don’t destroy the furniture. I have reached a stage in my study of Les Futuriens that requires more consultation with Madame Calagna. Traill, stay and observe, but do not interfere unless there is danger to the furniture.”
Traill sputtered at being treated as an upper servant, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He might now be an ordained Presbyterian minister, but in reality, as a tutor, he was an upper servant. His obligation was to Lord Clanboye rather than to Rohan, but as he was a guest . . .
Not even Hamilton and Traill could permanently distract the duke from his determination to understand the up-time mind. “Is this Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now? really part of the juvenalia? The language is simple, but . . . ”
Carey frowned. “There was something political about it; I honestly can’t remember.” She made a note on her list for the Grantville researcher.
“Now we reach The Cat in the Hat. I will analyze it together with the sequel, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. There is far more substance here.”
“If you say so,” Carey answered.