Chapter 20
Besançon
December 1636
Rohan waved a letter. “It looks as if this household is about to have uninvited guests.”
“Can they just show up and move in?” Carey asked. “Without an invitation?”
“The letter is from my sister Anne in Paris. It appears that she has invited them on my behalf. Her former English tutor, a man named Robert Traill, is now a most formidable Scots Presbyterian clergyman, a grim Geneva minister. At the time, he had already graduated from St. Andrews and was in France to study at our academy in Saumur. Her tutor’s brother is also employed as a tutor and is currently shepherding a young Ulster nobleman around Europe on his grand tour. It’s not his first enterprise, since he’s already been around the continent a couple of times, once with a son of Lord Brook and again with a son of Lord Carlisle. This boy is a couple of years older than he should be for such an experience: the original intent was that he should come in 1633, but he is an only son and his father delayed his departure because of the troubles with the League of Ostend. They’re basically on their way home now, but the tutor wants to get his charge out of France, so they will detour in our direction and finish their trip through the western USE.”
He glanced at the letter again, threw it down, and screamed “Non!”
Carey said nothing.
“The father, the Scotsman, is one of those who defrauded Con MacNiall O’Neill of most of his lands thirty years ago. This is not an accident. The tutor and this . . . ” he looked at the letter again, “ . . . this Hamilton have been lurking in Paris, waiting until the conclave was over and Owen Roe O’Neill and his associates were well out of Besançon. Anne, also, never does anything without some motive, some reason. I need to know more about these people.”
He picked up his newest toy. He had read about “ringing for” a servant or secretary, but one of the up-time mechanical artists had told him that the cost of installing such a system in what was, after all, a rented house would be more expensive than it was worth. As he was frowning, his daughter’s young dressmaker had asked, “Why don’t you get a cow bell?” So he had. No one could hear it from more than a room away. Then Ron Stone had sent, from Grantville, a genuine long-handled nineteenth century brass school bell. The din that arose when he shook it brought a footman into the room at a rapid trot.
Rohan tossed the letter to him, though he was still talking to Carey. “My sister says they are coming so that this young Hamilton can obtain an understanding of what Grand Duke Bernhard is organizing here in Burgundy and a comprehension of the issues in regard to Lorraine. I don’t believe it for a minute.” He turned to the servant. “Take this to Priolo at the Green Lion and tell him to find out what is going on, as fast as you can. What is on their minds? What is on my sister Anne’s mind?”
The man backed out, holding the letter as if it might catch on fire at any moment.
* * *
“So,” Rohan said, “these juvenalia, Madame Calagna. What do you think of them?”
Carey raised her eyebrows. “No Latin here, Your Grace. No Latin at all. Well, maybe a few words, but they all have to do with probate law.”
“Ah. Well, my Latin is also minimal. I have Priolo check my manuscripts over before I send them to be published—sometimes he even takes the ideas I talk about and puts them into writing for me. One thing that Bernhard and I have in common is that we are woefully undereducated by the standards set by the rest of our families. I never attended a collège any more than he completed a university degree. Juvenalia—books designed for young children learning to read. I have concluded that they can be useful for understanding the up-time cultural milieu and the up-timers’ mentalité. Or, sometimes, juvenalia may be an author’s early works, written when he himself was a youth.”
“English words do that too,” she said. “Jump around and change their meanings on a person.”
* * *
Grand Duke Bernhard announced a public dedication ceremony for the new central heating and intercom systems in the garrison’s barracks and mess hall. Carey thought that it could have been postponed until . . . um . . . somewhat better weather. Everyone invited, at least everyone who accepted, which for a grand ducal invitation was almost everyone invited, was arriving by climbing up to the Citadelle on foot. Grand Duke Bernhard refused to allow his horses to be taken out unnecessarily in this minor storm, which certainly said something about how the ghastly stuff falling from the sky today related to the rest of the winter yet to come. So as the grand duke was walking, they were all walking. Once they got to the top, it was like being on a windswept mesa. In the Arctic Circle. The only thing missing was a hungry polar bear.
The speeches didn’t keep them long. Within two hours, everything, including the remarkably terse and concise remarks by a few town officials (the grand duke tried to be nice to the city fathers, given that he had stolen their status as an imperial city right out from under them) and the refreshments, was over. The grand duke had said that it had better be over on time, because he didn’t want anyone falling and putting himself out of commission by breaking a limb on the way back down to the town and the Quartier Battant. Carey drew a relieved breath when she spotted the outline of the Church of St. John the Baptist ahead. It was getting dark fast, but once they reached the church, the worst of the downward slope would be behind them and the path would turn into a street—a narrow street, but at least paved.
“Watch yourselves,” the footman in front called as they walked around the little bend where the path skirted the steps into the church. “As soon as you get to the paving, this sleet has frozen hard and you’ll be trying to walk on ice.” Then he called again, “Wait a minute, everybody. Stop now.” Past the church, toward the archbishop’s residence, there was a small cart overturned, blocking the center of the street, with two donkeys standing on the right side, tethered to one of the cart wheels, and no driver in sight.
They flailed and slipped, trying to stop. Shae fell, her arms extended. A man came running out of the archbishop’s winter-dead gardens, slipped when his feet hit the pavers, and tripped over her arms. The footman fell on top of the man who had fallen on Shae. A second man, holding something that glinted in the bit of light coming from the partially open doors of St. John’s, followed the first. Dominique, still standing on the rougher path above the paving stones, yelled, “Ride ’em, cowboy!” swung her tote bag by its long handle, and let it fly at the second man. He dodged back a little, slipped, and fell.
The footman at the rear of the party managed to stay on his feet long enough to come forward six feet and deliberately sit on the second attacker.
Carey shook her head. “What’s going on?”
Marguerite blinked. “I don’t have the slightest idea.”
The watch apprehended the two men. The only injury was to Shae’s arm, badly broken in three places, but the attackers hadn’t done that. It happened when she fell.
“But why?” Marguerite asked the next morning. It was closer to noon, actually.
“Grand Duke Bernhard’s people are questioning them,” Rohan answered. “It appears that they are supporters of Ducos, the man who led the assassination attempt on Urban VIII—the one in Rome that the Stone boys and their associates averted. They do not appear to have had any contact with Ducos himself for nearly eighteen months so can’t provide us with any good intelligence as to where he may be. So far, it is not clear whether the attack was aimed at any specific one among you, or at all of you, or had any determinable purpose at all. They certainly did not take into account that there isn’t a single one of you who has so much as seen a pope.”
“I suppose it’s some comfort that the supervillain doesn’t have his eye on us,” Dominique said. “That it was just a couple of loose screws.”
After they explained loose screws to the duke, he said that they were dangerous, whether in machines or in human organizations. All of them were to take extra care. He hired two more footmen.