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Chapter 16

Paris

September 1636


“Can you believe the news?” Mademoiselle Anne tossed the latest report from one of their observers onto the table. “What am I supposed to say when I start my cycle of attendance upon the queen? That’s Monday, which doesn’t give us much time to develop a reasonable narrative.”

Soubise rescued the report from the most immediate danger of sinking into the sauce for the fish fillets. “Of course I can believe the news. I can believe almost anything I hear about that infuriating little bitch.” He snorted. “Anything derogatory. I’m not surprised that she absconded. She made it plain enough all along that she had no intention of rejoining Henri.”

“It’s not as if she can come back to Paris, though.”

“I wouldn’t put it past her.” Soubise shook his head hard enough that his curls wobbled. “To come back with some touching fable about how she was forced to leave Paris against her will but at the first opportunity bravely, all alone, dared the dangers of the roads and joined an escort party she had arranged to be available for her in order to return, because perish the thought that the House of Rohan would ever be disloyal to the monarch.”

“She’d be capable of that, I suppose.” Mademoiselle Anne wrinkled her nose in disgust. “I expect that she was forced to leave Paris. I just don’t know by whom. Those men of Bernhard’s that Henri sent, I suppose, but I can’t imagine how they managed it with all the guards that Gaston had in place.” She sighed. “Where do you suppose she linked up with Candale again?”

“I’m sure they arranged some rendezvous well in advance, similar to the one she might have arranged with an escort party. Well, did arrange with an escort party, according to this.” He picked up the report and shook it at his sister. “He’d been in Paris for weeks.”

“Why wasn’t he with his regiment?”

“Because she has involved him in one of her schemes. Again.” Soubise gnawed on one end of his flourishing moustache. “At least they’re not at court yet.”

“But where are they?”

“No idea. We’ll find out.” He stood up. “I’m going to send for Sandrart.”

“Who?”

“The artist I worked with in Frankfurt am Main a couple of years ago. If he isn’t already tied up with preexisting commissions. They’re bound to be sneaking around from one prominent Huguenot family to another. Artists hear things. Sandrart can claim he’s here for an educational tour or something. Maybe studying the work of the Le Nain brothers. The style that they have developed is different enough from anything the German artists have been doing to make a good reason. He can visit their studio here in Paris and then set out on a tour to look at paintings that they’ve already sold, ones that are scattered around the countryside.

“Before I set out on this last trip to England, Henri told me not to bring him on my staff again. I’ll pay him out of my own pocket, since I have the revenues from the estates that Maman left me coming in again now that Gaston revoked the exile. If our brother complains, I’ll present it as being more a one-time commission than a permanent hire.”

Sandrart replied by letter that the Le Nain brothers themselves were in Magdeburg for a major competition, or would be soon if he could believe the latest Calendar of the Arts. It seemed as if every artist on the continent was or soon would be in Magdeburg. However, as most of the works they had already completed were still in France, he would be more than happy to tour around and view them.


Besançon

September 1636


Marguerite and Susanna watched Ruvigny and Bismarck ride out, headed for the Rhine, a raft, and a task.

“I wish they weren’t leaving,” Marguerite pouted.

“You can’t complain. Marc and Gerry left last week. It’s going to be a dull winter.”

“At least Papa didn’t make the grand duke fire them because Maman ran away. He even asked to borrow Henri again. Why didn’t Bernhard let him?”

“For the first, your father probably realized that your mother was beyond their control. As for the other, the grand duke needed them to do something else.”

“How long does it take to go to the Low Countries and come back?”

“Not too long in this season, but there’s no way to predict how long they will be in the Netherlands. If that is where they are going.”


Laubach, Solms-Laubach

September 1636


Käthe found the newspapers unsettling. Almost everything in them contributed to her general restlessness. She put the latest edition down, dipped her fingers in a small bowl of water, and dried them on the linen towel. Only then did she pick up her embroidery.

An airship had lifted off in Copenhagen last week. She had not been there to see it. Amalie Elisabeth hadn’t been there to see it, either, as far as she knew. But Amalie Elisabeth could have been there, if she had wanted to be there.

With the emperor’s connivance, Gretchen Richter, a printer’s daughter and former camp follower, had risen to astonishing heights in Saxony and Silesia. Gustavus’ new secretary of state was a Jewess. The Anhalt-Dessau girls were making names for themselves; Eva was an author. Her own cousin Litsa had become a journalist.

Whereas she was . . . She put her embroidery aside and stood up. She didn’t enjoy embroidery, but it kept her hands occupied with something useful, rather than picking at the upholstery. Or at her own skin. The devil found work for idle hands.

A sudden, sharp, very welcome, cramp pierced her abdomen. She was, with deepest thanks to divine providence, at least not pregnant again. Which, for the past couple of weeks, she had been afraid that she was. Albert Otto was enthusiastic about marital relations.


Geneva

Early October 1636


“A cat!” Potentiana Turettini, by marriage Mme. Cavriani, put the newspaper down. “Marc, why on earth are they making so much fuss about a cat?”

She was a woman inclined to accept life’s vicissitudes phlegmatically. In her twenty-three years of marriage, her husband Leopold—a fine man, an excellent provider with a sly sense of humor, not a husband she could complain about—had actually been present in their mutual household for . . . she stopped and calculated . . . something less than six. There had been that stretch of time early in the war, between when he left in 1618 and did not reappear until a couple of months after the end of General Tilly’s 1622 Rhineland campaign. She often had not even been certain where he was. That absence had resulted in a four-year age gap between her daughters Crescencia and Fabiana.

The children showed signs of taking after Leopold. Idelette had taken off at the age of eighteen to the astonishing Grantville, where at Leopold’s wish, she was learning to be a businesswoman rather than a businessman’s wife. Marc showed every indication of becoming as peripatetic as his father, but at the moment, for the first time in several years, he was here at her breakfast table.

With the third genuine up-timer she had ever met, a red-haired boy named Gerry Stone, whom she would never have expected to be the son of one of the wealthiest men in Europe. He reverted back and forth, almost at random, from acting like a ramshackle boy reaching the end of his apprenticeship years to acting like a solemn young theology student.

The first and second up-timers of her acquaintance were also theology students, possibly not typical of the Grantvillers. The first she met, some two years ago, Charles Vandine, had been a sturdy man in his fifties who had come to Geneva to seek ordination as a Presbyterian minister in the heartland of Calvinism. The dominies had granted it almost immediately after the assassination of Mayor Dreeson and Enoch Wiley, already a year and a half ago now, and he had returned to take up his duties at the church there. The other, who had come with Vandine, was also not a boy, but rather an earnest man in his thirties who now, aside from his height, could scarcely be told from any Scots student from the realm of John Knox, so strictly did he imitate his mentors.

But Marc was here this morning. It was inevitable that he would soon go again, but while he was here, she would be glad and rejoice in it.

He was here, not just with Stone, but also with a six-year-old boy whom he expected her to keep. “But Maman,” Marc had said blithely, “you only had me, amid all these girls. I would have loved to have a little brother, but it turned out to be one more sister, every single time. It will be such fun for you.”

She eyed Tancrède. She had listened the previous evening to Marc’s entire convoluted tale of the saga of Tancrède LeBon, comprising Huguenot dukes, adulterous wives, scandalous lovers, outraged half-sisters, and . . . 

“About that cat . . . ” Marc started to say.

“Stop that,” Potentiana’s youngest daughter and namesake screeched. Tia, now eight, grabbed for a piece of ham that the boy had snatched off her plate.

Tancrède waved it triumphantly over his head, gloating, “It’s mine. I got it fair and square. Which cat? I like cats, at least most of them, but some of them bite if you pull their tails. Do you have a cat? I see three dogs; the white one with black spots is cute. Are they friendly?”

“There’s plenty more ham on the plate. That piece was mine.” Tia, with the advantage of two years and three inches, jumped out of her chair, took a two-handed grasp on Tancrède’s wrist, and shook it. The greasy slice flew out of his fingers and landed on the floor, where the spotted dog promptly provided a final settlement for the argument.

“Hey, no fair. Why did you do that? Is there any more bread? I like white bread better than rye bread. Have you ever been to a flour mill? The flour coming down into the sacks looks sort of like a waterfall. My nanny took me to see a waterfall once, but it wasn’t big. I fell in and she scolded me. I get scolded a lot.”

“My ham,” Tia wailed.

“As for the cat . . . ” Marc tried once more to get a word in.

“Maman,” seventeen-year-old Crescencia protested. “Make them stop. You never let us act like that at the table.”

Marc and Gerry looked at one another, recalled that they had an appointment, and made their excuses.

* * *

“Ideally,” Gordon Partow said, “I’d like to stay in Geneva for a couple more years, get deeper into the theology, plus I should continue to keep an eye on the Vandines’ two foster sons—they wanted to stay in the Latin school and they both have another year and a half. But I’ve also been thinking that I need to get back home. I’m an only child and farming’s a hard life. Dad’s not sixty yet, but Mom keeps adding postscripts to their letters to say that his back is starting to go out on him and his knees are getting bad. I’ve still got plenty of cousins in Grantville, though, so maybe, for a while longer . . . 

“Vandine was ahead of me—not with the languages, of course. We both had to start from scratch on those. He came up to Jena to begin on them in 1632. I’d already started teaching English lessons there, freelance, the year before. I’d done temp work through an agency up-time, so freelancing right off the bat didn’t frighten me the way it did some people. We both picked up the ones we really need, the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, enough to barely get by here. Nobody expects us to hold a conversation in Greek or Hebrew; we only have to be able to make out the grammar and vocabulary in the Bible. Vandine was a deacon, though, before the Ring of Fire hit, and had done a lot more reading in churchy stuff.

“It was really hard for me to get back into the swing of studying. I just had a high school diploma, and it was close to twenty years old when the Ring of Fire hit. Vandine must have graduated not much later than 1970, but he’d kept taking classes every now and then—courses he took one at a time at the community college when he needed to learn something specific, but they were all in business management.” Gordon stretched. “Since he’s been back home, he’s written that the business management stuff comes in as handy for running a church as it did for running an auto parts store in Fairmont.”

He stood up and walked over to a small brazier filled with coals. There was a pot of water boiling on it and a contraption that could have come out of the laboratory of a mad alchemist on a small stand next to it. “Coffee? I’ve rigged up my own Drip-o-Lator(TM), as you can see. I had Grandpa Miller send me a description of how theirs works. It’s one of the originals, from before World War II.”

“Look,” Gerry said. “I know your mom and dad. I see them every now and then when I’m in Grantville. Your mom misses you, but she’s too proud and stubborn to break out in a chorus of”—his voice rose—“Come home, come home, ye who are weary, come ho-o-o-ome. Your dad’s still on foot and able to work. You can always check in with Doc Adams by mail; see what he thinks about your dad’s health, if you’re worried. But you should be fine, and I think you ought to stay and finish. That way, when you go back, you’ll be on an equal footing with the other Calvinist ministers. Mr. Vandine, well, Rev. Vandine now, has as much education as Rev. Wiley did, so the up-timers think he’s fine as he is. The down-timers figure that he’s an emergency appointment, so they cut him some slack, but it will be a lot better in the long run if you get your degree before you’re ordained.”

Marc, who was not acquainted with any of the people under discussion, kept his mouth shut except for saying, “Coffee, yeah, coffee. Thanks.”

Gordon pulled three mugs off a small shelf nailed to the wall of his room, looked inside to judge how clean they might be, and set them down on the stand. “Sometimes, it’s a relief to be able to talk to someone.” The coffee-contraption sputtered, spraying drops of brown liquid on the newspaper that was already lying there.

“By the way,” Gordon said, picking it up and waving it at them, “What’s going on with this ridiculous cat thing? Has everybody back home gone nuts?”


Magdeburg

Late October 1636


“It was gracious of you to receive me so promptly, my lady.” Marc bowed to the landgravine-regent of Hesse-Kassel and handed over a packet of correspondence that she passed on to her secretary. “I have been in France and Burgundy with Gerry Stone, whom I left in Jena for the winter semester. The packet includes a note for you from him.”

“It is my pleasure,” Amalie Elisabeth replied. “I have the greatest respect for your father. We have cooperated on several projects over the years. Also for the elder Mr. Stone.” A round of protocol-induced pleasantries ensued until she thought of the time and got down to the point. “Do convey my respects to M. Cavriani when you next see him. Now, how may I assist you?”

Marc resisted the temptation to twist the curl that was always falling down right in the middle of his forehead. He had been rigidly schooled by a tutor who believed it was bad manners for a gentleman to twitch, wiggle, purse his lips, rub his nose, puff out his cheeks, put his hands behind his back, or, well, pretty much anything, during a conversation with his elders and betters.

He explained about his almost-a-fiancée Susanna Allegretti and the circumstances which persuaded her to believe so firmly that she needed to see if she, as a Catholic, could live contentedly among Calvinists before she would marry him. “So I thought . . . Here is the letter from my father. If perhaps, my lady, you could find her a position in your household for the next year or so, it would be the best possible choice. You will soon be out of deep mourning for the late landgrave; your attendants will be needing more in the way of court clothing, you have so many contacts among the highest and most influential ladies in the city.”

The landgravine agreed that when the time came, she would make the appointment.

Marc took a deep breath. “I haven’t mentioned the next idea to my father.”

“Yeeeess?” Amalie Elisabeth’s older sons might be aged six and seven, but she had encountered a lot of young men over the years of her life.

“If you please . . . It’s about the cat.”

“Cat?”

“Richelieu’s cat; the Siamese kitten that Rebecca Abrabanel took him from Grantville; the one all the newspapers have been talking about for a couple of months.”

The landgravine raised her eyebrows.

“Oh, the kitten!” Her ten-year-old daughter Charlotte jumped up from the floor, followed by six-year-old Philip. “Everybody knows about the kitten.”

Amalie waved her hand. “Go to your lessons, now. The tutor is already in the schoolroom. Your sister and brother went the first time I told them.” She turned back to Marc. “It’s not that I don’t know about the cat. It’s inescapable. However, I do not understand how the cat is relevant to USE politics.”

“Well, it’s this way. Papa says that the cat is probably safe, but nobody in the USE seems to be convinced of that. Additionally, it’s possible, given the current situation in France, that the cat is not safe.”

The landgravine tilted her head to one side.

“I was thinking . . . Maybe if someone inconspicuous went into France to find the cat and rescue it, and it leaked that the person who funded the rescue expedition was the landgravine-regent of Hesse-Kassel . . . we can add in now, because her children are so tender-hearted and worried about it . . . it might well garner a lot of favorable publicity for you. Which would be favorable publicity for the Calvinist minority in the USE, incidentally. ‘See, the landgravine went to the rescue of a Catholic cat. Surely in the interest of tolerance, others also can see beyond narrow sectarian limits.’ That sort of thing. Or it might give you some leverage in the House of Lords, if some issue important to you came up.”

He swallowed. “Of course, it would have to be kept under wraps until I actually find the cat. If I can find the cat.”


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