Chapter 14
August 1636
Still on the blasted road in Eastern France
“Since this whole project is about who Marguerite’s going to marry or not marry,” Gerry said the next evening, “we ought to take stock. What’s the status of the rest of us? Maybe we could do one of those mass marriages someday, all lined up one after the other, like the Moonies.”
“Moonies?”
Gerry had more explaining to do. “There was this preacher from Korea. I saw pictures in the papers. He’d arrange marriages between men and women who followed his cult and then marry them off to each other, hundreds at a time, all the guys in suits and the women in fluffy white dresses.”
“Where was Korea; in America?”
“I thought up-timers were supposed to marry for love!”
“Mass polygamy?”
Gerry rapped on the table for attention. “No, guys. Korea’s somewhere south of China. Was then; still is, I suppose. No polygamy; one husband to one wife, but he married hundreds of couples in the same ceremony. And yeah, generally speaking, at least in the US of A, people were expected to marry for love, but we weren’t all clones of each other.”
“What’s a clone?”
“I’m pretty sure that German doesn’t have a word for it. Nor French. Nor the folks over the channel in England in this day and age, for that matter. It’s like this . . . ”
By the time he finished with that, it was time for the adults go up to bed.
The next night after supper, he persisted. “Start with Ruvigny. Henri, what are your preferences in a bride? Prerequisites?”
“A dowry. I think 150,000 livres would be nice, but what do I have to offer in exchange?”
“There is sure to be some banker somewhere,” the duchess said. “Some noblesse de cloche, who would regard friendly ties to the Maison de Béthune as a quite sufficient compensation for a penniless son-in-law.”
“Noblesse de cloche?” Gerry wrinkled his forehead. “Bell nobility? I’ve never heard of that. In Rudolstadt, at the Latin school, they instructed us about the difference between noblesse d’épée and noblesse de robe.”
“It’s not a legal term like the others,” Marguerite said. “It’s what you call slang. Wealthy townsmen, rich urbanites, social-climbing bourgeois. Men who live within hearing range of the bells in the steeples of city churches.”
“Do your best,” Ruvigny assured the duchess. “Given the right girl with the right dowry, I’m prepared to go into matrimony with good intentions and live in amicable fidelity for the next forty-plus years.”
“Er! Okay. What about you, August?”
“God-fearing,” Bismarck answered. “Ah, nice and plump, if I can take my choice. Ideally with an equally nice dowry.”
“Define nice in comparison to Henri’s nice.”
“Where I come from, it’s a trousseau and usually about four thousand to five thousand Thaler, to be paid in installments, but you have to calculate in the reality that dowries and dowers are hardly ever paid in full. You can use the promissory notes as security for loans, though, even if they haven’t been paid out. When collection time comes, the lender has to deal with your father-in-law, because a betrothal contract constitutes a legal obligation. Four to five thousand is plenty if you’re farming in the Altmark. It wouldn’t go far to support the lifestyle of a colonel, if I ever get that rank. But it looks like I’ll still be a captain when I die or retire, whichever comes first, so the question is moot. I can’t afford a wife.”
“Candale?”
“Not until Épernon dies. I can’t afford to remarry on my own funds and he’s too tight to fund another try after the fiasco with the duchess of Halewijn. That cost him a bundle and we didn’t get anything out of it in the end, neither a higher title nor heirs.” He turned to Raudegen. “Anything to contribute?”
“I had a wife, once. She died a long time ago, in Bayreuth, before I joined the army. The baby was stillborn. My mother arranged it, but everything was all right. Our families were friends and we were friends. There wasn’t any money involved because all of us were refugees from Lower Austria. We were peasants before we left. There wasn’t any money around. Ferdinand II confiscated everything when he drove the Protestants out.” He shrugged. “I’m not likely to marry again.”
Not even Gerry had the nerve to ask anything on the order of what was her name?
Raudegen’s expression did not invite further questions. He stood up and disappeared in the direction of the stairs.
After a short period of silence, Marc opened his mouth. “I don’t suppose you have to speculate much about my marriage.” He winked at Susanna. “I give it five years, more or less. But what about you, Gerry? You started it all.”
Gerry winked back at him, grinning at Bismarck. “God-fearing is good, but since I’ll probably marry a pastor’s daughter, it’s not likely to be a problem.”
“Why a pastor’s daughter?”
“Because most of the girls I’ll meet will be the daughters of pastors. It’s propinquity. It’s hard to marry someone you haven’t met.” He looked at Marguerite and cleared his throat. “Unless you’re a member of a royal family or such. Or a Moonie. Plump isn’t bad, but I think ‘willing to put up with me’ would top anything else. I don’t have to worry about it yet, because it will be at least fifteen years before I can go looking for a wife—longer, if I keep getting yanked out of school to do this, that, and the other for Dad and Ron.”
“Let’s set up a wager,” Ruvigny said. “Each of us makes up a list of the order in which we think we’ll wed and throws some money in the pot. We’ll invest it. Marc can take care of that, or get Cavriani to do it. Then when the last of us ties the knot, or dies unmarried, we’ll open the envelope that we deposited with the money, compare the lists, and the winner who was closest to right will collect the pot.”
“Great idea,” Bismarck said. “As long as it’s cash that we get from the investment. A part of the widow’s dower assigned to my mother, all specified in the marriage contract, consisted of annual allotments of Wispel of rye. Nineteen Wispel of rye every year. By the time the last of us marries, that would be a lot of rye piled up.”
“What’s a Wispel?”
“Um.” Bismarck ran his hand through his hair. “About 24 American bushels, I think.”
“What on earth did she do with it?”
“She had it ground into flour and we ate it. Brandenburg is really strong on rye bread. Rye bread, cabbage soup, and pork sausage. That’s a meal that breeds up real men.”
Every French person in the room shuddered.
The next morning, at breakfast, Marguerite asked. “Henri, do you ever think about Jericho?”
“What?” The sudden question, popping up out of nowhere, disconcerted Ruvigny a bit.
“Jericho. It was one the stories that Grand-mère Rohan used to read me from the Bible. When the Chosen People marched around the walls for seven days and they fell down. Then Joshua’s men killed everyone in the city except the harlot who helped them and her family. You know it, don’t you?”
“I know it.”
“Have you ever stopped to think about La Rochelle? And Magdeburg? The sieges and the sacks? It was the Catholics who were outside the walls. It was the Huguenots and the Lutherans who got massacred. Could God be trying to give us a hint about something? That we’re on the wrong side, maybe? Is that why God let Louis’ armies defeat Papa and Uncle Soubise and send them into exile?”
“Trust me, little seed pearl. If God talked to Tilly or Richelieu, nobody heard him.” This is way above my pay grade. “Ah, who else have you talked to about this concern?”
“Nobody. Nobody ever listens to me. Hardly anybody else ever listens to me at all, and I couldn’t ask Susanna because she’s Catholic. And she doesn’t know any more about her religion than I do about mine. As far as I can tell from things she’s said, not discussing theology but talking about how she lives, for her it’s mostly habits and actions; smells, sounds and colors. Habits of going to mass on certain days, actions like the incense censers going down the aisle and smells like the incense burning in it; sounds like the bells they ring with the incense; colors in the stained-glass windows and the idolatrous statues of the saints. And, also for her, because she loves fabrics so, the brocades and tapestries, the embroideries and laces, on the paraments and vestments. She’s used to it, and when she goes to church it’s like she is pulling a warmed blanket around her on a cold day and cuddling in. Calvinist churches aren’t cuddly.”
“They aren’t supposed to be cuddly, little daisy. They are designed to be spare, to focus our minds on God’s Word as expounded from the pulpit.”
“I’m not sure that Susanna even connects what Richelieu and Tilly did with what she feels when she goes to mass.”
More of the group came into the breakfast room, turning the conversation into generalities.
“We have to leave tonight,” the duchess said to Candale while the rest of the travelers stretched their legs at mid-morning. “I’ve deferred to your preferences this far, but we’re getting too close to Burgundy. Once we pass the border, it will be far harder for us to slip away, and getting back out through the grand duke’s border posts without being stopped would be chancy. In any case, the escort I arranged before we left Paris will be waiting for us on this side.”
“Assuming that they have arrived in a timely fashion, which isn’t a safe assumption given the road conditions I’ve observed.”
“Be reasonable, mon ami. They are men on horseback; they won’t have had to concern themselves with the various other delays this party experienced. They’ve probably been waiting for several days, spending my money on wine.”
“Are you still sure of this?”
“I am sure of this. There will be nothing for me to accomplish in Besançon. I have no connections in the grand duke’s picayune little court, the archduchess is Catholic and Italian to boot, and Rohan will keep me sidelined from his concerns. I belong in France, where I intend to see that Soubise does not garner any glory that may still be available for our cause and that we collect every ounce of advantage that we can from the new king’s political uncertainties. Even though we have still heard no news, there are bound to be political uncertainties. Even without fresh news, I can be certain that there are political uncertainties because the world hasn’t come to an end yet.” She took a deep breath. “We evaluate, and we throw Rohan’s influence behind the party that appears most likely to triumph. I belong in France, and so do my children.”
“On the basis of candid observation thus far,” Candale said, “it is not easy to travel with children. It will particularly not be easy to take the boy sans Susanna. Having him will slow us down immensely—delay us as much going as he has delayed us coming. He can’t ride—the plan was that all of us would ride once we rendezvoused. If you bring him, your escort will have to find a carriage again. Marguerite will not come voluntarily: I’m more than sure of that. In any case, if you take her, willing or not, Rohan will never stop his pursuit. Do you want Raudegen, Ruvigny, and Bismarck on our tails all the way?”
“Tancrède, then. Please Candale? Just let me bring Tancrède.”
They all woke up no more than an hour after the last of them had gone to bed, to the banshee wail of a six-year-old blowing on a harmonica as loudly as he could. Susanna jumped out of bed and dashed toward the cot in the corner of the chamber where he was sleeping. Or, rather, had been sleeping. Bleary-eyed, she tried to make out shapes in the darkness. The harmonica howled again. She scurried faster, grasped an arm that was much too long to belong to a child, and bit the attached hand. Hard. A soprano scream joined the shrillness of the harmonica as the hand’s owner tried to shake her off.
Tancrède untangled his legs from the sheet and started kicking.
Susanna got an arm around his waist. “Don’t kick me. Kick him. Kick her. Kick the other person.”
Marguerite woke up in the adjoining room she was sharing with her mother and, still half-asleep, managed to light a lantern. The men poured out of the rooms across the hall, at first trying to break through the inside bar to the room where Susanna was, until Marguerite yelled that the door to her room was unbarred and open, so they could enter through that. Three of them headed that way, but by the time they arrived, the intruder was gone through the window and Susanna remained in possession of the prize.
A few minutes later, the duchess wandered in, clutching together a long, loose cloak thrown over her nightclothes. “What’s all the excitement? I had to go to the necessary.”
“Are you sure,” Marguerite hissed, “that you didn’t find it ‘necessary’ to pay a visit to M. de Candale’s room?”
Susanna unbarred the second door. Candale, who had been standing outside it, came in. “No, she did not. Nor do I think she appreciates your impertinence.”
“What happened, anyway?” Marc asked.
“I wasn’t asleep,” Tancrède said. “But I’m not supposed to get up and wander around at night, so I didn’t. Not this time. Sometimes I do, when I’m at home with the LeBons and know my way around, but I don’t know my way around any of these new places. I was lying there, playing with my harmonica. I sleep with it under my pillow. Somebody opened up the window. I thought it might be an interesting monster, so I waited. But it was a person and the person tried to pick me up, so I blew and blew and blew and blew and . . . ”
“All right,” Bismarck said. “We believe you. You blew.”
“I tried to make out some trail,” Raudegen said, “but whoever it was headed back toward the outbuildings. It’s dark, and there’s too much of a mess of footprints in the loose dust behind the inn. The best thing to do is for the rest of you to go back to bed. Ruvigny, you stand guard on the ladies’ doors inside. I’ll take the outside.”
“Let me take the outside watch,” Candale said, “since I have two hands available. If Susanna’s teeth did their work the way she describes, you and he would be evenly matched if he dares to come back, but I will have the advantage.”
In the morning he was gone, and so was the duchess.
“I could have told you if you asked me,” Tancrède said. “But you didn’t. I knew it was the lady who visited me sometimes who tried to take me out of my bed. She smelled like she always does.”
Bismarck predicted the worst possible vocational outcome for all of them if they turned up in Besançon without the duchess. Raudegen, although on this particular venture he was not responsible to Rohan for getting the duchesses to the duke but rather, along with Marc, for getting Susanna to someplace she would be safe, was not at all inclined to let them go. Bismarck reiterated that Rohan would not like it. In his opinion, it could be a career-ruining event for Ruvigny—well, for him, too—to turn up without the older duchess.
“Not,” Marguerite said, “if you bring me. Maybe only career-discouraging or at worst career-transferring. Henri can always go to Grand-père Sully and find another patron. And you work for the grand duke, not for Papa. Well, so does Henri, for that matter. Papa just borrowed you. I doubt that the grand duke will place so much importance on all of this.”
Raudegen pointed to Gerry. “What did you tell me the night of the extravaganza? ‘If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all’? Bismarck seems to be adopting it as his motto.”
“Theme song, actually.” Gerry played a few notes. “Gloom, Doom, and Agony on Me.”
“Up-time must have been a strange world,” Marguerite said. “A world in which people turned deep, dark, depression and excessive misery into a joke.”
“Some didn’t,” Gerry said. “They ended up doing stuff like committing suicide. If Magda and Pastor Kastenmayer, he’s the Lutheran pastor in Grantville, hadn’t talked to me, there was a point when I might have done something stupid like that myself after we came home from Rome. A person has to keep going. It helps to laugh about it if you can. When you can. Sometimes it all drops down on your head at once, but the rest of the time, you might as well make jokes.”
“Melancholia,” Ruvigny said. “The ancients knew about it.”
“More practically,” Raudegen said, “if we aren’t going to retrieve the duchess, we might as well sell one of the carriages here and those two horses as well. We don’t need them without her and it never hurts to have some additional resources. Especially since she took most of the money, but I suppose we can’t honestly complain about that, since she provided it in the first place. At least Candale was decent enough to only take his own horse.”
“Rohan didn’t send money to get them out?” Susanna asked.
“Not enough to last Ruvigny and Bismarck in both directions. He expected his wife to pay her own way to join him. She has more money than he does. As for Marc and me, it’s been an expensive trip. We cashed in the last bank draft from Madame Cavriani before we left Brussels.”
“Keep the smaller carriage,” Marc advised. “As we get up closer to the Jura, the roads aren’t meant for vehicles at all. We may end up selling everything but the horses in a couple of days, to someone who’s headed out in the other direction.”
* * *
The grand duke had more guards than usual on the Burgundy side of the border where the road crossed toward Dôle. The king also had more guards than usual stationed on the French side. That wasn’t surprising, considering the amount of traffic that the conclave in Besançon had generated throughout the summer—unsurprising, but unfortunate and inconvenient.
Raudegen dismounted, handing his reins to Gerry, and talked to them. He called up Marc, who also dismounted, handed his reins to Gerry, and talked to them. Raudegen produced paper. Marc produced more paper. The guards shuffled paper.
Susanna, looking as nursemaidly as she could, stepped down from the carriage, lifted Tancrède from the steps, shot the guards an apologetic smile, and said, “He has to go.”
Gerry trotted after the two of them, leading the horses.
“Hey you,” one of the guards yelled. “Come back here.” He was speaking French, but his gestures indicated what he meant in any known human language.
Gerry answered. “I’m going that way.” He pointed. “I’ll be in plain sight. I’m supposed to keep an eye on the kid.” His voice was sulky, his German accent was provincial, and his facial expression indicated that although his body was moving, his mind had never fully caught up with it.
Just a dumb ol’ country boy, that’s me. He’d seen the role played up-time. He’d seen it played down-time. One of his classmates in Rudolstadt had been a genius of a mimic. He could probably do it in his sleep. He watched Susanna lead Tancrède back and then ambled over to the guard who had yelled, still leading the horses. “What’ya want?” It was bad Hochdeutsch in a dialect that couldn’t be understood ten miles from the speaker’s home village, but it was definitely some variety of down-time German. It was also amiable, cheerful, and unthreatening.
“Go back, stupid.” The guard shoved him.
Tancrède started to screech, in French, of course, “Why are we stopped here? I want to go home. I’m tired. I want to go hoooome!” What he wanted was to go back to the LeBons in Paris, but there was no reason to mention that to the border guards. Let them assume that “home” was someplace in Burgundy.
One of the senior guards looked up in annoyance and shuffled more paper. Marc walked back, stuck his head through the door, and talked to Marguerite, with much waving of hands. “Marguerite,” Tancrède screeched, “I want to go home!”
None of the alerts that the guards had received from Paris said anything about a child and they were supposed to be watching for an older woman and a young one, not two young ones. The alerts mentioned two army officers, but said nothing about four red-headed siblings from Alsace. They didn’t even adumbrate the personas of a bodyguard and assistant steward, though, naturally, no sensible man would have sent a young woman he cared for anywhere without such precautions. After more shuffling, the lieutenant handed the papers back to Raudegen and motioned them through.
Bismarck flicked the reins in a disinterested manner, stuck his legs out straight as far as they would go, and slouched his shoulders, about as far away from the image of a smart city coachman as a driver could be unless he was in charge of a donkey cart. Raudegen and Marc climbed back on their horses. Gerry climbed back up to ride postilion. Ruvigny prayed that the two extra horses would be taken for spares. It wasn’t as if they were highly bred chargers. In accordance with the party’s original fairy tale, they were utility horses, the kind that could be used for pulling something light or a servant could use if he needed to keep pace with his betters. Only Raudegen and Marc rode halfway decent mounts, and they were no prizes.
Ruvigny rode ahead and Marc next to the carriage, with Raudegen bringing up the rear. Ruvigny was well into the space that separated the two sets of posts when Bismarck brought the carriage up to pass through. One of the indolent-looking guards gazed lazily into the window, stopped looking lazy at all, and cried out, “Stop them! I’ve seen that girl in Paris. She’s the one we’re looking for.” He leaped to grab the collar of the lead horse.
Ruvigny started to turn back, but was blocked by another of the French guards. Bismarck jumped off the bench and onto the shoulders of the soldier who was gripping the collar. Marc, from the other side, leaped off his horse and onto the bench, to take charge of the reins. Gerry, like a monkey, climbed up the back, across the roof, and came down on another soldier who was heading toward the collar of the other horse. Raudegen yelled, “Go!” and Marc went, right toward the Burgundian border post. Not very rapidly, though, since each horse had a Frenchman on his collar, each Frenchman had a limpet on his back, trying to pull him off the collar and in the opposite direction, and the spare horses had no idea what was going on and were inclined to dig their feet in and refuse to move at all. The speed of Marc’s brave steeds was more comparable to that of two snails than to that of the legendary Pegasus as they dragged their burden along toward the border of the Grand Duchy of Burgundy, inch by reluctant inch.
Two of the soldiers grabbed guns from the guardhouse. Old guns. Functional, but not the modern design. The new ones went to Turenne’s army, not to undistinguished infantry companies in regions of the country where nobody expected anything to happen right now. Of course, the officers kept their men drilled. Something might happen here someday, if not in the immediately foreseeable future, and the French military establishment was in a constant budget crisis. Wherefore, they had to go through the whole, by current standards stupendously, excruciatingly, slow routine of getting them ready to shoot. Which they did as they had been trained to do. They might be on the far edge of what was happening, but their officers knew that could always change and some day they might be, on short notice, in medias res. There was no such thing as a stable front in seventeenth_century warfare. Armies moved around.
They aimed at the carriage. One shot grazed the flank of one of the spare horses, who reared and broke his lead, but not before slowing the progress of the carriage even more. The other man might well have made his shot except that Bismark, taking advantage of the delay caused by the slow fuse, dropped off the soldier he had been pulling down and ran toward the muzzle of the gun.
Raudegen’s horse didn’t like any of this noise and confusion at all. Raudegen had wrapped the reins around the wrist of his incompletely healed hand, but that didn’t give him much control, and he’d had very little time to practice using his sword with the “wrong” hand since they left Paris. The horse refused to come around, much less move in the direction of loud noises. Raudegen threw the sword.
It didn’t hit the shooter. No reasonable man could have expected it to, under the circumstances. It did flash by the side of his head, into his peripheral vision, the light reflecting off its blade, close enough that he closed his eyes and flinched a few seconds before he was ready to pull the trigger.
The shot would have hit right where Marguerite was sitting. If she had still been sitting there, that was. She was on the floor with Tancrède. Susanna was on top of them.
It did hit Bismarck, but, thanks to the flinch, not quite in the chest.
Marc got the carriage onto Burgundian soil. Gerry dropped off the back of the second soldier, who had been hanging onto a horse collar, landing on his rear end with a thump. The soldier dropped off in turn, managed a better landing, and ran back toward French soil before the Burgundian border guards could catch him.
The rest of the escape party, being no fools, did not remain to conduct a brave and valiant rear-guard action. They scrambled after the carriage as fast as they could, Raudegen dragging Bismarck, with his good hand, by way of a firm grasp on the other’s collar. He left the sword behind. It was an ordinary sword, not some fabled blade long sung by bards in legend. He could buy another one.
* * *
“You’re an idiot, you know,” Ruvigny said bracingly, while Gerry patched Bismarck up. “Normal people don’t run straight at guns. At least not when they’re on foot. We’re all a little strange, I suppose, in that we’ve chosen a profession that causes us to run right out to get shot at, but we’re supposed do it on horses, while we’re wearing armor. The infantry on foot don’t normally charge guns. At most, they stand there and take it, hoping that one of the balls doesn’t have their number.”
Gerry, although he was stoically continuing to swab the wound out, was going from pale to greenish. Ruvigny turned to him. “How did you do it? Tricking that soldier into thinking you were a down-time peasant when you’re an up-timer.”
Gerry fought down his gag reflex. “Think about it. I was twelve when the Ring of Fire hit. I’ve lived nearly a third of my life down-time. I’ve been going to school with either a majority of down-timers in Grantville and now at the university in Jena or to a school where everybody else was a down-timer when I was at the Latin School in Rudolstadt.”
He rearranged the tools he was using to probe at Bismarck’s shoulder. “This is going to take a surgeon, you know, once we find one.”
After that bit of drama, the rest of the trip to Besançon was just a matter of moving forward.