Back | Next
Contents

Chapter 16


“I’d say…” Paolo held up his medal, awarded privately, for unspecified meritorious services, by the imperial administrator of the Upper Palatinate. “I’d say that I earned it.” He waved it back and forth, like a small pendulum.

It was a medal of modest size, suspended not from a golden chain but from a black and gold ribbon, woven in the colors of the provincial flag. Duke Ernst was a thrifty man.

“Your stupid idealism will get your head chopped off some day. Also, I earned more,” Carlo answered.

“What?”

“I sold a contract for fourteen duplicating machines to Cadoni while I was in Salzburg chatting about what intentions the Fourth of July Party appears to have in the Oberpfalz as they apply to the troubling…troubling, at least to Paris de Lodron…doctrine of ‘separation of church and state.’ He’s against it, which makes perfect sense for a prince-archbishop. But he’s not in favor of Lutheran established churches, either, so his attitudes may balance out. I took orders for two duplicating machines from Duke Albrecht—and got a contract for sixteen from Wallenstein’s major domo, while I was in Bohemia chatting about what plans the SoTF may have regarding the young Austrian dukes. I sold eight to the private secretary of the chancellor in Tyrol after our wide-ranging conversation about ‘Committees of Correspondence and how to avoid them,’ or at least how best to avoid having them organize in your jurisdiction without getting into trouble with the USE administration and irritating the Fourth of July Party now that the regent has caused Tyrol to join up. Then over a dozen individual ones while I was in here and there in the Trientino discussing…”

“There’s no point in looking so smug. Errr…how much does that amount to on commissions?”

When Carlo answered, Paolo’s mouth dropped open.

“Haven’t you been keeping the ledger up to date?” Carlo picked up the offending book, glanced briefly at the maroon cover embossed with the Vignelli logo, and fanned through its oversized pre-lined pages. He had concluded that daily entries saved a great amount of anguish at quarterly report time.

Quarterly reports had come as an unwelcome surprise to both of them.

Looking back, Carlo suspected that they, or the military equivalent, might be why regimental officers employed regimental clerks.

“I’ve been spending more time keeping up with the news. You may have sold eight machines to the chancellor in Bolzano, but Tyrol has not only entered the USE as a state. The regent has remarried to Duke Ernst’s brother—Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar that was, now the greatly elevated Grand Duke of the Free County of Burgundy. This will almost certainly bring about a shift in Tyrol’s field of interest. This will equally certainly impact whether or not the archbishop of Salzburg will continue to pay us a retainer to keep him informed about how her policies affect the Upper Palatinate and Franconia. Also, I hired a cook who isn’t German.”

“Is it too much to hope that she is Italian?”

“From Ragusa, originally, by way of Venice and a teamster for the Oberpfalz iron industry who married her thirty years ago; now a widow. Partly Moorish, if I had to guess. She goes by the name Domicilla.”

“Who would baptize a child ‘little housemaid’? How did you avoid hiring one of Frau Mechthilde’s relatives?”

“As to the name, probably her owner told the priest that’s what she was, and never assumed he’d use it at the font; I suspect she was a slave. For the other, I pulled ‘charitable concern for a fellow countrywoman’ as an explanation.”

“Venice is no more the same country as Naples than…” Carlo sputtered. “Than Denmark is the same country as Sweden.”

“Frau Mechthilde remains blessedly unaware of that. Anything south of the Alps is Italia as far as her geographical knowledge extends. Also, I hired her sister-in-law’s (actually, the sister of her brother-in-law, but let’s not be picky) deceased paternal uncle’s (he had an unfortunate accident on icy cobblestones last winter) widow (yet one more Anna) as our general housekeeper.”

“And why are there several reams of cheap, sub-par, printer paper in the shop? If the supplier switched quality on us…”

Paolo dropped the medal back into the little wooden box with a recessed space to hold it in place impressed into the satin padding and put it away. It wouldn’t bring a lot of cash if they ever had to pawn it, but it would be worth something.


Amberg, Upper Palatinate

July 1635


“According to Brick Bozarth, who was somehow in on the deal, Fucilla did some fancy footwork,” Keith Pilcher wrote to Arnold Bellamy. “I’m not disputing that the trick he pulled did all of us a big favor. Duke Ernst agrees. Von Dalberg agrees. It’s that, no matter how I rack my brains, I can’t remember that his name was among the Wartburg survivors that came through Grantville. Or Rugatti’s name, for that matter. They must have been there: they remember too much about the place not to have been. They’ve been inside St. Mary’s. But there’s something about the two of them that doesn’t add up. Something shifty, even though I’ve got to admit that they sell a good product.”

***

In the meantime, Duke Ernst ordered a census.

Like good citizens (even if they were not, technically, citizens; nor even, technically, subjects), each of them volunteered to take a local district. After all, as Carlo pointed out, what else would get a person into so many different households and license him to ask so many inquisitive questions. Information was where a man found it.

Paolo and Carlo invited everyone over to their new house.

The brick mason they had called in to remodel the kitchen had done his best to follow Paolo’s instructions. The oven looked like nothing he had ever built before.

Amberg, meet Neapolitan flatbread dipped in herbed olive oil, accompanied by ripe olives and figs.

“It’s not pizza,” Vanessa Ebeling wrote to her parents later. “For one thing, no tomato sauce; no pepperoni; no mushrooms, no sausage. Fucilla says he has someone working on mushrooms. Not even cheese, even though their cook put out a dish of something crumbly like feta as a side. But it sure was a real treat to have something that wasn’t solid German food for a change, which is all I’ve been eating since I got to Amberg. Mostly, when we’re home, we look around and see all the differences now from the way things were before the Ring of Fire, but we still have Castalanni’s. Sometimes we forget how much of America we have managed to keep alive in Grantville until we go somewhere else and start living the way the down-timers all do.”



Back | Next
Framed