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Chapter 5


The actual arrival of the countess of Pfalz-Sulzbach merited even more newspaper coverage than the announcement of her intention to arrive had. She was in her early thirties, her straight hair still very dark, her brown eyes darting everywhere, her straight lips firm, her chin…double; energetic, and certain of herself. And her nose… The reporters, especially those whose papers appealed to a Crown Loyalist subscriber base, tended to use “hawk-like” in preference to “enormous beak.”

“Her sense of style is certainly interesting,” Paolo said. They had turned out to watch her entry, since it was the most interesting thing to do that afternoon. “The tailor must have said that the off-the-shoulder cut with the almost horizontal trimming is fashionable. To which she must have answered that the only way she would wear it was if he covered up every inch of that decolletage with a modest linen collar and a couple of necklaces.”

Carlo shrugged. “Maybe she’s modest. Maybe she has smallpox scars. The neck and shoulders are a prime place for them. Some of the women in Grantville wore things that filled up low-cut tops like that, sometimes, though, and none of them ever had smallpox, so you can’t tell. I thought it was a waste. What’s the point of having it if you don’t show it off? What did Bibi Barlow call them?”

“Dickeys. And it’s colder here in Germany than it is in Italy. I wouldn’t want to have to walk around Amberg in a shirt cut so low that it almost showed my nipples, not even in summer, and certainly not in winter. Maybe the way the women dress north of the Alps is because they’re modest, but it’s more likely just common sense. If you moved one of those marble statues from the ancient Romans up this way, the stone itself would develop goose bumps.”

***

Paolo picked up the Amberg Global News. “Nice column, Sebastian. More balanced and judicious than the one Jacob did for the Loyalty. What have you concluded about what the real cause of this visit may be?”

“Aside from that it’s most likely something else to do with her children’s rights to this, that, or the other in the former Pfalz-Sulzbach? Nothing, really, even though I tried. And that ought to have all been straightened out by now.”

“She’s a suspicious woman,” Stentzel said. “Keeps her precious offspring safely tucked away in non-USE and firmly Lutheran Nürnberg, and why not? The Bavarians threatened more than one Protestant widow with having her children taken from her unless she converted; Philipp Jakob von der Grün’s widow wasn’t the only case. After what the countess went through under Wolfgang Wilhelm and the Bavarians, she’s unlikely to ever trust a Catholic. She certainly doesn’t trust the Jesuits for a minute, nor is she the kind of person to make fine distinctions: probably can’t tell Gregory of Valencia, S.J., from Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, equally S.J., or even care to try.”

Jacob Ranke pointed his finger across the table. “She’s deeply suspicious of you, von Dalberg, and what you may be up to. Puts you in the same category as Piazza over in Thuringia-Franconia: a Catholic who is stirring up trouble.”

“That’s too bad,” von Dalberg said. His voice was solemn, his face neutral.

“Yes, it is too bad.” Carlo shook his head mournfully. “I was hoping that I could sell her a duplicating machine while she was here. I’ve tried to get appointments with her when I was going through Nürnberg, but never got so much as an acknowledgment of the request. Now, I guess I know why.”

“It could be that you’re Catholic,” Kellermeister said. “It could be that you’re Italian. She comes from somewhere way up north. She was a duchess of Holstein-Gottorp when Count August married her. It was a grand marriage from his point of view, but didn’t give him as much leverage for the Lutheran cause as he had hoped. Holstein’s a long way away.”

“What’s her name? Beyond ‘countess,’ that is?” one of the stringers asked.

“Something utterly outlandish. Hedwig.”

“That’s not outlandish,” Ranke protested. “Elector John George of Saxony’s older brother, the one who died young and childless, married a woman named Hedwig. She was a sister of the Danish king. Is a sister of the Danish king, I suppose; she’s still alive.”

“Denmark,” Grube pointed out, “is also way up north. My favorite headline was:


‘Halsstarrige Ehefrauen’ Rejoin Their Husbands


The Bavarians really didn’t like women who were so stiff-necked that they took exile even when their husbands were willing to compromise and convert. Because Count August held the Sulzbach lands under his father’s will, she didn’t have to become an exile herself. She did have to sit there and watch, powerless to do anything about the forced conversions in his territories.”

“I sort of like ‘Halsstarrige Ehefrauen’ too,” Ranke said. “Perhaps it was an omen. A prophetic foretelling of what the Austrian archduchess would do to Duke Maximilian later on.”

Grube crossed his legs, first one way, then the other. Cushions would be nice. “Fucilla, what was that material you said the Grantvillers use to cover pillows?”

“Vinyl.”

“They were filled with something we don’t have either, called foam rubber,” Carlo said. “I saw some of it; it didn’t look a thing like anything else they said was rubber. Not soft, like feathers; kind of bouncy. If you pushed it down, it popped right back up, like a jack-in-the-box in the puppet shows. In the chairs at Cora’s Café, it was no thicker than the end of my thumb.” He stuck it up as a standard of measurement. “In the booths at Castalanni Brothers Pizza, more that of…”

“Don’t do it,” Paolo ordered.

So Carlo didn’t get to give everyone in the dining room at the Golden Lion the finger under the perfectly good pretext of demonstrating a unit of measurement.

But he wished that he’d been fast enough to get it in.

***

The countess met with Duke Ernst.

Kellermeister duly covered the meeting. As did, of course, every other reporter in Amberg and several who had come over from Nürnberg or up from Regensburg for the occasion, one from Ingolstadt, two from Neuburg, and someone from the Sulzbach weekly rag.

Paolo and Carlo hosted them all for drinks once they had done whatever they planned to do with their stories.

The reporter from Sulzbach was an aggrieved man. The more he had to drink, the more openly he displayed his grievances.

“She’s planning to establish communities of Jews, that’s what she’s doing. Because the eastern section of the lands assigned to Count August in the partition are along the Goldene Strasse, the great trade route into Bohemia, she thinks that having them along there will be ‘good for the economy.’ Good for the money she rakes in for her son, is what she means. What about the ordinary traders and artisans in Weiden? In Floß? In Sulzbach itself, for that matter? All of them already there; all of them good Germans?”

“Seems an odd thing for her to do,” Carlo said. He kept his tone of voice noncommittal. Bland. Neutral.

“She had some researcher looking things up in that up-time town, Grantville. She claims that in that other world, her son did this later on, so she might as well do it on his behalf now and take advantage of the extra years of economic improvements it will bring about.” He spat on the floor. “So here she comes, traipsing over to talk to Duke Ernst and get his ‘assurances’ that her little court Jews will be secure and that the provincial authorities will take proper care of them.” He spat again. “Believe me, if we get a chance, those of us who will have to live next door, we’ll happily take care of them, all right.”

When Carlo requested an appointment with the visiting countess the next day, the request made no mention of duplicating machines, but rather referenced information concerning rumors of popular unrest and discontent in the Sulzbach districts.

That opened the door that had previously remained closed.

He did manage to interest her secretary in a duplicating machine while he was there.

Before she returned to Nürnberg with her entourage, the interest had turned into a sale.

And a small retainer.

***

Meanwhile, the reporters had other stories to cover.

Duke Ernst was a busy man.

“It is a major issue,” Grube pointed out after one unusually tedious and prolonged public hearing.

Major, but not the kind of thing easily summed up in a catchy headline.

Paolo Fucilla was always happy to listen, though. Just the kind of guy a reporter appreciated.

“To a limited extent from 1621 through 1627, more oppressively after 1623, and then with almost no limits from 1628 through 1631,” Grube went on, “as Ferdinand II granted him more extensive rights, Maximilian of Bavaria’s officials took possession of all ecclesiastical property in the Upper Palatinate and turned it over to the Catholics. Mostly to the Jesuits, some to the Franciscans, since there’s such a shortage of halfway competent priests who aren’t in religious orders—Bavaria hasn’t had a lot of success in setting up seminaries.”

“Not all of it,” Kellermeister said. “Not the revenues of the secularized monasteries, which remain with the government and are supposed—did you hear the word supposed—to be used for the support of schools.”

“Not Höchstädt, either,” Ranke noted.

“They would have included Höchstädt if Wolfgang Wilhelm’s Lutheran mother had not managed to live as long as she did and hang on to the dower lands assigned in her marriage contract. She managed to survive until the year after the Swedes arrived.”

“What did they decide?” Paolo asked.

Kellermeister grinned. “You should have heard Duke Ernst. So cool. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. At the end of it all, what he said was, ‘The emperor has not yet come to a final decision in regard to an established church in the Upper Palatinate. In any case, I do not regard these issues as matters of religion—of faith. I regard them as matters of real estate law, and as such, believe that it is within my competence as administrator, not as a Lutheran Landesbischof, to deal with them.’ I expect he’ll do exactly that.”

“Most likely with a heavy tilt in favor of re-establishing Lutheran parishes. Maybe giving the Calvinists a few.”

“Matthew 15:27.”

“Why not Mark 7:28?”

Paolo looked at them blankly.

“The verse about dogs being allowed to eat the crumbs that fall from the table where the children have dinner,” Ranke said. “Even if we Lutherans get dinner, the Catholics and Calvinists will be left some crumbs.”

***

A few days later, Stentzel Grube backed through the door of the inn, pushing it with his butt, manhandling two…somethings…taller than he was.

Frau Mechthilde gave him the look that mothers of sons have perfected for centuries. “Grube, if you plan to clutter my dining room all evening with whatever that is…”

“Ah, no. A gift for you, most gracious lady, a gift. A donation. A benefaction. An offering.”

He was carrying two bench cushions, with ties to hold them in place.

“For our Stammtisch.”

“I thought we couldn’t figure out what to use.”

“‘We’ didn’t. I went and talked to the tanner.” He turned back to the landlady. “Your sister’s husband’s cousin, that is. The respected proprietor of our friends’ shed.” He nodded at Paolo and Carlo. “Who, since it was for you,” Grube mimicked a formal court bow toward Frau Mechthilde, “provided me with professional advice at a discount.”

“What are they filled with?” Carlo pressed on one of them as soon as he got it tied to the bench. “Firmer than feathers.”

“Old woolen rags, washed, flattened out, and quilted together. My landlady figured out how to do it. Like a winter jerkin, but thicker.”

Everybody in the room had to take a turn sitting on the two cushions.

Prohorsky eyed them; eyed the other benches.

***

The cushions proved to be an inspiration when it came to inducing even longer-lasting talk fests.

“There’s really no such thing as a national or imperial policy on religious toleration yet,” Sebastian proclaimed.

“That doesn’t make sense, Herr Kellermeister. There has to be. Why would people talk so much about something that’s…not?” That was young Lambert Prohorsky arriving at the table, his hands full of refilled beer steins.

Sebastian coaxed the handle of his own stein carefully off Lambert’s thumb. “The USE has something it’s calling ‘religious toleration.’ We call it religious toleration when we write about it. But no statute has defined it. It ranges all the way from full acceptance of the most wildly irregular sects in Thuringia-Franconia to ‘if you’re not Lutheran, hide your church on an upstairs floor in a building off the street and never mention it in public’ in Pomerania.”

Stentzel reached out and grabbed his own beer. “Pomerania is, I’d point out, under the direct control of Emperor Gustav Adolf. That, to me, doesn’t spell out that the emperor is enthusiastic about this non-existent something.”

“The editorial position of the Loyalty,” Ranke pronounced, “is that Duke Ernst is attempting to maintain a balanced and impartial position in the face of potential chaos.”

***

In practice, as far as Amberg itself was concerned, “balanced and impartial” meant that Duke Ernst allowed the Jesuits to retain possession of St. Georg’s church, which had been allocated to them in 1624, as long as they agreed that it would also officially become the parish church for any Catholics who might be residing in the province’s capital city or visiting it as diplomats, guests, merchants, technicians for advancements in the mining and metal forging industries, bankers, exporters, importers…

“How about sales representatives?” Carlo asked Böcler somewhere in the middle of a discussion of paper shredders.

“Sales representatives, too,” the duke’s secretary assured him. “Aside from St. Georg’s, which the Jesuits already have, he has also allotted the little church by the Spital to the Franciscans and give them their old monastery building back, over a lot of vociferous objections from the Lutherans. He’s assigned Holy Trinity to the few Calvinists who have bothered to return now that there is no Elector Palatine or his regent to guarantee them a specially privileged status. The Lutherans get St. Martin’s back, which has a certain elegance to it. Our Lady’s as well, but the Jesuits will receive fair financial compensation, seeing that the Calvinists had degraded it to the status of a horse stable and they spent a lot on repairs. There aren’t enough Catholics in Amberg right now that it makes any sense for them to have two large churches.”

Böcler’s life ambition was to be a great historian. For a minute, he abandoned current politics. “Though, to be honest, at some point in the past, the Catholics built them all. There hasn’t been a new church constructed in Amberg since the Reformation. Thank heavens for the Peace of Augsburg.”

Carlo’s knowledge of the provisions of the 1555 Peace of Augsburg fell somewhere between vague and non-existent. He maintained a noncommittal expression rather than commenting on its possible merits or lack of them. For his own part, he thought that all these various religious denominations added unnecessary confusion to a man’s life. What was the problem with just showing up at mass regularly enough to keep the priest from nagging you?

When he expressed no caveats, Böcler continued talking.

“The chapels attached to the leprosy hospitals outside the walls, both of them, for men and for women, will be subject to simultaneum and clergy of all faiths may use them as needed to minister to their small flocks. As for the smaller churches and chapels inside the walls… Really,” Böcler tapped on his clipboard, “it’s not that difficult a project when there are several different buildings available in a town.”

“If it’s not difficult, then why is this interminable series of public hearings going on?” Carlo finally got the detachable crank reattached, put a dab of grease on the gears, and checked that the blades were still aligned. Their tendency to go awry and catch on one another every time a person moved the shredder was a nuisance. Maybe something more robust… In his next letter to Bolzano, he’d mention a push lawn mower he’d seen in Grantville. Figuring out how to modify it was Vignelli’s problem, though; certainly not his.

“The grating irritations arise in the villages where there is only one church building and, ordinarily, barely sufficient population and income to maintain that one church building and one clergyman, if that. Because of the problems of the last few decades, obviously, Duke Ernst is encountering contending claims by the adherents of the various faiths and weariness on the part of many of the laity, who simply do not want to be instructed and converted again, no matter by whom or to what. All this is compounded, you understand, in almost any village, by ongoing family feuds, economic resentments, and other utterly non-doctrinal problems. The reasonable solution in regard to the village church buildings, the one toward which Duke Ernst is tending, is to force a simultaneum solution on all of them.”

“Then, why didn’t he go ahead and do it without wasting time on all this procedural stuff?”

“Think about it, Carlo. It’s fairly easy to say that the Catholics can have the early morning mass, the Lutherans can have a service of the word and sacrament at mid-morning, and the Calvinists come in for a long sermon beginning at noon. But when it comes to scheduling catechism instruction classes, choir rehearsals, and special services during Advent and Lent, not to mention the disputes in regard to both interior and exterior ornamentation when Calvinists are involved…

“If he does it, though, it will also means that hardly any village will have a resident pastor. Any of them, whether Lutheran or Catholic, or Calvinist, or…” Böcler paused and thought about the way some of the up-time sects were already spreading through the State of Thuringia-Franconia, “…others, perhaps, as time goes on. The pastors will have to travel among three or four or five villages, probably, because it will take that many of his own adherents in several religiously-divided villages to support one man; he’ll live in one of them, but be gone most of the time. The parishioners in any specific village will only get a service or sermon perhaps once a month, rather than weekly or several times a week, as is the case in towns. I don’t like that at all.”

***

Neither did Duke Ernst. He simply hadn’t managed to identify any alternative, while knowing that the Fourth of July Party would object, vociferously, to any solution he imposed.

It wasn’t as if the Fourth of July Party at the national level had produced any constructive suggestions or proposed any viable alternatives. Its commitment to the “complete separation of church and state” slogan, in Duke Ernst’s opinion, clearly fell within the scope of Hebrews 11:1. “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” He wondered what one of the up-timers, any of the up-timers, would have done if confronted with the need to decide how to handle ecclesiastical property in the Upper Palatinate. He wondered if Michael Stearns had ever given a thought to it at all.

The one mitigating factor, he sometimes thought, was that in the Upper Palatinate, at least, Werner von Dalberg had seen a lot of church property titles, up close and personal, and understood the complexities of the issue.

After one of the hearings, the man had commented, “The only alternative solution that I can see would be for you to confiscate all of it in Gustav Adolf’s name, the way Henry VIII did in England. You could turn it over to the provincial treasury the way the electors did with the monastic revenues a century ago, and make the different churches buy back anything they decided that they wanted. Let each denomination bid on the village churches; winner take all, and the rest of the villagers either convert out of weariness, become unchurched, or face a five or ten mile walk to the nearest village in which those of their own confession managed to make the highest bid. In which case, I assure you, everyone, most likely including myself on behalf of my party, would object even more loudly that the solution was unjust.”

As far as Ernst had been able to find out by dint of having his brother Albrecht employ diligent researchers in Grantville’s libraries, nothing equivalent to the Bavarian confiscations—for that matter, nothing equivalent to the things that were done throughout much of what was now the USE during the era of Emperor Ferdinand II’s Edict of Restitution—had ever happened in the United States of America. Prior to their revolution, some of the British colonies had established churches, yes. But the revolutionaries had not confiscated the property of those churches and turned it over to some other church that they preferred, leaving the situation to be sorted out by some unfortunate, harried, bureaucrat several years later.

The series of public hearings went on, whether an eventual simultaneum for the villages was inevitable or not. Letting people talk themselves into exhaustion was occasionally a viable procedural approach.

***

Although he would have been mildly distressed to realize it, Duke Ernst’s mind had worked its way along the same path as that followed by Bishop Albert of Regensburg—the administration needed office supplies. Vignelli’s factory was closer and he had a better service network here in the south than IBM did.

Böcler and Carlo had quite a bit of time for conversation as they worked through the major order that the provincial administration placed. Forms for the central office in this stack; forms for provincial offices in that stack; does it need to be divided by category between capital investment and consumables?

“It’s not just churches. It’s also schools.” Education was a topic dear to Böcler’s heart; his grandfather was a Latin School teacher. He was delighted to explain. At length.

“What will happen in villages where there is only one school building, and barely enough children to justify the employment of one teacher? Here in Amberg, Duke Ernst has given the Paedagogium back to the Calvinists, since they founded it, even if not successfully, and the old Latin School back to the Lutherans, since they had it longer than anyone else. Neither of those buildings is contiguous to the Jesuit Collegium in any case. There are four dame schools for beginners; there are three or four German schools for boys and girls at the various churches. Parents can choose.”

The topic of the schools in Amberg itself saw them through an excessively large pile of requisition forms from Sulzbach, an improperly completed estimate from Passau, and a demand that Hilpoltstein should be allowed to do its own ordering and not from a Catholic firm. Böcler’s assistant trotted in, picked those up, and trotted back out, presumably to deliver them and their attached memoranda to some hapless clerk in a back room.

Carlo picked up another piece of paper. “Why does Rosenberg want its own duplicating machine? I should toss this in the pile and chortle all the way to my commission, but it does not make sense. They can share the one that you’ve ordered for Sulzbach.”

Danke.” Böcler stuck his head out the door, yelled for his assistant to come back, and resumed talking. “In a village, though, how many of the parents who adhere to one confession will be content to send their children to school at all if the teacher belongs to one of the others? Some won’t care a great deal; however, others will care a lot. After all, one major function of a school, if not the major purpose in the opinion of most people, is to instill a knowledge of correct doctrine into the pupils.”

Carlo ran a finger across a letter expressing the wishes of the Amtspfleger in Tischenreuth and Waldsassen in regard to filing cabinets. “This paper is sleazy. If you want the duplicators to function without excessive maintenance, you’ll need to set minimum quality standards for paper purchased by all the local offices to which Duke Ernst provides them.”

Without changing pace, he followed that with, “In Grantville, before the Ring of Fire, the schools weren’t connected to the churches. They left religious instruction out of it. The catechetical instruction for the Catholic children was at St. Mary’s, just like the ‘civics’ lessons for us former mercenaries.” He laughed. “Which, I suppose, is not quite the same thing, although they took it just as seriously.”

Böcler looked at the offending piece of paper and made a note. “Grantville was a town, though—not as large as Amberg, but, still, a municipality. How did the up-timers afford to educate village children? Were they truly so prosperous that even a small village could afford a full-time teacher—not the pastor doing it as a second job or the sexton teaching when he wasn’t keeping the buildings in order, or a tailor taking it on during the hours when it was too dark to sew?”

Carlo thought a minute. “There were the famous school buses. I think they brought many of the children from farther away to the schools in the town; not just the children in town to the schools. Which sounds peculiar, but only the middle school was where one would expect it to be. The elementary school and the high school were both an excessive distance away from the market square, I thought. Or from the part of Grantville that would have been a market square if there was one.”

Then… “They didn’t, really, have villages. Villages weren’t the way their land was settled. The Grantvillers spoke of widely scattered farms and ranches.”

That, somehow, had never appeared in Böcler’s reading about the up-time world.

It was something so self-evident to the up-timers that no author of any introductory Latin or German text on Introduction to the United States of America for Dummies had thought to mention it. Carlo had seen it with his own eyes and asked.

“No villages? How did they pay the teachers?”

Carlo had no idea.

“And where did the people live, if there weren’t villages? They can’t all have been in cities and chartered towns. The daily travel to the fields for farmers would have taken much too long, even with those motorized vehicles. But to live out in the middle of nowhere, a family by itself, no one to share the expense of an ox team or a plow? How did they even have an oven? A bath house?”

***

Böcler spent the evening at home, mulling over the matter. He was an intelligent, generally well-informed, man. He was also a very busy one.

His contact with the up-timers in Amberg was mostly limited to taking notes when Duke Ernst conferred with them about the revival of mining and the iron industry. Or about Bavarian military threats. They didn’t invite the administrator’s secretary to their homes—or, for that matter, to their offices. They came to meet with the emperor’s appointed chief official in the province, discussed specific professional concerns with him for limited amounts of time, and returned to their own preoccupations.

He had never been to Grantville. He would like to go, some day, if possible, but he had a job that was more than full-time.

Maybe, when the planned imperial normal school came to be…since it would be located in Amberg…perhaps one of the professors would have ideas and information on how to pay for village schools not affiliated with one particular church…

What was the State of Thuringia-Franconia doing about schools outside of Grantville, for that matter?

He sighed. How did the emperor propose to assign the new graduates of his new normal school to village schools that he did not control? Particularly in provinces that he did not directly administer? In the Upper Palatinate, that would require far more school funding than the revenues of the secularized monasteries, no matter how well invested, would ever provide—without, please, subjecting the province to one more round of confiscations of church property by the government as von Dalberg had suggested to Duke Ernst.

Leases, perhaps…

No. Having the government confiscate all the church property, retain title, and lease it to various congregations would not exactly amount to “complete separation of church and state” either.



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