Chapter 11
Duke Ernst, naturally enough, mentioned some of his concerns to his private secretary.
The events of Krystalnacht and the following weeks were certainly no secret. Also naturally enough, every politically interested person in Amberg, including a specific group of political columnists and reporters, assumed that the administrator would have concerns. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be the sane individual he had demonstrated himself to be over the past couple of years.
When the reporters asked, Böcler saw no reason why he shouldn’t agree that Duke Ernst did, indeed, have concerns. He didn’t specify precisely what they were, but no one expected him to.
Paolo listened. If Carlo were here, he would have a half-cocked, wild idea. But Carlo, by the divine intervention of Our Lady, was still off in Salzburg. Or points east. Or south. Or wherever the needs of this particular trip had led his feet. He’d been gone for two months.
Unfortunately, Paolo had an idea of his own. The more he mulled it over, the more it appeared to make perfect sense.
That might be dangerous.
To be feasible.
That might be dangerous.
To be something that was not excessively dangerous.
That might be the most dangerous thing of all.
***
There were some things that were better not discussed in the dining room of an inn, nor the sales room of a shop, nor even in an administrative office in the Schloss. The snow was gone from underfoot; the grass so green that it almost hurt a person’s eyes. A thin sun was chasing off the worst of the morning’s chill. Paolo found himself on a walking tour around the city walls with Böcler. At this time of year, the moat still didn’t smell so bad that one couldn’t enjoy the hour or so that a perambulation took. Wherefore, they ambled.
They started at the Wingershofertor and ambled clockwise past the Georgentor, which opened onto the old highway to the west; then past the Vilstor in the northwest and the arched Stadtbrille spanning the Vils River, where they paused, letting bits of conversation drift into the air. “…not really large enough, any more, to house both the granary and the municipal armory for the militia, but the city council can’t seem to decide…”
Leaning against the Ziegeltor. “…any plans for the mint building? I understand that the new congress in Magdeburg has passed a law phasing out local coinages.”
“Duke Ernst is hoping to get a regional mint for the province. The prospects look good, because this location should attract skilled metallurgists easily. If the former electoral armory can be expanded to include a more extensive manufacturing facility, the number of jobs…”
They ended at the Nabburgertor, with its round twin towers topped by the second-level octagons and pointed roofs, far more impressive than the others with their single, squat, square towers, and stopped for a while. Paolo looked up. This was where he and Carlo had first entered Amberg. It was the main gate for travelers coming from a generally southeasterly direction.
The up-timers weren’t impressed with Amberg’s fortifications. The soldiers had a tendency to look at them and say, “Those wouldn’t really hold up for long under a good artillery barrage. Not like the fortifications at Ingolstadt.” Amberg city councillors who heard such remarks devoutly thanked providence that the Vils was a small river, unsuited to the famous ironclads that had done so much damage to the fortifications of Hamburg.
Paolo still found that being surrounded by walls, not to mention gates that were securely locked at night, was something that made him sleep more peacefully. Of all the things about Grantville that had disturbed him, the lack of walls had been the greatest.
Bamberg was as bad, of course—completely open to the countryside. All rational men knew that the countryside was full of wolves and bears and things that went bump in the night.
Maybe that was why the up-timers in the SoTF government hadn’t made more of a fuss about moving the capital there. One of the up-time women at the Red Cross had said that city walls gave her claustrophobia.
He mentioned it.
“Interesting word,” Böcler answered. “Greek in origin. The opposite would be agoraphobia from the open square in towns of the classical era…”
To any passer-by who might be listening, they were a couple of men, probably clerks of some kind, having a casual conversation about the peculiar things that clerks talked about, even if one of them did happen to be the administrator’s private secretary.
Nothing to see, here.
The parts of their conversation that had taken place along the stretches of walls between the busy gates where busy ears might be listening had been more to the point.
***
Böcler pulled Paolo into his first, highly UNofficial, meeting with Duke Ernst. Stating firmly that reporters were to be definitely EXcluded. None of this was to be mentioned to them. And told him not to speak until he was spoken to, since Duke Ernst had indicated he was willing to entertain the suggestion presented by an Italian business machines factor, but had not committed himself to accepting a proposal from a sales representative for business machines who might not, if one listened carefully to the way he spoke, be a factor for a firm selling business machines.
Although he definitely was that, Böcler had assured his employer. Fucilla and his partner, Carlo Rugatti, sold a lot of office supplies in the region.
“It’s not as if I would have to sneak into the city,” Paolo pointed out in that preliminary conversation attended by the three of them, “since Ingolstadt is garrisoned by General Banér’s men, in the name of Gustav Adolf as emperor of the USE rather than as king of Sweden. They open the gates to let people in and out all the time. A couple on the north side are open all day. It’s not the army alone that needs supplies. There must be over five thousand civilians still there. It takes an ox-drawn wagon full of turnips a while to get through. They can’t be opening and closing them all the time. There are guards, but if I arrange a legitimate appointment with a legitimate potential customer, I can just go in.”
“Unless things have changed a lot,” Böcler said, “the garrison is responsible for guarding the gates of the outer fortification ring. It used to be, under the Bavarians. But the city is responsible for staffing the guard posts on the gates of the old inner fortification ring. This sometimes contributes to mis-communication, or at least lack of communication, between the two. The space between the two rings has never been fully settled. A lot of it is vegetable gardens chicken coops, rabbit hutches, owned by people who live inside the old walls.”
So, now, Paolo was one of eight men sitting around a table. Or seven men sitting at a table and one pacing restlessly around it.
“What is being done with the city militia these days?” That was a captain from the Grenzjaeger regiment that Duke Ernst had recruited during the Bavarian Crisis. The young officer seemed to be the only military man in the room; he was also the one doing the pacing. “I haven’t heard that it has been active. It wasn’t during the siege last year.”
“Nothing, much, as far as I know, Jurgen. Banér’s deputy in Ingolstadt doesn’t have much respect for militia. They do have their own weaponry, though, separate from that of the armory for the garrison troops in the Neues Schloss. He hasn’t confiscated that; the first attempts aroused too much in the way of civic unrest.”
Paolo thought it was interesting that the answer came from the civilian secretary, Böcler. None of General Banér’s staff were present, which was potentially even more interesting. Jurgen would be Captain (recently promoted from lieutenant) Lux. Paolo found the honors lists published among the classified advertisements to be endlessly interesting.
“But since the militia consists of the adult male citizens of the town and the citizens are pretty much the people upon whom Banér has quartered his soldiers…the Ingolstädter don’t love the USE any more than they loved Maximilian and a long string of his predecessors for quartering soldiers and workers extending the fortifications on them. In 1632, there were more of those in Ingolstadt than ordinary residents, not to mention the refugees. The city councilmen are free from quartering, at least in theory; the university members the same; the clergy the same. That leaves the ordinary people to bear the burden, which is pretty much the same whether the garrison consists of allies or enemies. Pile the epidemic the same year on top of that; no, the survivors have no great affection and admiration for soldiers, no matter whose soldiers.”
Thoroughness, thy alias is Johann Heinrich Böcler, Paolo thought.
“Why hasn’t the garrison dug Westerstetten out and turned him over to the SoTF long since?” Lux asked.
“I doubt that it has been one of General Banér’s priorities,” was Duke Ernst’s response. “And the Collegium and complex of university buildings are full of people, most of them university students and teachers. Who are what I would classify as non-combatants rather than part of the opposition.”
“If the Jesuits have been sheltering this man, I’d count them as part of the opposition, if I were you.”
“Does the garrison commander even know he’s there?” The fourth person at the table was an up-timer to whom Paolo had not been introduced. There had been no formal introductions at all. He wasn’t military; he wasn’t young.
Paolo did recognize the fifth, utterly unexpected, person at the table. Father Caspar Hell, S.J., rector of the Jesuit Collegium. Attended by Jacob Balde, S.J., as the sixth, in much the same way that Duke Ernst was attended by Böcler.
Hell’s voice was firm. “Even if the Jesuit Order is showing signs of an internal split, sending the Swedish army into one of our establishments would piss us all off. It might even push the ones who are now inclined to cooperate with the USE back into the reactionary camp.”
Duke Ernst tapped on the table. “How many? Any real idea?”
“How many what?”
“Students.”
Balde had an answer for that question. “There used to be well over a thousand students, probably about twelve hundred, before the Swedish intervention in 1630. The next year, enrollment dropped—plunged really—by maybe a third. I can’t tell you how many more have decamped since General Banér took it for the Oberpfalz. That has to have made a lot of parents nervous; no rational person can assume that Duke Maximilian will be content to leave a USE garrison in Ingolstadt indefinitely. If I was the Catholic father of an adolescent boy down here in the southeast, I think I’d send him somewhere that wasn’t right on the edge of what has been some pretty major combat in the recent past and could be again.”
He leaned back. “Like Graz or Vienna. Or Salzburg, for that matter, where Paris de Lodron is busily creating a nice new episcopally-funded university with modern facilities and all four faculties plus a new one that he is calling theoretical and applied sciences rather than technology or engineering—in a place barely touched by the war. With a big astronomical observatory. A botanical garden. A hospital modeled on Leahy in Grantville. He’s building it out of the struggling little liberal arts school the Benedictines started there fifteen years ago. He’s…”
Everyone in the room contemplated Salzburg for a few minutes. As prince-archbishops went, Paris de Lodron was an effective, so far successful, prince.
“…making out like a bandit,” Jacob Balde continued. “As for Ingolstadt…the location, the fortifications… My best estimate would be that five hundred or six hundred students are there today.”
Duke Ernst made it absolutely clear to everyone that he had no intent of authorizing the burning out of over five hundred university students and eighty or so professors, secular and clerical, to get at one witch-hunting bishop. No, not even if they were Catholic students with quite a number of Jesuit professors.
He looked at the sixth person at the table. Nor would he wink or look away if anybody else who fell under his jurisdiction as imperial administrator of the Upper Palatinate tried it.
Werner von Dalberg’s narrow face remained impassive. His light gray eyes, usually as icy as a frozen lake under an overcast sky, might have flickered slightly, but probably not. He indicated his understanding by a slight wave of one of his long-fingered hands.
Duke Ernst left nothing at all to anyone’s imagination.
He might not be looking in the direction of Neuburg right now. He would, if he must.
He would not cower away from this, even under threat.
He would not be part of this.
Nor parcel of this.
Nor tolerate this.
Nor wink at this.
Nor…
They were going to have to think of something else—some way other than outright aggression—to get hold of Johann Christoph von Westerstetten before—as everyone seemed to think they might—the CoCs from Bamberg and other points in Franconia invaded another province of the USE in pursuit of the man, the way the CoCs from Magdeburg Province had invaded Mecklenburg and those from the eastern USE generally had invaded the Rhineland.