Chapter 19
Carlo came home from the shop wearing a new, heavy, coat and a fur-lined hat with ear flaps. “Wish Book. The package was waiting at the post office.”
Paolo eyed them. “Those will never fit in a backpack if we end up having to leave town.” He looked around the room. “Any more than all this furniture would.”
Which wasn’t one of his worries. They had rented the furniture from the estate of a deceased tinsmith (a long-time friend of Frau Mechthilde’s late father).
“It’s cold out. Jozef says that, according to his father’s arthritis, it’s going to get colder in the next few days.”
“German winters! Anything else of interest in the mail?”
“Not in the mail. Not at the Golden Lion. There’s no news to be had, since our best source is out of town.”
Carlo shook his head. “I knew I hadn’t seen him around for a few days, but I just put it down to the weather. Everyone with sense is huddling around a stove. Crouching on a hearth, if they can’t afford a stove. Did Böcler finally get permission to follow Duke Ernst into Saxony?”
“Nothing so fortunate for him. He’s been sent to sort paperwork in Ingolstadt. If you ask me, Birkenfeld-Bischweiler isn’t making the best use of him. He spent a long enough time sitting behind Ernst Wettin’s shoulder, silently taking notes, that he knows where every significant political corpse in the Upper Palatinate is interred.”
The newspaper reporters missed Böcler, too. The administrator’s secretary was reliable. Distressingly discreet, but anything he did say was certain to be accurate.
The Golden Lion was prospering. In the autumn, Frau Mechthilde had a fine ceramic tile stove, brown and tan, with molded images of fruits and vegetables, installed in the dining room. In spite of Dionys’ grumbling, she wasn’t skimping on the firewood, so the dining room was almost always full. The flue ran up through the second story and shared the warmth with the sleeping rooms; most of the time, they stayed above freezing.
“Birkenfeld-Bischweiler is an interim appointment,” Georg Betz said. Hans Seidel, the other stringer from Nürnberg, had been caught by an ice storm and hadn’t made it back from Sulzbach, so Betz had come in looking for company.
“That is not news,” was Ranke’s retort. “Everyone has known from the outset that all he wants to do is get back to the Rhineland—didn’t even bring his family with him. Until he can, he’ll just sit up in the Schloss, all nice and comfy, marking time, while those of us who have to go outdoors in search of non-existent news have dripping noses and half-frozen toes.”
“What is it that the uptime woman, Frau Pilcher, says so annoyingly in every conversation? ‘Y’know, y’know, y’know.’” Stentzel Grube frowned. “Y’know, if you ask me, something’s about to pop.”
Sebastian Kellermeister was missing from the group. He was over at the normal school (which did not feature glorious ceramic stoves), his gloved fingers tucked inside his jerkin, discussing current events with politically interested students.
“I’m not so sure that Böcler is just sorting papers in Ingolstadt,” he said. “The interim administrator has to be concerned about what is going on inside the university. If he isn’t, he certainly should be. Getting Westerstetten out didn’t mean getting friends of progress and enlightenment in.”
“What’s Keitel doing? Does anybody know?”
Sebastian glanced at Dee Hardy, who mouthed, “Cordula Bader. From Neuburg.”
“Well, Fräulein Bader, that’s not a question with a simple answer. Given the close cooperation of the various CoC groups…”
“You sort of ducked what Cordula asked,” Dee said later.
“It would need a lecture of its own, given the overlap between what may or may not be going on in Ingolstadt, what Keitel may or may not be doing, and what we don’t know about Eichstätt. About which, since it’s in the SoTF, Keitel really shouldn’t be doing anything at all, but probably is. I don’t want to be responsible for starting rumors.”
“What have you heard, though?”
“So far, the cathedral chapter hasn’t elected a successor; there wasn’t any designated coadjutor at the time Westerstetten met with his ‘unfortunate accident.’” That was Rector Muselius, who couldn’t be fobbed off as easily as a student.
“With the papal situation, Urban in exile, not to mention the attitude of the SoTF administration… Separation of church and state or not, they’ll have something to say, I’m sure… Someone will drop a discreet word to the pope regarding eligibility. The last thing that Bamberg is going to want is a duplicate of Westerstetten in one of the Franconian Catholic dioceses. Von Hatzfeld holds the other two and supposedly is cooperating with Piazza’s administration fairly well.”
Sebastian pulled off his gloves and rubbed his fingers together, which gave him a little time to collect his thoughts. “I’m not sure that the canons will be able to elect any time soon. The everyday routines will go on, even if the old chancellor and his staff are still hiding in Ingolstadt. As far as the cathedral is concerned, I don’t know much about the suffragan—his name is Resch—but the fellow who was there several years ago swore by the Malleus Maleficarum. The vicar general is new—Georg Motzel is his name. He had only been in office a year or so when Westerstetten met his fate. Also young, about thirty, I’d guess. According to my father, he’s one of the sons of old Georg Motzel who was the episcopal Amtmann at Arberg and died the first year of the war.”
So much for the facts.
Should he express his private speculations?
“The interim administrator has sent his private secretary down to Ingolstadt. Böcler knows Motzel because both of them have aspirations to write a history of this war; from opposite perspectives, of course. But they are acquainted, so who—other than a Jesuit in the intransigent party, who would be unlikely to share information with the provincial administration—would be in a better position to find out what’s happening than our friend, while he chats about Herodotus and Tacitus with a professional acquaintance after he’s spent a day sorting papers? Böcler is excellent at looking through paperwork and making sense of what it doesn’t say.”
Magdeburg, capital of the USE
January 1636
The leaders of the Fourth of July Party had gathered to discuss the Crown Loyalists’ “concessions” regarding established churches. Helene Gundelfinger, vice president of the SoTF, identified three major points that might make the “concessions” essentially worthless. Werner von Dalberg, lawyer that he was, responded with a long musing on probable potential outcomes of court cases that might be brought regarding each of them, concluding that the proponents of meaningful religious toleration would probably win on the first two, whereas regarding the third…
Rebecca Abrabanel cut him short, but when the issue of confirmation of Oxenstierna’s choice to replace Wilhelm Wettin as prime minister arose, he went right back to the constitution of the USE, the laws on the books, and the impossibility that the impaired emperor could, at present, meet the requirement of confirming the Swedish chancellor’s puppet prime minister. “Judges will be aghast at the reckless procedural violations by Oxenstierna’s supporters.”
Von Dalberg was present. Ed Piazza was not; worried about the Bavarian threat to the Upper Palatinate, he had stayed in Bamberg. Von Dalberg would much rather have stayed in Amberg; he spoke strongly in favor of the proposal to form a FoJP executive committee with Rebecca Abrabanel at the head, warned that it shouldn’t become too Magdeburg-oriented but rather formalize some process for bringing in the views of the provinces, and signed off with, “I need to get back as fast as possible. The fight against the Bavarians is getting intense, and so is the political spill-off.”
Von Dalberg had dinner with Charlotte Kienitz, his Mecklenburg counterpart, at the Golden Arches. They talked about Alessandro Scaglia’s new book on the “soft landing” that had come out of the Spanish Netherlands; Rebecca’s proposed counterpoint.
“And more.” He pulled a book with a cracked spine and worn, blue-cloth surfaced, hard cover out of his briefcase. Charlotte gasped softly: it must be an up-time original, worth a fortune, and he was carrying it around Magdeburg? Where the police, no matter how hard they tried, did not keep perfect order in a rough, industrializing, city?
Von Dalberg’s lips quirked. “Ernst Wettin loaned it to me before the emperor transferred him. By way of his brother Albrecht, by way of the private library of an up-timer teaching ‘principles of public administration’ at the University of Jena. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution. Because so many people tell us that the USE’s new governmental system is ‘quasi-parliamentary with a constitutional monarchy, based to some extent on the nineteenth-century English model,’ rather than purely a copy of the American system that the up-timers used, I thought I should inform myself, insofar as possible.”
“I haven’t even heard of it. Or of the author.”
“Apparently, it was not that widely known—at least not in a rural county of West Virginia anno domini 2000. Yet, upon reading it, I think I came to understand what I am facing in the Upper Palatinate considerably better. Bagehot talks about the need to ‘break the cake of custom’ before reform can be introduced. In your Mecklenburg, Krystalnacht and its aftermath have disrupted a rigid system: one of those cakes. Hard, dried, compacted, north German peat. Bagehot was not talking about a sweet Kuchen stuffed with damsons or pears. He was thinking of a cow pie baked hard by the summer sun, so that it takes an equally hard kick to break it. Often a violent kick, carried out and delivered by an equally violent man.”
“I agree.” Charlotte chewed the last of her fries, a meditative expression on her face. “Your point is?”
“By the time Gustav Adolf’s troops, the USE, Ernst Wettin—or I, for that matter—arrived in the Upper Palatinate, the local cow pie was already a pile of small lumps, cracked by the Palatine electors over three quarters of a century and then shattered by Maximilian of Bavaria over a decade. A ceramic pitcher smashed to shards, if you will, impossible to glue back together and reuse in its old form. Certainly in the matter of religion.”
“We heard that you cooperated with Ernst Wettin.” Charlotte’s eyebrows went up.
“It’s not that easy to rile up fury against an ‘evil overlord’ when the current titular occupant of the position is a mild-mannered, quite competent, man. Against an ‘invader’ when the current invader is expending a lot of resources to defend you against the previous one. Against ‘economic oppression’ when an industrial revival—not an introduction of industry, but the revival of one that employed almost a third of the workers in the province recently enough that living men remember those days—is bringing renewed prosperity. When a good proportion of the ‘ruling class’ with the ear of the administrator spent a dozen years in exile and is more focused on reclaiming legal rights to estates from other members of their own class than on oppressing the peasants who lease them, even a good, generalized ‘down with the nobles’ evokes a lot of yawns. ‘Abolish serfdom’ or even the ‘abolish the vestiges of serfdom’ slogan that the up-timers used so cleverly in Franconia doesn’t resound, doesn’t constitute a meaningful rallying cry, in a territory where serfdom hasn’t existed for nearly two centuries.”
Von Dalberg was attached to precision. “Well, there were some serfs in the southwest, around Ingolstadt and in Neuburg, but those are Bavarian areas that have been incorporated into the province quite recently and the serfs were ducal or comital, working directly on the possessions of the rulers. I don’t know of any noble or patrician member of the Estates who felt pain when the law freeing Duke Maximilian’s serfs, and those of Wolfgang Wilhelm, passed. They’re the people who passed it. With considerable malicious glee.”
Charlotte laughed. “I feel your pain.”
“Seriously. If there is any province in the USE where I see a prospect for achieving the Fourth of July Party’s aspirations, what we want, the reforms that the country needs, without violent revolution, the changes accepted, however reluctantly, by the majority of the powerful, rather than enduring the obdurate, reactionary, response you dealt with in Mecklenburg and we are facing now in the form of the Berlin conspiracy…may Axel Oxenstierna rot where he lies!…it will be the Upper Palatinate. I don’t have any illusions that it will come easily or without setbacks. I have hopes that, with hard work, it may come.” He tucked the book back into the briefcase and picked up his now-cold Reuben sandwich.
Amberg, Upper Palatinate
January 1636
Sebastian Kellermeister had found transportation to Magdeburg. He wasn’t present at the FoJP meeting, of course; much less at the Golden Arches for the Kienitz/von Dalberg conversation. Nevertheless, a reporter could usually find someone willing to talk. Like a waiter, for example. Von Dalberg’s opinions made the Amberg headlines.