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Chapter 25


Sebastian Kellermeister let the dining room door of the Golden Lion slam behind him. “Alert, everybody. Incoming news. Böcler has taken a new job, with that David Bartley who serves the USE Third Division as some kind of procurement specialist.”

Paolo looked up. “Is there any hope of getting him back?”

“No.”

“That’s too bad.” Paolo meant it.

***

Up at the Schloss, Christian von Pfalz-Birkenfeld-Bischweiler reacted by asking Böcler’s assistant, who had been filling in since January, if he would accept the position on a permanent basis. The administrator of the Upper Palatinate, whoever that administrator might be, needed a competent secretary.

“No, I’m going back to Helmstedt in the fall. Originally, I didn’t plan to take more than a year out of my studies. I would have returned this term if Heinz hadn’t gotten caught in that chaos in Ingolstadt. I’ve promised Professor Calixtus that there won’t be any more delays.”

“Then I’ll need to hire someone else. Even though it’s only three months to the election and my return, I most sincerely hope, to the Rhineland, I’ll still need someone. As will my successor, so I need to get someone in place now while you can train him.”

Werner von Dalberg gave some brief thought to the obvious truth that if he thoroughly disliked any of the potential replacements for Böcler, he could, given the current political situation, get rid of—torpedo was the word since the siege of Amsterdam—the candidacy simply by making a favorable comment about him where it could be overheard in public. Somewhat regretfully, he decided not to, mostly because none of the candidates was really objectionable and they were, in truth, as far as their formal qualifications went, nearly interchangeable.

“He picked one of the younger Richius boys rather than Anton Pilgel,” Sebastian said to the politically interested students of the normal school. “Neidhardt Richius. That family—it’s from over by Neumarkt—went into exile in Brandenburg in 1629—they’d dragged things out with the Bavarian officials as long as they possibly could, so they weren’t gone long before they, some of them, at least, came back. Given the competing recommendations provided by Sauerzapf vs. von der Grün’s widow vs. Lobenstein, every one of them with a protégé, and it’s not as if a person can expect the Lindharts to agree with the Rummels about anything, much less the Neumars with old Murach. Nobody really knows what the Kolbs and Brandts are thinking, much less Dietz. It’s probably as uncontroversial a choice as the administrator could have managed. It’s not as if it will be a long-term appointment if the Fourth of July Party wins in July—which almost everyone expects that it will. Still, it’s a step up for a man beginning his career.”

Dee Hardy listened to the names slide by her and thought, It’s not what you know; it’s who you know. Which, actually, had been pretty much the same up-time. Ms. Mailey had called it the “old boys’ network” and given quite a tirade on it in Social Studies.

***

The Estates, in the meantime, hired Konrad Balthasar Pichtel (sponsored by the countess of Pfalz-Sulzbach) as their own chancellor and supervisor of the finance office, coaxing him to return from his secure sanctuary in the far north. Pichtel had impeccably Lutheran credentials: not only was he a native son of Amberg, where his father had served the electors Palatine as an adviser during one of the Lutheran episodes of its past history, but his preparation involved secondary school in Nürnberg, liberal arts study in Altdorf, and law studies at Wittenberg, Leipzig, and Frankfurt am Oder, leading to the Doctor juris. A clerkship at the Imperial Supreme Court, the Reichskammergericht; most recently, he had been working for the duke of Holstein-Gottorp. He also had a wife whose family was furnished with equally impeccable Lutheran credentials; her father was chancellor of the Abbess of Herford—a lady second only to the Abbess of Quedlinburg when it came to prestige among Lutheran canonesses.

Whatever or whomever the voters might foist upon the Upper Palatinate in the coming election, the members of the Estates as they had been reconstituted by Duke Ernst now felt that they had acquired a doughty champion, fully prepared to enter the lists in combat with the Old Evil Foe (cf. Ein’ feste Burg), whatever form he might take. Most likely, in the immediate future, that of an at-least-nominally-Catholic Fourth of July Party governor.

***

Keith Pilcher opened the packet from Arnold Bellamy’s office. Two men meeting the descriptions of Fucilla and Rugatti had spent well over a year in Grantville, going by the names of Piero Abrazamontis and Tomasso Sardella. They were known to the Office of Vital Statistics, where they had registered their birthplace as Cicciano in the Campania. They were known to the SoTF National Guard only in the form of signed paroles; they had declined the offer to join up. They were not known to the police in the sense of having offended against good order to the extent of being arrested for any misdemeanor or felony, although Preston Richards had added a note in his own handwriting, “as to what they may have gotten up to that we didn’t catch them at…” They had occasionally attended services at St. Mary’s and obligingly sat through the civics lectures, but as the turnover in staff there had been almost total between 1633 and 1636… At the time they left, they had been working for Garland Alcom.

As to why they had changed their names, Bellamy had no explanation to offer.

Garland Alcom could have given them a good guess, but he was out of town again. At the time, he had thought that what Monkey and Ape Hart got after they pissed off Piero and Tomasso was no more than what they had coming to them. Still—the two Italians had been good workers, former soldiers with a fair understanding of explosives who easily picked up a lot more knowledge about primers and percussion caps while they were working for him, but they were foreigners and the two of them kind of kept to themselves. Ape and Monkey were local Grantville boys with a lot of friends. He hadn’t been surprised when Piero and Tomasso quit and left town.

It had been a real Here, hold my beer and watch this episode while it lasted, though. The laudanum-drugged Ape and Monkey, stuffed into partial Bo-Peep costumes, each with half of a blonde wig glued to his head with an up-time, non-water-soluble, adhesive. The other half of their scalps ornamented with turquoise dye in designs similar to the face paintings that children got at the annual fair, posed decoratively in front of the 250 Club when dawn came to Grantville that sunny morning.

Bibi Barlow never admitted to supplying Piero and Tomasso with a cheap, bedraggled, extraordinarily beruffled, Halloween costume that she’d once worn, years before, as a gag. But nobody ever denied that Bibi was a very big woman, and Bibi had been pissed off at Ape and Monkey, too.


July 1636


“It only makes sense that von Dalberg is waiting out the election returns here in Amberg rather than going to Magdeburg,” Kellermeister said.

It was a significant wait. The election process had taken ten days and getting the returns took nearly that long. Amberg reported first, with a good turnout. Also with a narrow, very narrow, margin—at least in the gubernatorial race. When it came to throwing the rascals out of the city council, by contrast, a lot of them were tossed a long way.

There was an excellent turnout in Regensburg, which was good for the FoJP.

In the mining and ironworking areas, the Crown Loyalists really shouldn’t have even gone to the trouble of running candidates.

Ingolstadt still had a large USE garrison, mostly made up of the SoTF National Guard.

“A lot of those SoTF Guardsmen voted absentee at their homes and in person in Ingolstadt. The election officers weren’t brave enough to challenge them. The Crown Loyalists will complain.” That was Jacob Ranke.

“They’ll be quite justified in doing so,” Stentzel Grube admitted. “If they sued and I was the judge, I would find in their favor.”

Fortunately for von Dalberg, the FoJP majority in the province as a whole turned out to be large enough—sixty percent—that the discrepancies in Ingolstadt had no effect on the final outcome.

Fuchs held onto his seat in the Estates. But even Keitel admitted to von Walberg, more than somewhat reluctantly, that other than missing the later Neuburg eruption of witch trials, all the information provided by Fuchs had been accurate. It was probably better that the new governor would be working with him than with some of the other Crown Loyalists he could name.

Count Christian of Pfalz-Birkenfeld-Bischweiler stayed barely long enough to perform the essential courtesies of turning over the administration to the new regime; then he shook the dust of the Oberpfalz off his sandals and headed back to the Rhineland, leaving only a parting recommendation that von Dalberg really ought to retain Richius, at least for a while, because he had, himself, found Duke Ernst’s experienced secretary invaluable at the time of his own appointment.

***

Dee Hardy read every word in Sebastian Kellermeister’s political columns.

“I hope the new governor has fun,” she commented one evening. Supper at the normal school was not the kind of gourmet experience that caused a girl to focus on what she was eating. It was better to just choke down the mystery meat and hope for the best.

“What now?” Cordula asked.

“Let’s see. He gets to oversee the drafting of a new provincial constitution, somehow funnel the newly elected members of your…” She paused, racking her brain for what remnants of her freshman civics class might remain in memory. “That’s it! unicameral—one house, not divided into lords and commons.” She beamed as the only other shred of information she possessed on the matter rose to the surface. “Nebraska had one; it was the only state that did. I got the answer right on a social studies test that Mr. Thomas gave us. So, funnel your unicameral Estates into whatever new legislative body that the new constitution designs… If you ask me, he’d better be hoping against hope that it’s unicameral also, because otherwise it sure will be a nightmare to sort out which member belongs in which house, and…what else?”

The political science club also wanted to discuss “what else,” so they invited Kellermeister back.

“He’ll have to finish trying to blend the six major component parts of the new Upper Palatinate into some kind of single structure.”

“Which six?” That was Samuel Svoboda, a wandering Bohemian (in the geographical rather than ideological sense of the word; he was quite properly behaved) who had no familiarity with the structure of the province in which he found himself attending college.

“The Oberpfalz proper, that’s the old Upper Palatinate, is the largest. Then the three parts of the Junge-Pfalz—Neuburg, Sulzbach, and Hilpoltstein—Regensburg, and Ingolstadt. With occasional bits and pieces of other jurisdictions, here and there, such as Cham, Vilseck, and Parkstein, not to mention Leuchtenberg and its potential complications with Bavaria. When the young dukes inherit—for that matter, now, with their father as their guardian—the governor will face the charming situation that the duke of Bavaria owns a big chunk of real estate in the middle of the Upper Palatinate. Doesn’t rule it anymore, but still owns it; nobody got around to confiscating it after the USE threw Maximilian out. I suppose they all had too many other things on their minds. How would you like to be the tax collector who gets to go to Munich, hat out, and say, ‘Ante up, please, Your Grace; according to the assessor, your revised bill amounts to…’?”

“Oh!”

“Maybe they can wait a while and take it for back taxes if the duke doesn’t pay up. That happened, up-time. There were auctions at the courthouse in Fairmont; it was a pretty good way to get hold of a piece of land, cheap, as long as you were willing to wait out the lawsuits. The buyer almost always got sued by the previous deadbeat of an owner unless he’d croaked himself with an overdose or something.”

***

“In practice,” Stentzel Grube said, “the new governor is going to have to spend more of his time on the always charming issue of the privileges of chartered towns vis-a-vis the countryside. It’s not as sexy as dealing with Bavarian dukes, but for meaningful modernization of the provincial structure, it’s as important as breaking the Hammereinung was for the iron industry.”

Paolo sensed marketable information in the offing. “What do you mean?”

“Well, for example—” Grube picked up the latest issue of the Current Tidings, which had expanded from four pages weekly to six, and pointed to a paragraph well down among the legal advertisements. “Floß wants to have its own apothecary. It’s larger than a lot of the towns with charters, but legally it’s a village. So how is the Dalberg administration going to handle it? Ask Emperor Gustav Adolf to issue it a town charter? Decide that the governor can issue a town charter? Write a provision into the new constitution that the provincial legislature can charter towns? Pass a law that villages can have any kind of business that wants to open up in them? Those kinds of decisions don’t happen by magic. Someone has to make them.”

“It’s probably a good thing, then, that he’s a lawyer.”

“Not really. Any administrator can hire competent lawyers when he needs them. It’s a better thing that he’s a good organizer.”

***

Carlo had been corresponding with the clerk in Bolzano for so long now that in his letter dated July 24th (Gregorian calendar), he made a joke about the possibility of submitting an order for a couple of nice Italian wives.

In the clerk’s mind, matrimony was not a joke. Marriage was a business matter, involving prenuptial contracts and family alliances. This possibility behooved a more serious look at the credentials of these two sales representatives in the Oberpfalz. After all, his Aunt Emiliana’s third daughter…

Their paperwork was not in order. The dossiers contained no signed originals prior to the first order that the manufactory had received from Carlo Rugatti two years earlier. It appeared that some careless or hurried predecessor had—slightly forged the earlier documents. Possibly to cover his ass for having misplaced the signed originals, but…

He instituted a more diligent search through the files; then reported to Arno Vignelli that, according to his best efforts, it would appear that the firm had never actually employed two of its most effective sales representatives; that, indeed, the firm did not have the slightest idea how they came to occupy their current positions in Amberg. Given that no authorization for the opening of a branch office in Amberg existed in the files either!

Vignelli agreed to pay for a more thorough investigation.

Step by step, the inquiries made their way from Bolzano to Brussels.

Step by step, they made their way up the chain of command, ultimately reaching the desk of Miguel de Manrique. His adjutant, who had become something of an aficionado of an up-time entertainment series called Star Trek, smiled at the familiar face-palm gesture as his commander winced.

Madre de Dios!” Manrique exclaimed. “Those two survived? Again?”

“Those two?”

“Cast your mind back fifteen years. Winter quarters near Lille. The impossibility of getting Captain Darosa to ensure that his company maintained their arms in good condition, the lazy bastard. The mysterious disappearance of all those filthy muskets and nicked sabers from storage. The mysterious appearance of a company’s worth of impeccably cleaned and sharpened weapons in possession of the sutler—weapons so impeccably cleaned that no identifying marks were to be found on them; even when a hilt seemed somewhat familiar, it was not attached to the same blade that the claimant alleged should be the case. The cost to Darosa of purchasing a company’s worth of arms; his bitter recriminations. The subsequent unexplained prosperity of Giovanni Coppola and Lorenzo Esposito.”

“Oh. That pair.”

“Their prosperity didn’t last long, though. It never did, after one of their capers.”

“What should I tell this Vignelli?”



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