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Chapter 7


Amberg, Upper Palatinate

December 1634


Back in August, far away in Magdeburg, a committee dealing with school reform concluded that they had everything for the current project organized, which had taken far longer than they had originally hoped. The staff put together a packet containing the organizational chart and proposed curriculum for an Imperial Normal School designed to establish a model for the training of elementary school teachers for the villages of the United States of Europe, boxed it up, and sent it off to Duke Ernst in the Upper Palatinate.

The new institution would open in Amberg in September, the cover letter informed him cheerfully, and would be, for the time being, located in the building of the Jesuit Collegium. In fact, it would be sharing the building with the Jesuit Collegium.

Duke Ernst had looked at the cover letter and made a rapid executive decision. That opening date would be September 1635; definitely not September 1634.

The proposed institution did not have a permanent rector. It didn’t even have an interim rector. The packet did not even contain a recommendation for a rector. That, in an environment that functioned largely on the basis of patronage and nepotism—a couple of rather pejorative terms that might be more neutrally described as social networking, or less neutrally described as cronyism, or… Such a lack was practically unheard-of.

For the moment, Duke Ernst added the matter to his personal secretary’s workload. That was obviously not a feasible solution for the long term.

The committee, which consisted entirely of upper-middle-class, up-time, women, focused on modernizing and improving pedagogical methodology. The members had not, by and large, worried about most of the pragmatic questions that plagued the mind of Johann Heinrich Böcler on those occasions when he had a few spare minutes to think about the matter.

A recommendation finally arrived in December, not from the imperially sponsored committee in Magdeburg but informally from Grantville: several recommendations, from several different people, for several different reasons. Duke Ernst decided to hire the young down-timer who had lived for years among Grantville’s up-timers as rector of the new Imperial Normal School that the emperor had decided to dump in his lap, partly because it appealed to his sense of humor to respond in that way to various solicitations he had received in regard to the employability of the man and partly because he was coming to realize that he probably should expand his understanding of the place and people that had instigated so many changes. Since he would be paying the man’s salary… Duke Ernst had a firm grasp on the reality of patronage. Namely that the person who controlled the purse strings controlled the project, no matter how courteously. Magdeburg was a long way away.

Böcler was simply relieved that when the new rector arrived, he would be able to hand off one of his several essentially full-time occupations to someone else. Nobody expected this Muselius to come until sometime in the spring, though; the weather was horrible this winter.


Amberg, Upper Palatinate

February 1635


The headlines in the Amberg papers moved on to the up-coming elections. There wasn’t much that their friends the reporters could tell Paolo and Carlo after hours that hadn’t already been printed. Hans Friedrich Fuchs had, to no one’s surprise, emerged as (under Duke Ernst) the leader of the provincial Crown Loyalists. Even the CoCs had trouble despising him other than on general ideological principles. Within the parameters of who he was and what he represented, Fuchs was a solid man. Not brilliant, no. By no means a potential convert to progressive opinions. Not villainous, either.

Brick Bozarth drew a cartoon in one of his reports to Ed Piazza. It showed Fuchs as Popeye the Sailor, proclaiming, “I yam what I yam.”

“If you find yourself working with him,” Bozarth wrote, “try not to back him into a corner early on, because once he takes a stand on something, he can’t be budged any more than Press Richards can once he’s made up his mind about something. It’s equal opportunity stubbornness.”

Von Dalberg worked hard for the Fourth of July Party ticket. Outside of the province, he wasn’t yet really well-known in the upper FoJP circles, even though he attended their meetings in Magdeburg regularly.

Ed Piazza and Helene Gundelfinger worked with von Dalberg more closely than any of the other provincial leaders. What the rest of the upper leadership knew about him was generally favorable; Rebecca Abrabanel respected him. Constantin Ableidinger tended to proclaim that he was too preoccupied with twiddly little legal fine points. He didn’t hold any government position in the Upper Palatinate (yet, was the unspoken hope), but given the success of his various maneuvers with Ernst Wettin and Johan Banér, the FoJP leaders generally acknowledged that he had to be a skilled politician as well as an effective organizer.

Brick Bozarth, from his perch in Regensburg, wrote to Piazza, “The way he moves, I can imagine him on a basketball court at West Virginia University, playing for the Mountaineers. It’s the way he’s alert. He’s always looking around, ready to spot someone from the other team, coming at him from the side or behind, those long fingers with a firm grasp on the ball, but ready to hand it off to a team member if that’s the best chance to take the shot.”

As Rebecca Abrabanel said, the political situation for the Fourth of July Party—every political party in the USE, actually—was always tricky in those areas that were still under direct imperial administration.

In the Upper Palatinate, the Crown Loyalist ticket came in with a substantial majority. The province’s seat in the House of Lords was occupied ex officio by Duke Ernst, of course. The headlines emphasized that Wilhelm Wettin, the former Duke Wilhelm of Saxe-Weimar, Duke Ernst’s brother, would be, everyone assumed, the next prime minister. Neither von Dalberg nor Fuchs had been eligible to run for a seat in the House of Commons; neither man was a commoner.

“Mud time” would intervene before the new Crown Loyalist government of the USE actually took office in June.


***

Toward the end of the month, Carlo announced that he was heading out on another sales tour. “I figure,” he told the Stammtisch, “that I’ve sold about as many machines as I can locally, at least for the time being. My last little stay in Regensburg was profitable. I think it’s time to try a few other spots on the map.”

Paolo, who hoped to have a relaxing time, discovered that people were turning up at the shop almost every day, wanting things like repairs. Which he had to learn how to do. Refill kits, which he had to learn how to order. Demonstrations, which he had to learn how to perform. Catalogs, which he had to run off while they watched. And more of each of the above, along with a ledger to maintain.

Being a sales representative was tediously time-consuming, he concluded, and also constantly stressful. Soldiering had been occasionally stressful, but only in short bursts. The other services that he and Carlo provided at unpredictable intervals were usually more entertaining than stressful.

There was, of course, the benefit that nobody was shooting at him, much less catapulting Greek fire in his direction. So far.

There was also, of course, the problem of the deed to buy a house. A house currently owned by Frau Mechthilde’s older half-brother’s (on her mother’s side) first wife’s (deceased) maternal uncle (a butcher), who was planning to retire and go live with his surviving married daughter (yet one more Anna) in Kemnath, she had explained. Paolo still was far from certain that it was a good idea, but Carlo… It was likely the latest instance of Hold my beer and watch this. The alchemists, some of them, at least, had believed they could transmute lead into gold. He had serious apprehensions that he and Carlo, very shortly, would be in a position to closely observe the transmutation of gold into lead and the placement of that lead, in the form of tiles, on a leaky roof for which they had made themselves responsible.

He looked at their lawyer and asked, “Wouldn’t you be interested in purchasing a duplicating machine, Herr von Dalberg?”

That earned him a sour look and an admonition to pay closer attention to the tax implications of clause IV(A)(3)(ix) as they related to an agreement that had been concluded in regard to the piece of land on which the house was built in…1439. Oh, well.

On the fourth of March, nobody shot at Paolo, but someone did shoot at—successfully—the mayor of Grantville. Kellermeister and the other reporters were nearly frantic with excitement. All of them interviewed Paolo, because he had spent some time there and Amberg’s few up-timers were much too preoccupied by the assassination—no, two assassinations—to give them interviews.

Had he met the man?

No, but he had attended a meeting where he spoke.

Did he know the other men who were killed? Wiley and Beasley?

No.

No?

Sorry, but no. His time in Grantville had not included hobnobbing with the town’s elite. Rather more the contrary.

Not that, to the best of his recollection, Buster Beasley had been considered elite. Rather more the reverse, but he had no intention of badmouthing a sudden cultural icon.

He was grateful when Carlo got home safely, even if it did mean that they both had to sign the completed purchase agreement for the house, which Paolo was still not fully persuaded was something they should do. Not something they should have done, more accurately. It was too late to reverse it.

Still not holding a government position, and therefore still needing to earn a living, von Dalberg was still a practicing attorney. Shortly after they signed the purchase agreement, he called in Paolo and Carlo for a heart to heart discussion of estate planning and the importance of drawing up their wills, now that they had substantial assets.

Which led them to have a heart to heart discussion about the names they were currently using as compared to the names with which they were born. The likelihood that they still had living relatives in the far distant “back home.” The likelihood that such relatives would feud with one another incessantly if blessed with an unexpected inheritance. The pointed comment that von Dalberg had made to the effect that inheritance matters were always simpler if a man had direct heirs and bequeathed his possessions to said direct heirs in a fair and equitable division.

“I suppose we could write home.” Carlo rarely frowned, but he was frowning now as he stared at the fire flickering in their hearth that evening. “Ask Father Vituzzi if there are a couple of spare wives he could send us. Not girls. Women. Widows with kids okay. That way, at least, you definitely know that your bride is fertile. I’ve never understood this virginity fetish. Talk about buying a pig in a poke!”

“Vituzzi has to be in his grave.”

“Not really. He can’t have been more than forty years old when we left. Sure, he prepared us for our first communions—proclaiming all the time that we were clearly destined to become the devil’s property for our mischief—but he was really young, back then. It was his first parish.”

“He probably said a paternoster, maybe a whole rosary or the complete stations of the cross, when that recruiting officer came along and robbed the devil of what Father Vituzzi thought was his due.”

“Still, if he hasn’t been taken from the world by the plague or a rabid wolf, there’s no reason why he couldn’t be alive. Your father though…”

“That’s one of the hazards of being the last-born child of a man’s second marriage. But I spat at his feet the day I left, and told him to bequeath everything to Elisavetta, because I would never take it.”

They sat and looked at one another for a few minutes, then at the flickering flames, then back at one another.

“If Our Lady has spared her the most difficult travails of childbirth, if the mal’aria has not been too severe, if… Your sister may still walk among us.”

“Though it’s not likely that Luigi would permit her to receive a letter from me, much less pay a scribe to respond. Father never had her taught to read and write.”

Silence descended upon them again.

“If we wrote, we would have to use the names that were ours back then.”

“It could get confusing for everyone if we did—if a couple of woman arrived here expecting to marry A and B, only to find that we are now P and Q.”

“It might be more practical to try to find wives here. Surely Frau Mechthilde has a second cousin who has a great-uncle whose former housekeeper’s nephew’s widow…”

“She’d be German, and cook cabbage.”

They looked at the fire for a few minutes more.

“I know.” Carlo suddenly grinned. “We can order a couple from Vignelli. Needed: two nice Italian women from the Trientino, suitable to complete the appropriate image of a successful regional sales office in Amberg.”

That was definitely one of Carlo’s, Here, hold my beer inspirations.

On the other hand… “It does have the advantage that in Bolzano, they know us by the names we bear now.”

“An order for two nice Italian women, still of childbearing age, preferably trained in bookkeeping and accounting, willing to transfer.”

Paolo mentally filed the whole possibility under things that bore a whole lot more thinking about before a person did anything.

Carlo only stayed for a few days; then headed out again, telling people who came by the shop that he thought that he ought to make a sales trip to Salzburg and check on prospects in a few other places. Nobody thought this was odd; such expeditions were a part of his regular routine, and spring was bringing a break in the weather. It was probably a false break that heralded only the return of winter, but there was an occasional day when the frozen mess on the roads thawed to slush and the ruts were rearranged by the passing carts. Not to mention that Salzburg was in the opposite direction from the rising troubles in the USE. If a man was going on a trip, Salzburg sounded like a reasonable destination.



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