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Chapter 27


Amberg, Upper Palatinate

September 1636


The up-timers once more removed Duke Albrecht’s sons from the Collegium, bundled them into a flying machine, and took them away, this time to Freising, the headquarters that the USE army had established in Bavaria. Away from their long-time tutor Vervaux, the only stable factor in their lives. The pilot said that he’d have to find a horse and get himself to Freising if he wanted to go. Took them away, into the waiting arms of their father and of, presumably, the preceptress who would determine much of their future up-bringing. Mike Stearns’ sister Rita, the new USE ambassadress to Bavaria.

With no fanfare, after consulting their bank balance, Paolo and Carlo bought two good horses for Father Vervaux. Surely, His Eminence the archbishop of Salzburg would want them to do that much. Neither they nor any of the Jesuits mentioned this to the reporters—or, for that matter, to anyone else. It was a couple of weeks before anyone outside the Collegium noticed that Vervaux was gone.

“It would be nice if young Sigmund was allowed to return here; he’s quite artistic,” Balde said. “But now he’s in the direct line of succession, so his father is sure to keep him at the Wilhelminum in Munich. Maybe, eventually, when he does his grand tour, we’ll see him again.”

***

It was Frau Mechthilde who first mentioned that there was discussion up at the Schloss of moving the capital of the Oberpfalz from Amberg to Regensburg. She delivered the news to Paolo and Carlo as she slapped two plates containing mushroom omelets—only this inn could produce a tough omelet, Paolo thought—on the table in front of them. They were eating at the inn again because Domicilla’s second son’s wife was about to deliver her first child and she had requested a month’s leave. The housekeeper said that she didn’t cook.

Frau Mechthilde had heard it from her cousin Franz, whose fourth son had been cleaning harness in the tack house attached to the stables when two clerks had a conversation outside the door while waiting for their horses to be saddled.

When they passed the rumor on to their reporter friends, Kellermeister didn’t respond that the idea was outlandish.

This disappointed Paolo. Not that he wasn’t prepared for disappointment.

“They couldn’t accomplish it before next year,” Kellermeister mused, “but it does make sense. Regensburg is a much larger city than Amberg and economically stronger. It’s poorly placed geographically in that it is on the southern border of the province, but better placed militarily for keeping a wary eye on Bavaria. A much better platform for that.”

“The transportation is better there, too,” Grube added. “It’s a major river port, which Amberg certainly is not.”

“Not to mention,” Jacob Ranke commented, “that if Duke Albrecht should prove insubordinate in his actions, the emperor might swallow his reluctance to incorporate more Catholics into the USE and add what would become the former duchy of Bavaria to the USE outright. He wouldn’t want a majority-Catholic new province, though, so he might possibly, even probably, fold it into the Province of the Upper Palatinate, in which case Regensburg as the capital would be right in the middle of the expanded version.”

***

Something was going to have to be done about the ever-growing Imperial Normal School. Its students were spilling out of the Collegium building in every direction, tripping over University of Ingolstadt students in the corridors, studying in the streets whenever the weather allowed it, cramming themselves into Amberg’s attics and basements after the dormitory ran out of space for cots and bunks, eating the nearby inns and food trucks out of their daily supplies, and sometimes coming nearly to blows over a ream of paper at the stationer’s or the last copy of a required textbook in one of the bookstores.

At which point, three wagons arrived from Grantville, full of freshman enrollees, up-timers and down-timers. Which didn’t count the new students from the rest of the Oberpfalz. From the rest of the USE. From Bohemia across the border. Much less the illicit border-crossers from Bavaria.

Only the Grantville contingent was fully pre-enrolled. The deans worked a lot of overtime. Their clerical staff worked more. The headline in the Amberg Global News (page four, below the fold) read:


Rector of Normal School Hiring New Staff Rapidly


The space crunch was rapidly reaching a level of no-longer-optional-to-take-it-seriously, particularly since Muselius was fiercely determined that the long-standing custom of Pennalismus, the fierce physical and mental hazing of incoming students by the older ones, against which the faculties of most German universities had been struggling with no notable progress for what was now close to a century, was not, definitely not, going to take root at the normal school, particularly in light of its co-educational nature. But preventing it was going to require firm, consistent, close adult supervision, which was not possible when the boys were finding rooms, helter-skelter, here and there, all over the town, sometimes renting whole houses and turning them into residential groups, and starting to organize private eating clubs.

Caspar Hell, S.J., rector of the Jesuit Collegium, and Jonas Justinus Muselius, B.A., rector of the Imperial Normal School, both had the same thought.

If the provincial administration moved to Regensburg, then…

Turning the Schloss over to the normal school would solve so many problems for everyone. Really, the Schloss was in good condition, not some moldering medieval structure; it had been modernized, enlarged and reconditioned a lot during the regency of Christian of Anhalt a half-century ago.

Not to mention that there was a certain satisfaction to be found in the possibility that the architectural efforts of that most Calvinist of the various Calvinists who had inflicted their doctrines on the hapless residents of the Upper Palatinate over the course of modern history would go primarily to the benefit of Catholics and Lutherans. Even this long after the expulsion of the Bavarians, not a lot of Calvinists had returned.

***

“If von Dalberg does move the capital,” Paolo predicted, “we’ll lose everything. Our market will disappear. Nobody is going to make a trip from Regensburg to Amberg to buy office supplies, and we’re tied down with the house and shop. He has to know how disadvantageous such a change would be to us. He’s the lawyer who handled the house purchase; both the leases.”

Carlo thought back to their interview on the citizenship issue. “He’s probably forgotten all about us again. Not deliberately, but because he’s overworked. Over-committed. His mind is full of politics now, with no room for people who used to be his private clients.”

“We will lose everything. The FoJP headquarters will move if the capital does—we won’t even have the rent from the upstairs rooms to help offset the lease payments on the shop.”

“Naked came I,” Carlo answered, referencing Job. “And naked will I leave. The LORD gives and the LORD takes away; blessed be the name of the LORD. No matter what comes next, this has been one of our longest and best runs. Besides…”

Paolo groaned.

“…it hasn’t happened yet.”

***

In Bolzano, Arno Vignelli read the same headlines. “Take a memo.”

His clerk took up fountain pen and clipboard.

“Instruct Fucilla and Rugatti that if the Oberpfalz legislature does transfer the capital, they are to hire someone to handle Amberg, which can become a branch office serving the northern portion of the province. I really don’t know why we haven’t opened up a permanent station in Regensburg earlier than this: in the long run, a major river port on the Danube certainly offers prospects for more development than a small city up in the sticks. If they’ll need a capital advance…”

“But they aren’t even…” his clerk protested feebly. “Remember what we heard from Brussels!”

“Have you looked closely at the profits they return to the firm?”

“What do you want me to do about the order for wives?”

“Look into it; see if they were serious. If so…”

***

For his homily at St. Georg’s the next Sunday, Caspar Hell chose Joshua 11:23 as the text: “So Joshua took the whole land, according to all that the LORD said unto Moses; and Joshua gave it for an inheritance unto Israel according to their divisions by their tribes. And the land rested from war.”

“Except, of course for the Ottomans,” Paolo whispered.



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