Chapter 8
According to poets, spring brought many things. April showers with following rainbows. May flowers adorned with dewdrops. Baby lambs gamboling in meadows. Tender lamb chops (or perhaps the poets didn’t dwell on those). Young lovers… Everyone knew pretty well what young lovers were inclined to do, spring or not.
There was not a lot of attention when the new young rector of the planned Imperial Normal School drove his wagon full of luggage, mainly comprising household effects and books, through the Vilstor toward the end of May, accompanied by his newly wed wife—the generally accepted adages concerning spring and young lovers might possibly be applicable—who was an up-timer. Paolo stood at the door of the shop, watching them go by. Grantville wasn’t a large city, but large enough that he had not met either of them during his time there. It would be interesting to see what happened next.
The lack of interest in Herr Muselius on the part of Amberg’s newspaper reporters was mostly because they were distracted by the incoming news from Rome.
Riots at the Vatican!
Several Cardinals Killed!
Pope Flees Rome!
With headlines like that available, it was hard to get
Rector of New Imperial Normal School Begins Hiring Permanent Staff
above the center fold, or even onto page four. Not even when several of those staff members were genuine up-timers who would be coming from Grantville and take up residence in Amberg. Herr Pilcher’s wife; Major Ebeling’s wife.
Not most of them, of course. There were nowhere near enough up-timers to supply the entire faculty of a new institution of higher education without stripping the Grantville schools of their teachers. There were certainly not enough up-timers who had the slightest desire to move to Amberg to supply it. Muselius was doing most of his hiring on the basis of recommendations sent from Bamberg by Wolfgang Radke—Ratichius, to use the Latinized form of his name—who was the Secretary of Education for the State of Thuringia-Franconia.
“It may or may not be coincidental,” Sebastian Kellermeister said, “that Ratichius is originally from Holstein. I note that the countess of Pfalz-Sulzbach is taking an interest in these educational developments.”
Stentzel Grube wrinkled his nose. “Her researcher in Grantville dug up an obscure footnote in an encyclopedia article on a different topic that informed her that her cherished oldest son, as a matter of political expediency, converted to Catholicism about twenty years from now. Does that grammatical construction make any sense whatsoever? Would have, in the other universe, become a Catholic in a world in which Maximilian of Bavaria retained the Upper Palatinate, married the Austrian archduchess, begat sons, lived longer than was reasonable, and conveyed messages along the line of, ‘if you know what’s good for you.’ Which Christian August apparently did.
“In any case, the countess is anxious that the new imperial school for the training of teachers not allow its students to be mentally or spiritually contaminated in any way by their physical proximity to Jesuits. I understand that she has presented Rector Muselius with an extended memorandum compiled by her chancellor in regard to the confiscation of ‘heretical books’ as carried out by Bavarian officials in 1628 and 1629, followed by the great book-burning outside the city walls in 1630. This as a warning admonition to the effect that the normal school must, absolutely must, develop its own library rather than arranging for its students to share the one already owned by the Jesuit Collegium.”
“Didn’t Father Balde negotiate some arrangement about a shared library with…who would it have been with?”
“The step-granddaughter of the widow of Kilian Richter. He owned the property before the Bavarians took it by eminent domain. Who—the step-granddaughter, that is; not Richter; like I said, he’s dead—was not here, but rather in Grantville, and has never seen the Collegium building and probably has no idea how it is arranged.”
The matter was, in fact, on the mind of the newly hired staff member in charge of the normal school’s library. She sent regular messages, all marked Urgent in the brightest red ink she could buy, to the members of Frau Mary Simpson’s school committee in Magdeburg, all on the theme of Books! Send us books! The rector needs more books right now! See the enclosed lists! Books! Send us books! Frau Juliana Theresa Weberin, widow of one Franz Blatzer, did not find importuning others for funds and supplies in the least humiliating, embarrassing, or degrading. Franz had managed an unendowed hospice for the deserving poor throughout the two decades of their marriage.
They got an authorization for the purchase of office supplies from Duke Ernst, who was paying for them. Frau Weberin interpreted the definition of “office supplies” liberally.
The committee in Magdeburg had estimated a first-year enrollment of about a hundred students. They had been told that was more or less what to expect when a new university was first established.
The pre-registrations now stood at two hundred thirty-three, with more forms arriving in the mail every day. Ratichius sent a memorandum reminding them that such concepts as applications, pre-registrations, and acceptance letters were radical innovations. The normal school should be prepared for the majority of its would-be students to simply show up sometime around the first week of classes, more or less, and expect nothing more in the way of formalities than signing a matriculation book.
“What’s a matriculation book?” Ronella Koch asked. She had happily adopted the down-time custom of keeping her maiden name when she married Muselius. “I wouldn’t recognize one if it walked up and bit me.”
“They’re sort of like those visitor books people sign at a funeral in Grantville,” Jonas said, “only bigger.”
Muselius made the acquaintance of every printer in town. He also bought a duplicating machine. Then another one. Every student was to be issued a clipboard and a fountain pen. “Hang the cost,” his wife exclaimed. “They need to have the latest in educational technology.”
Not every Jesuit at the Collegium was content with the agreement that Balde had negotiated. “They have women,” was the contribution of one of his crustier colleagues. “On the faculty as well as among the student body. If the superior general is not even willing for Jesuits to cooperate fully with a parallel Catholic order such as the English Ladies, it is utterly impossible that we should be associated with those who are not only laywomen but also, at least the major part of them, heretics.”
“But, in turn, we might get access to their library,” Balde pointed out.
“Get thee behind me, Satan!” came the retort.
“Our…tenants…are not likely to trust us with access to their library,” Caspar Hell pointed out to his colleagues. “I am afraid that in their minds, we are too closely associated with the great burning of heretical books in 1630.”
“It’s not as if the countess of Pfalz-Sulzbach, on her various forays over here, doesn’t take every opportunity to remind them.” Old Father Ziegler snorted in disgust. “The Collegium didn’t order the confiscation of the books; Duke Maximilian did. We didn’t confiscate the books; Maximilian’s Bavarian officials did. For that matter, we didn’t preside over the book burning.”
“We were, however, present. We did nothing whatsoever to discourage the process over the two years from its initiation in 1628 until its conclusion two years later. Our students were given a day off school so they could go watch it and keep it fresh in memory.”
“‘We have all sinned and come short of the glory of God’ (Romans 3:23). The Collegium also,” Balde pointed out, “managed to get hold of a significant number of the books that were in good condition before they landed on the pyre, which is why some eight hundred of the five thousand or so that the officials confiscated are now safely tucked away in our own library.”
“Ah, yes. ‘We need them for research.’ I must say that the recommendation of ‘know thine enemy’ comes in handy for an extraordinarily wide spectrum of purposes. Nevertheless, to return to my first point,” Hell said, “I do not believe that the officials of the normal school will allow us unfettered access to the library they are accumulating, even if it is located in our building. And even if, under the agreement, it will consist in large part of German translations of educational treaties on teaching methods that our order developed—somewhat shorn of their confessional aspects.”
Not every faculty member at the normal school was content with the agreement that Annalise Richter had negotiated in absentia either. “Those black cloaks,” Ronella shuddered. “What’s worse, those round hats with the wide, flat brims. They remind me most of a flock of vultures, circling around, waiting for some other predator to bring down the game so they can pick off the carrion.”
***
When Maxine Pilcher arrived with the kids, she delivered to Keith and Jake Ebeling everything that Arnold Bellamy’s nosing around had turned up about two men who might be Fucilla and Rugatti. Several people remembered that a pair much like the description Keith had sent had, in fact, spent time in Grantville as Wartburg survivors.
“I had someone go over and talk to the Red Cross ladies,” Arnold wrote. “Mary Jo Kindred, Marcia Alexander, and that bunch. Mary Jo went over to St. Mary’s, too. Gus Heinzerling gave most of those lectures to the Wartburg survivors, and he’s not in town. The balding head on the one guy struck a chord, though.
“Most of the Wartburg survivors who ended up in Grantville were pretty shell-shocked when they first came straggling in. That was only a few hundred of the ten thousand or so Spanish who were inside the fortress. Most of them took full advantage of the chance that Mike Stearns gave them and went away—as far away as they could get. Some of them, like the commander, all the way to Brussels. But before Mike gave the order to let them go, we’d thrown those proclamations into the castle—the ones that said that if the soldiers surrendered, they’d be well-treated; that we’d take them in and even give them a chance to join our own army. Most of the ones who showed up here were carrying those. Overall, we’re pretty sure that the two fellows you’re worried about were here, but definitely not under those names. Once someone on my staff has a spare moment, I’ll arrange a search of the records from 1632. Everyone has been so busy ever since then that nothing has been properly filed in the first place, and with the disruption in records management caused by the still-on-going and occasionally piecemeal move of the state capital to Bamberg, which has left most of our computer capacity in Grantville where the electricity is more reliable…”