Table of Contents

- Dedication

- Acknowledgments

- Foreword

- Cast of Characters

- Chapter 1

- Chapter 2

- Chapter 3

- Chapter 4

- Chapter 5

- Chapter 6

- Chapter 7

- Chapter 8

- Chapter 9

- Chapter 10

- Chapter 11

- Chapter 12

- Chapter 13

- Chapter 14

- Chapter 15

- Chapter 16

- Chapter 17

- Chapter 18

- Chapter 19

- Chapter 20

- Chapter 21

- Chapter 22

- Chapter 23

- Chapter 24

- Chapter 25

- Chapter 26

- Chapter 27

- Afterward

The Unexpected Sales Reps

Virginia DeMarce

How to succeed at spying without really trying

Pranksters and scammers from way back, Paolo Fucilla and Carlo Rigatti fought for Spain at the Wartburg and survived.

Curious about the people who had beaten them so handily, they went to Grantville. Whatever their other faults, they were serious about keeping their oaths. When they promised not to take up arms they meant it. In Grantville, they got in trouble again and skipped town.

Looking for a job that didn’t include being shot at with napalm, they decided to try their hand at spying. It was a “Here, hold my beer and watch this” inspiration. It wasn’t their first, and it wouldn’t be their last.

They went to work for the Archbishop of Salzburg. But spies need cover stories, so they decided to sell office supplies. It was supposed to be a single job, so they didn’t bother to tell the manufacturer that they were now the sales reps for Vignelli Business Machines.

Watch as Paolo and Carlo demonstrate the kind of trouble they can get into.

The Unexpected Sales Reps

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2022 by Virginia DeMarce

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

eISBN: 978-1-62579-980-7

Cover by Jennie Faries

Original publication February 2022, 1632, Inc.

Dedication

To those in historic preservation offices who work tirelessly to preserve the remnants of our material past from the ravages of destruction and redevelopment.

Acknowledgments

The major acknowledgment, of course, is to Eric Flint for writing 1632, which spawned this fictional universe, and for inviting me to be a part of it. Specifically, for this book, I appreciate the loan of a character he created, Werner von Dalberg.

Many thanks to Walt Boyes, the editor in chief of the Ring of Fire Press, for struggling with my manuscripts, and to Gorg Huff for turning them into something that is e-book friendly.

Foreword

The maps depicting the boundaries between the State of Thuringia-Franconia (USE) and the Province of the Upper Palatinate (USE) that Sebastian Kellermeister references in Chapter 9 are, essentially, those that appeared sequentially in: Eric Flint with Virginia DeMarce, 1634: The Ram Rebellion (Baen Books, 2006); Eric Flint and Virginia DeMarce, 1634: The Bavarian Crisis (Baen Books, 2007); and Eric Flint, 1636: The Ottoman Onslaught (Baen Books, 2017).

Those three books, along with Flint’s novella “Four Days on the Danube” (Ring of Fire III, Baen Books, 2011) are the works in the 1632 series most closely connected to The Unexpected Sales Reps.

The USE Province of the Upper Palatinate includes more than the historical Oberpfalz proper. It incorporates three smaller Junge-Pfalz territories (Neuburg, Sulzbach, and Hilpoltstein) formerly held by cadet branches of the Wittelsbach counts Palatine, the former imperial city of Regensburg, the former Bavarian fortress city of Ingolstadt, and a half-dozen or so even smaller previously independent or quasi-independent jurisdictions. It sprawls along the north (mostly) side of the Danube River, shaped essentially like a boomerang with the points to the south, from Donauwörth to Passau, about 120 miles west to east. North-south, the distances range from a few miles at the narrow Donauwörth end to about seventy-five miles going north from Regensburg to the border beyond Tischenreuth and Waldsassen. As of 1636, on the east, the province borders Bohemia; to the north, Saxony; to the west, the State of Thuringia-Franconia.

Cast of Characters

Key:

fi d-t - fictional down-timer

hi d-t - historical down-timer

fi u-t - fictional up-timer

hi u-t - historical up-timer

Abrazamontis, Piero—see Fucilla

Alcom, Garland (fi u-t), explosives manufacturer in Grantville, SoTF, in 1632-1633

Bagehot, Walter (hi u-t), nineteenth-century English writer on political theory

Balde, Jacob, S.J. (hi d-t), playwright and poet, dividing time between the faculties of the Jesuit Collegium in Amberg, Upper Palatinate, and the University of Ingolstadt

Bamberg, Franz von Hatzfeld, bishop of (hi d-t), residing in the Rhineland; Catholic

Barlow, Barbara “Bibi” (fi u-t), pharmacy clerk in Grantville 1633

Baumschlager, Hans (fi d-t), sergeant, Upper Palatine Grenzjaeger regiment

Bavaria, Albrecht, duke of (hi d-t), younger brother and heir to Duke Maximilian

Sigmund Albrecht, duke of (hi d-t), younger surviving son of Duke Albrecht

Maximilian, duke of (hi d-t), ruler of Bavaria; opponent of the USE

Maximilian Heinrich, duke of (hi d-t), older surviving son of Duke Albrecht

Bellamy, Arnold (fi u-t), USE Government, Department of State, 1634-1635; formerly NUS government, Department of International Affairs

Böcler, Johann Heinrich “Heinz” (hi d-t), private secretary to Duke Ernst

Bozarth, Brick (fi u-t), NUS and then SoTF trade delegate in Regensburg

Coppola, Giovanni—see Fucilla

Dalberg, Werner von (fi d-t), lawyer and head of the Fourth of July Party in the Upper Palatinate

Denmark, Auguste, princess of (hi d-t), widow of the duke of Holstein-Gottorp, mother of the countess of Pfalz-Sulzbach

Christian IV, king of (hi d-t), brother of Auguste and Hedwig

Hedwig, princess of (hi d-t), childless widow of John George of Saxony’s older brother

Dewitz, Georg von (hi d-t), commander of Swedish garrison in Ingolstadt 1635

Domicilla (fi d-t), cook for Fucilla and Rugatti, widow, originally from Ragusa (now Dubrovnik)

Donhauserin, Mechthilde (fi d-t), innkeeper in Amberg, Upper Palatinate; married to Dionys Prohorsky

Ebeling, Jacob (fi u-t), major in SoTF National Guard

Vanessa (Jones) (fi u-t), instructor at normal school in Amberg

Eckenberger, Georg (hi d-t), Lutheran pastor

Eichstätt, Johann Christoph von Westerstetten (hi d-t), bishop of; enthusiastic witchcraft persecutor; Catholic

Ernst, duke—see Saxe-Weimar

Esposito, Lorenzo—see Rugatti

Ferdinand II (hi d-t), deceased; Holy Roman Emperor

Fuchs von Walberg auf Winklarn, Johann Friedrich (hi d-t), exile, speaker of the Upper Palatinate Estates; Lutheran

Fucilla, Paolo (fi d-t), sales representative for Vignelli Business Machines, ex-mercenary in the service of Spain

Grube, Stanislas “Stentzel” (fi d-t), reporter in Amberg, Upper Palatinate

Gundelfinger, Helene (fi d-t), vice president of the State of Thuringia-Franconia; succeeds Ed Piazza as president in July 1636

Gustav II Adolf (hi d-t), king of Sweden, emperor of the United States of Europe

Hart, Dexter “Ape” (fi u-t), employee of Garland Alcom in Grantville, 1633

Hart, Arthur “Monkey” (fi u-t), employee of Garland Alcom in Grantville 1633

Hardy, Deirdre “Dee” (fi u-t), student at the normal school in Amberg beginning fall 1635

Hatzfeld, Franz von—see Bamberg

Heinzerling, Augustus “Gus” (fi d-t), ex-Jesuit; Roman Catholic priest at St. Mary’s, Grantville

Hell, Caspar, S.J. (hi d-t), rector of the Jesuit Collegium in Amberg, Upper Palatinate

Holstein-Gottorp, Hedwig, duchess of (hi d-t), widow of Count August of Pfalz-Sulzbach; regent for and subsequently guardian of her children; Lutheran

Hopfenbeck, Thomas (hi d-t), member of the Committee of Correspondence in Amberg, Oberpfalz

Jülich-Cleves-Berg, Anna, duchess of (hi d-t), deceased; widow of Philipp Ludwig, count of Pfalz-Neuburg; mother of Wolfgang Wilhelm, August, and Johann Friedrich; Lutheran

Keitel, Theodor (fi d-t), head of the Committees of Correspondence in the Upper Palatinate

Kellermeister, Sebastian (fi d-t), reporter in Amberg, Upper Palatinate

Kienitz, Charlotte (fi d-t), head of the Fourth of July Party in the Province of Mecklenburg

Koch, Ronella (fi u-t), wife of Jonas Justinus Muselius; instructor at the normal school in Amberg

Korn, Lutz (fi d-t), member of the Committee of Correspondence in Amberg, Oberpfalz

Langenfeld—see Spee

Leitsinger, Erdmann (fi d-t), member of the Committee of Correspondence in Amberg, Oberpfalz

Lena (fi d-t), sister of Erdmann; CoC member in Amberg, Oberpfalz

Lodron, Paris von—see Salzburg

Lux, Jurgen (fi d-t), captain, Upper Palatine Grenzjaeger regiment, recently promoted spring 1635

Manrique, Miguel de (fi d-t), Spanish commander at the Wartburg; 1636 in the employ of Fernando, king in the Low Countries

Mechthilde—see Donhauserin

Medici, Claudia de’ (hi d-t), regent of Tyrol for her sons; marries Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar

Muselius, Jonas Justinus (fi d-t), rector of the new Imperial Normal School in Amberg, Upper Palatinate; former village school teacher; then teacher in Grantville 1631-spring 1635

Nasi, Francisco (fi d-t), chief of espionage for Emperor Gustav Adolf

Palatinate, Karl Ludwig, count of the (hi d-t), oldest son and heir of the Winter King, in polite custody in Brussels

Pfalz-Birkenfeld-Bischweiler, Christian, count of (hi d-t), appointed interim administrator of the Upper Palatinate by Gustav Adolf, November 1635-July 1636

Pfalz-Hilpoltstein, Johann Friedrich, count of (hi d-t), former ruler of one of the formerly quasi-independent jurisdictions incorporated into the Upper Palatinate; Lutheran

Pfalz-Neuburg, Anna, dowager duchess—see Jülich-Cleves-Berg

Pfalz-Neuburg, Wolfgang Wilhelm, count of (hi d-t), deceased; former ruler of one of the formerly quasi-independent jurisdictions incorporated into the Upper Palatinate; older brother of August and Johann Friedrich; Catholic

Pfalz-Sulzbach, August, count of (hi d-t), deceased; former ruler of one of the formerly quasi-independent jurisdictions incorporated into the Upper Palatinate; Lutheran; for his wife, see Holstein-Gottorp

Christian August, count of (hi d-t), minor heir of Count August

Piazza, Edward (fi u-t), president of the State of Thuringia-Franconia; prime minister of USE as of July 1636

Pichtel, Konrad Balthasar (hi d-t), lawyer, hired by the Upper Palatinate Estates spring 1636; Lutheran

Pilcher, Keith (fi u-t), NUS and later SoTF delegate to the iron industry in the Upper Palatinate

Maxine (Maddox) (fi u-t), instructor at normal school in Amberg, Upper Palatinate

Megan (fi u-t) daughter of Keith and Maxine

Prohorsky, Dionys (fi d-t), innkeeper in Amberg, husband of Frau Mechthilde

Prohorsky, Lambert (fi d-t), oldest son of Dionys and Mechthilde

Radke, Wolfgang (hi d-t), SoTF Secretary of Education; prominent educational reformer

Ranke, Jacob (fi d-t), reporter in Amberg, Upper Palatinate

Ratichius—see Radke

Regensburg, Albert von Törring-Stein (hi d-t), bishop of; Catholic

Richards, Preston (fi u-t), chief of police in Grantville, SoTF

Richter, Annalise (fi d-t), granddaughter of Kilian Richter (deceased), who was the former owner of the premises in Amberg, Upper Palatinate, where the Jesuit Collegium is located

Rickel, Jozef (fi d-t), CoC member in Amberg, Oberpfalz; manages shop for Fucilla and Rugatti when both are out of town

Richius, Neidhardt (fi d-t), private secretary to Count Christian of Pfalz-Birkenfeld-Bischweiler

Rubenbauer, Hans (fi d-t), member of the Committee of Correspondence in Amberg, Oberpfalz

Johann Thomas (fi d-t), brother of Hans; student at the University of Ingolstadt

Rugatti, Carlo (fi d-t), sales representative for Vignelli Business Machines, ex-mercenary in the service of Spain

Salzburg, Paris von Lodron, archbishop of (hi d-t), archbishop of Salzburg; Catholic

Sardella, Tomasso—see Rugatti

Saxe-Weimar, Albrecht, duke of (hi d-t), brother of Wilhelm and Ernst, runs the family properties

Bernhard, duke of (hi d-t), subsequently grand duke of the Free County of Burgundy

Ernst, duke of (hi d-t), appointed by Emperor Gustav Adolf as administrator of the Upper Palatinate and subsequently of Saxony

Wilhelm, duke of (hi d-t), aka Wilhelm Wettin, Crown-Loyalist prime minister of the USE between July 1635 and July 1636

Schwandorfer, Achaz (fi d-t), head of the Committee of Correspondence in Amberg, Oberpfalz

Schupp, Johann Balthasar (hi d-t), educational reformer; instructor at the normal school in Amberg

Spee von Langenfeld, Friedrich, S.J. (hi d-t), author of the Cautio Criminalis against witchcraft persecutions

Stearns, Michael (fi u-t), prime minister of the United States of Europe 1633-1635; subsequently general

Rita (fi u-t), sister of Michael Stearns, married to Tom Simpson; ambassadress to Bavaria

Törring-Stein, Albert—see Regensburg

Vignelli, Arno (fi d-t), business machines entrepreneur, headquartered in Tyrol

Wallenstein, Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von (hi d-t), aka Venceslas V Adalbertus, king of Bohemia

Wettin, Ernst—see Saxe-Weimar

Westerstetten, Johann Christoph von—see Eichstätt

Chapter 1

Amberg, Upper Palatinate

August 1634

“The archbishop thinks that Duke Albrecht is too calm.” Paolo Fucilla waved the knife with which he had been peeling a still rather green apple. A ray of the setting sun slid through a thin spot in the tree that shaded the old barn and highlighted the silver threads that usually weren’t so visible in his black hair.

Carlo Rugatti scratched, first his nose and then his privates. His own hair hadn’t done so well. Whenever he looked at his reflection, whether in water or metal, or in the incredibly clear glass mirrors so numerous in Grantville, as good as seeing one’s portrait immortalized in oils by the greatest of painters, he saw his uncle. “Damned bedbugs. There must have been ten thousand in that mattress last night. Stinking, backwards, country innkeepers.” He scratched his nose again. “You mean?”

“Duke Albrecht doesn’t know where his sons are. At least, that’s still the official line in Prague. Whenever a reporter holding a clipboard pops up, he says he doesn’t know where his sons are. Wallenstein says he doesn’t know where Duke Albrecht’s sons are. Same thing from Munich, too. Duke Maximilian says he doesn’t know where Duke Albrecht’s sons are—except he adds that almost certainly some dastardly minion of the emperor, or of Stearns, has done them in.”

“So?”

“So why isn’t Albrecht rushing around to find another wife and beget some more sons? His wife is dead. He’s young enough. Why is he sitting on his rump in Prague and…”

“Don’t say it.”

“So I won’t say it.”

“The man’s only been a widower for six weeks.”

“Even so, he should be putting out feelers. If, that is, he doesn’t know where his sons are. But he isn’t putting out feelers. Ergo, Duke Albrecht knows where his sons are and has at least some reason to think that they’re alive. So Paris von Lodron wants to know the same thing, and why. Preferably before Claudia de’ Medici finds out first and sticks her elegant finger into the pie. She could probably think of a dozen reasons why those boys, wherever they are now, would be a lot better off in Innsbruck or Bolzano.

“Speaking of pots…” Paolo took the lid off the little copper cauldron. “Get out your bowl.”

“I don’t care what you say. I can’t stand that stuff.” Carlo frowned at the bubbling contents and shook his head. “It’s worse than the barley that the damned Scots make into porridge. Twenty years ago, in the Netherlands, we were on short rations. The quartermaster imported it and tried to make us eat it instead of decent bread. It practically caused a mutiny.”

“Wait. If you boil it in milk instead of water and put a little honey on top, you’ll never even recognize that it’s rice. Takes longer than boiling it in water, but it’s a lot better.”

Carlo nodded toward the house at the edge of the village. “I say it’s worse than oat porridge. Worse than polenta. You paid her for the milk. I saw you.”

“We’re respectable now. Even our aliases are respectable now. After the debacle at the Wartburg, we saw the light. After what we went through there, we left the mercenary trade, found paying civilian jobs that didn’t require nasty things like apprenticeships and actual, measurable, competence, and made good. We are factors representing Arno Vignelli of Bolzano. Marketers. Peddlers of inexpensive duplicating machines and other useful office supplies. No need to bring up that the archbishop of Salzburg is also paying us. We are not foragers. We pay for what we eat.”

“Respectable factors sleep and eat at inns every night, not just sometimes. They don’t sleep in barns and cook their own food over a fire, not even sometimes.”

Paolo let out a short laugh. “At least the hay won’t have bedbugs. Other bugs, maybe, and prickly stems, but not bedbugs.”

“Respectable factors can afford inns that don’t have bedbugs.”

“We’re as ‘respectable’ as the duplicating machines are ‘cheap.’ For every ten thousand people in the Germanies, nine thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-nine of them can’t afford one. For every thousand villages in the Germanies, nine hundred ninety-nine would rather spend their money on something else.”

“So we haven’t quite made the transition to ‘salesman,’ as Cadoni would call us rather than factors.”

Paolo looked blank.

“You know. Lodron’s adjutant, or whatever an adjutant is called when he works for a cleric rather than a colonel. Same job, different title. I hate those motivational speeches. I love the idea of per diem, though. He pays us the same, whether we spend it or not. If we want to skimp ourselves and put the money in a bank, how is that his problem?”

“As long as we look respectable to the point of stodgy when we get to talking to the customer. Tomorrow night, it’s an inn, a bath, neat trims for the mustaches and beards, a haircut…”

“Sure, sure.” Carlo stood up and scratched his back against one of the thick posts that supported the floor of the hayloft where they would be sleeping later on.

The next noon, in Amberg, they dined at a table in a respectable inn. After a visit to the public baths and a barber.

It wasn’t a tavern (the sign that impudently pirated the heraldic symbol of both the province and city by proclaiming it to be The Golden Lion said so). It was an inn with an eating room that was open to the public. It served beer, but it didn’t have a bar. It wasn’t a tavern.

It appeared that the floor was regularly swept out with sawdust, since a slight odor of freshly sawn wood competed with those coming from the kitchen annex behind the building.

Carlo twisted around on the bench. Some things changed; other things did not. A bench made of a smoothed plank affixed to a table also made of smoothed planks in Amberg in 1634 was extraordinarily similar to a bench affixed to a table made of smoothed planks by Anabaptists in the Netherlands in the previous century (he had sat at quite a few of them there) or a bench affixed to a “picnic table” made of smoothed planks in the “Fairgrounds” of the up-time town of Grantville that had been built three-hundred-fifty years from now in a world that he would never see.

There appeared to be eternal verities in human history, one of which was that it was much harder for casual thieves to steal a bench that was permanently fastened to a heavy table large enough to seat eight hungry men.

“Hähnchensuppe mit Karotten und Spätzle,” the waitress said. Her clothing, the modest tan dress and clean white apron, was, in keeping with the inn’s sign, not new but well-cared for. It proclaimed her to be a respectable woman who would not tolerate casual fanny-patting from the patrons.

Paolo raised an eyebrow. “And?”

“There is no ‘and.’ That’s the menu for today. In the interest of truth, the chicken was an old hen who had stopped laying; not a young cockerel. Also, there are onions in it, as well as carrots and dumplings, because a few of the ones in storage were starting to go bad, so we pulled off the bad layers and used the good parts. The little red lumps are something new called bell peppers.”

Carlo considered her. At some point in the past decade, a female who must, at one time, have been the old host’s pretty daughter-in-law had metamorphosed into the current host’s plump and bustling wife. No waitress dependent upon the goodwill of her master would dare to speak so brusquely or forthrightly.

Paolo sighed. “Two bowls of soup, then.”

“Some of our customers have found that the peppers induce flatulence.” The waitress kept a deadpan expression on her face.

“They’re nothing new; they come from Spain; I’ve eaten them before.”

“It’s your funeral; I hope you don’t have an important meeting this afternoon.” She disappeared into the kitchen, turned back, and announced, “We do our brewing in-house. If you want beer, that’s what you get.”

One of the young men at the longer table next to them laughed out loud. “Newcomers to our fair city? I have a feeling that it’s your first encounter with Mechthilde the Ineffable. Call her Frau if you address a request to her. You’ll get better service; she seized upon the honorific with enthusiasm when the ignorant up-timers started to use it. The fair city of Amberg now has cobblers and harness menders who insist upon Herr.”

Paolo bowed to him as far as one reasonably could when seated. Carlo gave a half-hearted wave.

“May I tell you something? Anything?” The man—really, scarcely more than a boy; he looked to be not much past his twentieth year—laughed again, his red curls bouncing.

Paolo raised an eyebrow.

“Food, shelter, sports, church services, quality of the local schools? Feuds in the city council? Success in reviving the mining industry? If it happens in our fair city, I’ve written an article about it. Sebastian Kellermeister, star—not to mention only—reporter for the Amberg Global News at your service. In return, of course, I would like to know something. Are you passing through? Are you envoys? Have you plans to open a business? Anything for another paragraph.”

Paolo laughed. “We are factors for Vignelli Business Machines in Bolzano, Tyrol, selling office products. Or hoping to. I wasn’t aware that Amberg had a newspaper yet.”

Kellermeister drew back, mock-affronted, his bright blue eyes twinkling. “Why sir, we have three. Which, I admit, is more than one would expect from a town this size, but because it’s the provincial capital, there’s a market. That doesn’t count the Forge, which, as you might guess from the name, will tell you far more than most people will ever need to know about what’s going on in the iron industry, but its subscribers appear to find the content fascinating, given the determination of the Swedes and up-timers to break the Hammereinung, the cartel, and get production back to where it used to be much faster than I think is possible.

“The Patriot isn’t quite a newspaper, either. It is, I think, funded by the Bavarians, even though the Swedes are in occupation now. It might as well be called the Patriarch, because the main message of that weekly broadside is that Papa knows best and the duty of subjects is to remain loyal to their rightful lord and attend mass regularly, supplemented by reprinting some bits and pieces from other newspapers and newsletters that arrive in the mail from other towns. Then there are two stringers for papers in Nürnberg, Georg Betz and Hans Seidel. Both of them sell articles to more than one paper. Neither of them is with us here today.”

Paolo nodded. “We were in Grantville for a while. Such men are called ‘free-lancers’ by the up-timers.”

“Then there are the three real papers. Jacob Ranke,” Kellermeister gestured to his right, “does the political column for the Loyalty. That’s pretty much subsidized by the Crown Loyalists, as the name would lead you to think, but he’s on the news side rather than the editorial side. Not that he wouldn’t appreciate a promotion.”

The scrawny young man with a large Adam’s apple who was seated next to Kellermeister nodded.

“I wouldn’t spill my heart out to him, though, if I were you. Much better to spill it out to me. Then there’s Stentzel Grube from the Current Tidings on the bench over there.” He waved at a square-faced, snub-nosed, blond on the other side of the table. “And several of the outlying towns have weekly papers now, or try to. Sulzbach’s is doing reasonably well, I think.”

Frau Mechthilde returned, plopping down two large beige ceramic bowls and a brown platter with a small loaf of rye bread. “You have your own knives, I hope. Do you need to borrow spoons?”

Paolo reached down to his belt and unhooked one of the various implements attached to it. The useful device contained not only a blunt-ended bread knife but also a spoon, a pronged fork with two tines, and several other small tools, designed by the ingenuity of Swiss mercenaries, he had heard, although it was said that even the ancient Roman legions had something similar. He waved it at her. Carlo was already eating.

Kellermeister kept talking while Paolo and Carlo ate their soup.

Carlo as usual, ate faster. Then he started talking about Vignelli duplicating machines, a magnificent new low-cost alternative to traditional printing.

“Amberg has several well established printing shops,” Ranke said. “At least one of them has been in business for over forty years. I can’t imagine that they will appreciate competition from this innovation.”

Carlo gave him a lecture on the joys of the free market and the absence of guild restrictions when it came to new products. A short one, necessarily, given that Frau Mechthilde was giving them the look that signified that they should all pay their tabs, get up from the benches, and go away in order to make places for new paying customers.

Paolo gave them all copies of their business cards.

Produced, as Carlo pointed out, on stiff paper by a Vignelli duplicating machine and cut neatly into sections by a Vignelli gridded lever-style paper cutter. No, he did not happen to know how those had obtained the nickname of guillotines.

No, alas, they did not have a sample to display at the moment. Their equipment, unfortunately, was on a freight wagon that had broken an axle. They, themselves, had come ahead, but, “soon, most certainly,” he assured the reporters.

Chapter 2

“Don’t you think that was pushing things a bit?” Paolo asked that evening. They had taken a room at the inn—one to themselves, with two cots, since they were respectable businessmen, rather than pallets on the floor of one of the common sleeping rooms used by less affluent travelers.

Frau Mechthilde took payment for a week in advance. In coin, please; not the paper money now more commonly used in the State of Thuringia-Franconia. And weighed the coin on a currency scale that she pulled out from a cubbyhole. Neither of them commented on her conservatism. Many merchants had lost large sums during the Kipper und Wipper inflation a decade ago or more. There was no pressing reason to mention the time they had spent in Grantville. As far as Frau Mechthilde and her harried spouse were concerned, they had arrived from Tyrol. Which lay in the same general direction as Salzburg. More or less.

The evening meal offered sausages and sauerkraut.

Sauerkraut was cabbage.

But, then, they were in Germany. It might be called the United States of Europe now, but it was still Germany when it came to cabbage.

“We shouldn’t be here long enough for them to get skeptical. All we have to do is figure out where the young dukes are, if they are here at all. And I have an idea.”

Paolo raised both eyebrows. Over their long years of friendship, Carlo’s ideas had often fallen into the category that—according to one of the up-timers alongside whom they had worked during their year or so in Grantville—many men preceded with the statement, “Here. Hold my beer a minute and watch this!”

“Why don’t we simply mention to one of those reporters that we’re curious? Let him do the leg work. That way, we get the information for no more money and effort than buying a copy of the paper, and then treating the reporter to a drink and coaxing out of him everything he discovered that didn’t make it into print.”

It took less than three days for them to be sure enough that the young dukes, Maximilian and Sigmund, were safe and sound at the Jesuit Collegium, under the care of their tutor Vervaux, and send a letter to that effect off to Salzburg.

“Shouldn’t we move on?” Paolo asked.

“We have to wait until the rest of the money comes; our advance was only half of what Paris de Lodron’s chancellor agreed to pay us. Maybe the archbishop would like to know something about something else. He may request other services from us in his acknowledgment. Anyway, we paid for a week.”

“Why should the archbishop of Salzburg care about what’s going on in the Upper Palatinate? He sits there all snug, keeping his prince-bishopric out of the war. He only wanted information on this because he worries about Tyrol, I think.”

The next day, Caspar Hell, S.J., rector of the Jesuit Collegium, showed up at the inn, wanting to buy a duplicating machine.

Paolo made warning noises intended to remind his associate about the imprudence of taking orders for which there was no product to be delivered. If Carlo insisted on waiting for that bank draft—he, himself, suspected that the chancellor never intended to pay them the promised second portion—they shouldn’t get themselves thrown out of town before it came.

Carlo flipped him a meaningful gesture.

Not a rude one. He’d learned it during their sojourn in Grantville after the Wartburg.

True: Mike Stearns had ordered that the Spanish common soldiers be released, marched ten miles west and then allowed to walk away. From the perspective of seventeenth-century infantrymen, ten miles was a bagatelle. They had walked west; then they had turned around and walked in the other direction—slowly, but fast enough to trace their way along the obvious path that any moving army left behind it, following Frank Jackson and his troops to Grantville.

Carlo shrugged his shoulders, took the order and a letter of credit to cover the cost—he could probably trust the Jesuits to be good for it—and mailed it off to the address in Tyrol that he had for Vignelli. It was printed right there on their business cards. Using The Golden Lion Inn, near the Vils Gate, Amberg, as a return address.

In case inconvenient questions did arise, he chatted amiably with the post office clerk for several minutes about delivery intervals and other such matters, to fix in the woman’s mind that the order had indeed been sent out. Arno Vignelli existed, after all. So did his duplicating machines. Those two facts were what he and Paolo were relying upon to make their current subterfuged identities viable.

They merely didn’t happen to be Vignelli’s employees. Or his subcontractors. Or anyone the man had ever heard of.

In the course of his verbose and voluminous apologies for not having a sample to demonstrate, accompanied by eloquent lamentations in regard to the imaginary axle of the imaginary freight wagon onto which it had been loaded in Bolzano, Carlo happened to mention after mass the next Sunday, as he stood on the front steps of St. Georg’s, that he had heard somewhere that the archbishop of Salzburg had some interest in events in the Oberpfalz and he wondered why, because he didn’t see a connection.

Owing to a series of unfortunate events, the Jesuit Collegium in Amberg was rather short on students these days and its staff were doing double duty as parish priests. Caspar Hell, S.J., rector of the institution, was, by both training and inclination, a teacher. He was more than happy to explain that the recent placement of Regensburg into the new USE province of the Upper Palatinate by Gustav Adolf at the recently concluded Congress of Copenhagen meant…

“What it boils down to,” Carlo said that evening, “is that the diocese of Regensburg, which is a lot bigger than the imperial city of Regensburg, not to mention Catholic rather than Lutheran, is in the Salzburg archdiocese. Most of the Catholic parishes in the Upper Palatinate fall into the jurisdiction of the diocese of Regensburg. Therefore…”

“Oh, sure,” Stentzel Grube was happy to answer Paolo’s follow-up question. “A few of the Catholic parishes, to the west and southwest of here, fall under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Eichstätt—those are over around Neumarkt. A few more are under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Bamberg, which will likely cause Franz von Hatzfeld to stick his nose into the Upper Palatinate’s affairs, even from his comfortable perch in Cologne, if that is where he still is.

“Most of the Catholic parishes, though—an even higher proportion now than between 1621 and the Council of Copenhagen, given that Regensburg itself has been incorporated into the USE Province—fall into the Regensburg diocese. Now that the secular force of Duke Maximilian’s Bavarian officials is not available to carry out the program of recatholicization in the Upper Palatinate, it becomes the obligation of the church itself. That will be rewarding, if it prospers; something like the ecclesiastical equivalent of the up-timers’ ‘hearts and minds’ program that they were running over in Franconia before the Ram Rebellion. Hell and his Jesuits are supposed to be doing the heavy labor of keeping the theoretical converts made during Maximilian’s tenure as actual converts. Or, at least, as many of them as they can. If it does not prosper, that becomes, ultimately, Lodron’s problem. So, ja, it’s only natural that he would be interested.”

They extended their stay by a second week. Carlo still believed in a bank draft from Salzburg. Paolo found his simple faith touching. During their first Christmas season in Grantville, they had learned about Santa Claus.

Before they received Lodron’s (possible) payment of the second installment for services rendered, they received a crate.

The cooperation of the Thurn und Taxis postal system (now no longer imperial) with the hybrid Swedish/USE postal system (now newly imperial) was becoming remarkably efficient.

A duplicating machine for delivery to Caspar Hell, S.J.

A frazzled clerk in the Bolzano factory, having received the order, couldn’t find any record of these two sales representatives, concluded that his incompetent predecessor had mis-filed the information, completed a set of substitute records, filled out the requisite dispatch slip, and messengered that over to the warehouse, which sent the order out.

With…

Paolo looked at the second layer packaged in the crate with deep suspicion.

Unpacking produced a demo model of the new and improved version of the Vignelli duplicator and samples of several other products. There was also a pamphlet containing a model spiel for sales representatives to use explaining how, owing to the location of the factory, it was far wiser for Germans in the south to purchase from Vignelli rather than from IBM in far-away Magdeburg, where the owners were mainly looking for contracts in the north, such as the one they recently signed with the USE navy, which would distract them from showing proper concern for the needs of private customers, of smaller customers, of—really, of any customer who might be somehow persuaded to buy office supplies from Vignelli instead.

Along with a reminder that they were not factors. That term was not modern. That term was not progressive. That term was stodgy and failed in presenting the image of go-getters (that was printed in English, in Latin letters rather than Fraktur). They were sales representatives (also in Latin letters; please use that rather than salesmen, as some of Vignelli’s representatives were women; this should be mentioned when demonstrating products to wealthy ladies and the change was pleasing to the regent of Tyrol).

It was a slow news day in Amberg. All the newspapers, even the Forge, carried three or four lines about the arrival of the demo model, which, really, did wonders for adding verisimilitude to their assumed identities. The arrival of the crate almost made the mythical freight wagon and its broken axle real. Nobody, not even the reporters or Frau Mechthilde, stopped to analyze why the promised demo equipment had arrived in the same crate as Father Hell’s order.

The Patriot had a half-column on the wisdom of the Jesuit Collegium in becoming the first institution in Amberg to take this progressive step. Father Jacob Balde, S.J., tried the experiment of using it to produce a parish bulletin for St. Georg’s the next week.

It was surprising how many people wanted to see the machine.

The innkeeper, whose name had proved to be Dionys Prohorsky (a Bohemian Protestant from across the border, who had married into the Golden Lion, which was Frau Mechthilde Donhauserin’s inheritance, which explained a lot, Carlo thought; she hadn’t been the old host’s pretty daughter-in-law, but rather his daughter), was not thrilled about having one of the tables in the dining room frequently occupied by a duplicator. His redoubtable wife, she who had embraced the up-time use of the honorific for ordinary commoner women with enthusiasm, pointed out that most of the potential customers for the duplicating machine came in during the slow hours in the dining room and bought a beer while observing its operation.

It didn’t hurt, from Prohorsky’s perspective, that one of the visitors was Keith Pilcher, one of the up-timers who had come to Amberg the previous spring to assist with revival of the iron industry, who gave an impromptu talk in Amideutsch, to an equally impromptu gathering of a half-dozen or so men who had money to spend and a dozen more who did not, on the general subject of copy machines I have known, from hectographs and mimeographs through dot matrix printers and many more. His cheerful, encouraging, final pronouncement was that this one looked to be less prone to going out of service at inconvenient times than most of them.

“I’d order one now,” he said, “but I’ll be heading down to Regensburg in a few days. I’ll check in with you when I get back.”

A couple of the spectators placed orders. Carlo mailed them off to Bolzano, with due attention to the post office clerk.

One fine day, the bank draft for the second half of the payment that the archbishop of Salzburg had promised them did arrive, to Paolo’s considerable surprise. There was also a modest retainer in case of future useful data that might come their way.

The same day, it turned out that Keith Pilcher had passed the story of his encounter with the duplicating machine to another up-timer, a Herr Brick Bozarth, who served as the up-timers’ “trade representative” in Regensburg. Pilcher had been serious when he complimented the machine’s simplicity of operation. This resulted in, not a command, but a strongly phrased request, that one of the sales representatives should proceed to Regensburg for the purpose of discussing duplicating machines and other office supplies.

Regensburg was at least four times the size of Amberg.

“We really can’t do this,” Paolo protested. “We’ve got our money. We ought to be getting out of here. Besides, they’ll want you to take the demo model to Regensburg. As long as it’s right here, at the address where Vignelli sent it, and he knows where it is, it should be obvious to any magistrate, if the matter should come up, that we haven’t stolen it. If you take it out of town, though…”

To the government clerk who had passed on the directive that they were to go cooperate with the up-timer in Regensburg, he demurred at taking the machine away from Amberg on the grounds that many people were still coming to see it.

Fortunately (according to Carlo), or unfortunately (according to Paolo), Father Balde volunteered that the Jesuits would be happy to have potential customers come visit the machine at the Collegium while the other one was out of town. “Hearts and minds” and all that. The up-timers in Franconia hadn’t been the first humans to think up public relations.

Carlo put the demo model in a smaller crate, hired a day laborer to carry the crate out the Vils Gate to a commercial barge landing, climbed on the barge, once more carrying his well-worn backpack, and floated down the Vils to the Naab to the Danube to confront whatever destiny that fate might have in store for him this time.

Chapter 3

Regensburg, Upper Palatinate

October 1634

The formerly independent imperial city of Regensburg, the Province of the Upper Palatinate’s protrusion into otherwise Bavarian territory on the south side of the Danube, had fewer up-timers than Amberg. To be specific, it had one up-timer. Herr Bozarth had been in Regensburg for over a year. His title was “trade representative.” His exact position in the government of the State of Thuringia-Franconia was vague. Carlo expected to sell one duplicating machine, at best when he climbed off the barge on the left bank, found a day laborer loitering around the dock in hopes of picking up some work, hired him to move the crate, crossed the bridge over the river’s muddy waters into Regensburg proper, oriented his general direction by identifying the cathedral tower, supplemented that by asking directions from one of the customs officials checking as to whether this crate might contain a taxable import, and headed in the direction of the USE Exchange.

The Exchange was new to Regensburg in the past couple of years, occupying premises in the main commercial district, but was not new to Carlo. He had seen similar arrangements—multiple traders occupying booths in one building—in the Netherlands. Unlike artisans, traders really did not need a shop to produce the product or a residence above the shop to keep an eye on their tools and inventory while housing their apprentices and journeymen. Unless a trader was a factor for a massive firm such as the Fuggers, in which case he had at least a nice, and sometimes luxurious, house, their lives were lived in inns, supplemented by warehouse space in cheaper suburban areas. And, with increasing frequency, rented booths in a mercantile center.

This would be—not bad. Perhaps he could interest other traders in a duplicating machine. But the skinflints would be more likely to band together and buy just one that all of them could use. Which was what they did: businessmen were depressingly alike in their desire to keep operating costs down.

Beyond the traders, though…

Shortly after his arrival in Regensburg, Herr Bozarth (somewhat to his dismay) made the acquaintance of one Georg Eckenberger, former Lutheran pastor in the Upper Palatinate, who had been without a parish since the Bavarians drove him out.

In one of his earliest reports, Bozarth, whose real position was “one of Mike Stearns’ cadre from the United Mine Workers,” and who was a staunch member of the Church of Christ, described Eckenberger to Stearns, who was technically a member of Enoch Wiley’s little offshoot of the Presbyterians in Grantville, as a “professional Protestant.” It wasn’t a bad characterization; both of them were familiar with the general type.

In Eckenberger’s case, the status was almost hereditary; his father-in-law had been a Lutheran whom the Bavarians had expelled from Straubing a generation earlier. When the emperor sent Duke Ernst to the Oberpfalz, Eckenberger had hoped to be appointed as court chaplain. No such appointment had occurred, although Eckenberger would have embraced the position with unbounded enthusiasm as an opportunity to defend the just and righteous interests of his miserably oppressed co-religionists.

As it was, the man remained in Regensburg as an unbeneficed gadfly. One who wrote enough pamphlets, and had enough supporters—Bozarth referred to them as groupies for some reason—that he could utilize a duplicating machine. The groupies took up a collection.

This came to the attention of the episcopal chancery.

The bishop of Regensburg was not delighted with the recent political dispensations instigated by the heretical up-timers, placed into policy by the heretical king of Sweden, and summed up to him, on one memorable occasion, by Brick Bozarth as, “I have news for you, buddy; the Protestants can’t keep the Catholics from holding processions in the streets and they can’t keep you from calling in Franciscan preachers to try to convert them. On the other hand, you can’t call on the Austrians or Bavarians to back you in throwing their exiles out. It’s called religious toleration.”

Regensburg had a political bishop, of course. All dioceses (Lutheran as well as Catholic, the Protestants would admit if pressed hard enough) that had exercised secular as well as religious governing functions prior to the arrival of the new dispensation in the USE had political bishops. Under the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, a prince-bishop had been…well…a prince. A ruler. With a seat in the Reichstag. A vote in the Imperial Diet. The last thing any prince-bishopric needed was a sanctified and unworldly type with his mind floating off into some spiritual cloud when he should be thinking about tax subsidies to fund campaigns in Hungary or canalization of a major river or new regulations to reduce the power of guildmasters in imperial cities when it came to restricting imports of tooled leather from Morocco. Leave religion to the mystics and theologians, not to mention the suffragan bishops and vicars general!

Albert von Törring-Stein wasn’t young; he was in his fifties. He’d been bishop for twenty years or so. Over those years, he had dealt with a frustratingly—in his opinion—large number of Protestants: Austrian noblemen exiled by Emperor Ferdinand II who took refuge in the Lutheran imperial city; wealthy merchants and industrialists, large landowners (both nobles and commoners, or would-be, alleged, nobles who nevertheless bore surnames such as Gewandtschneider or Holzschuher), Lutheran Landsassen whom Duke Maximilian had been forced to allow (under the pesky provisions of the Peace of Augsburg of 1555) to leave the Upper Palatinate with their fortunes fairly well intact during his decade of occupation from 1621 through 1631. Now there was the USE.

Things could have been worse, of course. As a prudent man, Bishop Albert had told his chancellor to hire a researcher at the famous library in Grantville. So… First, in this strangely changed universe, Regensburg had not been conquered by Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar in the name of the king of Sweden; second, he himself had not been driven into exile; third, that pestiferous Georg Eckenberger had not been appointed the court preacher for said Bernhard in his now (hopefully) never-to-exist Duchy of Franconia. Although, since Bernhard was now far away in Burgundy, in the Franche Comté, almost in France, entirely on the other side of the USE, it might be nice if he summoned Eckenberger to become his chaplain and got the man out of Regensburg.

He looked at his chancellor. “Call that factor in for an interview. Tell him to bring his machine; at least the manufacturer is Catholic, unlike the IBM people.”

The chancellor nodded. “I sent out a few enquiries. Vignelli is Italian, actually, born in Tuscany; it’s his wife who is originally from the Trientino.”

“Outstanding!” Bishop Albert clapped his hands. “The Lutherans will not get ahead of us in this matter. Send a messenger to this Carlo Rugatti at once.”

In the event, the bishop ordered several duplicators.

As did the city council.

Carlo shrugged and mailed the list off to Bolzano.

It took longer to be towed back up-stream to Amberg on a barge than it had taken to be poled down-stream to Regensburg on a barge. Still, it was far more comfortable than going overland, especially if one was accompanied by a crate.

Amberg, Upper Palatinate

November 1634

Paolo was stomping around the dining room at the inn when Carlo got back to Amberg, threatening to tear his hair out. He pointed toward the corner table.

“Another crate arrived from Bolzano. Where do they expect us to put these things?”

The wall behind the table now featured a poster displaying an exploded drawing of a machine called a typewriter (not yet in production).

“Look at those.”

Those were a pile of stencils for producing catalogs.

“The letter says that we are to produce the catalogs ‘on demand,’ whenever possible, with the potential customer observing as we run his (or her, if that should be the case) copy of it off. Prohorsky is objecting to the odor of duplicating fluid in the dining room.”

There were also stencils for standard forms, a ledger, and a stern letter from a clerk somewhere in Bolzano about the importance of following proper procedures, which they should remember from their training sessions!

Carlo shook his head in wonder. “The firm runs training sessions? Who knew?”

Prohorsky had come to the end of his patience, no matter how Frau Mechthilde coaxed and cajoled. These…Italians…could continue to rent one of the upper rooms, if they wished (it was after all, an inn), but they could not continue to use the dining room to run their business. No, not even for the additional customers they brought in during the slow hours. No, not even if they agreed to pay rent for a corner of it with a table. No…

Fortunately, Frau Mechthilde had a sister (a pain in the neck) who had a husband (a soap manufacturer who preferred a cash dowry to a share in an inn) who had a cousin (a tanner) who had a building (no, not a shed, there was a small street frontage) some three blocks away. Of course, he would not want to rent month to month. Real estate in Amberg was currently a seller’s, or landlord’s market. He would want a long-term lease.

“Six months?” Paolo asked. In the worst case, that wouldn’t cause them too great a loss if something came up and they had to depart from Amberg in an expeditious manner, especially if they could get a provision to pay monthly rather than up front for this structure. It was not a shed, but it was on a side street, nowhere near the market square nor close to having a view of the signature arches that marked the front of the Amberg Rathaus.

“Minimum of five years,” the cousin’s lawyer said, “paid quarterly in advance.”

Carlo, somehow, had found them an attorney of their own. A trained jurist, reduced by circumstances to doing work more suitable to a notary.

Werner von Dalberg gave the other man a predatory grin. “One year, maintenance to be the responsibility of the owner.”

Paolo and Carlo left the lawyers to it. Von Dalberg stood up to bow them out. Up, and up, and up.

They had an important appointment. One that involved not only a visit to the baths and barber, but new jerkins for both of them.

Of course, they weren’t important enough to get an interview with Duke Ernst, who was administrator of the province, second only to Emperor Gustav Adolf himself. They did have one with his private secretary.

Paolo checked a few notes that he had scribbled on the back of a business card. “His name’s Johann Heinrich Böcler; he has a good reputation.”

“By which you mean?”

“No bribes necessary. We only need to persuade him of the quality of the product, according to von Dalberg.”

“That doesn’t mean that we can’t take him out to dinner.”

Dinner, in Amberg, happened at noon.

Dinner needed to be a social occasion, not obviously connected to business transactions.

Böcler was young, in his twenties, a stocky fellow of undistinguished appearance, and according to what Sebastian Kellermeister said, didn’t get out and have fun often, if at all.

So they invited…not their unwitting intelligence sources, not their assets…oh, no…their amiable young acquaintances. Kellermeister, Ranke, and Grube were more than delighted to accept an invitation to have dinner with the administrator’s private secretary at the expense of Vignelli Business Machines. What reporter wouldn’t be?

“Do you suppose,” Kellermeister asked Paolo, “that we could eat somewhere that would be private enough for conversation, but still the fellows from the Forge and the Patriot, and the stringers for the Nürnberg papers could see us having dinner with the administrator’s private secretary?” He tried for a wistful expression. The result was more similar to that of a hunting hound eyeing a meaty bone.

Paolo pursed his lips. “I think we can manage that. I’ve noticed that the dining room at the Golden Lion has a small private parlor. The door into it is next to the fireplace. Frau Mechthilde doesn’t open it regularly, but few bottles of good Italian wine as an additional gratuity should do the trick.”

They had been in Amberg long enough now that Paolo had a reliable source for good Italian wine. Sometimes, when he stopped to think about it, that made him a little nervous.

Frau Mechthilde didn’t open the parlor regularly because, twenty years earlier, it had been refurbished for her late mother after she became too crippled to climb the stairs to the family quarters. She had no intention of letting the nice things in it be ruined by drunk patrons. For a quiet private party, though… The Italians paid regularly, in advance. Dionys and the children helped her push the big four-poster bed into a corner and she drew the hangings to close it off.

The dust wasn’t too thick. She cleaned the parlor every spring.

“Georg Eckenberger may qualify as a gadfly; I grant you that,” Böcler said after his second early afternoon glass of an Italian red that was very good indeed. He was not being indiscreet, at all, but considerably more expansive than was usually the case. “But Count Johann Friedrich over at Hilpoltstein is more in the category of a hornet.”

“Hornet?” That was Ranke from the Loyalty. The general editorial stance of his paper was that the dispossessed ruling nobles, the Hochadel, should, under the new dispensation, retain as many of their rights and privileges as they could manage.

“I will grant a certain misapplication of the seventeenth verse from the book of Jonah, Chapter One,” Böcler said, “for that is a great fish.” He was the son of a Lutheran pastor and knew his Bible. There was no frantic flipping through the pages to locate a pertinent verse for him. “You will find references to the hornet in Exodus 23:28 and Deuteronomy 7:20. Ever since Emperor Gustav Adolf sent Duke Ernst to administer the Oberpfalz for him…”

“That was in the late summer of 1633,” Grube interrupted. “It’s hard to recall that well over a year has already gone by.”

“Since then,” Böcler continued his thought, ignoring the interruption. It was not for nothing that he was the grandson of a Latin School teacher with a splendid talent for controlling unruly adolescents as well as the son of a pastor. “Hilpoltstein has been making full use of his status as one of the hereditary dukes of the Junge-Pfalz, even if, after his father died twenty or so years ago, as the youngest brother of Wolfgang Wilhelm at Pfalz-Neuburg, he only got three districts to collect revenue from and no actual sovereignty over those. As God is not afraid to push his chosen people in the direction he wants them to go, neither does this hornet hesitate to buzz behind the provincial officials to push them this way, or that, or the other.”

“Hilpoltstein got stinking little districts,” Grube commented. “Like a lot of younger sons of the Hochadel, no sovereignty and a piece of land not much bigger than the estate of a country nobleman who isn’t especially well-off. Basically, he got a place to live, one that he had to remodel and expand at his own expense before it made reasonable accommodations for his household, and an annual allowance; he couldn’t even prevent his brother from forcibly converting everyone in those districts except his own family and personal servants to Catholicism.”

Jacob Ranke, loyal Crown Loyalist as ever, felt some obligation to come to the count’s defense. “Ever since Wolfgang Wilhelm was killed fighting against Essen last June, though…”

Grube shook his head. “Hilpoltstein has been throwing his weight around. Or trying. Not that there’s much weight for him to throw; politically speaking, he’s a lightweight. For one thing, all of his children have died before they were three years old, so he doesn’t have heirs. I wouldn’t even guarantee that he would win a match against his sister-in-law. Not Wolfgang Wilhelm’s widow; she’s up in Jülich and fully occupied with securing her son’s inheritance in the Rhineland. The middle brother’s widow—August, his name was—the one who was allotted Sulzbach. That one has taken her children, five or six of them, I think, and established a base of Lutheran operations in Nürnberg.”

Paolo and Carlo leaned back, sipped their excellent wine slowly, and listened with delight. Gathering intelligence was a far easier enterprise than they had ever dared to dream. Disseminating it to interested parties was a matter of a few pieces of paper and a postage stamp. Simple coding and encryption were no challenge and they sent out a lot of mail these days. The clerk at the post office knew Carlo well.

Chapter 4

The following week, the hornet’s sister-in-law announced, with considerable pomp and advance publicity, that she was coming to town for serious discussions with Duke Ernst.

“She’s been in Amberg before,” Sebastian Kellermeister told Paolo. “Since the Swedish takeover, I mean. She’s been here lots of times. Why is she making such an occasion of it now?”

It was probably reparations.

So reparations became the theme of that evening’s conversation.

“Almost the first thing that the Swedes had to deal with after they conquered the Upper Palatinate in 1632 was reparations demands of their own by the exiles, the Exulanten, who had been faced with the ‘convert or emigrate’ demands of Maximilian of Bavaria’s officials after Ferdinand II turned the Oberpfalz over to him as ‘war reparations’ in 1621.”

“He’s talking about the Lutheran exiles,” Ranke pointed out. “Since the Calvinists weren’t covered by the provisions of the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, the Bavarians could throw them out and didn’t have to let them take their property. I’m sure that a lot of them were glad enough not to be executed.”

Kellermeister wrinkled his nose. “Anyhow, there were several months when, almost every week, there was a headline saying something like:

Von Gleißenthal Returns from Saxony

or

Portner Arrives from Altdorf; Petitions for Return of Lands at Theuern.”

He winked. “The one that really warmed my father’s heart was:

Confiscations of Property of those Emigrants Who Attached Themselves to the Swedish King to Be Reversed.”

Ranke’s explanation was more pedantic. “To maintain legal legitimacy, Maximilian’s officials did have to allow the Lutherans to sell or take along their personal property, and give them time to arrange the sale of real estate, which some of them managed to drag out for years, not to mention that a lot of them used ‘inability to find a suitable buyer’ as an excuse to come back for visits from wherever they had perched themselves.”

“Most of them didn’t go too far,” Grube added. “After all, there was a war on, so they kept hoping that the other side would toss Maximilian’s officials out in turn, which the Swedes eventually did.”

“If they had gone through with what amounted to a forced sale, though, now they wanted their property back. When von Dalberg first came to Amberg,” Ranke added, “he was hired to represent the title claims of Catholic buyers during the Bavarian occupation.”

“Such as they were.” Kellermeister wriggled. They’d been sitting on this unpadded wooden bench for the better part of an hour. “Most of them claimed to have bought in good faith, even though they must have realized that real estate in the Upper Palatinate was a pretty risky investment, given that Maximilian got it through the tides of war and the war was far from reaching a decisive end.”

“He didn’t stick with it very long.” Grube shifted position, too. Cushioned benches would be nice. Of course, in a room like this, they would soon be hopelessly filthy from spills and messes.

“Who didn’t stick with what very long?” Carlo had lost track.

“Von Dalberg with Catholic land titles.” That was Ranke.

“I was thinking that it’s too bad there’s no way to have cushions on these benches,” Grube readjusted his position again. “But there’s nothing that Frau Mechthilde could wipe off the way she does the tables.”

“There is in Grantville,” Paolo said. “I’ve sat on it. It was called vinyl.”

“Didn’t know you’d been in Grantville.” Ranke never missed a beat.

“Factors—excuse me, sales representatives—get around.”

Carlo grinned. “Sometimes, the cushions covered with it made funny farting noises when a man sat down. I loved it when they did that.”

“Vinyl is one of those things the up-timers say there won’t be any more of,” Paolo said. “Or, if there is, none of us will live to see it.”

“A person could use leather, maybe?”

Carlo pursed his lips. “Even leather soaks up stains the way that vinyl didn’t.”

“Maybe oiled leather?”

“What kind of oil?”

“Does this have anything to do with what we were discussing?”

“No. But, however, that may be,” Grube answered, “cushions would be nice, and there were endless demands for reparations, resulting in lots of work for paper pushers.”

Carlo picked up his beer. “Actually, he’s our lawyer. He’s supposed to drop by in a few minutes with some final paperwork, so we can move all this stuff over to the shed…err…shop. I’ll introduce you.”

***

The shed-to-shop transformation involved a surprising amount of work.

A couple of laborers spent a day scrubbing the grime off the interior with lengths of old hempen rope and harsh lye soap, ruthlessly evicting spiders and beetles. When Paolo examined the result, his eyes blinking a bit from the soap fumes, he hired them for a second day and bought four large pails of whitewash. The next evening, the not-a-shed smelled like chalk, which was an improvement on lye soap, and far better than whatever it had last contained before it was cleaned. But the white walls reflected light and made the floors look worse.

He had suspicions about what might have been the previous use of the place, involving an unsuccessful effort to cultivate mushrooms that had left trays of the fungus to rot in place. If it had worked, though… Paolo liked fresh mushrooms. Maybe…

Whatever had been in them, the floor was marked by odd, tray-shaped, stains. Those required hiring the laborers for a third day, more old hemp rope, more lye soap, and a lot of linseed oil. Linseed oil stayed sticky for weeks, but eventually cured well on wood. They didn’t have time to wait, so they would have to move into a building that smelled like flax, which wasn’t pleasant, but the odor should be gone in a month. Or two.

Right now, he looked at the reporters hopefully. Young men, strong backs. He would rather not have to pay the laborers for a fourth day. His savings were suffering from all this.

“Do any of you know where we could borrow a couple of wheelbarrows?”

As it happened, they did. After the wheelbarrow parade down the street the next day, which was punctuated by Paolo’s anxious admonitions of, “don’t bounce the barrow on the cobblestones like that—some of the machinery is delicate,” the well-lubricated amateur moving crew retired once more to the inn. To even more beer. To even more conversation.

The beer ended up costing as much as hiring the laborers for a fourth day would have.

At the end of the evening, the delighted Carlo remarked, “Sometimes, I think they like to talk even more than they like to write. What was that song about words that a girl sang in one of the plays we saw at the high school in Grantville? About words all day long, until she was tired of hearing words? I never get tired of hearing words. They’re often so informative.”

***

Now they had added their attorney to the group that talked. And talked. And talked. Not as a regular member, but von Dalberg was an occasional visitor.

“Interesting man,” Sebastian had said after the lawyer left the first evening that he joined the group who drank Frau Mechthilde’s beer. “He’s sure never going to have a problem looking over the heads of other people in a crowd.”

Ranke frowned, picking up the previous evening’s dissection of the impact of the Bavarian occupation on real estate. “He’s Catholic.”

“What does that have to do with how tall he is?”

“Nothing. As I was saying, the Bavarians, and by ‘Bavarians’ I mean Catholics whether they came from Bavaria or someplace else, confiscated all of the churches and church property—that included almost every school, of course—and turned them into Catholic equivalents.”

“There were lectures.” Carlo leaned one elbow on the table. “While we were in Grantville, after the Wartburg. That was 1632. Part of what happened in Grantville were ‘civics’ lectures for the former mercenaries who had survived the up-timers’ early battles. Some had been taken prisoner; some had come in as refugees.” He added a second elbow. “We are Catholic, of course, Paolo and I, so our lectures were mostly at the Catholic church—St. Mary’s, it’s called. Pretty stained glass windows, made in Austria, so the wonderful America didn’t have everything; they had to buy some things from us. Or from our many-times great-grandchildren. The colors in the glass were too pale, I thought, but there’s no accounting for taste.”

“Rugatti!” Ranke rapped his knuckles on the table. “Get to the point. We don’t care about…”

“Someone might. Father Heinzerling talked about something called the Counter Reformation, the Council of Trent, and that Catholics would rather call it the Catholic Reformation. He went on and on and on.” He grinned. “I think he’d avoided the whole movement, himself. He was married with children.”

Grube stuck his tongue out. “Aren’t ninety percent of priests who haven’t taken monastic vows? Even if the rigid celibates insist that the ‘housekeepers’ are concubines rather than wives?”

Ranke ignored the interruption. “What Duke Maximilian’s version of the Catholic Reformation, or Counter Reformation, or whatever the up-timers decided to name it, meant here in Amberg, in the Upper Palatinate as a whole, was that everyone had to decide whether to return to the ‘old belief’ or leave. Expatriation, that’s what they called it when they left.”

“I wasn’t here,” Stentzel Grube said. “My family was still in Moravia.”

“Mine was in Saxony,” Ranke admitted. “Make that already in Saxony, to be precise. My mother had inherited some property there. She wishes I’d give up journalism, go back, and run it.”

“Mine decided to leave,” Sebastian said. “I came back from Bayreuth right after the Swedes arrived, but my parents have stayed there. It was mainly the richer families who left; they had the funds to settle and make lives elsewhere. Men like Kaspar Maier—he was one of the four Bürgermeister at the time Maximilian issued the edict.”

“Why four?” That was Carlo.

“They serve in three-month rotations. Normally, they are chosen from the most prosperous patricians of the town, but they still have businesses to run, after all. Full-time office holding would be a major burden,” Ranke answered.

Kellermeister continued, undisturbed by the interruption. “That isn’t relevant to the choices that most people made about emigration, and that includes most of the fifty or so members of both city councils who obligingly converted. What was the average shopkeeper or artisan to do? There’s never any guarantee, if a small shop owner or artisan leaves his home town, that the guilds will allow him to reestablish himself somewhere else, wherever he ends up or that any other town will accept him as a citizen. Much less the peasant farmers.”

“Somehow, you don’t strike me as coming from the rich ones,” Paolo said.

“No, but my parents could afford to make that choice. My family certainly was not among the wealthy, but my father can find a job anywhere he goes. There’s no such thing as a school teachers’ guild and you don’t need capital to buy into that employment. The human mind is a portable commodity, even if businessmen tend to look down at those who live by it and ask, ‘if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?’”

Grube poked into the conversation. “The peasants couldn’t afford to leave, but the landowners, the Landsassen like Hans Friedrich Fuchs auf Winklarn could, in hopes that they could continue to collect the rents from the peasants for the time being, get a substantial amount of capital if the forced sale went through, and buy in somewhere else.”

Werner von Dalberg jerked his head up. “Fuchs!”

“Hans Friedrich Fuchs is an honorable man,” Jacob Ranke said stiffly. “He’s from the Fuchs von Walberg family up around Tischenreuth in the north. He was the Landmarschall of the Estates before the Bavarians took over. That is perhaps, something like the speaker parliament. He’s nothing like that man over in Franconia who caused so much trouble for your beloved up-timers during the Ram Rebellion. Since the first intervention of the Swedes in the conflict, he has served Gustav Adolf with complete loyalty, first as his commissary in Nürnberg and then…”

“Enough. I take your point,” von Dalberg answered.

“Well, to get back to what I was saying then…” Kellermeister put down his stein and waved to Frau Mechthilde for a refill. “If a peasant gave up his lease, he wasn’t likely to find another one. If he went to Saxony or Ansbach, he’d run the major risk of ending up as a day laborer; a hired man in service on an annual contract if he was lucky. At that, a peasant had more choice than household servants or apprentices. They aren’t permitted to walk out on their masters, no matter what their personal consciences may tell them, until the contract expires.”

Ranke put his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers. “Martyrdom may be meritorious, but it’s not easy on the people who choose it; more than one of the Exulanten died in poverty, if you examine the records.”

Von Dalberg nodded his agreement, if a little reluctantly.

Ranke kept expounding on his theme. “The most fortunate daughters of prominent families married Swedish officers and their brothers studied at universities or became junior officers themselves. The less fortunate daughters of prominent families ended up in service to glass blowers or brewers and their brothers considered themselves fortunate to be allowed to join a regiment as a common soldier.”

Kellermeister looked at Carlo. “Figure that ten percent of the population left. The remainder decided that they might as well be Catholic. After all, if you’ve already been jerked around several times by the rulers from Lutheran to Calvinist to Lutheran to Calvinist—what’s one more conversion? I’d say that every person who went into exile had at least one brother or cousin or in-law who took the conversion route and was in place to claim the family’s estates if the Bavarians confiscated them.”

It might be reparations that were bringing the countess of Pfalz-Sulzbach to Amberg this time. But, then again, it might not. As a good reporter should, Sebastian Kellermeister set out to find out. He was absent from the Stammtisch for several days.

Chapter 5

The actual arrival of the countess of Pfalz-Sulzbach merited even more newspaper coverage than the announcement of her intention to arrive had. She was in her early thirties, her straight hair still very dark, her brown eyes darting everywhere, her straight lips firm, her chin…double; energetic, and certain of herself. And her nose… The reporters, especially those whose papers appealed to a Crown Loyalist subscriber base, tended to use “hawk-like” in preference to “enormous beak.”

“Her sense of style is certainly interesting,” Paolo said. They had turned out to watch her entry, since it was the most interesting thing to do that afternoon. “The tailor must have said that the off-the-shoulder cut with the almost horizontal trimming is fashionable. To which she must have answered that the only way she would wear it was if he covered up every inch of that decolletage with a modest linen collar and a couple of necklaces.”

Carlo shrugged. “Maybe she’s modest. Maybe she has smallpox scars. The neck and shoulders are a prime place for them. Some of the women in Grantville wore things that filled up low-cut tops like that, sometimes, though, and none of them ever had smallpox, so you can’t tell. I thought it was a waste. What’s the point of having it if you don’t show it off? What did Bibi Barlow call them?”

“Dickeys. And it’s colder here in Germany than it is in Italy. I wouldn’t want to have to walk around Amberg in a shirt cut so low that it almost showed my nipples, not even in summer, and certainly not in winter. Maybe the way the women dress north of the Alps is because they’re modest, but it’s more likely just common sense. If you moved one of those marble statues from the ancient Romans up this way, the stone itself would develop goose bumps.”

***

Paolo picked up the Amberg Global News. “Nice column, Sebastian. More balanced and judicious than the one Jacob did for the Loyalty. What have you concluded about what the real cause of this visit may be?”

“Aside from that it’s most likely something else to do with her children’s rights to this, that, or the other in the former Pfalz-Sulzbach? Nothing, really, even though I tried. And that ought to have all been straightened out by now.”

“She’s a suspicious woman,” Stentzel said. “Keeps her precious offspring safely tucked away in non-USE and firmly Lutheran Nürnberg, and why not? The Bavarians threatened more than one Protestant widow with having her children taken from her unless she converted; Philipp Jakob von der Grün’s widow wasn’t the only case. After what the countess went through under Wolfgang Wilhelm and the Bavarians, she’s unlikely to ever trust a Catholic. She certainly doesn’t trust the Jesuits for a minute, nor is she the kind of person to make fine distinctions: probably can’t tell Gregory of Valencia, S.J., from Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, equally S.J., or even care to try.”

Jacob Ranke pointed his finger across the table. “She’s deeply suspicious of you, von Dalberg, and what you may be up to. Puts you in the same category as Piazza over in Thuringia-Franconia: a Catholic who is stirring up trouble.”

“That’s too bad,” von Dalberg said. His voice was solemn, his face neutral.

“Yes, it is too bad.” Carlo shook his head mournfully. “I was hoping that I could sell her a duplicating machine while she was here. I’ve tried to get appointments with her when I was going through Nürnberg, but never got so much as an acknowledgment of the request. Now, I guess I know why.”

“It could be that you’re Catholic,” Kellermeister said. “It could be that you’re Italian. She comes from somewhere way up north. She was a duchess of Holstein-Gottorp when Count August married her. It was a grand marriage from his point of view, but didn’t give him as much leverage for the Lutheran cause as he had hoped. Holstein’s a long way away.”

“What’s her name? Beyond ‘countess,’ that is?” one of the stringers asked.

“Something utterly outlandish. Hedwig.”

“That’s not outlandish,” Ranke protested. “Elector John George of Saxony’s older brother, the one who died young and childless, married a woman named Hedwig. She was a sister of the Danish king. Is a sister of the Danish king, I suppose; she’s still alive.”

“Denmark,” Grube pointed out, “is also way up north. My favorite headline was:

‘Halsstarrige Ehefrauen’ Rejoin Their Husbands

The Bavarians really didn’t like women who were so stiff-necked that they took exile even when their husbands were willing to compromise and convert. Because Count August held the Sulzbach lands under his father’s will, she didn’t have to become an exile herself. She did have to sit there and watch, powerless to do anything about the forced conversions in his territories.”

“I sort of like ‘Halsstarrige Ehefrauen’ too,” Ranke said. “Perhaps it was an omen. A prophetic foretelling of what the Austrian archduchess would do to Duke Maximilian later on.”

Grube crossed his legs, first one way, then the other. Cushions would be nice. “Fucilla, what was that material you said the Grantvillers use to cover pillows?”

“Vinyl.”

“They were filled with something we don’t have either, called foam rubber,” Carlo said. “I saw some of it; it didn’t look a thing like anything else they said was rubber. Not soft, like feathers; kind of bouncy. If you pushed it down, it popped right back up, like a jack-in-the-box in the puppet shows. In the chairs at Cora’s Café, it was no thicker than the end of my thumb.” He stuck it up as a standard of measurement. “In the booths at Castalanni Brothers Pizza, more that of…”

“Don’t do it,” Paolo ordered.

So Carlo didn’t get to give everyone in the dining room at the Golden Lion the finger under the perfectly good pretext of demonstrating a unit of measurement.

But he wished that he’d been fast enough to get it in.

***

The countess met with Duke Ernst.

Kellermeister duly covered the meeting. As did, of course, every other reporter in Amberg and several who had come over from Nürnberg or up from Regensburg for the occasion, one from Ingolstadt, two from Neuburg, and someone from the Sulzbach weekly rag.

Paolo and Carlo hosted them all for drinks once they had done whatever they planned to do with their stories.

The reporter from Sulzbach was an aggrieved man. The more he had to drink, the more openly he displayed his grievances.

“She’s planning to establish communities of Jews, that’s what she’s doing. Because the eastern section of the lands assigned to Count August in the partition are along the Goldene Strasse, the great trade route into Bohemia, she thinks that having them along there will be ‘good for the economy.’ Good for the money she rakes in for her son, is what she means. What about the ordinary traders and artisans in Weiden? In Floß? In Sulzbach itself, for that matter? All of them already there; all of them good Germans?”

“Seems an odd thing for her to do,” Carlo said. He kept his tone of voice noncommittal. Bland. Neutral.

“She had some researcher looking things up in that up-time town, Grantville. She claims that in that other world, her son did this later on, so she might as well do it on his behalf now and take advantage of the extra years of economic improvements it will bring about.” He spat on the floor. “So here she comes, traipsing over to talk to Duke Ernst and get his ‘assurances’ that her little court Jews will be secure and that the provincial authorities will take proper care of them.” He spat again. “Believe me, if we get a chance, those of us who will have to live next door, we’ll happily take care of them, all right.”

When Carlo requested an appointment with the visiting countess the next day, the request made no mention of duplicating machines, but rather referenced information concerning rumors of popular unrest and discontent in the Sulzbach districts.

That opened the door that had previously remained closed.

He did manage to interest her secretary in a duplicating machine while he was there.

Before she returned to Nürnberg with her entourage, the interest had turned into a sale.

And a small retainer.

***

Meanwhile, the reporters had other stories to cover.

Duke Ernst was a busy man.

“It is a major issue,” Grube pointed out after one unusually tedious and prolonged public hearing.

Major, but not the kind of thing easily summed up in a catchy headline.

Paolo Fucilla was always happy to listen, though. Just the kind of guy a reporter appreciated.

“To a limited extent from 1621 through 1627, more oppressively after 1623, and then with almost no limits from 1628 through 1631,” Grube went on, “as Ferdinand II granted him more extensive rights, Maximilian of Bavaria’s officials took possession of all ecclesiastical property in the Upper Palatinate and turned it over to the Catholics. Mostly to the Jesuits, some to the Franciscans, since there’s such a shortage of halfway competent priests who aren’t in religious orders—Bavaria hasn’t had a lot of success in setting up seminaries.”

“Not all of it,” Kellermeister said. “Not the revenues of the secularized monasteries, which remain with the government and are supposed—did you hear the word supposed—to be used for the support of schools.”

“Not Höchstädt, either,” Ranke noted.

“They would have included Höchstädt if Wolfgang Wilhelm’s Lutheran mother had not managed to live as long as she did and hang on to the dower lands assigned in her marriage contract. She managed to survive until the year after the Swedes arrived.”

“What did they decide?” Paolo asked.

Kellermeister grinned. “You should have heard Duke Ernst. So cool. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. At the end of it all, what he said was, ‘The emperor has not yet come to a final decision in regard to an established church in the Upper Palatinate. In any case, I do not regard these issues as matters of religion—of faith. I regard them as matters of real estate law, and as such, believe that it is within my competence as administrator, not as a Lutheran Landesbischof, to deal with them.’ I expect he’ll do exactly that.”

“Most likely with a heavy tilt in favor of re-establishing Lutheran parishes. Maybe giving the Calvinists a few.”

“Matthew 15:27.”

“Why not Mark 7:28?”

Paolo looked at them blankly.

“The verse about dogs being allowed to eat the crumbs that fall from the table where the children have dinner,” Ranke said. “Even if we Lutherans get dinner, the Catholics and Calvinists will be left some crumbs.”

***

A few days later, Stentzel Grube backed through the door of the inn, pushing it with his butt, manhandling two…somethings…taller than he was.

Frau Mechthilde gave him the look that mothers of sons have perfected for centuries. “Grube, if you plan to clutter my dining room all evening with whatever that is…”

“Ah, no. A gift for you, most gracious lady, a gift. A donation. A benefaction. An offering.”

He was carrying two bench cushions, with ties to hold them in place.

“For our Stammtisch.”

“I thought we couldn’t figure out what to use.”

“‘We’ didn’t. I went and talked to the tanner.” He turned back to the landlady. “Your sister’s husband’s cousin, that is. The respected proprietor of our friends’ shed.” He nodded at Paolo and Carlo. “Who, since it was for you,” Grube mimicked a formal court bow toward Frau Mechthilde, “provided me with professional advice at a discount.”

“What are they filled with?” Carlo pressed on one of them as soon as he got it tied to the bench. “Firmer than feathers.”

“Old woolen rags, washed, flattened out, and quilted together. My landlady figured out how to do it. Like a winter jerkin, but thicker.”

Everybody in the room had to take a turn sitting on the two cushions.

Prohorsky eyed them; eyed the other benches.

***

The cushions proved to be an inspiration when it came to inducing even longer-lasting talk fests.

“There’s really no such thing as a national or imperial policy on religious toleration yet,” Sebastian proclaimed.

“That doesn’t make sense, Herr Kellermeister. There has to be. Why would people talk so much about something that’s…not?” That was young Lambert Prohorsky arriving at the table, his hands full of refilled beer steins.

Sebastian coaxed the handle of his own stein carefully off Lambert’s thumb. “The USE has something it’s calling ‘religious toleration.’ We call it religious toleration when we write about it. But no statute has defined it. It ranges all the way from full acceptance of the most wildly irregular sects in Thuringia-Franconia to ‘if you’re not Lutheran, hide your church on an upstairs floor in a building off the street and never mention it in public’ in Pomerania.”

Stentzel reached out and grabbed his own beer. “Pomerania is, I’d point out, under the direct control of Emperor Gustav Adolf. That, to me, doesn’t spell out that the emperor is enthusiastic about this non-existent something.”

“The editorial position of the Loyalty,” Ranke pronounced, “is that Duke Ernst is attempting to maintain a balanced and impartial position in the face of potential chaos.”

***

In practice, as far as Amberg itself was concerned, “balanced and impartial” meant that Duke Ernst allowed the Jesuits to retain possession of St. Georg’s church, which had been allocated to them in 1624, as long as they agreed that it would also officially become the parish church for any Catholics who might be residing in the province’s capital city or visiting it as diplomats, guests, merchants, technicians for advancements in the mining and metal forging industries, bankers, exporters, importers…

“How about sales representatives?” Carlo asked Böcler somewhere in the middle of a discussion of paper shredders.

“Sales representatives, too,” the duke’s secretary assured him. “Aside from St. Georg’s, which the Jesuits already have, he has also allotted the little church by the Spital to the Franciscans and give them their old monastery building back, over a lot of vociferous objections from the Lutherans. He’s assigned Holy Trinity to the few Calvinists who have bothered to return now that there is no Elector Palatine or his regent to guarantee them a specially privileged status. The Lutherans get St. Martin’s back, which has a certain elegance to it. Our Lady’s as well, but the Jesuits will receive fair financial compensation, seeing that the Calvinists had degraded it to the status of a horse stable and they spent a lot on repairs. There aren’t enough Catholics in Amberg right now that it makes any sense for them to have two large churches.”

Böcler’s life ambition was to be a great historian. For a minute, he abandoned current politics. “Though, to be honest, at some point in the past, the Catholics built them all. There hasn’t been a new church constructed in Amberg since the Reformation. Thank heavens for the Peace of Augsburg.”

Carlo’s knowledge of the provisions of the 1555 Peace of Augsburg fell somewhere between vague and non-existent. He maintained a noncommittal expression rather than commenting on its possible merits or lack of them. For his own part, he thought that all these various religious denominations added unnecessary confusion to a man’s life. What was the problem with just showing up at mass regularly enough to keep the priest from nagging you?

When he expressed no caveats, Böcler continued talking.

“The chapels attached to the leprosy hospitals outside the walls, both of them, for men and for women, will be subject to simultaneum and clergy of all faiths may use them as needed to minister to their small flocks. As for the smaller churches and chapels inside the walls… Really,” Böcler tapped on his clipboard, “it’s not that difficult a project when there are several different buildings available in a town.”

“If it’s not difficult, then why is this interminable series of public hearings going on?” Carlo finally got the detachable crank reattached, put a dab of grease on the gears, and checked that the blades were still aligned. Their tendency to go awry and catch on one another every time a person moved the shredder was a nuisance. Maybe something more robust… In his next letter to Bolzano, he’d mention a push lawn mower he’d seen in Grantville. Figuring out how to modify it was Vignelli’s problem, though; certainly not his.

“The grating irritations arise in the villages where there is only one church building and, ordinarily, barely sufficient population and income to maintain that one church building and one clergyman, if that. Because of the problems of the last few decades, obviously, Duke Ernst is encountering contending claims by the adherents of the various faiths and weariness on the part of many of the laity, who simply do not want to be instructed and converted again, no matter by whom or to what. All this is compounded, you understand, in almost any village, by ongoing family feuds, economic resentments, and other utterly non-doctrinal problems. The reasonable solution in regard to the village church buildings, the one toward which Duke Ernst is tending, is to force a simultaneum solution on all of them.”

“Then, why didn’t he go ahead and do it without wasting time on all this procedural stuff?”

“Think about it, Carlo. It’s fairly easy to say that the Catholics can have the early morning mass, the Lutherans can have a service of the word and sacrament at mid-morning, and the Calvinists come in for a long sermon beginning at noon. But when it comes to scheduling catechism instruction classes, choir rehearsals, and special services during Advent and Lent, not to mention the disputes in regard to both interior and exterior ornamentation when Calvinists are involved…

“If he does it, though, it will also means that hardly any village will have a resident pastor. Any of them, whether Lutheran or Catholic, or Calvinist, or…” Böcler paused and thought about the way some of the up-time sects were already spreading through the State of Thuringia-Franconia, “…others, perhaps, as time goes on. The pastors will have to travel among three or four or five villages, probably, because it will take that many of his own adherents in several religiously-divided villages to support one man; he’ll live in one of them, but be gone most of the time. The parishioners in any specific village will only get a service or sermon perhaps once a month, rather than weekly or several times a week, as is the case in towns. I don’t like that at all.”

***

Neither did Duke Ernst. He simply hadn’t managed to identify any alternative, while knowing that the Fourth of July Party would object, vociferously, to any solution he imposed.

It wasn’t as if the Fourth of July Party at the national level had produced any constructive suggestions or proposed any viable alternatives. Its commitment to the “complete separation of church and state” slogan, in Duke Ernst’s opinion, clearly fell within the scope of Hebrews 11:1. “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” He wondered what one of the up-timers, any of the up-timers, would have done if confronted with the need to decide how to handle ecclesiastical property in the Upper Palatinate. He wondered if Michael Stearns had ever given a thought to it at all.

The one mitigating factor, he sometimes thought, was that in the Upper Palatinate, at least, Werner von Dalberg had seen a lot of church property titles, up close and personal, and understood the complexities of the issue.

After one of the hearings, the man had commented, “The only alternative solution that I can see would be for you to confiscate all of it in Gustav Adolf’s name, the way Henry VIII did in England. You could turn it over to the provincial treasury the way the electors did with the monastic revenues a century ago, and make the different churches buy back anything they decided that they wanted. Let each denomination bid on the village churches; winner take all, and the rest of the villagers either convert out of weariness, become unchurched, or face a five or ten mile walk to the nearest village in which those of their own confession managed to make the highest bid. In which case, I assure you, everyone, most likely including myself on behalf of my party, would object even more loudly that the solution was unjust.”

As far as Ernst had been able to find out by dint of having his brother Albrecht employ diligent researchers in Grantville’s libraries, nothing equivalent to the Bavarian confiscations—for that matter, nothing equivalent to the things that were done throughout much of what was now the USE during the era of Emperor Ferdinand II’s Edict of Restitution—had ever happened in the United States of America. Prior to their revolution, some of the British colonies had established churches, yes. But the revolutionaries had not confiscated the property of those churches and turned it over to some other church that they preferred, leaving the situation to be sorted out by some unfortunate, harried, bureaucrat several years later.

The series of public hearings went on, whether an eventual simultaneum for the villages was inevitable or not. Letting people talk themselves into exhaustion was occasionally a viable procedural approach.

***

Although he would have been mildly distressed to realize it, Duke Ernst’s mind had worked its way along the same path as that followed by Bishop Albert of Regensburg—the administration needed office supplies. Vignelli’s factory was closer and he had a better service network here in the south than IBM did.

Böcler and Carlo had quite a bit of time for conversation as they worked through the major order that the provincial administration placed. Forms for the central office in this stack; forms for provincial offices in that stack; does it need to be divided by category between capital investment and consumables?

“It’s not just churches. It’s also schools.” Education was a topic dear to Böcler’s heart; his grandfather was a Latin School teacher. He was delighted to explain. At length.

“What will happen in villages where there is only one school building, and barely enough children to justify the employment of one teacher? Here in Amberg, Duke Ernst has given the Paedagogium back to the Calvinists, since they founded it, even if not successfully, and the old Latin School back to the Lutherans, since they had it longer than anyone else. Neither of those buildings is contiguous to the Jesuit Collegium in any case. There are four dame schools for beginners; there are three or four German schools for boys and girls at the various churches. Parents can choose.”

The topic of the schools in Amberg itself saw them through an excessively large pile of requisition forms from Sulzbach, an improperly completed estimate from Passau, and a demand that Hilpoltstein should be allowed to do its own ordering and not from a Catholic firm. Böcler’s assistant trotted in, picked those up, and trotted back out, presumably to deliver them and their attached memoranda to some hapless clerk in a back room.

Carlo picked up another piece of paper. “Why does Rosenberg want its own duplicating machine? I should toss this in the pile and chortle all the way to my commission, but it does not make sense. They can share the one that you’ve ordered for Sulzbach.”

“Danke.” Böcler stuck his head out the door, yelled for his assistant to come back, and resumed talking. “In a village, though, how many of the parents who adhere to one confession will be content to send their children to school at all if the teacher belongs to one of the others? Some won’t care a great deal; however, others will care a lot. After all, one major function of a school, if not the major purpose in the opinion of most people, is to instill a knowledge of correct doctrine into the pupils.”

Carlo ran a finger across a letter expressing the wishes of the Amtspfleger in Tischenreuth and Waldsassen in regard to filing cabinets. “This paper is sleazy. If you want the duplicators to function without excessive maintenance, you’ll need to set minimum quality standards for paper purchased by all the local offices to which Duke Ernst provides them.”

Without changing pace, he followed that with, “In Grantville, before the Ring of Fire, the schools weren’t connected to the churches. They left religious instruction out of it. The catechetical instruction for the Catholic children was at St. Mary’s, just like the ‘civics’ lessons for us former mercenaries.” He laughed. “Which, I suppose, is not quite the same thing, although they took it just as seriously.”

Böcler looked at the offending piece of paper and made a note. “Grantville was a town, though—not as large as Amberg, but, still, a municipality. How did the up-timers afford to educate village children? Were they truly so prosperous that even a small village could afford a full-time teacher—not the pastor doing it as a second job or the sexton teaching when he wasn’t keeping the buildings in order, or a tailor taking it on during the hours when it was too dark to sew?”

Carlo thought a minute. “There were the famous school buses. I think they brought many of the children from farther away to the schools in the town; not just the children in town to the schools. Which sounds peculiar, but only the middle school was where one would expect it to be. The elementary school and the high school were both an excessive distance away from the market square, I thought. Or from the part of Grantville that would have been a market square if there was one.”

Then… “They didn’t, really, have villages. Villages weren’t the way their land was settled. The Grantvillers spoke of widely scattered farms and ranches.”

That, somehow, had never appeared in Böcler’s reading about the up-time world.

It was something so self-evident to the up-timers that no author of any introductory Latin or German text on Introduction to the United States of America for Dummies had thought to mention it. Carlo had seen it with his own eyes and asked.

“No villages? How did they pay the teachers?”

Carlo had no idea.

“And where did the people live, if there weren’t villages? They can’t all have been in cities and chartered towns. The daily travel to the fields for farmers would have taken much too long, even with those motorized vehicles. But to live out in the middle of nowhere, a family by itself, no one to share the expense of an ox team or a plow? How did they even have an oven? A bath house?”

***

Böcler spent the evening at home, mulling over the matter. He was an intelligent, generally well-informed, man. He was also a very busy one.

His contact with the up-timers in Amberg was mostly limited to taking notes when Duke Ernst conferred with them about the revival of mining and the iron industry. Or about Bavarian military threats. They didn’t invite the administrator’s secretary to their homes—or, for that matter, to their offices. They came to meet with the emperor’s appointed chief official in the province, discussed specific professional concerns with him for limited amounts of time, and returned to their own preoccupations.

He had never been to Grantville. He would like to go, some day, if possible, but he had a job that was more than full-time.

Maybe, when the planned imperial normal school came to be…since it would be located in Amberg…perhaps one of the professors would have ideas and information on how to pay for village schools not affiliated with one particular church…

What was the State of Thuringia-Franconia doing about schools outside of Grantville, for that matter?

He sighed. How did the emperor propose to assign the new graduates of his new normal school to village schools that he did not control? Particularly in provinces that he did not directly administer? In the Upper Palatinate, that would require far more school funding than the revenues of the secularized monasteries, no matter how well invested, would ever provide—without, please, subjecting the province to one more round of confiscations of church property by the government as von Dalberg had suggested to Duke Ernst.

Leases, perhaps…

No. Having the government confiscate all the church property, retain title, and lease it to various congregations would not exactly amount to “complete separation of church and state” either.

Chapter 6

Carlo drank from his mug, realized that Frau Mechthilde was watching him, and didn’t make a face. Broth was unpredictable at the best of times; he had been out for lunch yesterday, but today’s broth had clearly been preceded by a main dish that contained a lot of cabbage.

On the basis of the major government order, he suggested in a low voice, “We don’t have to stay at this inn and eat the food that our landlady over there cooks. We have enough money now that we could rent a house. Hire a cook and tell her what we want to eat.”

Paolo tried the broth. Nevertheless, he shook his head. “Maintenance, my friend. Maintenance. No sooner do you sign a lease for a house than the roof leaks, the windows sprout drafts, and the bitch next door thinks you should install window boxes and cultivate flowers to improve the tone of the neighborhood. Then you re-read the lease, only to discover that the owner’s sneaky lawyer included clauses that put the cost of all such problems on you. There would go our retirement fund—down the drain, sucked away by someone else’s property. We can drink a lot of cabbage broth to keep our savings safe.”

Carlo tried the broth again and scratched his beard thoughtfully. The German enthusiasm for cabbage was inexplicable. Maybe they could buy a house. A duplex townhouse. Lease the other half to someone else to cover part of the expenses. Get von Dalberg, that sneaky lawyer, to draft a contract whose clauses would make that someone else responsible for the maintenance.

***

Immediately prior to the beginning of Advent, Caspar Hell, S.J., rector of the Jesuit Collegium in Amberg, requested an appointment with Duke Ernst to discuss the province’s “no established church” procedures and the USE’s expanded principle of religious toleration in light of the series of guest sermons currently being delivered in Amberg by one Pastor Georg Eckenberger, a resident of Regensburg.

The series, given on Thursday evenings at Our Lady’s (the pastor at St. Martin’s wouldn’t give Eckenberger time or space) featured, with numerous contemporary applications, Judges 2:1-5, in which THE ANGEL (Eckenberger managed to capitalize the words with his voice when he preached and actually capitalized them when he produced copies of his sermons for distribution by using his wondrous duplicating machine) delivered a message:

THE ANGEL of the Lord went up from Gilgal to Bochim and said, “I brought you up out of Egypt and led you into the land which I have sworn to your fathers; and I said, ‘I will never break My covenant with you, and you shall not make a covenant with the people of this land; but you shall break down their altars.’ Yet you have disobeyed me. Why have you done this? Now therefore I tell you that I will not drive them out before you; they will be thorns in your sides and their gods will be a snare to you.”

“Why?” Eckenberger demanded of his congregation. “Why has Gustav Adolf’s administrator not broken down their altars? Why are the Jesuits still here, tolerated when the Lion of the North entered the war as the champion of the Protestant faith?”

So why were the Jesuits still there? Duke Ernst also sometimes asked himself that question. Until Gustav Adolf made up his mind whether or not he was going to experiment more broadly with a “religious toleration” that might or might not come at the more or less permanent expense of the interests of young Karl Ludwig, the late Winter King’s oldest son, who had converted to Catholicism during his polite custody in the hands of the former cardinal infante—now self-promoted to the rank of king in the Low Countries—in Brussels, he was keeping his options open. That involved letting the Jesuits stay until such time as they might realize that their cause was hopeless, pack their bags, and go.

He was not aware that the Jesuits sometimes asked one another the same question.

***

In the current conversation, Father Hell appeared to be diplomatic, but not hopeless, and showed no immediate intention of departing hence into another place. He was…concerned…about some…incidents…that had arisen.

He slapped a couple of broadsides on the table that separated them. Duke Ernst glanced down; then handed them over his shoulder to Böcler.

Hell finished his presentation.

“I could sincerely wish,” Duke Ernst responded, referencing the first broadside, “that the only song being sung by my fellow Lutherans was Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort, Und steur des Papsts und Türken Mord. Dr. Luther wrote it himself, and a desire not to be murdered by either the pope or the Turks is a worthy enough sentiment.”

“Although its traditional classification as a children’s song may be a bit…”

“Not a ‘children’s song,’ precisely; rather, it was recommended for boys’ choirs. It’s not all that bloodthirsty. What’s wrong with, ‘avert our murder by the pope and Turks’ as a prayer?”

Father Hell brandished a reprint of the 1941 Lutheran Hymnal. “I note that the up-timers, even the most doctrinally conservative Lutherans among the up-timers as I understand it, had modified the lines to be somewhat more…neutral, shall we say? ‘Lord, keep us steadfast in Thy word, curb those who by deceit or sword…’ No pope; no Turks.”

“Point granted,” Duke Ernst admitted.

Hell persisted. “Beyond that, leaving Erhalt uns, Herr to the side, shall we consider:

Auß tieffer Not,

Schlag Pfaffen zu Todt,

Und laß khein Munch leben!”

The Lutheran administrator of the Upper Palatinate, duly installed by the Lutheran Emperor Gustav Adolf, winced. “I believe that is more of a…folk song? Popular ditty?”

“It is a satirical travesty of the De Profundis. ‘Out of deep necessity, beat priests to death, and don’t let a single monk live!’”

“There are…quite a few challenges in navigating this new universe that has been brought into existence by the Ring of Fire. The up-timers are strong proponents of religious toleration. Simultaneously, they are strongly opposed to government censorship of free speech.”

Hell raised his eyebrows. “You’re the governor; not me.”

When in doubt, toss the ball at the other party and see what they’ll do with it. “Do you have any recommendations?” Duke Ernst asked. “Somehow, I doubt that you are as enamored of the doctrine of ‘complete separation of church and state’ as our new friends the up-timers are. Or these Committee of Correspondence radicals who are sprouting up here and there well outside the limits of the State of Thuringia-Franconia, not only in Magdeburg, but right here.”

Hell steepled his fingers. “Their apparent leader came to Amberg from the SoTF and is, at least technically, a parishioner at St. Georg’s.”

Duke Ernst hesitated briefly, pursed his lips, and asked, “What do you think about Werner von Dalberg? I have really had no contact with the man other than in regard to reparations claims. I do know that he specializes in real estate titles and their incredible tangles.”

“He’s been around for a while—since before the Congress of Copenhagen, definitely.” Hell started to calculate out loud. “That was when? June, 1634, of course. No, he was here well before that—before the Ram Rebellion broke out in Franconia, so…early summer of 1633, probably. No, let me think a minute. He probably came right after the Swedes retook the Oberpfalz from Bavaria. That would be…”

He looked at up at the carved wooden ceiling tiles, their floral designs picked out in red and blue paint long before anyone had heard of the Ring of Fire, counting on his fingers. “Well, the Special Commission on the Establishment of Freedom of Religion in the Franconian Prince-Bishoprics and the Prince Abbey of Fulda—lovely title, don’t you think?—almost down-time in its charming verbosity—started work in Franconia in December 1632. Von Dalberg was here before that. The first time I became aware of his presence, he was speaking at a public meeting, giving an explanation of what the NUS commission would be doing in Franconia and what it might possibly imply for future developments in the Upper Palatinate.”

“Where did he come from?”

“He’s from somewhere in the Rhineland, originally, one of the old electoral prince-archbishoprics. Immediately, from the episcopal chancery in Würzburg.”

“Entwurzelt, then.” Duke Ernst permitted himself a small smile at his own cleverness and tugged at his blond goatee.

“Uprooted in more than one way, I would think. In social status, he’s from one of those families of imperial knights that made a successful transition from perching on hilltops in a ramshackle castle and raiding merchant caravans that passed by to perching in the chanceries of various ruling Hochadel and raiding the taxpayers. Like the von Hatzfeld family, but on a lesser scale. He’s younger than he looks, closer to mid-twenties rather than mid-thirties, even now. B.A. from Trier; law degree from Mainz. Würzburg was his first position, fresh out of law school. His family most likely expected him to make a career as a canon lawyer for one of the prince-bishops, if he didn’t get a spot in a cathedral chapter himself, which they’d have regarded as ideal. Now he’s deep into the Fourth of July Party—one of its main organizers.”

“How did he end up in Amberg?”

“Someone among the city officials who had been appointed by Maximilian of Bavaria hired him almost as soon as the Swedes retook the Upper Palatinate. He was supposed to produce well-footnoted counter-arguments that they could use against the Lutherans in regard to property titles. Given that when the emperor assigned Franconia to the New United States, as it was called then, the Lutherans were pretty much under the impression that the long and impressive name I gave you above really meant Special Commission to Make Catholic Franconia Safe for Lutherans. The exiles, the Exulanten who left rather than convert under Maximilian’s administration, were coming back in hopes that Gustav Adolf would send in appointees that would function as a Special Commission to give the Upper Palatinate Back to Us. Both secular and church property.”

Hell smiled briefly. “They got you.”

“Did the city official have any idea what kind of a man he was hiring? It’s a big, long, leap from parsing clauses in deeds to organizing a revolution, which is what the Fourth of July Party is doing. Not as obviously here as they did in Franconia, but there are a lot fewer of the up-timers in the mix and it’s a whole different situation. How did he connect up with it?”

“With the Fourth of July Party? During the Ram Rebellion, probably, but I can’t envision him as an associate of Ableidinger. As far as I know, he has never been to Grantville, either. Basically, he reads a lot. He’s created from scratch, organized, what exists in the way of the FoJP and the Committees of Correspondence in the Oberpfalz.”

“It seems odd to me,” Duke Ernst said, “extraordinarily odd, to think of an aristocrat as leading a revolutionary movement.”

“There’s Spartacus, of course. He’s from a noble family.”

Duke Ernst nodded. He had read several of the Spartacus tracts. Given what the changes had already done to Saxe-Weimar, it was well to keep abreast of what might happen next.

“I have a sense that something happened during von Dalberg’s time in Würzburg that made him unhappy. He may be willing enough to talk to you about political theory and revolutionary principles, if you want to arrange an interview, but he’s not the kind of person who will tell you anything about his personal life. I certainly can’t tell you anything.”

A Calvinist might have sneered something along the lines of, “Oh, of course, the seal of the confessional.”

Duke Ernst, as a pious seventeenth-century Lutheran, went to private confession himself. Luther had redefined the practice as not one of the sacraments, but he hadn’t abolished it, any more than he had abolished marriage or ordination when he denied their sacramental status. Ernst thought, basically, that the seal of the confessional was a fine thing. He certainly wouldn’t want his own confessor to go around gossiping about the state of his soul and conscience. What he said was, “He’s obviously not working for a Catholic ex-city-councillor any more. Who’s paying him?”

“That’s an excellent question.” Hell proceeded with the conversation while thinking to himself that the confessional seal was scarcely relevant. To the best of his knowledge, although von Dalberg identified himself as Catholic, the man had neither been to confession nor taken communion since his arrival in the city.

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.

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…”

Chapter 9

Amberg, Upper Palatinate

June 1635

The Crown Loyalist administration had assumed office, with an immense party in Magdeburg.

The USE started to blow up.

Krystalnacht. The dining room at the inn turned into a spontaneous session of self-appointed political analysts. Not limited to the reporters, who were supposed to double as political analysts. Everybody at every table joined in, with or without relevant expertise.

“Duke Ernst has to be even more worried about what Westerstetten is getting up to,” Sebastian Kellermeister said, “given his track records with witch trials. And what the Committees of Correspondence plan to do about it, considering…”

“As long as it’s the CoCs from the SoTF that carry out any measures that may be undertaken,” von Dalberg said, “I believe that Duke Ernst will consider it an internal matter for the State of Thuringia-Franconia.”

“It would be if Westerstetten was in Eichstätt,” Grube said, “because that’s in the SoTF now. But he’s not.”

“Who is this guy?” That was Paolo.

“Johann Christoph von Westerstetten. He’s…” Ranke stopped to think a minute. “He has to be over seventy by now. He’s only been bishop for about twenty years, though—he was a canon in the cathedral chapter for decades, one of the kind who collect the income and even do some work, but put off ordination for as long as possible, in case some better option comes along. Even then, he wasn’t elected bishop right away.”

Paolo raised his eyebrows. “So he didn’t start persecuting witches right away, either?”

“Ach, nein. Oder, ja. I mean that he did, but not here. I’m not old enough to remember it myself, but that is something he started out right away, after his ordination. He went off to Swabia to become the prince-provost in Ellwangen. He was there for two or three years, during which time more than two hundred witches were executed. There were reports in the papers. If you want to find out, you should probably send someone to look at back issues of the Nürnberg newspaper. I’m sure that he will be a target of the CoCs.”

Paolo tossed out what first seemed to be a red herring. “I thought those witch trials were in Bamberg. There was a big fuss about a girl who escaped from a witch trial in Bamberg in the early days after the Ring of Fire and came to Grantville for protection. Lots of newspaper coverage. That was in the lectures that they made us attend at St. Mary’s, also.”

“Ja, there were witch trials in Bamberg,” Stentzel Grube agreed. “A lot of them, with executions. Not your normal little village flurries with an accusation and then nothing else for twenty or thirty years. But Bamberg was not the only major sequence of witch trials.”

Then he went off on something of a tangent himself. “So Westerstetten was ordained as a priest right before he was appointed prince-provost in Ellwangen, which is over in Swabia, so the up-timers won’t be getting involved with the surviving persecutors there directly, I anticipate. I have no idea what Swabia may have in the way of Committees of Correspondence. If it has some, it will be up to General Horn to decide what to do about them. The coverage out of Magdeburg is focusing north, toward Mecklenburg, mainly. Some in regard to the Rhineland.”

“I agree that it’s unlikely that the up-timers will focus on Ellwangen,” Sebastian Kellermeister said. “Not the way they have on Bamberg and Würzburg, since those are in Franconia and fell into the SoTF. Although Eichstätt is also in the SoTF, so I don’t quite understand…” He ruffled the pages of notes in his hand. “Perhaps because it is in the extreme south. That’s a major part of the problem.”

He pulled out a couple of sketched maps, placing them next to one another on the table. “See, Paolo, this is a map of ‘Franconia’ as it existed at the time when the king of Sweden was the ‘Captain General’ and the parts of Thuringia that had fallen under the control of the up-timers were the ‘New United States.’ So, during the time that you and Carlo were in Grantville.”

Paolo looked. The map used for “civics” at St. Mary’s had resembled this one.

Kellermeister kept going. “Basically, it is a map of what was ‘Franconia’ during the Ram Rebellion. Margrave Christian had not yet brought in Bayreuth for himself—that territory is mostly east of Bamberg—and Ansbach on behalf of his nephews—that territory lies south.” He drew a circle with his finger. “This whole region, southeast of Nürnberg, coming down almost to Ingolstadt, was not a part of ‘Franconia’ then, any more than Christian’s lands were. It was not included in what the Special Commission did, nor did its inhabitants experience the ‘hearts and minds’ campaign.”

He pushed the two maps that were already on the table apart and tugged another piece of paper out of the sheaf in his hand. Paolo moved around the table and crooked his head over Kellermeister’s shoulder so he could see better.

“This is what we thought the boundary between the SoTF and the Upper Palatinate was last spring during the Bavarian Crisis—how it seemed to everyone that it had been delineated at the time General Banér took Ingolstadt. It ran along this sort of wavy diagonal line, from northeast to southwest.” His finger followed it.

“Then…” Kellermeister moved his finger to the third map. “Then, in July of 1634, the Congress of Copenhagen did all sorts of interesting things. Most of the focus in the newspapers published at the time was on the sometimes strange outcomes of its manipulation of the boundaries of the northwestern and Rhineland provinces. As far as the State of Thuringia-Franconia as it currently exists is concerned, however…” His finger described a circle on the new map covering the same region he had outlined on the first one. “It arbitrarily, almost as a footnote, threw this region away from the Oberpfalz and into the State of Thuringia-Franconia. A region that includes the widely scattered secular districts of what was once the prince-bishopric of Eichstätt. The bishop’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction is much wider than those districts, of course; it runs all the way down to the Danube and includes Ingolstadt. Which is still not the SoTF’s problem because the same arbitrary footnoter left Ingolstadt in the Upper Palatinate—a situation that makes no sense at all other than, I suppose, that Gustav Adolf wanted Duke Ernst to have some leverage in keeping an eye on it after Banér took it. Maybe. If the whole thing wasn’t an accidental slip of some clerk’s pen.”

Ranke cleared his throat. “Fortunately, Duke Ernst has been able to maintain an amiable and cooperative relationship with the administration of the SoTF. Let’s get back to Westerstetten. Then he was elected prince-bishop.”

Kellermeister interrupted. “That was in January of 1613.”

Ranke shook his head impatiently. “Between his election and when he fled from the Swedes and closed himself off inside the Jesuit Collegium in Ingolstadt, there were close to two hundred witch trials in the districts of the prince-bishopric, the districts under his secular government, and close to that many executions—more rather than less. He’s what you would call a true believer when it comes to eliminating witches—really the kind of fellow that Krystalnacht seems to be aimed at.”

“When did he flee from Eichstätt?”

“Late 1630 or early 1631. So he’s had plenty of time to foment mischief in Ingolstadt. The real point is that he isn’t just the bishop of Eichstätt and he isn’t just living in the Jesuit Collegium there, which is firmly in the conservative wing of the Catholic disputes over Vatican II. Ingolstadt is under his ecclesiastical jurisdiction—it’s part of his diocese, not part of the Regensburg diocese. He’s also the ex officio president of the university there. And bloody Ingolstadt is in the Province of the Upper Palatinate.”

Chapter 10

At the Schloss, Duke Ernst and his official advisers were going through much of the same material.

“There were Jewish settlements in the Upper Palatinate, here and there, during the Middle Ages,” Böcler reported. “Most of them fell victim to pogroms, but it is difficult to exercise measured vengeance on anyone alive today for events that took place three centuries ago. To the best of my knowledge, the only Jews currently in the province are those who have come since the establishment of the USE. There are a number of merchants in Regensburg; a few families here in Amberg. That leaves only the countess of Pfalz-Sulzbach’s tenaciously defended new settlements in Sulzbach proper, at Weiden, at Floß, and… Where else?”

“Rosenberg.”

“How much anti-Semitism has there been?”

“Given that I have paid attention to her,” Duke Ernst said. “That is, to her protestations that most of the hostility toward them would come from those members of the local merchant and artisan classes who resent competition… My decision to deputize her and her stewards has effectively prevented any anti-Semitic action in regard to those small groups. There has been some muttering, and occasional verbal hostility. The administration has received multiple complaints and petitions.”

“Moreover,” one of the advisers said, “we have no idea what the CoCs plan to do in regard to that kind of thing—verbal expressions not followed by any actions. How much unrest will they foment? If they take advantage of these minor episodes to…”

Nobody responded.

Not until Böcler cleared his throat. “You could always ask.”

***

“While I cannot pretend to know what was in the minds of those who unleashed this event,” Werner von Dalberg said a couple of hours later. It had taken him and Böcler that long to persuade the city’s more vociferous CoC members that he would not be cast into a dungeon if he went up to the Schloss to talk to Duke Ernst at this rather ticklish juncture. “Balancing the right to free speech against the desire to control incendiary speech is not something that will come easily. Whatever others may do, I am not going to sponsor counter-pogroms, anti-pogroms, where there have been no actual pogroms. It might not be amiss for you to send a company of militia to each of the settlements, where they can wander around looking more armed and dangerous than the average local hothead will be inclined to tangle with. So much for the anti-Semites.”

Duke Ernst looked at the ceiling. “Just in case, it may be useful for you to have some information.” He motioned to Böcler, who handed von Dalberg a pile of papers a couple of inches thick.

He sighed. “Copies of complaints and petitions which we have received about the Jewish communities. Signed. I am keeping the originals with the signatures safe in the archives, but these list the names. Unless someone in my own chancery is spying on me, this may not be available to the Committees of Correspondence.

“While I cannot prove it, I believe it is more likely that they have reports from the communities themselves indicating which local people have said hostile things. Reports which, I am presuming…” Duke Ernst looked firmly at the other persons present. “…presuming, mind you, and working on that presumption, that they obtain by way of Francisco Nasi. That is where his network of information on the anti-Semites will lie and I do not discern any probable alternative source from which the CoCs might be receiving such information. There will indubitably be overlap, but I doubt that the two sources are coextensive.”

Von Dalberg nodded, pulled his leather briefcase out from under the table, and placed the papers in one of the interior pockets. “Thank you, Your Grace. Which leaves witchcraft persecutions. Something with which, I, unfortunately, am much too well acquainted for the peace of my conscience.”

“In the Oberpfalz proper, at least, the CoCs won’t have much to do,” Hans Friedrich Fuchs pointed out, “considering that back in 1563, the elector, that was Friedrich III back then, issued an edict on witchcraft accusations that prohibited any future use of torture and banned the death penalty for alleged witches. We can be pretty sure that nobody involved before that is still alive; a couple of octogenarians, at most, who would have been teenagers then; perhaps the helper for the woodcutter who hauled in a wagon loaded with wood to be used on the pyres. We’ve had accusations since then. I doubt anybody can prevent accusations. But they’ve never gone to trial.

“Which means that there have been no deaths. It’s not as if crowds of angry peasants holding torches go chasing alleged witches through the Bayerischer Wald in the middle of the night. There are angry peasants, certainly, but they go and file complaints in the district court. Or angry people who file allegations in the municipal court, if it is a chartered city. Witchcraft trials are not extra-legal processes; they take place within the court system, according to the principles and procedures established by the Carolina.”

He didn’t have to explain. Everyone in the room knew that the Carolina was the imperial criminal code issued during the reign of Charles V. Herr Fuchs was clearly more upset by the prospect of burning a witch without following the proper judicial procedures than by the prospect of burning a witch per se.

“The Carolina did not make witch trials mandatory. Any local ruler can issue an edict prohibiting them or limiting the conditions under which they are allowed; many have done so. Just as many have not. The point is that a witch trial has to be preceded by a prosecutor willing to bring in an indictment and a magistrate willing to bring the matter to trial. If those aren’t present, the accuser and accused get a scolding from the judge and are sent back home. Or, perhaps, a fine, if the accusation has caused a lot of trouble.”

Fuchs was present because Duke Ernst had reconstituted the provincial Estates, the members of which had promptly re-elected him as speaker as soon as he moved back from Nürnberg. Ernst shook his head. The Estates would have to be modernized, of course…that was a problem for another day. “Ja, that seems safe to say. Why was Elector Palatine Friedrich III so enlightened?”

“Supposedly, he read a book.”

“Spee von Langenfeld hadn’t published yet, back then,” von Dalberg said. “He wasn’t even born back then. As little as I like the Jesuits,”—he looked at Caspar Hell—“I do have to give the man credit for the Cautio Criminalis.”

“Different author; different book. Johann Weyer, De Praestigiis Daemonum. That’s the short title. He was a physician and concluded that the night flights and such that witches report are hallucinations. I’m pretty sure there’s a copy in our library that includes the appendix. Weyer published in Basel, I believe.”

Duke Ernst looked interested.

Fuchs cleared his throat. “To return to the topic of immediate concern, in Pfalz-Neuburg, under Wolfgang Wilhelm, there were two cases. Six executions, I believe. That was close to twenty years ago.”

“We can look into it, and will, but it doesn’t sound like anything major—particularly considering that Wolfgang Wilhelm is very, very dead. No matter what is being circulated from Magdeburg in regard to magically appearing lists of persecutors, there is no way that anyone can have tracked down every minor flurry and episode. We must be realistic. While Nasi has the network to have assembled such data on the anti-Semites, or on most of them, at least, the loud-mouthed ones…” Von Dalberg paused and looked at Duke Ernst, one eyebrow raised in a tacit request for permission to say whatever he proposed to say next.

“Continue.”

“…when it comes to witchcraft persecutions, essentially, all that the CoCs have received in practice…” Von Dalberg paused to consider the best way to phrase this. “…all that I understand on the basis of rumor that the CoCs are receiving, that is…”

Duke Ernst permitted himself a small smile.

“…are lists of those cases that became so notorious that they made the newspapers. Not comprehensive lists of what Anna Beckerin from Tinkersdorf may have said about Elizabetha Deckerin from Rinkersdorf somewhere in remotest Brandenburg in regard to a dead chicken that led to their appearance before a district magistrate fifteen years ago. That would require that we of the CoC have examined every district, municipal, and village court record in every local jurisdiction in the USE.”

This time, it was von Dalberg who gave a rueful smile. “Which, I assure you, we have not. I advise anyone who dreams that we have to consider the feasibility of such a massive undertaking. So I am rather relieved to have received reliable data from Herr Fuchs.” He bowed at the other man; then changed the focus of the discussion. “What about Regensburg?”

“I am not aware of any cases there. Not in the imperial city. As for the prince-bishopric overall, I’m not certain. The bishop of Regensburg does not exercise secular jurisdiction over any of the parishes that lie in the Upper Palatinate. The others are in Bavaria, which is why I don’t know.”

“Which leaves the dilemma of Eichstätt.”

“That is the SoTF’s dilemma.” Duke Ernst stood up to signal the end of the meeting.

Von Dalberg also stood up. And up. And up. “Not as long as Westerstetten is holed up in Ingolstadt, it’s not. Divine providence and the ineffable wisdom of the delegates to the Congress of Copenhagen decided to place Ingolstadt permanently in the Province of the Upper Palatinate.”

***

In the less elevated environment of the inn dining room presided over by Frau Mechthilde, less influential people covered much the same topics in their conversation.

“I don’t recall that anyone said anything at all about a place called Eichstätt,” Keith Pilcher objected when the place was mentioned. “At least not anyone I know, and I know a lot of those people. Maydene Utt; Willa Fodor; Estelle McIntire. Hell, I know all of them, and so does my wife’s sister Jenny. If it had been their problem or the Special Commission’s problem, they’d have done something about it.”

Sebastian Kellermeister only knew the formidable auditors by reputation, but he got Pilcher’s point. “Herr Pilcher, that is because it was not their problem. Eichstätt was not yet under the jurisdiction of the New United States. Let me show you these maps.”

***

As soon as possible, Werner von Dalberg consulted with the head of the Committees of Correspondence for the Province of the Upper Palatinate. Who was not even close to being the same man as the head of the Committee of Correspondence chapter in Amberg. Who wasn’t even from Amberg. Was about as far away from Amberg as a man could get and still be in the Upper Palatinate. Donauwörth was a far more convenient location than Amberg for maintaining close connections to CoCs in points north. Points north such as the SoTF.

If one was organizing a revolution, it was best to look rather harmless when sitting directly under the eyes of its target. The Amberg Committee of Correspondence should look rather harmless if General Banér decided to focus his eyes on it. Rather like a book club. Or a debating society. If he could envision a debating society populated by teamsters and blacksmiths’ apprentices.

Maybe not a polite debating society. There had been quite a flurry when one of the tanners had been brought up for discipline by the city council because of an unauthorized expansion of his business into the manufacture of portable, oiled-leather-covered (the exact formula for the oil was a closely held secret), waterproofed, upholstered, seat cushions, in partnership with one of the reporters for the Current Tidings, who was a member of no guild at all. Against the rag-pickers, who in addition to the tanners had also appeared, for the purpose of testifying about the unfair diversion of woolen rags to this enterprise, the Amberg CoC had spoken energetically; to the city council sternly. Perhaps, more like yelled at the city council loudly and in a disorderly manner. But they had made their point. This was not against any regulation, because no such cushions had previously existed. With reference to cartels and the breaking thereof.

Still, it had been the kind of CoC activity with which Duke Ernst could peacefully co-exist.

The current situation…really wasn’t. Von Dalberg made the trip because he wanted his man on the spot, not delayed by coming to Amberg and then having to get back again.

The house where Theodor Keitel had his headquarters was in a rough, flood-prone, neighborhood on the Danube, next to the docks, up against the food warehouses. Everything unloaded from today’s barges for tomorrow’s early market was in those warehouses tonight: cages of chickens, so manure; pickles, so brine; fruit, so a slight finishing trace of over ripeness. In another hour, men with barrows would be coming.

They’d been arguing all night.

“Fuchs was bullshitting you. That’s to put the best construction in everything.” Keitel was a properly confirmed Lutheran and knew that he should put the best construction on everything, even if it was not his natural inclination. “Or, more likely, he was lying through his teeth. ‘Two cases, six executions, close to twenty years ago.’ It was more like fifty cases, just to give you an estimate off the top of my head, and I know the executions were still running as late as 1630. Never trust a noble.”

“He did not seem concerned when I said that we could look into it, and meant that we would look into it, which leads me to believe that he thought his information was good. Moreover, it remains true that Wolfgang Wilhelm is very, very dead. Fuchs is Lutheran; he has nothing to gain by defending Catholic persecutors in Neuburg. I suspect it is more that this southwestern region of the Upper Palatinate as currently constituted isn’t his prime area of interest. He’s from the Oberpfalz proper, in the north, and he was in exile for years. If reports on executions in Neuburg didn’t cross his desk for some reason, he probably wasn’t looking for them.”

Von Dalberg, although Catholic and therefore not having memorized Dr. Luther’s admonition to the young, had much more of a natural inclination to put the best construction on everything than the average person.

“Wolfgang Wilhelm is dead, but he didn’t execute those people in person.” Keitel slammed his fist down. “For most of the time, he’s been up in the Rhineland. The persecutions were carried out for the most part by people who are still alive and still in what used to be Neuburg. Although some of them have run back to Bavaria.”

“Do you know of cases outside of the Neuburg territories?”

“There are bound to have been some. I can…”

Von Dalberg stood up. “Look into it?” he asked with a small smile. “No. Concentrate on Neuburg. I’ll have Marquardt check Leuchtenberg; there must be someone who knows what was going on in Cham.”

Keitel laughed for the first time that night. “If anything.”

“And Passau. As for this western point of the province…” Von Dalberg drew a deep breath, the mixed scents of river water and brine tickling his nose. “Yes, look into it. As long as ‘it’ is in Neuburg and vicinity.”

He turned around. “And take care of it.”

***

Theodor Keitel was a systematic man.

Also a rather intimidating man.

In the absence of the very, very, dead Wolfgang Wilhelm, the administration of Neuburg had fallen to a disinterested official delegated by Duke Ernst, an import from Saxe-Weimar, who agreed to let Keitel talk to the judicial archivist.

Courts kept records of their proceedings; court clerks filed them in such a way that they could be retrieved and consulted at need.

“Herr Fuchs may have been thinking of these cases in the city of Neuburg in 1602 and 1613; the latter, the one in Burglengenfeld, terminated in an execution.” A small, rather apprehensive, court clerk was not enjoying Theodor Keitel’s visit to his department. “But I don’t think so, because those took place under the old count, who was Lutheran. Then, after Wolfgang Wilhelm’s succession, on the basis of recommendations from the Jesuits at the university of Ingolstadt, since he was Catholic, particularly Petrus Canisius and Jacob Gretser…”

Keitel wanted to shake the man until his brains rattled in his head. “Get to the point!”

“I believe that the two cases referenced by Herr Fuchs were probably this one in Hemau. Magdalena Scherer was tortured for months and finally executed in 1617. She confessed, but later repudiated her words on the ground that she was in great pain when she admitted to the charges. Three other women were tried at the same time.” The little man handed over a piece of paper. “And this case.” Another piece of paper. “Then, beyond those…”

Keitel ground his teeth.

“I believe these are the more recent cases you wanted. From Reichertshofen in 1628 and 1629, about eighty cases rather than the fifty you estimated when you presented your request. That is the best count that I can to provide under the short deadline you gave me. Please understand that some of the judicial Akten have gotten mixed up with one another when one accuser filed against more than one person, or there were multiple indictments of the same person, or trials were combined, and make allowances for the difficulty involved in determining the exact number. The number of executions was at least fifty-one; perhaps that was the number you had in mind. Here are the payment accounts for the court costs for those, so the information cannot be challenged.”

The archivist picked up another expanding pocket file folder. With the Vignelli logo printed on it, Keitel noted.

“However. Beyond the scope of your original request, I have located these thirty-eight cases from Neuburg in 1629 and 1630, with several executions, most by the sword followed by burning, but in a few cases… Please understand. Even when I cannot find a full record, the payment of court costs by dependents of the deceased, the escheat of estates to the count or the city council, and similar financial records are often the most reliable. Sometimes it is money that provides the clearest trail. Then it is not a matter of what people claimed, or alleged, or believed; not a question of guilt, or innocence, or motive, but rather of who was charged for a specific act, for something that was done and paid for. In the twenty-two cases in the town of Neuburg itself, the money went to the city council.”

The clerk looked at Keitel apologetically. “Because with motive, it is so hard to be certain—as with the accusation lodged against the wife of the retired head of the chancery—I knew them myself. To this day, I believe that the allegation against her was brought because of politics, with no devil involved other than human ambition.”

Keitel gritted his teeth. The little man was nervous to the point of trembling hands, but apparently he knew his way around the records system.

A few days later, he was certain that the archivist knew his way around the records system. Which caused him to wonder how on earth some clerk, somewhere, very likely working for Francisco Nasi, compiled the famous “official list” for the CoCs to use. Only a few of the Neuburg participants involved, only a few of the people who were clearly named in these court records, invoices, receipts, checklists, were on the paperwork that von Dalberg had received from Magdeburg.

Worse, some of the names on the list that came from Magdeburg were nowhere in the original records.

He’d sent his second-in-command back to double-check with the little man, just to be safe.

The archivist had been honest. He hadn’t omitted any names from the copies he provided for Keitel.

Which meant that someone else, somewhere along the line, had put them on the list that came from Magdeburg. He remembered the archivist’s words. “…because of politics, with no devil involved other than human ambition.”

Thought about the recent rumors, even these last couple of years, spread most likely by the Neuburg city treasurer’s enemies…rumors that, if nothing had been changed by the Ring of Fire, might have ended with the man on the gallows, supposedly for witchcraft. Actually for…well, no city council member was happy when someone exposed his embezzlement of funds from the municipal Spital. The councilman had influential friends.

Quite possibly no one, not even a genuinely, fanatically, insane witch-burning zealot, was immune from being manipulated by a cynical politician.

Quite possibly, not even a CoC leader.

In cooperation with cadres from the SoTF, Keitel’s forces did a sweep through the former Neuburg territories. The men were disciplined. They left the people whose names Keitel could not confirm independently alone. Which might get him into trouble with Gunther Achterhof and might not, but he had to live with himself.

The sweep did not include Ingolstadt, which was garrisoned by General Banér in the name of Gustav Adolf. In the north, the military might be holding back. The USE air force might be surreptitiously providing surveillance for the CoCs in Mecklenburg. In the south, Keitel knew better than to try to take the fortification of Ingolstadt with no more resources than a CoC column, no matter how well-trained, could bring to bear.

In the other world, the one from which the up-timers came, the history of this war said that, in another version of the year 1632, even Gustav Adolf had looked at those walls and turned away. Getting his horse shot out from under him for his trouble.

He could only hope that no hot-headed idiot would try it. Rumors kept floating around that some hot-headed idiot might.

“Grimly disciplined” was a relative concept. Also a matter of timing.

Any CoC hothead who tried something contrary to orders would, without doubt, end up grimly disciplined. How much trouble he could cause before his cadre leaders caught up with him was a different matter.

Chapter 11

Duke Ernst, naturally enough, mentioned some of his concerns to his private secretary.

The events of Krystalnacht and the following weeks were certainly no secret. Also naturally enough, every politically interested person in Amberg, including a specific group of political columnists and reporters, assumed that the administrator would have concerns. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be the sane individual he had demonstrated himself to be over the past couple of years.

When the reporters asked, Böcler saw no reason why he shouldn’t agree that Duke Ernst did, indeed, have concerns. He didn’t specify precisely what they were, but no one expected him to.

Paolo listened. If Carlo were here, he would have a half-cocked, wild idea. But Carlo, by the divine intervention of Our Lady, was still off in Salzburg. Or points east. Or south. Or wherever the needs of this particular trip had led his feet. He’d been gone for two months.

Unfortunately, Paolo had an idea of his own. The more he mulled it over, the more it appeared to make perfect sense.

That might be dangerous.

To be feasible.

That might be dangerous.

To be something that was not excessively dangerous.

That might be the most dangerous thing of all.

***

There were some things that were better not discussed in the dining room of an inn, nor the sales room of a shop, nor even in an administrative office in the Schloss. The snow was gone from underfoot; the grass so green that it almost hurt a person’s eyes. A thin sun was chasing off the worst of the morning’s chill. Paolo found himself on a walking tour around the city walls with Böcler. At this time of year, the moat still didn’t smell so bad that one couldn’t enjoy the hour or so that a perambulation took. Wherefore, they ambled.

They started at the Wingershofertor and ambled clockwise past the Georgentor, which opened onto the old highway to the west; then past the Vilstor in the northwest and the arched Stadtbrille spanning the Vils River, where they paused, letting bits of conversation drift into the air. “…not really large enough, any more, to house both the granary and the municipal armory for the militia, but the city council can’t seem to decide…”

Leaning against the Ziegeltor. “…any plans for the mint building? I understand that the new congress in Magdeburg has passed a law phasing out local coinages.”

“Duke Ernst is hoping to get a regional mint for the province. The prospects look good, because this location should attract skilled metallurgists easily. If the former electoral armory can be expanded to include a more extensive manufacturing facility, the number of jobs…”

They ended at the Nabburgertor, with its round twin towers topped by the second-level octagons and pointed roofs, far more impressive than the others with their single, squat, square towers, and stopped for a while. Paolo looked up. This was where he and Carlo had first entered Amberg. It was the main gate for travelers coming from a generally southeasterly direction.

The up-timers weren’t impressed with Amberg’s fortifications. The soldiers had a tendency to look at them and say, “Those wouldn’t really hold up for long under a good artillery barrage. Not like the fortifications at Ingolstadt.” Amberg city councillors who heard such remarks devoutly thanked providence that the Vils was a small river, unsuited to the famous ironclads that had done so much damage to the fortifications of Hamburg.

Paolo still found that being surrounded by walls, not to mention gates that were securely locked at night, was something that made him sleep more peacefully. Of all the things about Grantville that had disturbed him, the lack of walls had been the greatest.

Bamberg was as bad, of course—completely open to the countryside. All rational men knew that the countryside was full of wolves and bears and things that went bump in the night.

Maybe that was why the up-timers in the SoTF government hadn’t made more of a fuss about moving the capital there. One of the up-time women at the Red Cross had said that city walls gave her claustrophobia.

He mentioned it.

“Interesting word,” Böcler answered. “Greek in origin. The opposite would be agoraphobia from the open square in towns of the classical era…”

To any passer-by who might be listening, they were a couple of men, probably clerks of some kind, having a casual conversation about the peculiar things that clerks talked about, even if one of them did happen to be the administrator’s private secretary.

Nothing to see, here.

The parts of their conversation that had taken place along the stretches of walls between the busy gates where busy ears might be listening had been more to the point.

***

Böcler pulled Paolo into his first, highly UNofficial, meeting with Duke Ernst. Stating firmly that reporters were to be definitely EXcluded. None of this was to be mentioned to them. And told him not to speak until he was spoken to, since Duke Ernst had indicated he was willing to entertain the suggestion presented by an Italian business machines factor, but had not committed himself to accepting a proposal from a sales representative for business machines who might not, if one listened carefully to the way he spoke, be a factor for a firm selling business machines.

Although he definitely was that, Böcler had assured his employer. Fucilla and his partner, Carlo Rugatti, sold a lot of office supplies in the region.

“It’s not as if I would have to sneak into the city,” Paolo pointed out in that preliminary conversation attended by the three of them, “since Ingolstadt is garrisoned by General Banér’s men, in the name of Gustav Adolf as emperor of the USE rather than as king of Sweden. They open the gates to let people in and out all the time. A couple on the north side are open all day. It’s not the army alone that needs supplies. There must be over five thousand civilians still there. It takes an ox-drawn wagon full of turnips a while to get through. They can’t be opening and closing them all the time. There are guards, but if I arrange a legitimate appointment with a legitimate potential customer, I can just go in.”

“Unless things have changed a lot,” Böcler said, “the garrison is responsible for guarding the gates of the outer fortification ring. It used to be, under the Bavarians. But the city is responsible for staffing the guard posts on the gates of the old inner fortification ring. This sometimes contributes to mis-communication, or at least lack of communication, between the two. The space between the two rings has never been fully settled. A lot of it is vegetable gardens chicken coops, rabbit hutches, owned by people who live inside the old walls.”

So, now, Paolo was one of eight men sitting around a table. Or seven men sitting at a table and one pacing restlessly around it.

“What is being done with the city militia these days?” That was a captain from the Grenzjaeger regiment that Duke Ernst had recruited during the Bavarian Crisis. The young officer seemed to be the only military man in the room; he was also the one doing the pacing. “I haven’t heard that it has been active. It wasn’t during the siege last year.”

“Nothing, much, as far as I know, Jurgen. Banér’s deputy in Ingolstadt doesn’t have much respect for militia. They do have their own weaponry, though, separate from that of the armory for the garrison troops in the Neues Schloss. He hasn’t confiscated that; the first attempts aroused too much in the way of civic unrest.”

Paolo thought it was interesting that the answer came from the civilian secretary, Böcler. None of General Banér’s staff were present, which was potentially even more interesting. Jurgen would be Captain (recently promoted from lieutenant) Lux. Paolo found the honors lists published among the classified advertisements to be endlessly interesting.

“But since the militia consists of the adult male citizens of the town and the citizens are pretty much the people upon whom Banér has quartered his soldiers…the Ingolstädter don’t love the USE any more than they loved Maximilian and a long string of his predecessors for quartering soldiers and workers extending the fortifications on them. In 1632, there were more of those in Ingolstadt than ordinary residents, not to mention the refugees. The city councilmen are free from quartering, at least in theory; the university members the same; the clergy the same. That leaves the ordinary people to bear the burden, which is pretty much the same whether the garrison consists of allies or enemies. Pile the epidemic the same year on top of that; no, the survivors have no great affection and admiration for soldiers, no matter whose soldiers.”

Thoroughness, thy alias is Johann Heinrich Böcler, Paolo thought.

“Why hasn’t the garrison dug Westerstetten out and turned him over to the SoTF long since?” Lux asked.

“I doubt that it has been one of General Banér’s priorities,” was Duke Ernst’s response. “And the Collegium and complex of university buildings are full of people, most of them university students and teachers. Who are what I would classify as non-combatants rather than part of the opposition.”

“If the Jesuits have been sheltering this man, I’d count them as part of the opposition, if I were you.”

“Does the garrison commander even know he’s there?” The fourth person at the table was an up-timer to whom Paolo had not been introduced. There had been no formal introductions at all. He wasn’t military; he wasn’t young.

Paolo did recognize the fifth, utterly unexpected, person at the table. Father Caspar Hell, S.J., rector of the Jesuit Collegium. Attended by Jacob Balde, S.J., as the sixth, in much the same way that Duke Ernst was attended by Böcler.

Hell’s voice was firm. “Even if the Jesuit Order is showing signs of an internal split, sending the Swedish army into one of our establishments would piss us all off. It might even push the ones who are now inclined to cooperate with the USE back into the reactionary camp.”

Duke Ernst tapped on the table. “How many? Any real idea?”

“How many what?”

“Students.”

Balde had an answer for that question. “There used to be well over a thousand students, probably about twelve hundred, before the Swedish intervention in 1630. The next year, enrollment dropped—plunged really—by maybe a third. I can’t tell you how many more have decamped since General Banér took it for the Oberpfalz. That has to have made a lot of parents nervous; no rational person can assume that Duke Maximilian will be content to leave a USE garrison in Ingolstadt indefinitely. If I was the Catholic father of an adolescent boy down here in the southeast, I think I’d send him somewhere that wasn’t right on the edge of what has been some pretty major combat in the recent past and could be again.”

He leaned back. “Like Graz or Vienna. Or Salzburg, for that matter, where Paris de Lodron is busily creating a nice new episcopally-funded university with modern facilities and all four faculties plus a new one that he is calling theoretical and applied sciences rather than technology or engineering—in a place barely touched by the war. With a big astronomical observatory. A botanical garden. A hospital modeled on Leahy in Grantville. He’s building it out of the struggling little liberal arts school the Benedictines started there fifteen years ago. He’s…”

Everyone in the room contemplated Salzburg for a few minutes. As prince-archbishops went, Paris de Lodron was an effective, so far successful, prince.

“…making out like a bandit,” Jacob Balde continued. “As for Ingolstadt…the location, the fortifications… My best estimate would be that five hundred or six hundred students are there today.”

Duke Ernst made it absolutely clear to everyone that he had no intent of authorizing the burning out of over five hundred university students and eighty or so professors, secular and clerical, to get at one witch-hunting bishop. No, not even if they were Catholic students with quite a number of Jesuit professors.

He looked at the sixth person at the table. Nor would he wink or look away if anybody else who fell under his jurisdiction as imperial administrator of the Upper Palatinate tried it.

Werner von Dalberg’s narrow face remained impassive. His light gray eyes, usually as icy as a frozen lake under an overcast sky, might have flickered slightly, but probably not. He indicated his understanding by a slight wave of one of his long-fingered hands.

Duke Ernst left nothing at all to anyone’s imagination.

He might not be looking in the direction of Neuburg right now. He would, if he must.

He would not cower away from this, even under threat.

He would not be part of this.

Nor parcel of this.

Nor tolerate this.

Nor wink at this.

Nor…

They were going to have to think of something else—some way other than outright aggression—to get hold of Johann Christoph von Westerstetten before—as everyone seemed to think they might—the CoCs from Bamberg and other points in Franconia invaded another province of the USE in pursuit of the man, the way the CoCs from Magdeburg Province had invaded Mecklenburg and those from the eastern USE generally had invaded the Rhineland.

Chapter 12

“What’s the likelihood of finding someone inside the Collegium who would cooperate with a removal?” That was the up-timer again.

“Inside the Ingolstadt Collegium? Does it tell you anything that both Ferdinand II, the late unlamented Holy Roman Emperor, and Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, still distressingly alive, were both educated there?” Jurgen Lux was not a diplomatic man.

Paolo forgot that he was not supposed to speak until spoken to. “Who is the garrison commander? And do you want to tell him about any of this?”

“Georg von Dewitz, right now, but the general won’t waste him on a garrison command for long. He’d probably rather not know the details.” Lux turned around, moving restlessly. “I could let him know that there will be someone in town and that someone’s actions are directly authorized by the administrator.”

Since Paolo had spoken, Duke Ernst indicated that he should go ahead and outline his idea.

“Once you’re in the city, what? Go into the Collegium, spot the guy, and say, ‘Beam me up, Scotty’?” That was the up-timer. “The Jesuit Collegium in Ingolstadt is a fucking big building. It’s not as if you’ll be trying to flush someone out of a one-room cottage in the woods, somewhere.”

“Which is probably why the garrison hasn’t tried to dig Westerstetten out. Presuming that they know he is there.”

The discussion started to go around in circles.

Duke Ernst dismissed Paolo, who snaked his way through a spiderweb of back corridors and emerged into daylight from the provincial tax office—a place where a commercial agent might reasonably have business.

In the room, the inconclusive discussion continued for several minutes. Jacob Balde didn’t say anything more in the presence of Father Hell—who was, after all, the rector of the Collegium and his superior. After the meeting broke up, as proper junior members of the group, he and Böcler courteously allowed their superiors to precede them toward an inconspicuous side exit from the Schloss. The corridors in this part of the building were narrow; the procession was moving slowly.

Balde’s eyes drifted over the paintings along the corridor walls. He mentioned that he had visited the university in Ingolstadt several times in connection with those of his duties that involved imparting instruction in the art of writing modern Latin poetry. While, generally speaking, the order had success in forming the minds and hearts of young men into zealous adherents of the One True Church, which was certainly a divine blessing…nulla salus extra ecclesiam.

He looked at the other wall and then at the wooden tiles that made up the low ceiling. Yes. Generally speaking. Generally speaking was not, however, the same thing as universally successful. When it came to adolescent males, there were almost always a few who were…resistant to spiritual formation. Sometimes to the point of rebelliousness. They often manifested this (at least, if they were sufficiently academic types to have made it as far as university study) by reading forbidden literature. Not limited to books on the Index librorum prohibitorum, which some of them had a regrettable tendency to redefine as a recommended reading list—fortunately, almost everything it listed was a paralyzingly dull theological treatise—but also, for example, CoC broadsides, pamphlets by Spartacus…

Balde’s eyes came down from the ceiling, fixed briefly on the opposite wall, and then on something outside one of the windows that appeared to fascinate him through the watery, wavery, glass. “I have been convinced by Father Spee von Langenfeld’s arguments. If it would be of assistance in this matter for you to know how to contact a couple of these young reprobates… They are at heart fine young men, you must understand, simply…restless under the yoke of a perhaps too narrow definition of divine mercy.”

***

Duke Ernst did not confide what he decided to Werner von Dalberg. Or to Father Hell. Or to his up-timer liaison. He hoped that they would assume that he was simply letting the matter slide as long as no trouble broke out that brought his attention back to it. One eternal truth of a manager’s life was that not every infant initiative matured into a project.

“The beauty of the plan is,” Paolo pointed out, “that the whole thing depends on something that is absolutely true. It’s always a lot easier to work with truth than lies. Even if Westerstetten has tucked himself away, even if the widely-strewn districts of his former prince-bishopric have been incorporated into the SoTF as far as civil government is concerned, he’s still responsible for diocesan, specifically ecclesiastical, administration. For which he will have offices, and clerks, and, without the slightest doubt, an ongoing need for office supplies.

“Office supplies from a manufacturing firm already used by the bishop of Regensburg are surely more desirable than office supplies manufactured by up-time heretics.

“And I can tell you for sure: he does not have a duplicating machine. I wouldn’t want to enter Ingolstadt inconspicuously. I shouldn’t enter Ingolstadt inconspicuously. I’m a sales representative. I would want to have as many potential customers as possible know I’m coming as long in advance as possible. Preferably with an article in the newspaper about Vignelli Business Machines before I arrive and coverage of the demonstrations I give once I get there.”

***

“You were a soldier,” Hans Baumschlager said. The Grenzjaeger sergeant had a few years on Paolo—perhaps as much as a dozen. “We haven’t met before, but I eat at the Golden Lion every now and then. I know that I’ve heard you mention the Wartburg. Better that you go armed. Though I’ve never seen you carry even a dagger. Let’s drop by the armory on our way out.”

Paolo turned away and looked out the window. Supposedly, it was the mind that held one’s memories. Now his nose brought up the sharp odor of gun oil, the acrid scent of ignited black powder. His hands recalled the smooth wood of a rifle stock. “I may not carry arms.”

“What?”

“I am on parole, from Grantville. We ex-soldiers, after the up-timers examined our individual conduct, were given the option of joining their army. I could not accept, nor could Carlo. We were mercenaries, yes, in the sense that we were professional soldiers. That is how we earned our livings since we were little more than boys. However…”

He turned around again. “We are from the countryside around Naples, Carlo and I. We are natural born subjects of His Most Catholic Majesty, Philip IV of Spain. From your perspective, we are enemy aliens in your midst. I signed a parole that I would not again bear arms.”

“Surely they meant that you would not again bear arms against them…that you would not return to the Spanish army. Or the imperial army. Or, really, any army which they were likely to meet in battle. They can’t have meant to forbid you to carry a pistol in a dangerous neighborhood.”

“It is a matter of honor. I swore. First to the New United States. Then, after the events of 1633, a second oath to the SoTF and USE.”

The sergeant swore too—in utter frustration at concepts of honor that left no room for common sense. “Then I’m sending a couple of my men along with you.”

“Do you have any who can pretend to be business machine salesmen?”

“No.” Baumschlager grinned. “But I have a couple who are pretty good at manhandling crates in and out of carts.”

“That’s fine,” Paolo answered, “because it’s going to be a big crate.”

“Why? I’ve seen those duplicators. They aren’t very big.”

“I’m taking demos of several other things, too. They’ll be in their own smaller crates, all packed inside the big crate.”

“Why not just take the smaller crates? They’re a lot easier to handle.”

“First: Because after I have used the big crate, I can make noises about how Herr Pilcher insists in the ridiculously arrogant manner of the up-timers that ‘containerized shipping’ is so much more efficient than the way we poor ignorant down-timers do things, thus giving whatever Bavarian or episcopal or Jesuit spy is hanging around my showroom a clue that I might be disaffected or disillusioned or disjointed or something because up-timers don’t show me the proper respect. I can go all ‘pompous Spanish officer type’ if I need to—I served under enough of them.” Paolo grinned with pure mischief.

“Second: When I—or the assistants you are so kindly providing for me—empty the big crate, I will have an example of ‘containerized shipping’ that is large enough to transport a witch-hunting bishop. Well-padded on the inside, to prevent damage to my delicate and expensive wares. Most likely frustrating to any witch-hunting bishop who might wake up and start banging on the sides, hoping to attract the attention of possible rescuers.”

Chapter 13

You couldn’t get from Amberg to Ingolstadt. Well, you could, but not by anything like a straight line. The direct route involved crossing as many as possible of the forested hills of the Jura. The route might be recommended for birds, such as crows. Or for humans flying in one of the new dirigibles or airplanes. Crossing the Jura might be feasible for a Jaeger on foot; even he would find it slow going. It was not recommended for lesser humans on the ground, much less for draft animals pulling carts or wagons.

Either usable option involved two sides of a square. In a time of peace (ah, wonderful, blissful, time of peace), a traveler could get on a barge, float south down the Vils and Naab to Regensburg as Carlo did on his sales trips, and then, still on a barge, be towed west up the Danube. In other times, times like these, dreary times when the prospect of Bavarian soldiers with rifles on the right bank seemed unappealing to a commercial traveler, a man went west from Amberg to Nürnberg and then south from Nürnberg to Ingolstadt, overland, on a road. One that crossed much less of the Jura. A lower part of the Jura, along a little river valley.

Which meant that it only made sense to stop and demonstrate one’s wares in Nürnberg. It would, in fact, be quite suspicious if a factor didn’t.

Fortunately, the road was in fairly decent shape. The revival of the iron industry had required that. Paolo wondered briefly if an ox experienced sentiments such as gratitude for road improvements.

They plodded along. There was considerable traffic in both directions. Yokes creaked, harness emitted the unique sound of leather being stretched. Horses and oxen alike deposited urine and manure in the road bed. There were occasional villagers working in the fields he could see—at this season, most likely, because something had ruined the seeds planted in the fall and they were desperately hoping to get the fields ready in time to sow a summer crop.

He hoped that he’d left good enough instructions for young Jozef Rickel. Frau Mechthilde’s younger half-sister’s oldest stepson was minding the shop while he and Carlo were both out of town. The boy’s father was a blacksmith; the kid was mechanically minded. Actually helpful when it came to repairs, happily tinkering away on the machines, clicking little parts first one way and then the other, until they worked right again.

The hand-cranked “wringer” that Jozef had invented, after Lambert Prohorsky complained about all the cleaning rags he had to wash by hand, on the basis of nothing more than a sketchy description of one that Carlo had seen in Grantville combined with a modified copy of the gears of a Vignelli paper shredder, worked surprisingly well, even though it had taken many failed attempts before he got the two rollers to rotate at the same speed; Jozef’s father had made a good thing of his new sideline business and thumbed his nose at guild complaints to the council that blacksmiths were not supposed to go into partnership with a couple of failed cabinetmaker journeymen who had never been able to afford to qualify as masters.

The “wringer” did not require plastic, no matter what the up-timers in Grantville had told Carlo years ago. Wooden rollers worked just fine. Wooden rollers, just like the rolling pins that every baker used to flatten dough. Laundresses all over the Upper Palatinate were singing the praises of Rickelwringer. In combination with the corrugated washboards… So labor-saving; so easy on the back. So…comparatively speaking…cheap. Far cheaper than down-time copies of uptime washing machines, and requiring no electricity at all.

***

“Dalberg’s an absolute coward.” Achaz Schwandorfer, chairman of the Amberg CoC, moved a little closer to the embers in the hearth. The group met in a blacksmith shop outside Amberg’s walls, in the fast-growing industrial sector, not coincidentally because Achaz was a journeyman there. The group abstained from using the “von” particle in front of their leader’s surname as a matter of principle.

“Dalberg’s caving in to pressure from the conservatives, if you ask me.” Erdmann Leitsinger, one of the more combative members, banged a hammer down on the anvil for emphasis. He was almost ready to finish his apprenticeship at the tannery and move on to his journeying years. He was more than ready to get out of this town. He had seen more upholstered cushions than he had ever wanted to. Give him the task of some nice harness leather, or…

“Quit that. You’ll wake up old Rickel and his wife.” The master blacksmith turned manufacturer of Rickelwringer might be half-deaf from a lifetime of heavy hammering, but his second wife was younger.

“Other CoC units are doing something. Marching against reactionary nobles in Mecklenburg. Putting down anti-Semites in Frankfurt am Main. Even managing to catch a rather sub-par witch hunter in the Province of Westphalia.”

“Which gets them headlines in the newspapers.” Lutz Korn had a talent for pointing out the obvious.

“What are the CoCs—that’s us, by the way, Achaz—doing here in the Oberpfalz? Diddly squat, that’s what, and, if that’s relevant, getting no headlines at all.” Leitsinger started to bang the hammer down again, but thought better of it. “Why are we depending on top-down leadership? Aren’t we supposed to be all about initiative from the bottom up? The working class seizing power? Dalberg’s been in Magdeburg again, probably sucking up to the elite Fourth of July Party leaders from the other provinces.”

“The FoJP and the CoCs aren’t meant to be the same thing. Dalberg’s more a FoJP man.”

“Okay, guys. Let’s get down to business. Let’s do something. Show Gustav Adolf’s administrator that we need to be taken seriously.” Thomas Hopfenbeck was a practical man.

“We can’t go defend the Jewish settlements from rampaging anti-Semites. A week ago, I was thinking we could do that, but then Ernst Wettin sent in the militia, stealing the credit for the Crown Loyalists and the administration. Did you see the Loyalty yesterday?”

“The anti-Semites haven’t done any rampaging. Not around here.”

“Lutz, shut up! They might have, if it hadn’t been for the militia. Maybe we can find some of their propaganda pamphlets and burn them. Lena says…” Lena was Erdmann’s sister. She was a convinced and persuaded member, but prudently refused to attend outside-the-walls meetings after dark.

“What about freedom of speech?” Hans Rubenbauer scratched his head.

“That’s our speech; not their speech. Lena says…”

“Hans, you and a few guys take a look around and see if you can collect some of those pamphlets.”

“Ja, but there won’t be enough to make a big bonfire. Not like the big one of heretical books that the Bavarians did out in the field five years ago. That one was fun. We got the whole day off school.”

“There are duplicating machines. Buy a few reams of paper and run off some more. Enough to make a decent display when we light them up.”

“Lutz, that’s the stupidest idea I ever heard—even from you. We’d get caught, for sure.”

“It’s not stupid! Jozef’s one of us.” Lutz pointed at a gangly teenager with stencil ink on his fingertips. “And he’s managing the Vignelli shop while those two Italians are both out of town on sales trips because they drink at the Golden Lion and Rickel’s wife is Frau Mechthilde’s sister. Or aunt. No, she can’t be her aunt; she’s not old enough. Some kind of relative. We could get him to make them, after hours.”

“Look, guys…”

“Lutz, shut up!”

Lutz shut up, but not happily.

A slightly younger teenager, almost hidden where he was standing behind Jozef Rickel, tapped his shoulder. “I have a bad feeling about this,” he whispered to his cousin.

“Hush. Wait till we’re out of here.”

“What about witch hunters?” Hopfenbeck was asking.

“There hasn’t been a witch trial anywhere in the Oberpfalz since before I was born.”

“Lutz, you’re only seventeen!”

“There still haven’t been any.” Lutz tended to be single-minded.

“There were a bunch of them over in Eichstätt. That’s right across the border in Franconia.” Erdmann was, like Achaz, a few years older. Nearly ten years older than Jozef Rickel. Staring the imminent arrival of adulthood with all its tedious obligations in the face, and not liking the prospect.

Achaz Schwandorfer resolved to look into witch trials.

Jozef and his cousin climbed up into the loft.

“If Mutti knew I’d been here…”

Lambert Prohorsky, Frau Mechthilde’s oldest, was, like almost every adolescent offspring of a respectable Amberger, under strict orders to have nothing to do with the CoCs.

It wasn’t that Frau Mechthilde opposed their ideological position. She rather more agreed with it than not, when she thought about such things at all. It was just that the last three generations of life in the Oberpfalz had ingrained in most of its inhabitants a deeply held belief that anything you did might, when the ruler changed, or when the same ruler changed his mind, come back to haunt you. So the safest option was to keep your head down and do nothing at all. Let your betters fight these things out.

Lambert couldn’t sleep. He rolled off his pallet, looking down into the blacksmith shop through a crack between the worn floorboards of the loft. There was a moon. He rubbed one finger around and around over the irregular loops and whorls of the grain that had risen up long ago when the then-unseasoned wood of this old gray-weathered plank had dried out.

Paolo and Carlo had been around for months now. Never mean; good tippers when they asked him for anything that meant a bit of extra work around the inn. He’d miss the tips when they moved to their new house.

It didn’t seem right, what Lutz wanted Jozef to do. But Jozef would likely do it, if he thought it would impress Schwandorfer.

He was still awake when the sun rose. More precisely, when the long dawn made it possible to see where you were going. It was getting close to the longest day of the year. His parents took full advantage of daylight. He scrambled down the worn-slick wooden half-rungs of the ladder and out of the shop, making a frantic dash to be at the gate the instant it opened, in hopes of making it back to the Golden Lion before Mutti noticed that he’d spent the night out.

Ingolstadt, Upper Palatinate

Late June 1635

Getting into Ingolstadt from the north was no more of a problem than Paolo had predicted it would be for a commercial agent who had his paperwork in order. The garrison troops kept a close watch on the Danube Valley road that led into Bavaria and would ultimately take a person to Vienna. Georg von Dewitz saw no reason to stretch his resources by doing the same in the direction of the USE, the whole USE, and nothing but the USE, as one of the up-timers had joked. He had enough to do keeping an eye on the behavior of the Italian mercenaries that General Banér had foisted off on him, making sure that their treatment of the civilians didn’t get egregiously out of hand, to waste time guarding against unlikely impending threats from a reliable ally of the Swedes.

Ingolstadt had church towers. Not that other cities didn’t, but Ingolstadt had what amounted to an excessive surplus of church towers. Paolo looked around, trying to orient himself according to the description that Jacob Balde had provided. The university buildings—a warren of old structures—would be…that way, on his right…over next to the Liebfrauenkirche, Our Lady. That was the tallest tower, by a margin. The Jesuit Collegium—yes, there was the tower for Holy Trinity Church at the edge of the complex—was even further to the west, right up against the old city walls. The Collegium, construction completed not much more than fifty years earlier, with its neat, rectangular, whitewashed buildings around neat, rectangular, courtyards with neat, rectangular, beds of herbs and vegetables, edged by straight, graveled, walkways with square corners, represented the only concession to modern city planning inside the walls.

That would be the Dominican cloister a little to his left. If he could spot the convent of the Franciscan Sisters… The Neues Schloss with the garrison headquarters was in the southeast corner, as far away from the Collegium as it could be located inside the cramped old walls, which was a good thing, as far as Paolo was concerned. A man could run the distance in ten minutes—in a straight line. Ingolstadt was an old town; the residents had been rebuilding and remodeling for eight hundred years. Streets came to dead ends; alleys terminated in courtyards; cobbled paths curved around and went back the way they had come from, and passages were suddenly blocked by a flat stucco wall containing a door that opened into someone’s kitchen annex. A man might actually run the distance in twenty minutes, if he knew the best route to get there and no delivery wagons blocked a couple of the streets.

There usually were delivery wagons blocking the streets, unless it was the middle of the night.

The display space he had rented was close to the center of town, on one of the streets radiating from the Hardertor, not far from St. Moritz and the main market square. A man with goods to sell would naturally want to be in the center of trade.

“This way,” one of the men provided by the Jaeger captain said. He was one of Duke Ernst’s River Rats, a commercial boatman who had been in and out of every town on this stretch of the Danube many times over the past two decades.

The other man, who was driving the cart, pulled the reins to the left and clucked.

The ox made no objection.

Officially, the garrison headquarters were in the Neues Schloss. According to Jurgen Lux, von Dewitz and his officers had quartered themselves on the wealthier merchants (the factor for the Fuggers excepted, since nobody with even minimal common sense wanted to irritate the Fuggers) and the common soldiers on the common people.

Which was customary, but didn’t make for rapid communication down the chain of command in case of emergencies.

Not that Paolo wanted to become the cause any kind of military emergency.

He would really much rather not.

Paolo kept looking as he walked beside the cart, trying to keep his boots out of the worst of the sludge left over from yesterday’s steady rain, passing between the gable-roofed, stuccoed, houses with shops on the ground floor and residential spaces above, until the driver pulled the cart up. Ingolstadt wasn’t a Fachwerk town like many of the ones he had seen in Germany. There was probably wood inside the buildings, but not on the exteriors. Stucco walls and tile roofs; the dukes of Bavaria hadn’t wanted their major fortress on the northern border to burn down.

The store was a decent little spot, only a few doors away from the Gasthaus where he had reserved a room. The shoemaker who leased it was currently in bankruptcy proceedings and glad to get a bit of cash back from the property, even if only for a couple of weeks. There was an apothecary next door; a bakery across the street. Those should attract a reasonable number of gawkers.

The display attracted legitimate customers. Paolo took orders, issued receipts; the cart driver trotted back and forth to the post office. A supply officer from the garrison itself wandered in, since the Jaeger captain had sent notice they’d be in town. Some restless (if impecunious) students appeared and wandered around looking at the displays—universities did not adhere to anything like a semester schedule. Paolo chatted with them cheerfully if there were no potential buyers in sight.

The young men were well-versed in such matters as how to get in here, out of there, through this alley, around that hazard. Years of pranks had furnished them with thorough knowledge, passed from generation to generation of students as a valued legacy, of those places where people who were supposed to be there would take note of people who weren’t. And vice versa.

And they knew exactly where Westerstetten’s apartments were. Better, they knew how to get in and out of the building when a visitor wasn’t being escorted by a helpful footman.

The bursar for the Jesuit Collegium came by.

Then a diocesan official. The bishop might be in exile in Ingolstadt and no longer secular lord of the Pflegeämpter that fell into the SoTF, but he still had purely ecclesiastical administrative duties. How would such a machine work for documents that needed to go, for example, to twenty-five particular parishes, but not to every parish priest in the diocese? It was hardly worth having type set for so few copies, but producing that many multiple copies by hand of a document that might be ten pages long was time-consuming. Paolo was happy to talk shop.

The bishop was interested, but he did not visit shops or show rooms; Signor Fucilla was to come to him and bring the machine.

“The crate is too heavy for me to carry by myself; I will have to bring along my assistants to handle it.”

That was acceptable to the bishop.

“In two days’ time.”

“That is acceptable,” Paolo answered. “However, you do realize, don’t you, that I am scheduled to leave Ingolstadt the morning after that. If the bishop should not be able to make up his mind immediately, it won’t be possible for me to provide a second demonstration.”

Well, if he hadn’t previously had an exact date scheduled for his departure, he did now.

Amberg, Upper Palatinate

Late June 1635

The next CoC meeting was not without internal conflict.

“I don’t know how von Dalberg heard about it,” Jozef yelled. “I don’t have the least idea, but he caught us. Came storming into the shop, yelling about getting the Italians in trouble with the city council and Ernst Wettin. I didn’t even know that he could get that mad, he’s usually so disciplined about everything he does. Made us haul everything over to his rooms. He has one of those paper shredders that you have to crank and crank and crank. Put it all through and says we’re going to have to replace the paper that we used. The two of us, at our own expense.”

“Did you tell him about the guys who are headed over to Eichstätt?” Erdmann asked.

“No. Of course not.”

Achaz raised his eyebrows at the other partner in crime.

“How dumb do I look?” Lutz asked. He had been the other half of “us” for the pamphlet project.

“Dumb enough to do that,” Erdmann said.

“Lutz,” Achaz asked a little more patiently, “who did you tell?”

“Ach, Mutti. She always wants to know where I’m going. Mothers are like that.”

“Who did she tell?”

“Cousin Lisel, probably. They gossip all the time.”

“Who, likely, did Cousin Lisel tell?”

“Dunno.”

Erdmann jumped into the discussion again. “Think! I know it’s a stretch, but think!”

“Cousin Lisel is married to the brother of Mette’s husband.”

“Who’s Mette?”

“Frau Mechthilde, at the inn. The Golden Lion.”

“That’s where all the newspaper reporters hang out. Why didn’t you just tell a newspaper reporter and let him publish it?

“I didn’t know I was supposed to do that.”

“Lutz!”

None of them considered that Lambert might have told his mom. None of them even remembered that he’d come to the earlier meeting with Jozef. Except Jozef, of course, who wasn’t about to bring it up.

Since he wasn’t at this meeting, Lambert didn’t even have to feel bad about letting Lutz take the blame without speaking up like an honest boy should.

Besides, Lutz had told his mother.

Who had told Lisel.

Who had told Mette.

But Lambert’s confession of transgression and warning words had come first.

Which was just as well for Lambert, since he hadn’t made it inside the walls and back to the inn that morning before his mother arose for the day. Frau Mechthilde was more inclined to forgive if there was some sign of repentance. Concealment of offenses, on the other hand…

Chapter 14

Ingolstadt, Upper Palatinate

Late June 1635

A servant admitted Paolo and his minions to the Collegium.

He looked at the huge crate, which the minions barely managed to maneuver through the door.

He turned around, looked down the length of the hallway, and considered the two flights of stairway, narrow steps, tight turns, and minuscule landings, that lay between the downstairs hallway that led from the service entrance and the episcopal apartments.

As the students had predicted, he called another servant, spoke to him in a whisper, and sent him scampering up the steps.

He turned to Paolo. “If you would consent to wait for a few moments?”

The second servant came scampering back. “They can unpack the wares here.”

“What am I supposed to use for tables?” Paolo was completely the concerned and twittery small businessman, nervous at the prospect of appearing before a social superior, now more anxious in the face of an unexpected dilemma. “May I open the large crate; then use the smaller crates containing the individual machines to display them? Or would you prefer to provide tables? Or…”

“I was not aware that there were smaller crates inside this one,” the servant said, all arrogant disapproval. “If you had informed me, then…”

While Paolo was sorely tempted to reply, “You didn’t ask, dim-wit,” he heroically refrained. What he did say was, “Oh, dear, I am so sorry. It didn’t occur to me. Perhaps I could …” He managed to twitter again.

“Too late now.” The servant’s life thus far had been innocent of exposure to Italian stage comedians; he took Paolo’s performance at face value rather than recognizing his appropriation of a certain stock pantomime character. “His Eminence is on his way down. Get to your unpacking.”

Before his minions managed to get any of the smaller crates open (there might have been some purposeful fumbling here and there), Bishop Westerstetten entered with due pomp. With his chancellor. With his private secretary. With…a loud, maddening, blare of horns from outside the building. Was every trumpet in Ingolstadt in use? The servant ran to the entrance and hauled the door open, which made the noise even louder.

“What? Are we under attack?”

“Students, probably, Your Eminence,” the private secretary said.

Jesuits streamed out of the Collegium. Faculty members streamed out of the university buildings. City watchmen streamed out of their headquarters, all looking for the source of the racket. When student pranks were allowed to get out of hand, they often got far out of hand.

There was no one source of the noise. There were trumpets on rooftops; trumpets on the city walls, trumpets in alleyways. Each one blaring a different tune or call. As musical instruments went, trumpets were highly portable; the trumpeters stayed on the move, the various forces of law and order in pursuit.

Westerstetten impatiently waved his secretary toward the door. “Go, take a look at what is going on.”

Paolo could hardly believe it when the secretary actually stepped outside and…closed the door behind him.

Which left three to two. Three in good condition, even if (he admitted to himself) one was well into middle age. Two who were elderly and, obviously, not. Several years of self-imposed isolation had done nothing for the physical fitness of the bishop of Eichstätt and his immediate staff.

The two Jaeger grasped the chancellor by each arm, backed him into an alcove, pinned him down at the foot of a statue of three unidentified, but lavishly gilded, saints, and efficiently applied a gag and ties. The river rat opened a door off the corridor, pushed the chancellor through, around a table, and behind a podium. The man’s robes slid nicely on the polished black and white square marble tiles that made up the floor. He closed the door again.

Paolo applied a careful pinch to the back of Westerstetten’s neck and then proceeded just as efficiently, bundling him into the large crate. Then he whistled, considered double-checking, and decided to throw himself on the mercy of Dame Fortuna as carelessly as Carlo ever would. She had already shown herself to be in a good mood today when the bishop’s secretary closed the door. The minions picked up the large crate. Paolo opened the door, nodded politely to the bishop’s secretary, who was still standing there on the steps, craning his neck, trying to ascertain the source of the uproar, followed the crate down to the ox cart, tipped the boy who had been holding the reins, climbed up next to the driver, and departed the precincts of the Collegium.

For once, Fortuna kept smiling on him.

Enough students had been waiting in the wings of the Collegium, close enough to hear the whistle. All the smaller crates in which Paolo packed his wares vanished quickly into the depths of the building—only to reappear, as if by magic, stacked in the erstwhile shoemaker’s shop where their contents had been on display the last few days, ready for the Vignelli sales representative’s ox cart to pick them up for his announced departure the next morning.

Paolo, the crate, the driver, the other minion, the ox, and the cart, exited a gate in the old walls, turned left, and tucked themselves up for the night behind some Ingolstädter’s fully leafed-out damson trees, next to his grape trellises, discreetly disguised by his ambitiously espaliered pears. A gardener had put a lot of work into this little allotment. It was as warm as an evening was likely to get; the fresh earth smelled wonderful.

When Westerstetten’s secretary returned, he saw that the corridor was empty, assumed that the bishop and chancellor had gone back upstairs, and decided that rather than make an extra trip up and down those stairs, he might as well check on a problem that the finance office had mentioned. He turned right at the corner before the stairway, encountered a tangle of paperwork, and didn’t make it back to the episcopal suite for an hour and a half.

Upstairs, the staff assumed that the bishop was still inspecting business machines.

Nobody found the chancellor for a day and a half. The river rat had shoved him through the service door of a room that was only used for formal diplomatic receptions, which had been rare events the past several years. The servant in the first search party had only opened it and given the room a superficial glance.

***

One ox cart—for that matter, one ox—looks much like another if no one has any reason to examine them closely. One of the restless Ingolstadt students was the son of a miller. He was perfectly capable of driving an ox cart.

Two men, in rough worker’s tunics with capes thrown over after they finished bringing a load of equipment out of a shop and securing it on an ox cart, had no distinguishing characteristics.

One passenger, particularly a man wearing a loose hooded cape, looks much like another in the chilly early morning mist. Especially if no one has any reason to examine him closely and his paperwork is in order.

One of the charming things about duplicating machines, after all, was that they produced duplicates. Nearly identical duplicates.

If one cart with three men and a large crate rolled out of the new walls right before the changing of the guard; if another with three men and several small crates rolled through the inner wall and out the new walls right after the changing of the guard; if no one had any reason to be raising alarms… What sleepy guard was likely to wonder if someone else was using the same authorizations?

Coffee had not yet caught on in Ingolstadt.

***

Jurgen Lux had assumed that the group would use the Kreuzertor on the way out, since, fortunately, it was possible to go from Ingolstadt to Eichstätt in a more or less direct line, and given his men instructions accordingly. Paolo’s Jaeger assistants assured him that they would be prepared to head in that direction.

“Ah, but we won’t be going in the direction of Eichstätt when we leave with our cart and crate. We will head back to Nürnberg, the same direction from which we came in. I am but a peaceful merchant, heading home!”

Nürnberg, of course, although an ally, was not in the USE. Its city council would undoubtedly be most unhappy at an overspill of Krystalnacht into its territory. Basically, the city-state had closed itself to both fugitives and any CoC columns that might be chasing fugitives.

“So we have to keep it in Franconia. Plan to head north on the main road until we get out of Upper Palatinate territory. That’s to preserve Duke Ernst’s…” He switched to English. “plausible deniability. Then we’ll turn off and cut cross-country to deliver Westerstetten to a party of the Würzburg CoCs waiting for us a short distance outside of Eichstätt.”

“Why aren’t you cooperating with the Bamberg CoCs?” Lux had asked somewhere during the organization process. “That’s closer.”

Paolo had just looked at him. “The SoTF capital? If he were taken there, if he were known to be there, then whatever fate befell him, even if the CoC’s performed the act, would be the immediate responsibility of the SoTF administration. Whereas Würzburg is merely a regional center now—it was more important when Gustav Adolf first turned Franconia over to the up-timers, but now it only has a few offices dealing with agriculture and such. Surely, any fate that befalls Westerstetten there can be ascribed to—alas, unidentified—rogue CoC elements.”

They made the cross-country trek with some difficulty, in the absence of local guides, on not-so-good rural roads.

The ox expressed its opinion, not silently, as it struggled to haul its load across a less-than-perfectly maintained ford. Strong as an ox was an accurate adage. Nobody had ever suggested quiet as an ox. But mice did not haul carts. Although there had been that charming movie he saw in Grantville…but the mice were transformed into horses first.

“Well, I forgot about guides.” Paolo’s face assumed an innocent expression. “Nobody’s perfect. Certainly not I.”

Chapter 15

Somewhere outside of Eichstätt, SoTF

Late June 1635

Everybody who knew anything at all about Dame Fortuna knew that she was a fickle goddess.

There was a member of the Amberg CoC…shall we call him Hans? Hans is a safe, anonymous kind of name…it doesn’t have to be any particular Hans…it couldn’t possibly be Hans Rubenbauer…who was chosen by Achaz Schwandorfer to be a part of the unauthorized party sent out to “do something” about the witch-hunting bishop in Ingolstadt. If the anonymous Hans happened to be Catholic…and had an academically inclined brother…shall we call him Johann?…Johann is a safe, anonymous kind of name, even if everyone called him by his middle name, which was Thomas…who was a student at the university…one of the “restless” students who had gotten in on the prank with the trumpets…

When the Amberg CoC got to Ingolstadt, Johann told Hans what had happened; Erdmann Leitsinger turned the group right around and headed back up the Nürnberg road in hot pursuit of those who had so rudely deprived them of their target.

They overshot the turn-off on their first try, realized it when nobody else, a few miles farther along, had seen a certain ox cart, reversed course, and tried again. This time, they spotted the turn-off.

***

The Würzburg CoC men were waiting right where they said they would wait. They were…Paolo appraised them…experienced fighters. Many of them had probably been involved in the Ram Rebellion. Mentally, he compared them to the occasional CoC units he had seen around Amberg the last couple of years. Significantly better trained. Better armed in a major way, by an order of magnitude.

Their leader would have liked to take the bishop out of the crate and make a night run for it. More cautious voices in his party spoke about road conditions, the tendency of horses to do things such as break their legs, and prudence being the better part of valor.

Paolo’s Jaeger unhitched the ox and started to make camp. The Würzburgers followed suit—making camp, that was. They didn’t have an ox.

The ox lifted its head and bellowed. When the bellow died away—it had temporarily quieted the ordinary noises of a company of men shaking out blankets, starting a fire, cussing at holes in their boots where there had been no holes the day before—the sudden silence allowed them to hear the noise of an approaching party. On foot; there was none of the harness jangle made by riders.

The Würzburgers reached for their weapons.

The party came around the bend at the foot of the hill.

Paolo looked down. Some of them looked…dreadfully familiar. Like that bunch of young men who loitered around with Jozef Rickel in his spare time.

Young men who were possibly…probably…all too likely to be…

Why did Dame Fortuna always choose to go flirt with someone else when a man needed her the most?

The Würzburgers seemed inclined to shoot first and ask questions later. He couldn’t really blame them.

He looked around.

They were near the top of a hill.

The hill wasn’t terribly steep and flattened out gradually into a meadow at the bottom.

The unhitched cart was in the road (why push it to the side of a rarely used road when they would only have to push it back in the morning, the Jaeger had calculated).

Paolo pulled the chocks from behind the wheels and gave it a shove.

The oncoming party scrambled out of the way; most of them fast enough; a few of them not quite fast enough. But Dame Fortuna had been with them; the dragging tongue and hitch had slowed the cart’s downhill progress notably.

“Tell your men to hold their fire,” he directed.

The Würzburg captain was about to respond, “Who are you to give me orders?” Then, for some undefined reason, he decided that it might be better not to.

Paolo nodded at the two Jaeger. “Go down there and sort those idiots out.”

Then he looked at the Würzburg captain. “You don’t really want to start a war between two provincial CoCs. Not even unintentionally. You would win, but I suspect that your superior officers would be no happier than…” He pointed downhill with his thumb. “…theirs.”

***

The next morning, in the middle of breaking camp, Paolo looked at the Würzburg CoC detachment. “Anyone here know how to drive an ox cart?”

“We’re pulling him out and throwing him over the extra horse. We’ll make a lot better time that way.”

“You will take the ox, the cart, and the crate as well as the bishop. If you leave them here to be found, it will certainly ruin the whole plan. If I take them back to the Nürnberg road, it may well ruin the whole plan—for reasons that are beyond your need to know.”

“We can use your driver.”

“No, you can’t. Somewhere on the main road, there is a group of Ingolstadt students waiting with a pile of small crates and a different ox cart. I have to collect my wares, pay them for their trouble, and turn back into a sales representative placidly returning home from a commercial venture. Preferably with no suspicious delays that might cause anyone in the Ingolstadt garrison to wonder if I have taken a side trip. I need my driver to drive that cart. Which I have rented, in the name of one of those students, for long enough to get to Amberg with the cargo—and send it back to Ingolstadt with a different load.”

Silence ensued.

“As I was saying, gentlemen, anyone here know how to drive an ox cart?”

Amberg, Upper Palatinate

July 1635

“I did take an oath not to carry arms,” Paolo said at the after action review that the up-time liaison insisted upon. He harbored some apprehensions about possibly being remanded to the SoTF as a parole breaker. “I never swore that I wouldn’t hit anybody ever again. Honestly, Herr von Dalberg, the CoC fellows from Amberg shouldn’t have been anywhere near the rendezvous spot. They aren’t SoTF forces. The CoCs aren’t even, really, USE forces, so I didn’t violate my oath.”

“I know.”

Paolo felt a spark of hope. “And they all survived.”

“Somewhat the worse for wear.”

“It’s not as if I knew who they were.” He might have suspected, but that was not the same as knowing for certain. “They weren’t supposed to be there.” Even if he had only found that out later. “Anyway, most of them managed to get entirely out of the way of the ox cart when I pushed it down the hill.” Fact. “It wasn’t a steep hill.” Also fact.

“Hopefully they have ‘learned, marked, and inwardly digested’ a significant truth. Namely, that the adage about ‘measure twice; cut once’ applies to more things than the trade to which a man is apprenticed,” Duke Ernst said. Like Theodor Keitel, head of the CoCs in the province, had he only known it, the administrator of the Upper Palatinate had, at one point in his childhood, memorized Martin Luther’s Shorter Catechism. Learned it by heart, as the saying went. Was prone to grasp at its various catch phrases in moments of needing something to say.

“A Hussite war wagon is definitely a military weapon. An effective one,” the Jaeger captain pointed out.

“The ox cart didn’t have blades attached to the axles. It is an ordinary freight cart. And I wasn’t carrying it, Captain Lux, so I did not break my oath.” Paolo smiled.

The only other person in the room who truly appreciated this fine distinction was von Dalberg. He was, after all, a lawyer. Paolo’s lawyer.

“Who owns the ox and cart?” Böcler asked. “Will he be expecting compensation? Or did you arrange to have them returned from Würzburg? If so, when are they expected back? Have you submitted your list of reimbursable expenses?” He was, after all, a bureaucrat.

The after action review got down to the real issues.

***

All the headlines had some variant of:

Eichstätt Witch-Bishop Brought to Justice by Würzburg Committee of Correspondence

“I wonder how they managed that,” Jacob Ranke mused. “As far as anyone knew, Westerstetten was tucked up tight in Ingolstadt.”

“Maybe he had to stick his head out long enough to confirm some kids or ordain some priests.” Sebastian Kellermeister yawned. “I’m about to head home for bed. He was a contemptible dip-shit, but he was a bishop, after all. Most of his diocese fell into the SoTF.”

“‘Was’ being the operative word.” Stentzel Grube’s face reflected considerable satisfaction with the outcome.

Ranke looked into his mug. It was empty. “I might as well go home, myself. I still wonder how they managed it.”

Chapter 16

“I’d say…” Paolo held up his medal, awarded privately, for unspecified meritorious services, by the imperial administrator of the Upper Palatinate. “I’d say that I earned it.” He waved it back and forth, like a small pendulum.

It was a medal of modest size, suspended not from a golden chain but from a black and gold ribbon, woven in the colors of the provincial flag. Duke Ernst was a thrifty man.

“Your stupid idealism will get your head chopped off some day. Also, I earned more,” Carlo answered.

“What?”

“I sold a contract for fourteen duplicating machines to Cadoni while I was in Salzburg chatting about what intentions the Fourth of July Party appears to have in the Oberpfalz as they apply to the troubling…troubling, at least to Paris de Lodron…doctrine of ‘separation of church and state.’ He’s against it, which makes perfect sense for a prince-archbishop. But he’s not in favor of Lutheran established churches, either, so his attitudes may balance out. I took orders for two duplicating machines from Duke Albrecht—and got a contract for sixteen from Wallenstein’s major domo, while I was in Bohemia chatting about what plans the SoTF may have regarding the young Austrian dukes. I sold eight to the private secretary of the chancellor in Tyrol after our wide-ranging conversation about ‘Committees of Correspondence and how to avoid them,’ or at least how best to avoid having them organize in your jurisdiction without getting into trouble with the USE administration and irritating the Fourth of July Party now that the regent has caused Tyrol to join up. Then over a dozen individual ones while I was in here and there in the Trientino discussing…”

“There’s no point in looking so smug. Errr…how much does that amount to on commissions?”

When Carlo answered, Paolo’s mouth dropped open.

“Haven’t you been keeping the ledger up to date?” Carlo picked up the offending book, glanced briefly at the maroon cover embossed with the Vignelli logo, and fanned through its oversized pre-lined pages. He had concluded that daily entries saved a great amount of anguish at quarterly report time.

Quarterly reports had come as an unwelcome surprise to both of them.

Looking back, Carlo suspected that they, or the military equivalent, might be why regimental officers employed regimental clerks.

“I’ve been spending more time keeping up with the news. You may have sold eight machines to the chancellor in Bolzano, but Tyrol has not only entered the USE as a state. The regent has remarried to Duke Ernst’s brother—Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar that was, now the greatly elevated Grand Duke of the Free County of Burgundy. This will almost certainly bring about a shift in Tyrol’s field of interest. This will equally certainly impact whether or not the archbishop of Salzburg will continue to pay us a retainer to keep him informed about how her policies affect the Upper Palatinate and Franconia. Also, I hired a cook who isn’t German.”

“Is it too much to hope that she is Italian?”

“From Ragusa, originally, by way of Venice and a teamster for the Oberpfalz iron industry who married her thirty years ago; now a widow. Partly Moorish, if I had to guess. She goes by the name Domicilla.”

“Who would baptize a child ‘little housemaid’? How did you avoid hiring one of Frau Mechthilde’s relatives?”

“As to the name, probably her owner told the priest that’s what she was, and never assumed he’d use it at the font; I suspect she was a slave. For the other, I pulled ‘charitable concern for a fellow countrywoman’ as an explanation.”

“Venice is no more the same country as Naples than…” Carlo sputtered. “Than Denmark is the same country as Sweden.”

“Frau Mechthilde remains blessedly unaware of that. Anything south of the Alps is Italia as far as her geographical knowledge extends. Also, I hired her sister-in-law’s (actually, the sister of her brother-in-law, but let’s not be picky) deceased paternal uncle’s (he had an unfortunate accident on icy cobblestones last winter) widow (yet one more Anna) as our general housekeeper.”

“And why are there several reams of cheap, sub-par, printer paper in the shop? If the supplier switched quality on us…”

Paolo dropped the medal back into the little wooden box with a recessed space to hold it in place impressed into the satin padding and put it away. It wouldn’t bring a lot of cash if they ever had to pawn it, but it would be worth something.

Amberg, Upper Palatinate

July 1635

“According to Brick Bozarth, who was somehow in on the deal, Fucilla did some fancy footwork,” Keith Pilcher wrote to Arnold Bellamy. “I’m not disputing that the trick he pulled did all of us a big favor. Duke Ernst agrees. Von Dalberg agrees. It’s that, no matter how I rack my brains, I can’t remember that his name was among the Wartburg survivors that came through Grantville. Or Rugatti’s name, for that matter. They must have been there: they remember too much about the place not to have been. They’ve been inside St. Mary’s. But there’s something about the two of them that doesn’t add up. Something shifty, even though I’ve got to admit that they sell a good product.”

***

In the meantime, Duke Ernst ordered a census.

Like good citizens (even if they were not, technically, citizens; nor even, technically, subjects), each of them volunteered to take a local district. After all, as Carlo pointed out, what else would get a person into so many different households and license him to ask so many inquisitive questions. Information was where a man found it.

Paolo and Carlo invited everyone over to their new house.

The brick mason they had called in to remodel the kitchen had done his best to follow Paolo’s instructions. The oven looked like nothing he had ever built before.

Amberg, meet Neapolitan flatbread dipped in herbed olive oil, accompanied by ripe olives and figs.

“It’s not pizza,” Vanessa Ebeling wrote to her parents later. “For one thing, no tomato sauce; no pepperoni; no mushrooms, no sausage. Fucilla says he has someone working on mushrooms. Not even cheese, even though their cook put out a dish of something crumbly like feta as a side. But it sure was a real treat to have something that wasn’t solid German food for a change, which is all I’ve been eating since I got to Amberg. Mostly, when we’re home, we look around and see all the differences now from the way things were before the Ring of Fire, but we still have Castalanni’s. Sometimes we forget how much of America we have managed to keep alive in Grantville until we go somewhere else and start living the way the down-timers all do.”

Chapter 17

Amberg, Upper Palatinate

August 1635

The dowager countess of Pfalz-Sulzbach called on Rector Muselius to ask where the students at the normal school would be sent for their student teaching? Only to the towns? If so, she would be happy to welcome them to Sulzbach and Weiden. But why invoke such a limit, when one of the main purposes of the normal school was improving the teaching levels in the village schools? As it happened, Floß was a large village; larger than many towns. The school had nearly a hundred students, close to half of them girls; with the pastor currently tutoring ten or so of the sixty boys in Latin so that they could go on the secondary education. Why not there?

Not to mention that the influence of such progressive students, preferably Lutheran ones, might assist in reducing the level of local hostility toward her newly established Jewish settlements, she said enticingly.

Three wagons pulled up outside the Collegium. The student contingent dispatched from the somewhat haphazard teacher training program that Grantville had been running at the middle school for the past five years had arrived. A mixture of up-timers and down-timers, at various levels of progress through the program, both male and female.

All of the up-timers were girls.

Once they settled in to the dorm, Paolo and Carlo invited them to come see some business machines.

He coaxed Sebastian Kellermeister into meeting them there for introductions that would facilitate his doing a feature article on the up-time students newly arrived at the normal school.

“He offered me an exclusive,” Kellermeister said.

“We call it a scoop.” Dee Hardy giggled.

He started talking about the other reporters. “Then there’s Stentzel Grube at the Current Tidings.”

“Stentzel?” Dee thought she had heard a lot of German names over the last five years, but that one was new to her.

“Stentzel’s from Moravia. That’s a nickname for Stanislas.”

“Oh, okay. We had some Polish families around Grantville. There were a couple of guys named Stanislas. Stan Matowski. Stan Szymanski.” She relaxed into the comfort of something that she could feel that she was at least kind of familiar with, even if it wasn’t exactly the same.

Carlo invited each of the students to try out the machine.

Dee’s turn brought an ouchie. “It’s a lot harder to get a paper cut from down-time rag paper than it was from up-time typing paper or copy paper—even notebook paper. That stuff was sharp.” She sucked her thumb. “But when you do manage to get one of the things, it still hurts as much.”

Sebastian had never seen anything quite as fascinating as the skinny, narrow-shouldered, up-time girl, her dark brown hair falling straight to her shoulders from a center part, her brown eyes big and round, standing next to a duplicating machine and sucking her thumb.

He didn’t even hear Carlo expounding on the theme that paper quality was always a problem, and that in Amberg, since the forced sale of Michael Forster’s paper mill a dozen years earlier it was, he had heard, ongoing, so the city council seriously needed to put someone in charge of inspecting paper quality, as he remembered that a dozen or more so years ago when the regiment in which he Paolo were serving at the time was stationed in the Netherlands…

Chapter 18

The biggest news of September, at least for the Upper Palatinate, was that Gustav Adolf transferred Duke Ernst and Johan Banér for the purpose of “stabilizing Saxony.” They left without any particular fanfare.

Most people in Amberg who had anything to say about it were sorry to see the administrator go. Ernst of Saxe-Weimar, Ernst Wettin to the die-hard CoC members, had become a well-respected figure in the province. A person couldn’t really say “popular.” “A fair-minded man,” was a phrase you heard often when people spoke of him. As for General Banér—his departure was nowhere greatly mourned. He did leave some of his mercenaries behind, now incorporated into the USE’s Danube Regiment under Colonel Friedrich Engels, to garrison Ingolstadt.

At the Schloss, somewhat to Johann Heinrich Böcler’s dismay, given that his projected biography of his former mentor was making good progress, Duke Ernst left his private secretary behind. “Christian will need someone who knows where the bodies are buried,” he had explained.

Böcler modified the title page of his manuscript biography of Duke Ernst to include, “Volume I, until his Transfer from the Upper Palatinate to Saxony by Emperor Gustav Adolf in 1635” and buckled down to get the Vita Ernesti Ducis Saxoniae, an offshoot of his project of writing a greater history of the entire war, into sufficiently finished form to send to the printer.

Ernst and Banér had no more than left when the bigger news came in that the emperor had been badly injured in a battle at Lake Bledno on the Polish front and taken to Berlin for convalescence.

It said something about the nature of local journalism that Kellermeister’s headline in the Amberg Global News read:

Appointment of Interim Administrator Finalized before the Emperor’s Injury!

The interim administrator, Count Christian of Pfalz-Birkenfeld-Bischweiler, who had succeeded Count Wilhelm Ludwig of Nassau-Saarbrücken as imperial administrator of the Province of the Upper Rhine, would clearly be temporary. Probably picked by the emperor because of his distant relationship to the former Winter King and current heir-in-polite-custody-in-the-Spanish-Netherlands, Christian left that job in the hands of his competent deputy (who had also been his predecessor’s competent deputy). Given that he also left his wife and children in the provincial capital of Zweibrücken (which also happened to be her home town), it was clear that he expected to be returning to the Rhineland as soon as the emperor and his close advisors finished sifting through the options for a permanent replacement.

“Gustav Adolf really does stick with the old Adel, the old Hochadel really, as much as he can when he comes to making these appointments,” Erdmann Leitsinger griped. The Amberg CoC still met at Rickel’s blacksmith shop. “Aside from the up-timers, who are starting to be treated as some kind of honorary ‘von Up-time’ Adel, has the emperor put any commoner into an important office in his immediate circle?”

“What do you expect?” Achaz Schwandorfer answered. “The man’s a king.”

The CoC members were unfavorably impressed by the new appointee long before he arrived in late October.

There had been few social entertainments during Duke Ernst’s term. He didn’t have a wife yet; only jokes about the duration of his betrothal to his much younger cousin, Elisabeth Sofie of Saxe-Altenberg, which had run about as long as that between Prince Ulrik and Princess Kristina would. With the interim administrator’s wife remaining behind…

The tailors, dressmakers, and seamstresses of Amberg emitted a collective sorrowful sigh.

Amberg’s newspaper reporters were more interested by the arrival of several up-timers in Ingolstadt, particularly that of Michael Stearns’ sister and her husband, Major Simpson, who commanded the flying artillery unit. The occasional appearances of one of the great dirigibles with its pilot were also worth a paragraph. However, the weather was getting thoroughly nasty and it was much too far to go from Amberg to Ingolstadt in the possibly, yea probably, vain hope of being granted an interview. They made do with speculation and reprints from the Ingolstadt papers.

The constitutional crisis precipitated by the Swedish chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, in the name of the comatose emperor gripped every politically interested individual in the USE.

Except, perhaps, in the Upper Palatinate. Aside from Werner von Dalberg’s trips to Magdeburg to strategize with the Fourth of July Party, most people this far south waited to see what would happen next, in a fatalistic acceptance that there was not much, if anything, they could do about it, and whichever side triumphed in Magdeburg and Berlin some of them, inevitably, would suffer as a result of the outcome. There was a general feeling, not only on the part of the Crown Loyalists but also including a majority of the FoJP supporters, that it was too bad, those reports about how Oxenstierna and his supporters were treating Duke Ernst’s brother. Wilhelm Wettin had, after all, fairly won the election last July and therefore had a right to be the prime minister, but what could a person expect of politicians?

Their more immediate concern was Bavaria.

They all remembered Duke Maximilian’s tenure quite clearly.

They pretty much knew who, right around here, was hoping for him to do it again. If they didn’t know, they suspected.

The dowager countess of Pfalz-Sulzbach left her children in Nürnberg, but herself came back to the Upper Palatinate, where she could be sure of having the ear of the interim administrator. Her brother-in-law, the hornet, moved to Amberg with his family.

In Magdeburg, Werner von Dalberg was smiling at the other members of the inner cadre of the Fourth of July Party. “On the positive side, the Oberpfalz is already leaning toward us. Rest assured that if the Bavarians attack because the Swedes pulled out their troops and Herr Piazza comes to the rescue, the prospects for our party thereafter will be splendid. Assuming we’ve survived the civil war, of course.”

At the end of November, Sebastian Kellermeister asked Dee Hardy out. It would be most respectable, he assured Frau Ebeling. They would attend an evening Advent service at St. Martin’s.

“What’s Advent?” Dee asked her friends. First Baptist in Grantville did not follow the traditional liturgical calendar. It was safe to say that most of the members of First Baptist had never heard of a liturgical calendar. A few of them might have encountered Advent calendars—the kind that had chocolate candy behind little cardboard doors with pictures of glittery reindeer and such—but Dee’s mother considered the kind of woman who bought them in Fairmont, such as Hope Underwood, to be somewhat too much influenced by the decorating ideas found in women’s magazines.

“Wow, that’s impressive!” was her first reaction to the building. “Those pointed arches look like something that ought to be in a photo in an art history book. First Baptist in Grantville is a pretty church, not some hillbilly holy roller thing, but it’s nothing on this.” Her second was, “It looks sort of…Catholic…too. All those statues and stained glass.”

Sebastian laughed. St. Martin’s had been Catholic for a long time before the first occasion it became Lutheran about a century ago. Its stones had history.

Jacob Ranke gave Sebastian a solemn private warning as to the inadvisability of even thinking about marriage to someone who must be an Anabaptist. Kellermeister said that he’d cross that bridge when he came to it, considering that it would be at least three years before he could afford to marry anyone at all.

It occurred to the interim administrator that it would be a good idea to inventory which of the peculiar Grantville sects were followed by the increasing number of up-timers residing in the Upper Palatinate. “Only the civilians,” he ordered. “Soldiers come and go; I’ve never heard of an army that didn’t contain men of multiple faiths. Their chaplains can worry about them. Include the students, though.”

Böcler’s assistant (Böcler himself being out of town) could make sense of some of them. Catholic; Presbyterian (Scottish?); even one Lutheran. Methodist seemed to be an offshoot of the Church of England, with Calvinist tinges—and Frau Ebeling at the normal school was the daughter of their clergyman! Of their—clergypersons? Her mother also claimed to be a pastor? How extraordinarily distressing. Were Baptists the same thing as Anabaptists? What was “Disciples of Christ?” Weren’t all Christians disciples of Christ? How did one distinguish “Disciples of Christ” from “Church of Christ?”

Perhaps he should write a book on all these—a brief, informative, introduction for the benefit of those who needed to deal with such issues. Not a polemic. He cast this mind around for a suitably innocuous title and settled on Separated Brethren.

It was a rare and unusual private secretary who did not harbor aspirations to write and publish something. As an occupation, it tended to attract bookish types who felt no divine call.

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.

Chapter 20

Truthfully, though—the fight against the Bavarians was getting intense, but the intensity was nowhere near Amberg. After the fall of Ingolstadt to Bavaria in January, the headlines had proclaimed:

TREACHERY!

in block letters. Somehow, that hadn’t been the headline when Colonel Cratz von Scharffenstein, the Bavarian commander, had turned it over to Banér the year before. But, as Keith Pilcher said, these things tended to depend on your point of view. Or whose ox was being gored.

Colonel Engels of Danube Regiment, Wife, and Infant Daughter Murdered by Perfidious

Bavarians!

1st Battalion’s Italian Mercenaries Defected to the Bavarians!

Traitorous, unfaithful, untrustworthy, insidious. The headlines started running short on synonyms. Disloyalty, disaffection, infidelity. Deceptive, devious, two-faced, shifty. Within a week, they were out of anything with a passing resemblance to a synonym and had to start reusing words they had already employed.

Paolo and Carlo were a bit concerned about the frequency with which the headlines emphasized Italian mercenaries. Sebastian and the other reporters probably didn’t mean to spread incendiary propaganda, but…

Every bit of propaganda issued by von Dalberg’s organization in the Upper Palatinate emphasized two things. First, that this salvation had been sent to the citizens of the Upper Palatinate by an up-timer named Edward Piazza. Second, that the specified up-timer was a staunch leader of the Fourth of July Party.

“You guys might remember to add,” Paolo said to his journalistic acquaintances, “that Herr Piazza is Italian.” He figured that it couldn’t hurt and sent a short petition in the direction of Dame Fortuna.

Who was not an approved Catholic saint, but it never hurt to take precautions.

He also invested in metal shutters with padlocks for the doors and windows of the shed, just in case, and sent the cook and housekeeper (with pay) to visit their families until things calmed down. Followed by asking Jozef Rickel to have a few words with his CoC friends, just in case. He and Carlo didn’t live above the shop (the not-a-shed being but one story high) nor behind the shop (the not-a-shed having room only for the showroom and a small storage area), but most of the families along the block did, which he found worrisome.

It was hard to predict what local rowdies might decide to do if the words Italian mercenaries burrowed themselves too far into their heads like some mental tapeworm. Definitely heads; brains would be stretching the point.

Two days later, about dusk, he had Jozef Rickel move the machines from the not-a-shed to their house, leaving empty boxes of various shapes on the tables in the showroom.

It started shortly after dark, with a few people gathered in the street across from the shop.

The few attracted several more.

It was probably more than an hour before the first person in the group gathered the nerve to throw something.

It took less than five minutes for someone else to do the same.

The missiles weren’t improvised on the spot. Not most of them. Yes, there were a few loose cobblestones; in the next morning’s light, a person could see where they had been pried out of the walkway. The broken bricks didn’t come from nearby. Neither did the pieces of coal, nor the bits of scrap metal, the waste from the forges.

The shutters and padlocks held; the window frame on the right did not. The headline in the Loyalty proclaimed:

Unidentified Vandals Damage Amberg Store

“Jacob,” Stentzel Grube protested, “that makes it sound like they drew on it with chalk, or threw cow pies, or something. Why not say that they smashed the boxes that they thought were demo machines to bits with crowbars? That they splintered the tables when they realized the boxes were empty? Smeared soot all over the whitewashed walls?”

“I’m not the one who writes the headlines.”

Stentzel didn’t write the headlines, either, but the Current Tidings featured:

Unwarranted Attack on Vignelli Business Machines Distribution Center: How Will Tyrol Respond?

And in the Amberg Global News, after a considerable amount of nagging by Sebastian Kellermeister:

Thugs Destroy Local Business! CoC Breaks Anti-Italian Riot Before Watch Shows Up!

The city watch defended the slow pace of its response to the “minor” riot by saying that the two sales representatives for Vignelli Business Machines were, after all, not citizens of Amberg; therefore, technically, the watch owed them no duty of Schutz und Schirm.

“Why, then?” Sebastian Kellermeister asked, “If you believe that they are due no protection from you, if you believe that you have no legal obligation to defend them against attackers, why then did you eventually bother to turn out at all?”

“We were keeping an eye on it. Once the crowd got large enough that it seemed likely some of the violence might spill over and damage other businesses, especially those nearby where the owner and his family live on the premises, we really had no choice other than to intervene, even if it meant protecting those freeloaders as well. The fire marshal also wanted it broken up before someone got an idea to start setting things on fire before throwing them at the building. Or into it, after they got inside. Also, once the CoC showed up, the violence might have spread.”

“Why do you classify them as freeloaders? They own property. They pay taxes.”

“But they don’t assume their share of the burdens involved in maintaining a community. They aren’t citizens of the town.”

Paolo hired a carpenter to replace the window frame and a crew of day laborers to clean up. Jozef brought the inventory back. Carlo opened the next morning as if nothing had happened.

***

By the end of the month, aside from the five thousand or so unfortunates who had been trapped in Ingolstadt and remained at the mercy, or lack of mercy, of the Bavarian garrison, the provincial population north of the Danube, which comprised, basically, according to the census that Duke Ernst had taken the previous summer, about one hundred eighty thousand of the quarter of a million inhabitants of the province as a whole, were being spared another episode of the ravages of war while mining, manufacturing, and exporting large quantities of iron and iron products. Another thirty thousand or so of them in and immediately around Regensburg were making money hand over fist—largely in the form of promissory notes at the moment, but the State of Thuringia-Franconia had developed an excellent reputation when it came to redeeming promissory notes. The path of the march of the 2nd Battalion and the following Bavarians from Ingolstadt to Regensburg showed devastation, with no hope of improvement until spring, but most of the residents had found refuge. Somewhere.

Paolo and Carlo didn’t have anything to report to anyone that those who paid their retainers couldn’t read in the newspapers for themselves. Demand for their services was down.

Sales were good, fortunately, so their overall income was holding steady.

Yes, that was fortunate, Paolo thought. Very fortunate, now that they had a mortgage.

Less fortunately, the shop was outgrowing the not-a-shed premises in which it was located. Worse, several owners of neighboring businesses dropped comments that, given the riot, Vignelli Business Machines might be considered an attractive nuisance that would be better off elsewhere. But they were tied down by a five-year lease.

Werner von Dalberg, who still did not hold a government position, still had to earn a living. He negotiated a sub-lease for the shed on their behalf, pointing out to the lawyer representing the other party that the security precautions installed by Herr Fucilla had significantly increased its value, wherefore a rent increase was quite justified; he also located a new lease for a larger and more substantial shop that offered, even if it was not on the market square and did not have a direct view, at least a glimpse of the signature arches on the front of the Amberg Rathaus if one stood on the corner. Which meant that it was close enough to premises owned by several members of the city council that the watch was not likely to ignore any future disturbances.

There were living quarters above it, which Paolo and Carlo did not need.

The Fourth of July Party in the Oberpfalz had expanded its operations to the point that it did need something in the way of headquarters other than von Dalberg’s own skimpy two rooms. He rented the space. Which meant that the CoC was very unlikely to ignore potential future disturbances.

There was no doubt whatsoever that the Amberg CoC had become a much more disciplined and better-trained entity during the past months. Since the episode with Westerstetten, the Würzburg cadre, having taken note that von Dalberg had a true talent for attracting and inspiring enthusiastic recruits, but no experience whatsoever in paramilitary matters, had taken the provincial organization in the Upper Palatinate in hand.

After his first face-to-face meeting with von Dalberg, the head of the Würzburg CoC, who had a devout wife and rather liked Pastor Meyfarth himself, sat in church the following Sunday, listening to the choir render a hymn that the fellow up in Magdeburg, Gerhardt was his name, had written, or would have written, or something, and thinking that Werner von Dalberg showed no more prospect of being able to manage a militant resistance movement in the face of vicious tyranny than the lamb that, according to the soloist, was going “uncomplaining forth” to be sacrificed for the sins of the world. With luck, he wouldn’t need to. Without luck, someone else would have to step in.

Dame Fortuna did not always appear in her Latin guise.

February 1636

“My father is staying in Saxony.” Jacob Grube stood up. “Staying to try to protect the property, as much as he can. But he sent my mother to safety.” He smiled thinly. “She arrived this morning; has already rented rooms from my tanner friend. She has expectations of her son, so I’ll have to leave early this evening. I won’t be dropping out of the Stammtisch, exactly, but I won’t be around as much as usual, either. Probably not for a few months.” He sighed. “She’s made up her mind that I’m old enough to court a wife.”

“We’re fortunate that the Saxon uprising has stayed in Saxony, for the most part. Nothing more than a few random raids across the border in the north; the Jaeger are handling them without too much trouble. The civil war around Berlin, in the north, didn’t really get this far south, either,” Sebastian Kellermeister said. “Now that we hear…”

The headlines read:

The Emperor’s Miraculous Recovery! Provincial Day of Thanksgiving Proclaimed!

Axel Oxenstierna Dead in Berlin!

There were those who thought that the imperial administrator of the province had no business proclaiming a province-wide day of Thanksgiving (for the emperor’s recovery, naturally; in no way for Oxenstierna’s death; any pastor, priest, or elder who mentioned that unfortunate situation in his sermon or homily would regret it!) and announcing that every single religious denomination to be found within the province’s now-tolerant boundaries would participate in the celebrations. Or else!

More thought it than said it. Most of those who said it belonged to the CoCs.

Hans Friedrich Fuchs, in the name of the provincial Estates, not only endorsed the proclamation but gave several extensive interviews, not only to the Loyalty (though he gave Jacob Ranke the first one) but subsequently to the opposition papers. In his opinion, “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” was perhaps the most meaningful statement in the New Testament. Caesar had his instructions from God; the duty of a Christian subject was to let him get on with carrying them out, without interfering or criticizing.

“Yes, Saint Paul says in the twelfth chapter of First Corinthians that the toe is as important to the body as the head,” he paraphrased, “but he also says that they have different jobs to do. The governor is the head of our provincial household; just as a man is the divinely appointed head of his family, the sun to his wife’s reflecting moon…”

It was just as well that he was nowhere around when Lena Leitsingerin expressed her opinion of that idea. Her brother Erdmann had finished his apprenticeship. Instead of moving on to become a journeyman, he had moved to Magdeburg. Lena was stepping into his shoes as the resident radical.

At Vignelli Business Machines, Carlo opened his lunch sack and made a face. Goat jerky. Well, fresh lamb wouldn’t be affordable for another month or so. Rice. He still didn’t like it, but Domicilla had a way of fixing it with curry that made it at least tolerable. Better than the alternative. At this season, at the Golden Lion, Frau Mechthilde’s patrons would be getting bean soup. If they were lucky, she would throw in some salt pork and an elderly onion. There was one thing to be said for dried beans: if the storage crock was sealed tight and locked the vermin out, they kept well all winter. By March, that was the most attractive aspect of any food for most people.

April 1636

By April, the headline writers were being put to the test to come up with at least minor variations on the theme of:

Latest on the Conflict in Bavaria!

The newspapers were full of the names of Michael Stearns, Tom Simpson, Jeff Higgins, and Heinrich Schmidt, who, along with the rarely mentioned anonymous troops they commanded, had taken the fight to the Bavarians and were gracious enough to be conducting the ravages of war on Bavarian soil for the time being. “Heiliger Sankt Florian,” von Dalberg hummed under his breath. “Verschon’ mein Haus, zünd’ and’re an!”

Spare my house, Saint Florian! Burn up someone else’s.

The sentiment wasn’t limited to south German peasants petitioning the saint in charge of house fires.

He had run across Keith Pilcher at the Vignelli store. Pilcher’s comment was NIMBY. Not in my back yard.

So, up-time also. Perhaps a universal human inclination.

The news that most interested the residents of the Upper Palatinate, by and large, was that Duke Maximilian had pulled most of his troops out of Ingolstadt on the assumption that Mike Stearns would take the Third Division directly toward Munich. The USE dropped leaflets promising amnesty to those of the occupiers who had not been party to the January betrayal. Those who had been party to the betrayal started to desert; basically, they were all gone before Heinrich Schmidt arrived with SoTF National Guard units to occupy the city and its fortress, once again, for the USE.

Chapter 21

For those in charge of finding synonyms, it was something of a relief to be handed, with all its implications,

Wilhelm Wettin Calls for July Elections!

Von Dalberg fretted a bit that the proclamation only called for a time frame of ten days, rather than the constitutionally mandated two weeks. Everyone else in the Fourth of July Party basically told him to stop being such a lawyer.

O! What grist for a political columnist’s mill! Or pen, Sebastian Kellermeister thought, since he didn’t really utilize mills often. Nor did he want grist in his expensive new fountain pen. Perhaps some other analogy…

In Saxony, Duke Ernst, for the Crown Loyalists, would be opposing—Gretchen Richter! Ah, what rejoicing filled a reporter’s heart.

In the Oberpfalz, to no one’s surprise at all, the candidates for governor would be Hans Friedrich Fuchs and Werner von Dalberg.

Because…

Emperor Gustav Adolf, after the Dresden Crisis, or the Berlin Conspiracy, otherwise known, particularly to the Committees of Correspondence, as the Filthy Reactionary Oxenstierna Plot, agreed that the Province of the Upper Palatinate would be released from direct imperial administration and permitted to establish a republican constitution with an elected governor and no established church.

In most towns and districts, the and caused much more excitement than the governor’s race.

On the model of the State of Thuringia-Franconia, the Upper Palatinate would choose a directly elected legislature, replacing the traditional Estates made up ex-officio of the large landowners (be they actually noble, imperially ennobled, or commoners with enough money to buy rural estates and live like country gentlemen), urban patricians (be they merchants, industrialists, or large landowners who collected enough rents to afford to live in a city), and…well, once upon a time, back before the Reformation, there had been clergy in the Estates, the abbots of the big quasi-independent monasteries, but after secularization, those had dropped out of the picture and the monastic incomes had dropped into the provincial treasury.

In some places, there was quite a scramble to find enough candidates who could or would run. In others, it was hard to keep the number of potential candidates manageable. All politics was local.

***

“It’s funny,” Paolo said. His feet were up, the various out-of-town papers to which they subscribed in a pile next to him, a fountain pen in his hand and a clipboard on his lap for convenient note-taking. Sometimes, reports on the same events from four or five different papers—say one in Bremen, one in Wismar, one in Brunswick, one in Stuttgart, one in Dresden—provided bits and pieces that separately seemed to be of no particular importance, but when juxtaposed to one another, produced an interesting pattern.

The post office clerk always kept an eye out on Carlo’s behalf and handed over their bundle of papers as soon as it came in.

“Funny? How?”

“In Magdeburg, the editorials are saying things like, ‘The emperor’s decision to give the Upper Palatinate a republican structure will probably cause trouble for him in the future with sections of the nobility, who are not pleased by this modification in the USE’s existing, and to them perfectly satisfactory, arrangements.’”

“So? It probably will. Cause trouble, that is.”

“But what nobility are they talking about? In other provinces of the USE? Hochadel? Niederadel? Uradel? Reichsadel who were given some title by the Holy Roman Emperor for the sake of precedence and protocol? The known reactionaries? All those who are Crown Loyalists? And why only ‘nobility’ rather than including the urban patricians and other guys who hold significant power now? Many of the iron merchants who have bought country estates and become Landsassen have a lot more influence than some of the old Landadel families who have fallen on hard times. Think a bit. Right here in Amberg…”

Right there in Amberg, the city council elections were being fought like packs of hungry wolves over a fallen deer. For centuries, discontented and dissident citizens of the town had been kept off the council, and thus effectively prevented from obtaining their preferences and desires, by the simple mechanism of having new members of the large council brought in by the small council and the members of the small council chosen by and from the large council. Now, since both councils were to be directly elected by the general body of citizens—even if qualification as a citizen of the town was much harder than the new standards established (in accordance with the demands of the FoJP as represented by Michael Stearns) for the USE as a whole—a sizable number of the current council members were facing the prospect of defeat.

So, yes, the members of the urban patrician families were not pleased. The local election wasn’t being fought by hungry wolves, exactly. More like by starving bears just emerged from hibernation.

“If you ask me, they’d be better off if they reorganized their thinking a bit,” Carlo said. “They ought to stop fretting over nobility unless it’s an issue like taxation where, sometimes, in some places, being noble, or at least holding a grant of ‘noble land,’ has an actual legal impact. It would make more sense for them to say ‘upper class,’ the way some of the pamphlets in Grantville did.”

“Hilpoltstein’s certainly Adel. Hochadel, even, by birth. He’s certainly made it plenty clear that he is not pleased.”

“Kellermeister’s latest column says that he’s off to Magdeburg. He thinks that he can present his objections to the emperor in person.”

“He probably can. Aside from his sister-in-law, he’s the highest-ranking Lutheran in the Oberpfalz, so he can probably get at least a polite personal audience. More, he’s married to a sister of Landgrave Georg of Hesse-Darmstadt, who waves Lutheranism like a flag in his disputes with Amalie Elisabeth of Hesse-Kassel. His wife gave birth to another baby a couple of months ago, which will change the whole balance of power in regard to the Junge-Pfalz inheritance prospects if the boy lives. That family, collectively, still holds a lot of real estate in the province. Landgräfin Sophie Agnes is how old?”

“Thirty-two, I think.”

“So even if their first five children did die before they were three, the girl she birthed last year has survived this long, and now there is a boy… There’s no reason that she can’t produce several more. Hilpoltstein is not out of play.”

“I doubt the heirs to Leuchtenberg are pleased.”

“The heirs to Leuchtenberg are Duke Albrecht of Bavaria’s sons. Duke Albrecht of Bavaria is still huddling in Bohemia with Wallenstein. Young Maximilian and Sigmund, whom Piazza in the SoTF last year, rather spectacularly, arranged to have put in an up-time airplane and flown off to Bamberg to keep them well away from Duke Maximilian’s greedy hands. They’re not in any position to complain to the administrator about popular elections. Or anything else. Neither is their father, for that matter.”

All of which went into the letter that Carlo mailed to Salzburg the next day, amid a lot of business correspondence. Demand for their services was picking up again.

***

There might be armies charging all over Bavaria, but Thurn and Taxis managed to get a crate delivered from Bolzano to Amberg.

Paolo arranged for a viewing of the new device. This time it was a prototype typewriter. The interest was so great that he sold admission tickets for two-hour visitation intervals on the opening day.

“In this decade, there is no such thing as an inexpensive typewriter,” Carlo was saying. “Anyone who can afford to buy a typewriter at all can afford to have it personalized. In the instance of Vignelli typewriters, that is limited by the fully standardized casing and the resulting maximum number of keys. Beyond that, however—a merchant or banker may request more numbers for his office that maintains accounts, but more letters that appear in foreign languages for his office that corresponds with other nations. This is only sensible. Perhaps later there will be standardized keyboards and typewriters that students can afford. Perhaps in twenty years. Perhaps in fifty. But not now.”

Paolo shook his head at the questioner’s naïveté. A word which, in itself, only demonstrated the importance of personalized keyboards with specialized diacritical marks rather than standardized ones.

Carlo kept talking. “The mechanism of the keys is fully interchangeable; only the ‘caps’ with the letters and numbers are distinct. Additionally, one of the great advantages of the typewriter is that almost anyone, apparently, can learn to operate one of them, unlike the aqualators. Those are so high tech as it is called that they require an entire support crew of specially trained personnel. It’s a whole different order of expense, more on the order of…” He paused a minute. What comparison would be apt. “…supporting a stable that breeds war horses or, perhaps, the kind of hydraulic crane that loads grain on ships at Danzig for export. For the foreseeable future, only government agencies or large merchant or banking consortiums are likely to make an investment that extensive. A typewriter, however…”

There had been some large, clunky, down-time typewriters on the market for a while. Vignelli had held off while his engineers tinkered. His were workable. Functional. Like the trademark duplicators that had begun the rise of his firm, not prone to breaking down at the most inconvenient time possible.

Vignelli Business Machines was accepting pre-orders.

***

In some ways, Jacob Ranke at the Loyalty looked at the campaign more dispassionately than any of the other columnists.

Whichever gubernatorial candidate prevails in the Upper Palatinate, it will be difficult for even the most fundamentalist CoC member to interpret it as an example of the lower classes seizing political power for themselves. Basically, Fuchs and von Dalberg come from the same level of society—the same “class” if one wishes to call it that.

The main difference, aside from their political philosophies, is that Fuchs is a native citizen, from a family that has resided in the Oberpfalz for generations, and held a province-wide office under Winter King; he was Landmarschall of the Estates then, and has served once more as Landmarschall since the Estates were reestablished by the former imperial administrator, Duke Ernst of Saxe-Weimar.

Werner von Dalberg is an outsider, a private lawyer who has never held any governmental position at all—not only in this province but in any jurisdiction of the United States of Europe. He is affiliated with the Fourth of July Party and is known to have functioned as an organizer of the Committees of Correspondence in the province. He is an effective public speaker. No impartial observer will deny that he is a competent lawyer. Still, one can only recommend to his supporters in the FoJP and CoCs that they consider if he is even the figure they desire to have as the symbol of their movement, much less its acknowledged leader. He may present himself as a modern reformer, but he is, nonetheless, a Reichsritter. He may now aspire to become a provincial governor, but he is, nonetheless, an outsider who may have a natural inclination to subordinate the best interests of the Province of the Upper Palatinate to the preferences of his fellow party members in Magdeburg in pursuit of eventual national ambitions.

One might differ with Ranke’s editorial position. Kellermeister and Grube most certainly did, vociferously and at length, in the columns that responded to the Loyalty.

Ranke’s arguments, nevertheless, had a broader resonance than the Fourth of July Party had expected. His opinion columns began to be broadly distributed, well outside Amberg. Well outside the Upper Palatinate, for that matter.

“Outsider!” Grube banged his beer stein on the table. “Jacob, you grew up in Saxony yourself. You’re as much an ‘outsider’ here in the Oberpfalz as von Dalberg is. Or me. Or…” He gestured at the other people sitting around the table. “Or Paolo and Carlo.” He waved at the offending column. “Or the up-timers. Or the imperial administrator. The only person at this table who is not an ‘outsider’ is Sebastian and even he had all his schooling in Bayreuth.”

“I’m not an outsider,” Lambert Prohorsky said when he refilled Grube’s stein.

“Your father’s from Bohemia.”

“Ja. But my mother’s family has been here a very long time. Before she died, my grandmother used to joke that they built the first city walls of Amberg around the Golden Lion.”

Chapter 22

May 1636

The fighting in Bavaria calmed down enough that the SoTF administration in Bamberg—or, more precisely, the SoTF vice-president, Helene Gundelfinger—gave permission for Duke Albrecht of Bavaria’s sons to return to the Collegium in Amberg and rejoin their tutor, Father Johannes Vervaux, S.J.

Nobody else authorized their return. It wasn’t decided as a matter of high policy. Helene had a ten-year-old daughter from her first marriage and a six-month-old son from her second; she was haunted by the forlorn faces of the two boys.

It wasn’t as if anybody in the SoTF administration in Bamberg had time to pay attention to them. Basically, Ed Piazza’s secretary dropped them into the custody of Wolfgang Ratichius, the Secretary of Education, on the theory that he was a schoolteacher.

Ratichius had been a school teacher, a long time in the past. Right now, he was an overworked, unmarried, crotchety, sixty-year-old, educational bureaucrat, residing in rented rooms and sustaining himself on take-out from the nearest inn while trying to expedite educational reform during a time when everyone else seemed to be focused on either the war in Bavaria or the political maneuvers in Magdeburg.

There was no audience with the emperor for them; for that matter, there was no audience with the governor. There was no visit with pomp to meet Princess Kristina nor expedition with surrounding excitement to see the sights of Grantville. Those were not the kind of things that occurred to Ratichius, who was far more brilliant in developing theory than accomplished at applying it in practice.

“The man reminds me of Robert Reich,” Brick Bozarth wrote to Arnold Bellamy once. “Back when he was Secretary of Labor under Clinton. Absolutely brilliant at diagnosing what a problem was, but he couldn’t have found a solution if it was a butterfly perching on the end of his nose.”

Nor had Wolfgang Radke ever been celebrated for such qualities as charm or bonhomie. He didn’t treat Maximilian and Sigmund poorly, but they spent quite a lot of time sitting in the outer office of the SoTF Department of Education, under the supervisory eye of one of the filing clerks, playing board games and kicking their feet against the bench until she told them to stop. Then kicking their feet against the bench some more until she told them to stop. Then…

They were glad to go back and have lessons again.

Their return was low-key and unpublicized, but the students at the normal school learned about it, since it was the same building. Dee mentioned it to Sebastian who mentioned it to Carlo who included the information in his next letter to the archbishop of Salzburg.

Amberg, Upper Palatinate

May 1636

That letter had scarcely reached its destination when the return became much less low-key. The Jesuits decided to celebrate the return of the young dukes by the performance of a new play by Balde: Jephtha’s Daughter.

“I’ve had the theme in mind for a couple of years,” he told von Dalberg. “The first title was Jephtias, focused almost entirely on the Israelite general, I have reconfigured it somewhat. It lacks the Aristotelian unities, but the five acts are tied together by the central characters and their interactions, in addition to which I have modified the traditional function of the chorus. We were planning to present it in Ingolstadt next year, but under the circumstances, with the current difficulties, that isn’t likely to happen.”

Von Dalberg laughed. “What did one of my old friends from Würzburg write to me? One of the up-timers there is known for saying, so often that it has become a motto, almost, ‘We don’t have problems; we have challenges.’ Getting your play staged this year will be a challenge.”

It was a challenge: not a challenge quite on the level of sending missionaries to China, but, still, a challenge; not, however, an insuperable challenge.

“It won’t be a major production by the general standards of Jesuit drama.” Father Hell paused a minute in his explanation to Muselius. “We should be able to keep any disruption to the normal school classes to a minimum, in spite of the shared building. There just aren’t enough students at the Collegium for a major dramatic production. Even the ‘Israelite army’ will have to be represented by a small company of men with pipes and drums, who will do double duty as musicians. Allegorically, of course, the ‘Israelite army’ represents the milites christiani, serving God with religious zeal. Balde has however—in the interest of discretion, he says—rewritten their opponents as pagans in foreign lands rather than heretics in the United States of Europe. And there definitely will not be a cast of thousands. More on the order of a cast of dozens.”

“If I recall correctly,” Muselius commented, “the Ammonites of the Old Testament were, in fact, foreign pagans. In a pinch, Father Balde can rely on established fact in this matter if criticism from the zealots threatens to rise to too high a crescendo.”

“Balde has hopes of better stagings in the future if the play becomes popular enough to be produced in other cities,” was Father Hell’s response.

Balde recruited Paolo to play Jephtha, on the grounds that he believed, on the basis of the narratives written by travelers to the Holy Land over the centuries, that an Italian from the central or southern part of the peninsula would probably bear a greater physical resemblance to an ancient Israelite than the average German did. “And, additionally, Jephtha should be played by a mature man.”

The oldest student currently enrolled at the Collegium was eighteen.

Paolo’s first answer was a resounding refusal. “I haven’t read Latin, outside of my missal, much less spoken it, since I finished school and joined the army.” He winked. “I did an impressive job with a couple of Erasmus’ Colloquia when I was twelve years old, but there wasn’t much competition for the starring roles. Carlo would make a better job of it; he is far more eloquent. I was to be placed in a commercial apprenticeship, but his uncle had destined him to the Franciscans once he finished school, which would have nicely eliminated any claim by the son of a younger son to part of the family’s assets. His education was more purely academic and the rhetoricians emphasize voice projection when a boy is expected to join one of the mendicant preaching orders.”

“You’ll make a more impressive physical presence on the stage. Your friend is…

“Short and balding.” Paolo thought for a minute. “Don’t be hoping for a Cenodoxus moment.”

“I am not in the least expecting you to experience a dramatic conversion and join the Order the way the lead actor in the Ingolstadt production of Bidermann’s play did twenty years ago.”

“I’m not even likely to impress the local worthies of Amberg to the point that a dozen or so of them decide to undertake the Spiritual Exercises. Nor impress the students enough that a dozen or so of them enter your novitiate. Or…”

“If you impress them enough that the play gets a publisher, perhaps a translation into the vernacular, and a wider circulation, I’ll be quite happy.”

Carlo took on the quasi-jester role, constantly nattering at Jephtha about, “Are you sure that this is what you ought to be doing? Should you really have done that?”

“It’s allegorical, of course.” He put the script down and yawned. “I really hate allegories. How does Balde intend my role? As comic sidekick or a demon tempting the hero? Or am I supposed to flip a coin?”

On the day they started rehearsals, Balde was still planning on a small, indoor, production that would require only limited choreography. The big question was whether or not the city council would let them borrow the big hall in the Rathaus. In a rational world, there should have been no objection. In the real world, there was considerable argumentation among the various contending religious groups on the city council.

Chapter 23

The next day, the headline read:

SoTF National Guard Forces Identify Plague in Ingolstadt

That resulted in the descent upon Ingolstadt of large numbers of grimly experienced military medical personnel intent upon making certain that the plague didn’t spread farther into the Upper Palatinate, into Franconia, into Augsburg, into the rest of the SoTF and the USE.

There were only a few cases; it was spring. They evacuated the various groups and categories of Ingolstadt’s residents into “tent cities” outside of the walls and quarantined them there while carrying on a major decontamination of the shambles that the town and most of its buildings had become by dint of enduring quartering of troops, a siege, an occupation with quartering of troops, a siege, another occupation with quartering of troops, the withdrawal of the Bavarian forces, and a third occupation over the course of two years. On the outside, most of the houses still looked okay. There hadn’t been a lot of shelling. The stucco was pockmarked here and there; windows occasionally broken and boarded up, some damage to doors and frames. The interiors… Not to mention the heaps of garbage. Under the Swedes, most of the waste had been hauled out, because the gates were open to the north. Under the Bavarians these last few months, with the only usable exit the bridge across the Danube, it had been piled into the comparably open space between the two sets of walls. With the coming of spring. Down-timers described the result as a miasma: bad air. Up-timers were more likely to say something like, “try living in a hole where the donut is a landfill. Except that up-time landfills didn’t include manure and human waste.” Along with ruder comments.

The Jesuits and university personnel, secular faculty and students, were cleared, but the National Guard didn’t allow them back inside Ingolstadt’s walls. Some students went home or wandered away in search of another university to attend. The Jesuits and most of the students who were stubborn enough to have stayed in Ingolstadt this long headed for Amberg, making the space crunch at the Collegium acute. The secular professors from the university followed, hiring rooms in private homes in competition with the normal school faculty already there, and complaining to the Oberpfalz administrator that if he was granting refuge to the Jesuits in Amberg, they deserved it too, and should be allotted space for their lectures and approval for the schedule of fees they charged the students. One of their long-term grievances in Ingolstadt had been that the Jesuit professors didn’t charge fees, which they defined as unfair competition.

Father Hell suspected that the floors of Collegium might sink under the pressure of so many bodies crowded into the building. Or, more likely, that some epidemic might break out. It didn’t have to be plague. There were plenty of possibilities other than plague.

Balde was delighted. “We can make the play production so much bigger now. I know that only about three hundred of the Ingolstadt students came, but—that’s three hundred live bodies. Otherwise defined as cast members. Musicians; singers. Forget the hall in the Rathaus and negotiating with a mayor who is afraid to offend any of the factions on the city council. We can move it outdoors, outside the walls. With…”

“Well, of course we pretty well know already how Balde is handling it in the script,” Stentzel Grube said. “They can’t do their rehearsals outside in a field, with big, booming, voices, and not expect people to know. They’re not depending on the surprise factor to attract spectators on the day.”

Paolo didn’t boom when he was drinking Frau Mechthilde’s beer. He needed to save his voice for the production. “Unlike some commentators of the last couple of centuries, Balde is sticking to the story the way it’s told in the Book of Judges. His script takes the position that the girl was actually sacrificed as a burnt offering. Killed—not placed in perpetual confinement. Killed—not dedicated to lifelong virginity. Killed quite dead. Human sacrifice. He’s not trying to wiggle out of that.”

***

“No way am I going to that play, much less taking the kids. I think the whole thing is a nasty idea,” Maxine Pilcher protested. “It’s one of the most horrible stories in the Bible if you ask me. It’s about human sacrifice. Of a girl; by a man, killing his own daughter, even if that isn’t what he intended. I can’t imagine that Keith would ever swear an oath to sacrifice the first thing that came out the front door when he got home in order to conquer his enemies. But trust me—if he did, and if that first thing happened to be Megan, I’d never let him get away with it.”

“It certainly isn’t suitable as a school play,” Vanessa Ebeling said. “My parents sure wouldn’t use that story for a children’s program at First Methodist back in Grantville. No way!”

“These aren’t really children who are putting it on,” young Kromayer, one of the down-time instructors recommended by Ratichius, probably because he was some connection of Johannes Kromayer at Weimar, argued. “The students from the Collegium are college age, most of them; the rest at least middle school and high school. Several of the speaking characters will be played by adults.”

“In the eleventh chapter of the book of Hebrews, Jephtha is named as one of the great heroes of faith for his actions.” That reminder came from another down-timer, the even younger Johann Balthasar Schupp, who was, as a devoted follower of Jan Amos Comenius, teaching Philosophy of Education.

“There’s a clear classical thread in most contemporary literary presentations of the Jephtha incident,” Muselius said. The discussion in the faculty lounge at the normal school was becoming more than a little heated. “A tie to Stoic philosophy; the importance of self-control; of control of one’s own emotions. Jephtha doesn’t let his love of his daughter become a weakness in fulfilling his obligations to God. He prioritizes obedience over feelings; he suffers inner pain, but he controls it in order to fulfill his duties to a higher power.”

“That is,” Ronella protested, “an utterly, totally, completely, hideously, horribly outrageous idea.”

Vanessa’s final comment was, “When we had to study that stupid poem in English Lit, I thought it was ridiculous. I still think it’s ridiculous.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t remember the title. Or the author. I do remember, ‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more.’ I thought then, and I think right now, I bet he could if he put a little effort into it.”

“Jephtha and his men were willing to sacrifice their lives in combat, defending the people of God.”

“And ended up sacrificing a girl when they got back home. ‘I’m so sorry’ doesn’t really cut it in that kind of a situation.”

When Maxine brought the discussion home with her, Keith said, “I think it’s more of a story about keeping your promises. Keeping a vow, keeping an oath, keeping your word. I’ve always been pretty strong on that.”

***

A rabbi recently settled in Amberg wrote a letter to the editor of the Global News. Was the vow foolish? Should Jephtha have taken measures to have it annulled? Should Phineas, the high priest, have taken measures to have it annulled; was his failure to do so the reason that the priesthood was taken from him? Was the daughter actually sacrificed?

The resulting rerun in the Comments section of the early Reformation controversy over the validity of vows to monastic orders proved to be so highly distracting that almost nobody who wrote a follow-up to the original letter even bothered to note that its author was Jewish. The one letter-writer who did mention it, did so only to remark that the rabbi was agreeing with Saint Ambrose’s commentary on the passage.

The rabbi said privately to his wife that, more likely, it was the reverse: that Saint Ambrose had been familiar with the Talmud.

In the faculty lounge at the normal school, the controversy continued without let-up.

“I still think it’s weird that they’re having the daughter played by one of the college boys. Collegium boys. Whatever,” Maxine declared. “He’ll be in drag.”

“They do that in England. In Shakespeare’s plays. We had to study that in English Lit.” College-level English Lit. had been a near-traumatic experience for Vanessa, roughly comparable to water-boarding.

“Master Massinger’s Men don’t, in Grantville. The women on stage are women. Sometimes, they’re pretending to be boys, but they’re women. Mistress Antonia, Lorrie Mundell, a whole bunch of the high school girls. Lorrie said that Germans don’t have any laws against actresses being…well…genuine esses, rather than ors.”

“But these are a bunch of monks.”

“I don’t think Jesuits are monks, exactly,” Maxine said. “The students aren’t. Someone said that Father Balde got as far as being in law school before he decided to be a Jesuit.”

“That’s odd.” Ronella stood up. “I have class starting in ten minutes; back to the salt mines. I wonder why it isn’t back to the coal mines.”

“What’s odd?”

“So did Martin Luther. Study law before he decided to be a monk. Do you suppose there’s something about law school that drives people to the point that they decide that absolutely any alternative is better? Even being a monk?”

“Not given the number of lawyers that there are around.”

Maxine was undeterred. “Still, you would think that in a town this size, there would be at least one actual female who could have learned the part. I know there aren’t any girls enrolled at the Collegium, but the normal school could have loaned them one, just for the play.”

Muselius thanked the stars, the fates, divine providence, or whatever had intervened to spare him from having to deal with such an eventuality.

***

“She spent two months lamenting her virginity, quote/unquote.” Carlo, standing at the edge of the rehearsal, spat on the ground. “I’ve read the whole story again, trying to get into the spirit of the play. What she did was spend two months lamenting that she’d never get a chance to lose it. She had a fiancé—the guy with the long Greek name. Why would an ancient Israelite fiancé have a Greek name?”

“I don’t remember a fiancé in the Bible story. I think Balde invented him,” one of the extras from Ingolstadt said.

“Anyway, she had one, so instead of lamenting for two months, why didn’t she just marry him and have at it? You celibate types spend way too much time thinking about virginity or the lack of it.”

“But…Our Lady!” The Ingolstadt student standing next to him quivered with outrage.

“Brothers and sisters, boy. Brothers and sisters. Our Savior had them, and the religious writers waste a lot of effort trying to explain that away.” Carlo grinned. “Or don’t you believe the Word of God?”

The student complained to Father Hell that Carlo was a heretic.

Father Hell expressed his doubts about that.

The student cited original source material, namely, a conversation with Carlo.

“In any case,” Father Hell said, “I recommend that you undertake a review of the USE laws on religious toleration. You’re not in Bavaria any more, Aloysius. We’re not burning him at the stake.”

“You could remove him from the cast of the play.”

“Not at this stage in the rehearsals.”

June 1636

Sebastian kept up a low-voiced commentary as the presentation went on, explaining Balde’s elaborate symbolism and anagrams to Dee Hardy, who remained wholly ignorant of Latin, whether classical or modern, aside from an occasional abbreviation such as etc. or ibid.

“Notice that although the Bible story does not give a name to the daughter, in the play she is Menulema.” He scribbled that in the margin of the program with his faithful fountain pen. “Now, see, it’s an anagram of Emmanuel. She voluntarily agrees to the sacrifice required of her, to fulfil her father’s vow. Balde has interpreted the story as one more prophetic Biblical prefiguring of the willing sacrifice of Christ to fulfil the divine promise given in Genesis that God would send a savior to redeem the descendants of Adam and Eve from their sins. So, just as God made the promise and Jesus fulfilled it, Jephtha made the vow to save the Israelites from their enemies and his daughter did not evade the necessity of sacrifice.”

“Isn’t that awfully feminist?” Dee asked. “To have a girl be a prophecy of Jesus? I don’t think it would have flown, up-time. Certainly not in a church. Well, definitely not at First Baptist!”

Chapter 24

“At least the play is over.” Father Hell stood there, contemplating the debris on the field. “I’ll have to get the students out here to pick that mess up. Then, maybe, most of them will be moving on.”

“Why don’t you keep them?” Carlo asked.

Paolo winced. Another Here, hold my beer, moment was coming. He could see it, like…an ox cart rolling down a hill.

“Keep them?”

“There was never any logical reason for there to be a university in Ingolstadt.” Carlo grinned. “The dukes of Bavaria created it; the dukes of Bavaria supported it, financed the building complex; the dukes manufactured just about everything about it, just like they did for the new walls: a spiritual fortress to match their material fortification. Ingolstadt isn’t Bavarian any more. If the USE and SoTF have anything to say about it, it will never be Bavarian again. It’s going to be their fortress facing Bavaria; not Bavaria’s fortress facing north. Duke Albrecht’s sons don’t have any connections there; they do have connections here in Amberg. Perhaps even some fond memories. Move the university to your Collegium before Duke Albrecht can get around to thinking a thought after the USE installs him in place of Maximilian, which it probably will, and moves it to Munich; have two major institutions of learning in Amberg. Have a competitor for the USE normal school. Attract lots of Catholics.”

“But the Collegium building here is nothing but a stub,” Father Hell protested. “The one in Ingolstadt is complete. There’s no place for a major university to expand in Amberg.”

Paolo though of his visit there. How Ingolstadt was arranged. “Get the USE Army to buy the Collegium in Ingolstadt. It would make a decent set of barracks. The town’s still going to need a garrison and the Neues Schloss is more suited to offices. That would solve the repeated quartering of soldiers on the town’s civilians, too. The soldiers can get their exercise running back and forth from one end of town to the other.”

“I reiterate. There’s no room to expand in Amberg.”

“There might be,” Carlo repeated. “If you could find different quarters for the normal school. And had money from selling the property in Ingolstadt.”

Paolo cast his mind back to his limited experience with Amberg real estate.

“Talk to von Dalberg. Where do the land titles stand in regard to the eminent domain that Duke Maximilian exercised to get this spot for you? Didn’t he take enough for a full-sized complex? If you can get the Superior General to back you—that means, ‘send money’ or at least keep what they get for selling Ingolstadt—perhaps you could buy up the rest of it the way you came to a settlement with the Richters for this bit.”

Which led to a discussion among the Jesuits.

“The architectural plans do already exist.”

“We would want some modifications,” Balde said.

One of the Ingolstadt contingent raised his eyebrows.

“Running water, indoor plumbing, sewers, electricity…” Balde seemed prepared to go on.

“Surely not central heating!”

“We could cite the model of classical Rome. The villas of the ancients had heating pipes built into the floors. There would be no necessary reason to admit to up-time influence.”

“It’s worth writing to the Father General.”

It was also worth speaking to the secular authorities—and potential secular authorities. Count Christian received Father Hell politely; his response was terse and noncommittal, with a recommendation that the issue would be better considered after the elections.

Herr Fuchs’ reply was not encouraging.

Von Dalberg was as noncommittal as Count Christian.

“I didn’t see you at the play.”

“I did not attend.” Von Dalberg did not seem inclined to elaborate.

Father Hell waited.

“I have no wish to see another woman burned at the stake, even if that woman is a straw effigy.”

Father Hell maintained his silence.

“At one time, I was convicted by my conscience of having, by an act of omission, been party to a grave sin. In repentance, I went to my confessor, who refused to absolve me on the grounds that the…action…had not been a grave sin, but rather a righteous act pleasing to God. He saw nothing to absolve.”

Father Hell remained quiet.

“With due respect, I remain unshriven and will view no more burnings. I will go to my funeral accompanied by Seneca, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius.”

Father Hell had nothing to say.

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?”

Chapter 26

August 1636

In accordance with the time-tested wisdom of new brooms sweeping clean, with the advice of the up-time text on principles of public administration he had obtained from the up-timer Professor Okey Rush at the University of Jena, and his own inclinations, Werner von Dalberg came into office intending to hit the streets hard in the first month of his term. There were so many desirable reforms that would benefit the citizens once his administration pushed them through the legislature. Just the material from Ms. Mailey on the rights of women, the legalization of labor unions, elimination of restriction of trade as applied to guild-controlled occupations, definition of residency, the matter of the age of majority…

He rarely managed to hit anything except his desk, and that only in exasperation.

***

“Governor von Dalberg.”

“Yes, Richius.”

“The dowager countess of Pfalz-Sulzbach would like to arrange an appointment with you.”

“I’m sure that she would. Is it too much to hope that she wants to discuss something practical? Economic development, perhaps?”

“To present you to her mother, who is currently visiting Nürnberg.”

Von Dalberg sighed.

“From Husum. That’s in Holstein. The mother of the dowager countess is a dowager duchess of Holstein-Gottorp. Lutheran, of course.”

“I did not harbor the slightest doubt that a Lutheran fanatic’s mother would also be a Lutheran.”

“That’s scarcely a correlation that a person can rely on. Wolfgang Wilhelm was a Catholic fanatic, but his mother wasn’t. Not a Catholic fanatic. Not even Catholic. And, Governor von Dalberg, if I may be permitted…”

“You are permitted.”

“I’m afraid that a reminder may be in order. Unlike Ernst Wettin, unlike Christian of Pfalz-Birkenfeld-Bischweiler, you are one. Catholic, that is. The dowager countess does not trust you. She will probably never trust you. She fully anticipates that you will be coming under pressure to reverse Duke Ernst’s decisions in regard to allocations of church property now that the emperor has agreed that Lutheranism will not be the established church in the province, but rather that there will be separation of church and state and suspects that you will be inclined to look favorably on petitions from Catholics, given that you were originally hired by…”

Von Dalberg’s face sank down into his cupped hands.

“I rather expect that she is planning to assure you of her undying watchfulness and intent to prevent any such trend. Moreover…”

“This episode cannot possibly require a ‘moreover’—or can it?”

“Moreover, or somewhat more to the point,” his secretary said, “the reason that the late Count August’s marriage to her in spite of his extremely modest inheritance was such a triumph was…”

“Surely not more genealogy!”

“The countess’ widowed mother is Auguste, one of the widowed sisters of King Christian IV of Denmark. The countess is named for her Aunt Hedwig, who was married to John George of Saxony’s older brother. The one who was in the papers when…”

“I remember,” von Dalberg said. “It’s probably a conspiracy.” He almost meant that.

When Paolo read the report of the meeting in the Amberg Global Times, he said the same thing. Unlike Werner von Dalberg, he laughed when he said it.

***

“Governor von Dalberg.”

“Yes, Richius.”

“The count of Pfalz-Hilpoltstein has returned from Magdeburg and requests an appointment with you.”

“I’m sure he does. Any clue as to why?”

“It pertains to the outcome of his audience with the emperor. If you would care to review this duplicate copy of…”

The governor reviewed the document. “It’s definitely a conspiracy.”

Carlo laughed when he read the opinion column. Jacob Ranke made no bones that he thought the whole thing was hilarious. His column was clever. Gustav Adolf had appointed the count of Pfalz-Hilpoltstein, known to some as the hornet, as “guardian of the Upper Palatine property interests” of young Karl Ludwig, oldest son of the Winter King.

“Karl Ludwig is still in Brussels. Gustav Adolf is much too shrewd to openly try to undermine the republican constitutional form of government in the Upper Palatinate to which he consented last summer. It would have been far to crass to call Johann Friedrich ‘regent’ or Statthalter or…. As guardian of the boy’s personal property claims, though—he and the governor will be dancing a perpetual ballet around each other in regard to who has authority to do what and which property belongs to whom.”

“A deliberate distraction?”

“To some extent, maybe. On the other hand, I think a lot of FoJP people in the new legislature would have happily voted to confiscate the lot and call it ‘escheated’ if the emperor hadn’t done this. It’s certainly what the CoC would approve. Gustav Adolf has granted significant concessions to Stearns and Richter, but that doesn’t mean he will abandon those to whom he feels obligations for other reasons. The widow and children of the late Winter King are certainly among those.”

***

“Governor von Dalberg.”

Werner looked up wearily, pushing the stack of papers on his standing desk to one side. “Yes, Richius. What now?” He yawned. There was still daylight coming in the window, but even though the days were getting shorter, at this time of year the sun didn’t set in Amberg until well past the eighth bell in the evening and the twilight lingered for an hour after that.

“A delegation from the Committee of Correspondence in Nabburg would like to discuss land reform. That’s Nabburg, not Neuburg. And here are four more recommendations from local FoJP chapters or CoC subcommittees, sometimes from local FoJP chapters and CoC subcommittees, in various towns in the province that you should replace me with someone else because I am too closely associated with the hereditary upper class.”

“You’re no more closely associated with it than I am.”

“True,” Richius answered with calm objectivity, “but you have the advantage of being an outsider. Your family were estate owners, but somewhere else, whereas my uncle, even if an emigrant and a long-time adherent of the emperor, is, or was, local. My best professional advice is that you should comply with their request, dismiss me from my post, and get some favorable publicity in the papers in the process.”

“I take it that you have other job prospects.”

“Not currently, but I will. Somewhere out there is a Crown Loyalist who will be delighted to employ an upstanding young man who has been so unjustly treated by the rabid, slavering, maddened radicals.”

“That’s Byzantine.”

“More contemporary than the Byzantines, I believe. It’s worthy of Machiavelli, but was Paolo Fucilla, one of the sales representatives for Vignelli Business Machines, who suggested the solution to me. Perhaps he got it from one of the up-time textbooks on business management. He has purchased several of the reprints and reads them with delight.”

***

During a slow day at the shop, Paolo and Carlo were doing a bit of desultory cleaning and polishing with oiled rags while contemplating various other aspects of being what Ranke, in the widely distributed political column he had written during the campaign, had analyzed as outsiders as compared to insiders, in the light of citizenship.

Not citizenship in the light of some philosophical abstraction about the distinction between citizen and subject. That was the topic of considerable recent discussion because of Mr. Thomas Hobbes’ influential assertion that the two concepts were identical. It scarcely needed to be said that the Committees of Correspondence did not agree.

For Paolo and Carlo, it was obvious that the two were not the same. One of these things was manifestly not like the other. The election that put Werner von Dalberg into office had come and gone. They had not voted, because they were subjects of His Most Catholic Majesty, Philip IV, king of Spain. Still. Nor had they voted for anyone in the city council elections, because they did not have citizen status in Amberg.

Should that be changed?

“There’s Biblical precedent.” Carlo dropped his rag into a bucket, sat down, reached under the table, and tossed one of the brown paper sacks across to the other man. Lunch time.

Domicilla packed a good cold lunch. He’d rather have a warm meal at mid-day, but that was one of the disadvantages of not living on the premises. It wasn’t worth walking to the house and then back to the shop in bad weather. “Saint Paul wasn’t born in Rome, or even in Italia, but he got a pretty good deal out of being a Roman citizen, a couple of times.”

Paolo opened his sack and nibbled thoughtfully on a narrow stick of sliced bell pepper. Peppers had turned out to do well in the local greenhouses; they were available year-round. As were mushrooms, finally.

Carlo waited him out; sometimes Paolo couldn’t be hurried.

Paolo’s thinking finally turned into speech. “Render unto Caesar. Fuchs talked about that a lot during the campaign. Should we be rendering more duties to Gustav Adolf than has been the case thus far? To the governor? To the city? If we changed our citizenship, would it really change our nationality? We would still be Italians living in Germany. We can’t change where we were born; that’s already happened.”

“You’re losing focus on the real question. What’s in it for us?”

“The watch might come, if we needed them.”

“Even if it would be a good idea to change our status, could we now?” Carlo asked.

That turned out to be a question with some interesting implications. And no obvious answer.

The traditional way by which an outsider became an insider in a German city was to buy in—demonstrate sufficient financial resources to show that one would contribute to the tax rolls rather than becoming a drain on them; then be accepted by the city council.

But…

What was citizenship, precisely, now that it seemed to have become a federal matter?

Back when Michael Stearns was the prime minister (as compared to the present day, when he was commanding armies), for the election of 1635, he had more or less arbitrarily declared a standard taken from the constitution of the other United States, the one that had existed up-time.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State or Province wherein they reside. No State or Province shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State or Province deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

That remained the position of the Fourth of July Party, enthusiastically endorsed by the Committees of Correspondence. The Crown Loyalists, under Wilhelm Wettin, had not managed to reverse it nor to impose uniform, highly restrictive, nationwide standards for citizenship as the reactionaries had wished. Herr Piazza was now the prime minister, so, presumably, it remained in force. For the election of 1636, voting rights extended right down to serfs if they were born or naturalized in the USE.

The interesting words were “or naturalized.”

The USE constitution contained no clause in regard to eligibility for naturalization, much less defining naturalization procedures, any more than the constitution of the United States of America had done.

So far, the Lords and Commons had not seen fit to develop a naturalization policy at the federal level. No policy, much less actual procedures.

Neither Duke Ernst nor Count Christian had issued such a policy on the provincial level in the name of Emperor Gustav Adolf. No policy, much less actual procedures.

In the past, frantic two months since the election, von Dalberg had issued no pertinent statement, much less regulations. The provincial legislature wasn’t likely to address the matter until several more things happened—such as drafting and adopting a provincial constitution, reconstituting the people elected to the Estates in 1636 as members of whatever revised legislative system such a constitution might establish, and dealing with a myriad of issues more immediately pressing than the legal status of two Italian sales representatives for Vignelli Business Machines resident in Amberg.

Whatever the situation might be, however—there was no clarity.

If a man bought into citizenship in Amberg, did it make him a citizen of the Province of the Upper Palatinate by default? Much less, of the USE by default?

Two days later. “It’s a moot question.” Paolo picked up his glass of good Italian red wine. “The Amberg city council has decided to play it safe by not accepting any new applications for citizenship until such time as there are clear guidelines.”

Upon a bit of further investigation, it appeared that the Regensburg city council had come to the same cautious conclusion.

In the Oberpfalz, the majority of the Crown Loyalists—Fuchs had addressed the issue during the campaign—felt that the province should establish its own criteria for citizenship. That group was following the lead of the regent of Hesse-Kassel. However, there was no federal law allowing each province to do that, so this wish remained stuck at the level of a talking point during the campaign and became essentially irrelevant after the Fourth of July Party’s victory.

In any case, they had been talking about “citizenship” of “adult permanent residents” in the context of who would hold the right to vote.

Naturalizations had not come up.

Of the various states and provinces of the USE, only the SoTF (on the basis of established precedent) and Magdeburg (on the basis of gleeful innovation) were naturalizing new citizens in the absence of a federal policy. Even in Mecklenburg, another FoJP stronghold, the practical situation amounted to a rather ruthless, CoC-backed, insistence that towns, villages, rural districts, and any miscellaneous jurisdiction that didn’t fall into any of those categories had to admit as a citizen with full local rights anyone born within the current boundaries of the USE or currently naturalized within the USE who moved in from elsewhere in the province or elsewhere in the nation.

So, Paolo and Carlo concluded, if they had accepted the offer of New United States citizenship back in Grantville in 1633, they would have been transferred to State of Thuringia-Franconia and automatically brought into the United States of Europe as citizens. But they didn’t. They hadn’t.

Really, even now, they were not entirely certain that they would, if the option existed. Because they were, after all, subjects of…(see above). The conversation went around like a carousel.

But they couldn’t be the only persons in this situation.

“Is there even a route for aliens to petition for naturalization?”

“If there isn’t any, there should be.”

“Would von Dalberg know?”

“Well, we can ask him, I assume; after all, he’s our attorney, even if he is the governor of the province now.”

“Is he still our attorney?”

“He hasn’t sent a notice that he isn’t.”

“Not that we would commit ourselves to doing it, of course. But it’s always nice to have an option. Just in case. The recent news from Naples has been a little…odd.”

“In the worst case, I suppose, if everything goes sideways, we could go back to Grantville and see if the option is still open there.”

***

“Governor von Dalberg.”

“Yes, Richius.”

“Two sales representatives from Vignelli Business Machines in Bolzano—that’s Tyrol—want an appointment with you.

“I know them. What’s it about?”

“Definition of naturalization procedures.”

“Shouldn’t they have received USE citizenship when Tyrol joined? I knew they came here from the SoTF, but just assumed that since they came as factors for Vignelli…”

“They don’t have citizenship in Tyrol, as far as I have been able to determine. They don’t claim to.”

“Eventually,” von Dalberg told them. “Eventually, we’ll get around to it.”

He told himself that he should have run for a seat in the Estates rather than for governor, become the Landmarschall (the elected legislature, however forward-looking, was holding tenaciously to the traditional terminology in this matter of the formal designation of its chairperson), and stuck Fuchs with all these endless interviews. Perhaps, then, he could have gotten something done.

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.

Afterward

Research sources:

For the general history of the Upper Palatinate during the Thirty Years War, the best available (and also available for free online) is: Matthias Schöberl, “Vom pfälzischen Teilstaat zum bayerischen Staatenteil: Landesherrliche Durchdringungs- und Religionspolitik kurpfälzischer und kurbayerischer Herrschaft in der Oberen Pfalz von 1595 bis 1648” (University of Erlangen, Doctoral dissertation, 2006).

Johannes Laschinger, who served for decades as Amberg’s municipal historian, has a useful online article concerning the Estates (legislative body) in the Oberpfalz: https://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/Lexikon/Landst%C3%A4nde_der_Oberpfalz. Providing much more detail in the way of names and the impact of events on individual families is August Sperl, Der oberpfälzische Adel und die Gegenreformation (Berlin, 1900), now also available online: https://www.worldcat.org/title/oberpfalzische-adel-und-die-gegenreformation/oclc/163040963.

In English, there is Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: The Counter Reformation in the Upper Palatinate (St Andrews Studies in Reformation History) 1st Edition (Routledge: 2009).

For the University of Ingolstadt, the best source was Thomas Kossert and Marian Füssel, eds., Universitäten im Dreißigjährigen Krieg (Perfect Paperback: 2012), with additional information to be found online in Howard Hotson, “Catchment Areas and Killing Fields: Towards an Intellectual Geography of the Thirty Years’ War,” in Geographies of the University (University of Oxford, 2018), pp. 135-192 (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-75593-9_4).

The historical Oberpfalz, indeed, all of the territories included in the 1632-verse Province of the Upper Palatinate, are in the contemporary German Bundesland of Bavaria, which does outstanding work through its historical preservation office (Denkmalschutz). For this book, the material placed online by this office for Amberg and Ingolstadt was an invaluable resource.

List of architectural monuments in Amberg - Liste der Baudenkmäler in Amberg (https://second.wiki/wiki/liste_der_baudenkmc3a4ler_in_amberg).

Johannes Laschinger, Amberg: Kleine Stadtgeschichte (2016) was also helpful, although a general history rather than focused on the era of the Thirty Years War.

List of architectural monuments in Ingolstadt - Liste der Baudenkmäler in Ingolstadt (https://second.wiki/wiki/liste_der_baudenkmc3a4ler_in_ingolstadt).

Gerd Treffer, Ingolstadt: Kleine Stadtgeschichte (3rd ed., 2018), another in the now-numerous Kleine Stadtgeschichten series on German cities published by Friedrich Pustet Verlag GmbH, had a good-sized section on the late sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries.

There are entries concerning the neo-Latin poet and playwright, Jacob Balde, S.J., in both the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Catholic Encyclopedia. Jephtias was first produced in 1637 and first printed in the 1654 edition of Balde’s collected works. In the 1632-verse, the encyclopedia articles would have been available in Grantville to researchers who looked him up. The encyclopedia articles contain a few titles, but not comprehensive lists.

At the time of the Ring of Fire, he was at the beginning of his career; he will, thus, not experience the trauma that, for example, John Milton, did, of seeing what he would have written and wondering what he’s going to do now. He can simply go ahead and write whatever the spirit moves him to do. None of his works have been translated into English and none would have been available in the Grantville libraries. Most academic studies of Balde’s baroque neo-Latin dramas and poetry are in German.

For the twenty-first century writers using him as a character, as of 2020, there is a current edition of the Latin play with a French translation available: Dominique Millet-Gerard, ed., Jephtias Tragoedia / La Fille de Jephte, Tragedie (Bibliotheque Du Xviie Siecle).

See also:

Heidrun Führer, “Studien zu Jacob Baldes Jephtias. Ein jesuitisches Meditationsdrama aus der Zeit der Gegenreformation,” 2003. Lund University (Sweden), Doctoral Thesis (monograph). Gulsångarvägen 10, SE-24735 Södra Sandby (https://portal.research.lu.se/en/publications/studien-zu-jacob-baldes-jephtias-ein-jesuitisches-meditationsdram).

Anna Linton, “Sacrificed or Spared? The Fate of Jephthah’s Daughter in Early Modern Theological and Literary Texts,” German Life and Letters (University of Oxford) 57 (3), 2004 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229558357_Sacrificed_or_Spared_The_Fate_of_Jephthah%27s_Daughter_in_Early_Modern_Theological_and_Literary_Texts).