Ring of Fire - 1635_ The Legions of Pestilence

by Virginia DeMarce

  What if Éric had murdered his cousin? It was a hot-tempered family. The duke had pardoned him and there were men in this world who had done far worse.

  “At the back,” Thysac said. “He assigned us to the rear guard.”

  “And mine are next to last.”

  They looked at one another.

  “Shall we do it?”

  “Turn around and ambush the Spaniards?” Haraucourt threw his hat again. “Nom de dieu! Of course we shall. Sergeant Hennemant, bring Clinchamps and Vernier to us.”

  “What about?” Thysac nodded his head in the general direction where Monsieur Gaston and the senior officers of the expedition had last been seen.

  “They’d just muck it up. We can tell them about it when it’s over.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Zuñiga was caught in the fog, completely off guard. As the sun cleared off the mist, Haraucourt started the pursuit.

  Then he slowed it.

  “What’s up?” Verrier halted his horse next to the colonel’s.

  “They’re falling back, but they’re not falling back in disorder. Let’s not risk the possibility that they could provide us with a nasty surprise in return.”

  Night came late at this latitude and at this season.

  When darkness did fall, the Spaniard kept going.

  “What’s he doing?” Clinchamps asked.

  “Sergeant Hennement says that he’s changing out the rear guard by small units. They’ll still be tired, but not as tired as if the same men were constantly on the skirmish lines.”

  “We’ll catch them at the river. There’s no bridge here. It’s running too high for his infantry to wade.”

  Which it was, except that Salcido directed the men to unhitch the draft horses, rope spans of the heavily loaded baggage wagons together, and push them into the stream.

  They held against the spring current long enough for the Spaniards to cross.

  Then they sent swimmers out to cut the ropes.

  “Well, damn,” de Thysac said.

  By the time they got across themselves, the Spaniards were some distance ahead.

  This time, the scouts reported that there was a village and the stream, narrow but deep, had a stone bridge.

  “Same damned river,” Sergeant Hennemant said. “It wiggles all over the map. We’ll probably have to cross it a couple times more.”

  “Will they blow the bridge?”

  “They probably would if they had powder, but my men are pretty sure that they sank their powder with the baggage wagons.”

  The village, though, had stuff. Stuff as in furniture, stuff as in clothing, stuff as in chicken coops, stuff as in barrels.

  Stuff that would burn.

  The cursed Spaniards piled a village worth of stuff onto the narrow bridge and set it on fire behind them.

  It was amazing just how hot the stones in a bridge could get.

  “We could try to go around,” Clinchamps said. “There must be someplace else that we could ford it.”

  “I, for one,” Vernier answered, “would be happy to follow them through Luxemburg all the way to Brussels and smash them for good.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “We’ve been hauling the wagons out,” one of the captains said. “No point in wasting a decent wagon just because it’s wet. One reason they were so heavy is that they put the ones containing the fire bricks for the field ovens at the bottom.”

  Thysac looked around. “Where there are ovens, there should be flour. Or did they take it across with them?”

  “They didn’t take any wagons at all across that cobbled-together artificial ford. Just men and horses. But there’s no flour barrels in the creek.”

  “Get the scouts on it. Somewhere around here, stashed in one of these side valleys, there’s flour.”

  “Even better, if they baked when they overnighted at Montmédy, there may be bread.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Monsieur Gaston and his senior advisers did muck it all up, just as Haraucourt and de Thysac had been afraid they would.

  Monsieur caught up with the forward companies and forbade them to pursue Zuñiga’s retreat any farther, on the theory that doing so would violate Low Countries territory and––as Marchéville had pointed out, that would not be bright, considering that Gaston’s pregnant wife was in the Low Countries.

  Gaston and Clicquot insist insisted on making the men turn around and go back south, deeper into Lorraine.

  “That won’t make the men happy,” Arpajon, the last to arrive on the field, warned. “They haven’t taken many prisoners and they didn’t get much in the way of plunder and supplies from those sunken baggage wagons.”

  His regiment hadn’t gotten any prisoners, plunder, or supplies, because it had been a couple of miles away from the crucial events.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “It’s just bread, for God’s sake,” Monsieur Gaston said the next morning. “Why are you making such a fuss about it?”

  “Monsieur,” the wagon master said patiently. “Haraucourt and Thysac captured the products of the Spanish ovens. A ten-day supply of bread. It will be invaluable for us on the march, but when one loads eighty thousand pounds of bread on wagons to move it, it weighs just as much as eighty thousand pounds of powder or eighty thousand pounds of ammunition. There must also be horses to pull it, and for an army on the march, bread is as valuable and necessary as either of the others. Therefore, this expedition cannot move out until I have obtained the necessary number of horses. The Spaniards saved their horses.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “Overall,” Haraucourt said, “I think my wife would be proud of me for this one. She’s a ferocious lady in her own right. She’s fought off every band of marauders that came foraging their way by our place. A regular amazon.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Off in the godforsaken noplace, somewhere between nowhere and nowhere else, not near anything. Why in hell do you think I’m spending my life in the duke’s army?”

  Brussels

  “Under the circumstances, General Zuñiga, the council cannot fault you. In all ways, right up until the start of the action at Mouzay, you were acting according to reasonable expectations and in accordance with the instructions you had been provided. The enemy’s actions were wholly unexpected. From then until your safe, if unexpected, arrival at Arlon with the troops...”

  “That’s a relief,” Salcido said on their way out. “I had more expectations of a court martial than such reasonableness on the part of the queen.”

  “It was still a retreat,” Zuñiga muttered. “So it was a great retreat. From the military standpoint, it was a magnificent retreat. The kind of retreat that will go down in the manuals to teach aspiring officers how to do it if they get caught with their pants down. But, let me tell you, we got caught with our pants down and it was still a retreat.”

  Chapter 7 By Way of a Demonstration

  Brussels

  Marguerite of Lorraine gave birth to her baby, another girl to the absent Monsieur Gaston’s immense disappointment. The head midwife called a priest immediately and had the child baptized as Henriette Marie Louise. Before any suitably elaborate public baptismal ceremony with heads of state as sponsors could be arranged, after six weeks during which she did not thrive in spite of all efforts to coax her, the sickly infant died in May. “Failure to flourish,” the doctors said for the cause of death.

  Lorraine

  “There’s no point in trying to take Verdun. It’s too strongly garrisoned. We’ll just bypass it. This expedition is more in the way of a demonstration than a conquest, after all. Making a statement.”

  Ignoring the last two sentences, Marchéville focused on the first two, which contained more sense than he’d heard from Monsieur Gaston since they left Flanders. Verdun not only had a French garrison, but a commander with considerably more spine than the man at Stenay.

  “You’re absolutely right, Your Highness,” he said. “It’s not even as if we could nego
tiate with the bishop of Verdun to use him as some kind of a counterweight to the administrator named by your brother. François de Lorraine-Chaligny-Mercoeur has been in exile, under the protection of the archbishop of Cologne, since 1626. His mistress is a charming woman and they have two darling little girls. Her father was a gentleman-in-waiting to the late prince of Phalsbourg.”

  Clicquot looked up. “I wonder where Chaligny is now, given the archbishop’s own troubles?”

  “Either on the run or already in the Low Countries, frantically negotiating terms with the monarchy.” Marchéville was nothing if not a practical man.

  The longer he associated with the younger brother of the king of France, the more clearly he could foresee a day when he, too, would be frantically negotiating terms with a monarchy––just about any monarchy.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The French garrison at St. Mihiel was also too strong. Not as strong as that in Verdun, but still too strong and also commanded by a stubborn man. Even Gaston admitted that. Where, then? Commercy would do. There was a French governor in place, but Marchéville knew him. Réance was a man who could be bribed.

  Once they were safely inside Commercy’s walls, Clicquot dared to ask what the next stage in Monsieur’s plan might be.

  Gaston waved his hand. “By being here, I am making a statement that though I have proclaimed all along that I am in Lorraine on my dear Marguerite’s behalf, still, from this standpoint I could head up the Meuse to Neufchâteau and take these regiments into France itself. In a sense, I am just reminding my brother and Richelieu that I am still around.”

  Marchéville left the room in disgust.

  “Under Richelieu’s influence,” Gaston continued to Cliquot, “my brother does not give the great nobles of France the respect they deserve.”

  Cliquot bowed slightly. Beheading did, in many ways, indicate a lack of respect for the beheaded.

  “Should I raise my banner against the tyranny of this man who has so misled my brother, many French peers would flock to it.”

  They actually might. That was the kind of thinking that resulted in...well...beheading.

  Clicquot began to consider his options.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The ten-day supply of captured Spanish bread ran out. Commercy was not sufficiently provisioned to easily absorb some three thousand hungry soldiers at this time of the year. Within a few days, there were...hardships.

  Colonels Haraucourt and Thysac took a stand against letting the other regiments with Gaston maraud through the countryside around Commercy.

  Gaston made noises about mutiny.

  Haraucourt and Thysac made noises about being patriotic sons of Lorraine.

  Once they had left the room, Marchéville pointed out that they were also currently the heroes of the expedition because they had chased Fernando’s Spaniards back into Luxemburg, which made it possible that if Monsieur pressed them to the point of actual mutiny, the lower officers in the other companies might not obey an order to arrest them.

  “Well,” Clicquot said, “see what you can do, then.”

  “We could always try offering to pay in cash.”

  Chapter 8 I Don’t Have Enough Time and There Is Way Too Much to Do

  “Die zeitt ist mir zu kurtz und die geschefte zu viel.”

  Schwarzach

  Francisco de Melon offered Grand Duke Bernhard his report, straightening out, to the best of his ability, the mixed-up biography, supposedly of himself, that Matt Trelli had received from the Grantville researchers back during the siege of Kronach, with some trepidation. Sometimes it was not easy to predict how the grand duke would react. Luckily, he found it hilariously entertaining.

  “I myself,” Bernhard said, “found the article about me in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica very gratifying. It was nice to know that I had gone down in history as ‘Bernhard the Great,’ rather than any of the things that my older brothers called me over the years.” He made a general gesture of Phhhhtt! in the direction of those absent older brothers. “Who wants to be remembered as ‘Bernhard the squirt.’ Not that I find the notion that in less than five years, I will be––would have been––dead particularly appealing. I still have far much too much to do and not enough time in which to do it. So I do pay attention to the up-time nurse I hired, whether she realizes that I do or not.”

  Bernhard got up and started to stride around the room.

  That constant, restless, movement was something that de Melon had noted before, and would report upon to the regent in Bolzen. The man did, quite literally, think on his feet.

  “I was odd man out among the brothers in more than one way,” Bernhard was saying. “My older brothers, even Albrecht, all got names that were traditional in the Wettins. This caused a little confusion. We had Johann Ernst and Ernst. We had Wilhelm and Friedrich Wilhelm. We had Friedrich, Johann Friedrich, and Friedrich Wilhelm.”

  He turned and tapped his finger on the table. “Actually, we also had Johann Wilhelm and one just plain Johann, but they both died before I was old enough to know them. That, plus we were all so close in age, made things so confusing that the people around Weimar didn’t even try to tell us apart. We were just ‘Die jungen Herrschaften auf dem Hornstein.’ The young lordships. Hornstein was where we lived. Frau Dunn, the nurse I was mentioning, calls this type of name ‘generic.’

  “So by the time I came along, Mama had it up to the neck and insisted on naming me something that no Wettin in history had ever been named before. Then, since our father died when I was a year old and I therefore turned out to be the last boy of the crop, and energetic the way she was herself, she spoiled me, especially after my little sister died.”

  Bernhard turned again, more abruptly, and leaned an elbow on the mantle of the fireplace.

  De Melon emitted an encouraging mumble, designed to keep the discussion going.

  For a couple of minutes, it seemed that it might not. The grand duke just looked into the fire.

  “I was twelve when she died. She was out riding––we used to ride together, ever since I could sit on a pony. She was jumping the Ilm River when she came off her horse. She hit her head on a rock in the stream and drowned.”

  Bernhard pulled himself away from the fireplace and started pacing again.

  “If she were alive, she would be prostrate with fury to think that I’m marrying a Catholic. She left directions in her will that none of us should marry outside of the Lutheran faith. So much for filial piety, I suppose. I’ll just add that I’m going into this with open eyes. I recognize that this marriage may cause a catastrophe at some later time. I expect that the regent does as well.”

  De Melon prudently remained silent.

  “I stayed in Weimar with a tutor until I was fifteen, under the guardianship of Johann Ernst, who was all of twenty-three himself when Mama died. I told you we were all close in age. By 1619, all five of the ‘big boys’ were already in the field, involved with the Winter King and in serious political trouble with Ferdinand II and John George over in Albertine Saxony because of it. They assigned the local administration of Saxe-Weimar to Ernst, who was all of nineteen by then. The older brothers concluded that he would not have what it took to both run the duchy and supervise the two youngest of us, so they sent Friedrich Wilhelm and me off to Jena with a steward and two tutors to keep an eye on us. If nothing else, the family believed in education––especially on Mama’s side. It’s up in Anhalt where you’ll find the literary societies and the educational reformers spilling out the palace doors.”

  De Melon did a mental count. The five “big boys” were now down to two––Wilhelm Wettin and Duke Albrecht. The other three were dead, two in battle and one a suicide while mentally disturbed. His brothers had placed him in confinement before that.

  Bernhard suddenly, frighteningly, smiled. “Yes, I realize that you will report all this to the grand duchess.”

  De Melon nodded.

  “We were at the university for one five-month term. At the end of
it, we were invited to go on a big hunt at Georgenthal. We caught smallpox. Friedrich Wilhelm died. I recovered and brought his body back to Weimar.

  “One thing I’ll give Ernst credit for is that along with being the most incredibly idealistic person I’ve ever met, he’s also an utterly pragmatic realist. I get along with him a lot better than I do with Wilhelm. I refused to return to the university. He knew I meant it, so no matter what Johann Ernst wanted, he sent me to our Great-Uncle Johann Casimir at Coburg. I spent what were honestly the best two years of my life since Mama died in the Ritterakademie there. That’s what I wanted to be learning. Military skills, advanced riding. Practical stuff. Then I joined the army under Wilhelm, full-time, in 1622. I was eighteen and that’s where I’ve been ever since.”

  Bernhard flung out a hand.

  “All of that means that I don’t have a lot to offer to an Italian court lady in the way of companionship. I don’t have the education that my brothers got. I didn’t want it then and now I regret not having it, but there’s nothing to be done. Here’s what I was taught until I was fifteen: religion, Latin, French, geography, history, political theory, mathematics, and every imaginable form of physical education, including weapons training. Plus a really heavy dose of the legal system of Saxony as interpreted by Friedrich Hortleder, especially with a view to the rights of the Ernestine line vis-a-vis the Albertine line, and the rights within the Ernestine line of the Weimar line vis-a-vis the Altenburg line. Nobody could call old Hortleder impartial when it comes to defending the constitutional rights of Saxe-Weimar.

  “Since then, I’ve learned war.

  “If she wants to back out before we sign the pre-nup and make the betrothal official, give her the chance.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “No, it damned well isn’t what I wanted to be doing right now. It’s the very last thing I wanted to be doing this spring.” The grand duke of the County of Burgundy was not a happy man. “I need to be here. I don’t have enough time for this, and I have way too much to do.”