Ring of Fire - 1635_ The Legions of Pestilence

by Virginia DeMarce

  “Becky.”

  “Yes, Michael.”

  “Just for the record, I would like to file he the information that up-time I never, ever, watched soap operas and never, ever, wanted to.”

  “Duly noted.”

  “That protest now being on record, what happened next?” The USE prime minister handed Kathleen off to an entering nursery-maid, swabbed at his shoulder, and tried to get his mind focused on politics again.

  “Well, it seems that the outraged husband escaped. The general assumption is that he is now on his way back to his ancestral estates in the Franche Comté, where he will become the problem of Bernhard and Claudia. Wherever he is headed, though, he is carrying a personal safe-conduct signed by Isabella Clara Eugenia.”

  “There are rumors,” Francisco Nasi added, “that he is also carrying a personally signed letter to the effect that if Bernhard wants continued complacency, or complaisancy, from the indomitable Isabella in regard to his annexation into the County of Burgundy of those portions of her appanage once comprised by the Franche Comté , he will see fit to leave the gentleman to while away his time in rural tranquility on said estates.”

  “It is really a rather elegant solution,” Becky pointed out.

  “From the tone of your voice, I am guessing that there is more.”

  “Well the duke is dead now,” she answered at her most innocent.

  “Thoroughly so, I gather.”

  “Which means that Duchess Nicole is a widow.”

  “Surely she is not prostrate with grief.”

  “By no means. But she is available. Unless she enters a convent, slams the door behind her, and takes perpetual vows, there remains the question of her next marriage.”

  “Within a week of the abrupt termination of her last marriage?”

  “Of course. Now in regard to Henriette,...” She turned around. “Sepharad, Baruch. Stop that this very instant.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “It took some fancy footwork,” Mike said, “but I have managed to postpone the signing of any modus vivendi treaty with Bernhard in regard to Burgundy on the grounds of the still-unsettled conditions in Lorraine. Of course, it’s not that hard to persuade Gustavus into dragging things out as long as possible until he absolutely has to issue that apology that Bernhard wants.”

  Frank Jackson snorted. “The truth is, you don’t want to be ‘present at the creation’ of this one. It’s close enough to the changeover that you intend to duck out and let Wettin shoulder the responsibility for this particular kettle full of very smelly fish.”

  Mike didn’t answer.

  “Not that I blame you,” Frank added.

  Chapter 15 A Plague upon Your Houses

  Germersheim, Province of the Upper Rhine

  General Brahe and Colonel Utt, on behalf of the USE and the SoTF respectively, had stayed busy chasing the Irish dragoons while everyone else in the region was thinking about Lorraine. After the raid against the Merkwiller-Pechelbronn oil fields, they kept up the pursuit across the Province of the Upper Rhine, managing to capture the four colonels’ baggage train before it crossed the Rhine at Germersheim.

  That was the good news.

  The bad news was the discovery of sick people in it. One of the down-time medics proclaimed loudly that the illness was plague.

  Nürtingen, Duchy of Württemberg

  Gustav Horn found it hard to believe that he was sitting in his tent, politely entertaining the envoy from Bernhard. This time the previous year, he had been busily maneuvering to keep the man out of as much of Swabia as possible, so Gustavus Adolphus could operate untrammeled in the north.

  He had not liked Bernhard back when they were forced to work together under the king––the emperor. They had quarreled. He still did not like Bernhard. The man was reckless, prone to take unnecessary risks, overanxious to force things to a decision, and...

  “There is plague to the southeast, coming up from Marseilles, moving toward this region. The grand duke is instituting all possible preventive measures. The three Paduan physicians . . .”

  This upstart Colonel Raudegen’s voice went on, floating past Horn’s ears. “Strict quarantine at the borders...the up-time nurse...small capacity for manufacture of chloramphenicol will probably not prove to be sufficient...universities of Basel and Strassburg...would appreciate it if you would contact the faculty at Tübingen...all possible resources...certain that your own medical experts have warned you...”

  Horn rested his forehead on his hands. “May God preserve us all.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “It’s confirmed.” Måns Ulfsparre, recently a captain, now a colonel, and Nils Brahe’s liaison with Horn for the duration of the Württemberg combined action, shook his head. “When General Brahe stopped the baggage train of the four Irish colonels on the left bank of the Rhine, before it crossed to Bruchsal, there was sickness. One of our medics yelled ‘plague.’ We hoped he was an alarmist. He wasn’t. They had, indeed, picked up plague at some point on their journey from Euskirchen down the old Jakobswege and then through Lorraine.”

  “I suppose this means that you suspect that there was also plague among the Irish dragoons.”

  “If there was not, it would be a divine miracle. The people from the baggage train itself are not such a problem. General Brahe has instituted a strict quarantine at Germersheim. No one has been permitted to leave––not that some haven’t tried. Our men arrested two and shot one when he tried to run. We’re providing food, so no one in the camp starves. Fulda sent DDT and antibiotics. And, at least, we have a vague idea where they picked up the ‘infected’ rats. It has to be rats, we suppose. That’s where the up-timers say plague comes from.”

  “How does it help to know where they got it?”

  “At the insistance of the three Padua doctors sent by the regent of Tyrol and the up-time nurse, Frau Dunn, the grand duke has cooperated in setting up a strict quarantine of the border between northern and southern Alsace. Strassburg and Mülhausen have also instituted quarantines for travelers coming from the north. If those succeed, we hope that the Franche Comté can close its western border with France and thus buffer the Grand Duke’s Swabian territories––and, incidental to that, buffer you.”

  Niels Brahe and Derek Utt kept busy all the rest of April chasing the Irish dragoons through the Province of the Upper Rhine and Swabia.

  Johann Friedrich, Count Palatine and heir to the duke of Pfalz-Veldenz, showed up at Brahe’s camp at Maulbronn, coming from Augsburg with a “must hire” letter, written by Margrave Georg Friedrich of Baden-Durlach and endorsed personally by the emperor.

  Since the count had served as a Swedish officer for years and nobody had ever called him incompetent––not to mention that he was a son of the emperor’s first cousin, a grandson of Anna Maria Vasa––Brahe shrugged and slotted him into von Zitzewitz’s regiment, which had lost a couple of officers during the season’s campaigning.

  “I’m surprised your father lets his heir go into combat,” von Zitzewitz said.

  The count shrugged. “I’m thirty-one. I have two younger brothers. The youngest is ten now, so he’s likely to survive and too young to fight for some years yet. I also have a male cousin. He’s turned twenty and still at the university of Tübingen. Although, I suppose, I really should marry soon. I suspect that’s one reason that I’m here. The emperor seems to have fixed on the older sister of Duke Eberhard of Württemberg as suitable. I am advised to take advantage of this opportunity to make his acquaintance.”

  “You’re in luck.” Zitzewitz pointed. “He’s right down the hall there, talking with those three up-timers.”

  Chapter 16 Thrown into Confusion

  “Ich bin durch die bis anhero villfeltige fürgeloffene occasiones in solche confusion geworffen worden...”

  Sedan

  May 1635

  “M

  onsieur Gaston is most sincerely grateful for your permission to recruit in Sedan,” Clicquot said.

  “
I would be most sincerely grateful,” the duc de Bouillon answered, “if you would keep it quiet. I can certainly use the money that he’s paying me for the privilege, but if my brother Turenne gets wind of the matter, he will be furious.”

  “Oh, we can always cover it up one way or the other. If there’s any consistency to the alliances at the French court at all, it is that some nobles are for some reason forming a cabal against Richelieu.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “It’s so tiresome always to be on the outs with the court,” Gaston said. “I truly do not understand why Louis has this bee in his bonnet about consolidation of a centralized royal authority. Life would be so much simpler, so much easier, if he would only recognize the natural role of France’s great nobles and permit them to assume the positions that should be theirs by right of birth.”

  He waved his hand. “Particularly me, as his heir.”

  “Bouillon charged us through the nose for just the right to recruit. Once we’ve paid the recruiting bonuses, there won’t be enough left of the money the current cabal forwarded to us to pay the regiments we’re taking into Lorraine for more than a month.”

  “Ah, don’t worry about it. Bonuses now, one muster with pay a month from now, and by then we’ll be into Lorraine. By another month, we can put them off by promising them that they can make a profit by plundering the countryside.”

  “Are you certain that your wife Marguerite is content to see the people of Lorraine plundered?”

  “Since my brother is occupying the duchy and has been collecting the taxes and revenues for the past couple of years, why should she care? Not that I’ve asked her, but it’s not as if they’ll be taking away anything from her current income. We’re living on expectations anyway.”

  Lorraine

  “Through Stenay, again?”

  “That’s the only logical way to enter Lorraine from Sedan.”

  “Where next?”

  Gaston thought about it a minute. “What about Étain?”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “Why Étain?” the dragoon colonel Cliquot had hired in Sedan asked.

  “You’re used to the German way of fighting, aren’t you?”

  “That’s where I’ve worked mostly, yes. Early training in the Netherlands under Maurice de Nassau; then the campaigns in Westphalia for the better part of ten years.”

  “You might as well forget what you learned. Monsieur Gaston...just doesn’t operate that way.”

  Unfortunately for the local population, Étain was where the French money ran out.

  From Étain, they moved toward Pont-à-Mousson. It was a pretty enough town, on the Moselle, with a good bridge.

  The dragoon colonel saw only one reason to go there––namely, if a person wanted to cross that particular river.

  If, for example, a person wished to take Château-Salins, yet avoid the regiments that Fernando and Bernhard had at Nancy, Pont-à-Mousson made sense.

  Monsieur Gaston, apparently did not not want to do that. They turned around toward the west without crossing, burned a couple of villages, Montauville for one, and went back toward Étain by a route from which they had already foraged all the convenient provisions.

  Étain, at least, was some distance from Metz. A short distance. Not that anywhere in Lorraine was a long distance from anywhere else, by the standards of campaigning in the Germanies. Nancy, the capital, was not more distant than sixty miles from the border in any direction; in many places, it was less than that.

  But some distance.

  However, then they went to Briey, which was closer to Metz.

  The garrison came out and chased them, blocking the way they had come.

  In a disordered tumble, Gaston’s forces headed southeast toward Boulay, leaving most of their baggage behind. Disordered or not, he made it to Boulay in two days, which was about as fast as it could be done.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Haraucourt, Thysac, and almost all the other officers and men of the Lorraine regiments who had been allowed their honors at Commercy offered their services to Aldringen.

  For a reasonable reimbursement, of course.

  Claudia appealed to the heads of the joint protectorate.

  Aldringen duly thanked the gentlemen for the prompt subsidy payment, although he suspected in his heart that this first installment had come from the privy purse of Isabella Clara Eugenia.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “The good news, then, Your Grace, given this second invasion the duchy under the leadership of Monsieur Gaston and the undoubted fact that it will require me to draw down additional regiments from both the Low Countries and Burgundy, is that France has decided to cut its losses for the time being and withdraw the remainder of the garrisons it had in Lorraine. I have successfully negotiated their withdrawal with honors and beg to report that the last of them should be gone within two weeks.

  “Turning to the matter of additional regiments from the Low Countries and Burgundy, given the direction of Gaston’s current movements, reinforcements for the garrison at Saint-Avold are my most pressing need at the moment, although I hope that la princess de Phalsbourg will provide assistance, since it forms a portion of her appanage. In case she does not have sufficient resources, however, if the king in the Netherlands could spare one of the Spanish regiments or if Grand Duke Bernhard could advance the use of some of his troops, it would be most helpful.

  “The French, upon leaving, entirely stripped the duchy’s treasury, which was held in one of their remaining strong points rather than in Nancy. The city councils of Metz, Toul, and Verdun, calling on the ambiguous status that secularization by Fernando’s fiat brings to the former prince-bishoprics, would love to deny that they owe anything for the duchy’s defense, but need to see only to their own. From what I understand of the legal situation,...”

  Aldringen looked at his daily report to Claudia and decided that honesty would be, in the long run, the best policy.

  “Your Grace, I am completely confused by what the duc d’Orleans has been doing. I can make neither head nor tails of what Monsieur Gaston has undertaken, nor where he is going, nor why. His movements entirely offend my sense of military logic.

  “Additionally, I must work on the presupposition that although Richelieu is pulling out the garrisons, the French will be back. I cannot leave the western frontier undefended in order to pursue Monsier Gaston through the northeast.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “But Antoine,” Henriette said. She wriggled, snuggled, and then cuddled a little. Just why men became so malleable at that stage of a discussion would always be beyond her comprehension, but she was certainly not above using any advantage that life had given her. “Why on earth would I wish to join my forces with those of Monsieur Gaston at this point? He is planning to attack Saint-Avold. Saint-Avold is mine, part of my principality. Be reasonable, mon petit choux. I need to defend it, not help him attack it.”

  Puylaurens mumbled something into her shoulder.

  “I have what I want.” She looked at him with an adorably cute frown.

  At least, when she was five years old, a lady-in-waiting had said that the expression was adorably cute.

  Her siblings tended to associate it with such descriptions as “Henriette can be as stubborn as a mule when she wants to be.”

  “What did I want? How can you possibly need to ask? I wanted the French to stop occupying Lorraine so I could have Phalsbourg back. All the parts of Phalsbourg––not just this fortress. Now that Richelieu has withdrawn the garrisons, there is nothing to keep us from marching from here...” She put her finger on the map. “...to there...” She put her finger on the map again. “...in the company of those lovely gentlemen.” She gestured toward the window, in the general direction where the mercenaries upon whom she had expended a portion of the funds she had already raised were camped.

  “Then I can live very happily ever after, a free woman, with no man to rule me.” She shook her carefully arranged curls.

  Puylaurens op
ened and closed his mouth.

  For the first time, it occurred to her that Antoine was not always beautiful. Sometimes he looked sort of like a...rather large fish.

  How disappointing.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  To the great disappointment of both Claudia and Aldringen, the king in the Low Countries did very little more than say the equivalent of, “tut, tut.” He was seriously preoccupied with settling things in Cologne and with Essen.

  He did send a few additional garrison troops, most of whom were semi-invalids, along with his best wishes.

  Three hundred mercenaries arrived from Phalsbourg.

  It wouldn’t be enough.

  Aldringen was about ready to tear out his hair when a large contingent of militia, a good quarter of it consisting of mounted infantry, came marching into Saint-Avold flying the banner of Lorraine.

  “Who is that captain?” he asked. “I don’t think we were expecting...”

  Haraucourt looked out the window, let out a whoop of “Alberte! Reinforcements!,” and headed down the stairs at a run.

  Thysac followed him. So did Aldringen, somewhat more slowly.

  The captain threw his leg over the pommel of the saddle, jumped off his horse, and caught Colonel Haraucourt in a warm embrace while yelling loudly, “My scouts have spotted the Frenchie.”

  Her horse.

  Haraucourt was seigneur de Saint-Baslemont.

  Madame de Saint-Baslemont was...umm...wearing trousers, a man’s jacket, and some kind of military insignia.

  “There really wasn’t much danger when I gave the Grand Duke Bernhard my manor’s location when we were negotiating at Commercy,” Haraucourt said that evening. “I think I mentioned it to you some time ago, Éric.” He beamed proudly at the substantial figure of his solid, middle-aged, wife. “Alberte keeps everything under control. She is a true amazon of Lorraine.”