“There are a fair number of people who actually do have good reasons to want to get him.”
Diane crossed the room, picked up the papers, and tossed them on his desk. “Not on my watch, as they say. Where is Colonel Raudegen?”
“With Wettstein, I think, across the river, working on inspecting river boats for plague.”
“Bring him here. Call my bodyguards. Radio to Grantville and Magdeburg. Tell them that we are going to Lorraine.”
Magdeburg
“Damn it,” Frank Jackson said on receiving the radio report. “Yeah, I’m going to throw a tantrum right here at headquarters. I have a right to throw a tantrum. What in hell does Diane think she’s doing. ? She’s putting herself right into the middle of a plague situation. People are dying of it. Middle Ages. Black Death. All that stuff.”
“Once the plague is behind the frontiers at all,” Francisco Nasi pointed out, “and it is behind the southeastern frontier now, even though spottily, it’s more likely to be brought into a major commercial entrepot like Basel than anywhere else, so she wasn’t precisely safe there. We’ve thrown up a second plague screen, this side of Swabia, this side of the Rhine. A second-level barrier.”
Frank glared at him. “I am not in a mood to listen to sweet reason.”
Schwarzach
The grand duchess was in the process of transferring her working headquarters.
“What We would like to do,” Claudia said, “is to to see for Ourselves what the condition of the grand duke’s health is. We are tempted. However, duty requires Our presence in Besançon.”
Abbot Georgius bowed and said nothing. He did not wish to be rude, but neither did he want to say anything that might delay her departure. It would be a joy for the Benedictines to have the monastery to themselves again.
Of course, there was nothing to say that the grand duke or his officers might not return. Bernhard appeared to find the cloister convenient. Hopefully, once the fortress on the river was completed...
The grand duchess was expressing regrets that she had not been able to visit her children in Tyrol at all since her marriage.
“They are in a safe place,” he said, “while you are in a plague-infested one, even though, thankfully, the pestilence has not yet visited this immediate region.”
“Oh,” she said impatiently. “We know it. There is no way We are going to expose Our children to danger. But there is always the possibility that if We appear not to be taking advantage of the visitation schedule arranged in the agreement, the other members of the regency council may seek to renege on the privilege altogether. Dr. Volmar...” Her voice trailed off.
“I left Father Malaspina, my confessor, in Innsbruck, to oversee the religious education of the children. It has been very kind of you to act as my confessor during my stay here, but I really need one of my own.” She shook her head. She was starting to pick up the grand duke’s penchant for thinking of herself in the singular.
“If I may suggest...?”
“What, Father Georgius?”
“Instead of requesting a confessor from Spain or Italy, you might write to Cardinal-Protector Mazzare. He might know someone who could...help you adjust to the new world in which we are living.”
Claudia bowed her head for a few minutes.
“Let the Monster be summoned,” she ordered suddenly. “It is expensive, but I have really spent very little money this spring and summer. It will be best to avoid the possibility of acquiring plague during the trip. What do they call it? Point to point travel.”
The children. There was no way she would expose her children to danger, but there was no plague in the air. She suspected that she was pregnant. If so, the preservation of the child had to be her first priority, above all else. Especially with the grand duke sick. Sicker than he was admitting, she was sure. First Innsbruck. Then Besançon.
Besançon
This was the first time that Marcie had been invited into the grand ducal bedchambers. She mostly saw Claudia in her office.
The reason was immediately apparent. The grand ducal ladies’ maids were applying henna to the grand ducal hair. It looked like they would be at it for a while.
Marcie had occasionally wondered if she saw dark roots beneath the red.
She wondered if the grand duke knew. Probably not. He probably didn’t even know that henna existed. It didn’t have any practical military application.
The grand ducal dogs were either sleeping on the grand ducal skirts or running around them, yapping. There seemed to be another one every time a person turned around. Two little tan lapdogs, a fuzzy white one that Claudia called her little lion-dog and had brought back from Innsbruck, and a white one with brown spots. Luckily they were all small, because they weren’t entirely housebroken.
Claudia gestured toward the desk pedestal. She had one, with a secretary present, even in her dressing room. “We are not permitted to move Our head. It is a pleasure to have your company again, Lady Marcie.”
“Thank you, Your Grace.”
“Have you succeeded in deciphering the latest letter from the grand duke? It is good practice for you, you know. If you learn to read his handwriting, you will probably be able to master any down-time script. Plus, you need to know more of the geography.”
“The letter was sent from a castle south of Toul and is signed, ‘Meiner Herrin allezeitt williger diner.’ Not bad,” Marcie said. “‘At all times, my lady’s willing servant.’ I’d be happy to take that if Matt wrote it at the end of a letter. Instead, I get ‘in a hurry’ or, at most, ‘see ya’ one of these days.’”
Claudia smiled. “The grand duke puts such phrases before the formal signature. I might be more flattered if I didn’t know that, aside from the gender of the addressee, he signs his letters to Chancellor Oxenstierna precisely the same way––and if the topic were not that he wants me to negotiate better grain prices with the commercial houses of Paler and Rehlinger in Augsburg and Basel. He is worried about food for civilians in the plague-stricken areas as well as supplies for the army. This campaign is lasting far longer, and therefore turning out to be more expensive, than he had projected in March.”
A rattle, clatter, and the noise of falling boards came through a closed door, followed by curses from construction workers. The curses were in the local dialect, but Marcie could project what they were saying.
“Something new?”
Claudia carefully did not turn her head. “We are having a private chapel installed. We had one in Innsbruck. After childbirth––there are forty days before one is churched, during which one cannot appear in public. I do not ever want to go without hearing mass for that long. This must be completed and consecrated before the end of the year. Now they are doing only the rough work. Once the plague abates, We will bring decorators from Tuscany to make it beautiful. We prefer modern architecture.”
Oooh. Marcie got the implications of that in a hurry, but since there had been no official announcement, she kept her mouth shut. Maybe she was starting to get the hang of this courtier business. ‘Modern architecture’ to a seventeenth-century Italian meant lots of colored marble inlays, pillars cut so they looked like spirals and gilding on top of the gilding, simply dripping with madonnas. She wondered what the grand duke would make of that––he was pretty much bound to see the place.
She turned her attention back to the letter from Bernhard. “If I were you, Your Grace, I’d be more worried about this line.”
“Which one?”
“Es will aber die mattigkeitt noch nicht nachlessen, doch wird es nicht erger.”
Claudia frowned. “He keeps minimizing this illness. ‘The exhaustion doesn’t get better, but neither does it get worse.’ I have read the reports in the encyclopedias, of course. It was such a stomach ailment that eventually killed him. There were even rumors of poisoning.”
She frowned more deeply. “That’s always possible, of course.”
The grand duchess was, after all, a Medici.
; ✽ ✽ ✽
“If Bernhard dies, will I have the resources to hold Burgundy?”
Claudia used the first person singular because she didn’t ask that question out loud or direct it to any particular person.
She held it in her mind and asked it of herself.
She set up a conference with those members of Der Kloster who weren’t in Lorraine with him. She spoke with the duc de Rohan, with Hattstein at Dôle, and with the others whom he had left to garrison the Franche Comté.
“My personal motto,” she informed them, “is ‘God sees all.’ I do my best to take Him as my model.”
✽ ✽ ✽
After Rohan, she spoke to Leopold Cavriani. She already knew him, of course.
Speaking with Cavriani naturally led to contacting Bernhard’s bankers. A man engaged in military contracting on the scale Bernhard had done it, and now constructing a principality, needed to have credit always ready. There was only so far that ordinary revenue sources could be relied on and they were not something one could expedite in emergencies––if, for example, a city council needed a loan from the general or grand duke, it sometimes being a bit difficult to distinguish which hat he was wearing at the moment, to pay its own garrison troops. Even forced contributions wouldn’t cover something like that, since if the council had the money to contribute, it could pay the garrison. So a man borrowed, using expected revenues from taxes, tolls, dues, and Kontributionen as collateral.
So she contacted Marx Conrad Rehlinger––the grand duke’s merchant banker and most important financier, from an old Augsburg family, currently residing in Basel, and also, not precisely accidentally, the uncle of the grand duke’s chancellor, Hans Ulrich Rehlinger. Bernhard had told her that Rehlinger was probably the only man who entirely understood his complicated financial affairs, and that she could rely on him.
Rehlinger’s own pride had been somewhat offended by the decision of the Gustavus Adolphus and, subsequently, the USE to rely upon the Abrabanel banking network, as if the Germanies’ own bankers were not good enough.
It only made sense to rely on him. If someone as arrogant, incredibly demanding, suspicious, touchy, and sometimes, truth be told, generally a pain in the butt as her current lord and husband regarded Rehlinger as a reliable friend, she would, until she learned something to the contrary, accept that as true.
Then there were the Hervart brothers in Lyon––also descended from an old Augsburg banking family, the Herwarths, on their father’s side and an even older one, the Welsers, on their paternal grandmother’s side, they handled much of the business associated with the French subsidies. War was a business, after all, on the scale that Bernhard conducted it. Under the French agreement, he had promised to keep a certain number of men in the field. French inspectors took regular musters and deducted from the subsidy payments twelve livres for every missing infantryman, forty livres for ever missing cavalryman, and correspondingly more for any shortfall in regimental staff and officers.
The Hervarts would have ears in the French court––possibly even ears on Richelieu’s staff. Not to mention that Jean Henri Hervart, who also served as Bernhard’s purchasing agent in France, was married to one of Rehlinger’s daughters. All in the family. That was how the world worked. Things were all in the family.
Purchasing agent because if munitions and food were to be had at a reasonable price in France, they would do the army a lot more good than coins, so he was authorized to buy and ship.
Well, more good than coins as long as enough coins arrived to pay the men.
Mostly. Barthélemi Hervart was more of a free spirit. Well, as bankers went. Barthélemi enjoyed playing politics. Père Joseph and the dévots hated the sight of a Protestant with that much influence on the French court. Mazarin, rumor reported, loved him.
Not Jan Hoeufft. A Dutch Calvinist by birth, he was nonetheless a naturalized French citizen. For Bernhard, he mainly acted as a transfer agent for the payment of the subsidies the court owed under the contract. He performed some additional services, always taking his cut and profit, of course. He might exchange silver coins for gold, since gold was less bulky and saved on transportation costs. Occasionally, when the court gave him “assignations” on future income rather than cold, hard, cash, he even made advances on the subsidies from his bank’s own funds. But he was Richelieu’s man, not Bernhard’s.
Not Hoeufft. If a single word about this reached Hoeufft, heads would roll.
There were deposits in a Paris bank, too. Not large, but they were there.
Joachim van Vikvoort in Amsterdam. The French called him de Wiqueforte. He held most of Bernhard’s emergency funds––the kind of thing a prudent high officer kept in reserve in case of such emergencies as being captured on the battlefield and having to come up with an outrageously high ransom on very short order. He also kept safely what Bernhard called his “hoard.” That’s what it was––unset gems, jewelry, ceremonial gifts received from conquered cities as the price for tolerable treatment. Bernhard kept some of that sort of thing with him in a safe in one of the baggage wagons, just in case, but most of it he had sufficient sense to keep in a vault in Amsterdam.
Otherwise one risked, like de Guébriant after Ahrensbök, the possibility of either an indefinite captivity or the unlikely decision of someone else to ransom you for his own purposes.
As Bernhard had done for de Guébriant.
Who wasn’t supposed to know it.
✽ ✽ ✽
She needed her own cabinet, Claudia decided. Her own equivalent of Der Kloster.
De Melon. She liked the man, he was competent, and he spoke Italian as well as he did German.
Bernhard had summoned his chancellor, Hans Ulrich Rehlinger, a nephew of the banker, to Lorraine, so he wasn’t available.
Georg Wölcker, the army’s general auditor. She would need him at her side this summer, even though his first loyalty would not be to her.
Tobias von Ponikau, also, would forever be Bernhard’s man. In any case, he was in Brussels for the continuing negotiations in regard to cooperation with the Low Countries.
Johann Christoph von der Grün. For this campaign, Bernhard had left his general adjutant and chief ordinance officer at Dôle with Hattstein. He was far from trusting in regard to what the French might do on the western frontiers of the county if they thought he was tied up elsewhere. An organized, careful, meticulous man. She could use him, but he, too, was one of the grand duke’s long-time, reliable, servants.
Bernhard’s general counsel. The lawyer who read all the fine print in his contracts and crossed out the questionable passages. Could she rely on him? Was he competent? She would have to check in regard to both.
Too bad that de Guébriant was in Lorraine.
Claudia smiled suddenly. Bernhard now called the French count, who had started as a Breton country gentlemen with even fewer resources than Bernhard himself, “friend.”
Sometimes he called him “brother,” but given Bernhard’s relationship with his brothers, that was a more questionable description.
De Guébriant’s wife, though.
Renée du Bec-Crespin.
At some point, Bernhard had mentioned that his brother Albrecht had found out, from the up-time encyclopedias, that his marriage to Dorothea had been childless, but went right ahead and married her anyway. They’d known one another for years, of course.
De Guébriant had done the same with Renée. The two of them were so close that they even wrote joint letters, taking alternate paragraphs.
Perhaps some men did regard their wives as more than, or at least other than, brood mares.
Claudia had found a friend of her own. The only woman who, in the other world, had become a plenipotentiary ambassador for the French crown in this century.
Renée definitely went on the list of people to consult.
✽ ✽ ✽
“A letter from Cardinal Richelieu, Your Grace.”
Claudia took it. Read it. Cocked her head.
“More than a little. But, perhaps, a way to test the competence of that general counsel fellow.” Claudia waved at her secretary. “Make two clean copies, one for Forstenhauser and one for Motzel.”
Forstenhauser came back with an extensive and detailed analysis of the validity of the representations that the French court was making in this letter under the terms of their original agreement with the grand duke.
Volpert Motzel, the young legal officer she brought from Tyrol on Dr. Bienner’s recommendation, pointed out the loophole in the original agreement with a happily piratical expression. “Since the French have never kept up the contractual payments on schedule or in the defined amounts,” he chanted happily, “the grand duke is not legally bound by it at all.”
Forstenhauser answered that the French had not been obliged to pay the full amount, because the grand duke had never managed to get his roster men in the field up to prescribed strength.
Motzel replied that this was because as he had just said the French had never paid on schedule, which hampered the grand duke’s recruiting efforts. Muttering “poorly drafted,” he waved a copy of the original agreement in the air and concluded happily that, “There’s enough potential for trouble just in one subordinate clause here to keep a lawsuit going for a half-century.”
Claudia concluded that she would rely on Motzel rather than on Bernhard’s more pedestrian legal eagle.
✽ ✽ ✽
“The plague-fighting has gone well, yes?” Claudia, at the head of the table, stood up.
Her advisers had learned by now that when she decided to use her height to loom over them, the omens were not good.
“Well,” Dr. Guarinonius confirmed. “Both on the borders of the Franche Comté with France and on the Tyrolese borders with Venice. There is some plague, of course. There always is some plague, but not widespread pestilence as it appears in an epidemic year. Of course, there are no major troop movements within either region. The situation is even basically under control in Swabia.”
There was a moment of silence while everyone present contemplated the improbability of a world in which anything at all in Swabia could be described as “under control.”
Ring of Fire - 1635_ The Legions of Pestilence Page 20