Ring of Fire - 1635_ The Legions of Pestilence

by Virginia DeMarce

  “For this, we owe great gratitude to the efforts of the medical schools at the University of Basel, the University of Strassburg, and the University of Tübingen, combined with the cooperation of the margraves of Baden, both in their own Rhenish territories and from Augsburg. The recurring difficulties are in Lorraine and the USE’s Province of the Upper Rhine.”

  Claudia nodded. “Precisely as I thought. Therefore, since the danger is in Lorraine and the grand duke is in Lorraine, Frau Dunn shall also be in Lorraine.”

  Every jaw dropped.

  “The plague-fighting project is going well. It will do us very little good to have succeeded in saving so many lives if we lose that of my lord and husband.”

  Kamala shook her head. “But...”

  “Your Grace,” Guarinonius said.

  Claudia anticipated the objection. “No, a down-time trained medic will not do. I want the up-time nurse to be there, and that is that.”

  After considerable turbulence with Guarinonius, she got her way.

  “When?” Kamala asked. “The grand duke allowed me time, in coming from Grantville, for the children to finish the school year, and...”

  “There is no time. Tomorrow. Or as soon as I can arrange by the radio relays for the Monster to make the flight.”

  Kamala left her children in Besançon with Carey Calagna and set out for Lorraine the next day, carrying a letter from Claudia to Bernhard in the field, full of admonitions that since he had hired this up-time nurse and was paying her a very generous salary, he was also to pay full attention to her instructions and comply with all of her requirements for comporting himself if he was to recover, “just as the pagan general did––eventually, after considerable recalcitrance, if I recall––to those of Naaman’s captive Israelite serving girl in the Old Testament, after which he was washed entirely clean of his illness.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “We do not consider Ourselves to be beautiful.” Claudia twirled her glass of claret.

  Marcie cocked her head.

  “However, all three of Our husbands saw us in person before the weddings, not just in flattering portraits.”

  Marcie nodded.

  “Federigo was very young of at the time of the visit––he was eleven and I was twelve. Obnoxious boy. He had an actress who was his mistress and kept her right in the palace in Urbino where he expected me to live.”

  Marcie rooted around in her mind for some tactful comment and came up with, “A lot of teenage boys don’t exactly have it all together yet, Your Grace. He probably didn’t mean it as anything against you personally. They go for quantity rather than quality.”

  “Leopold had seen Us at family gatherings when We were a child. However, between then and the date that our marriage was arranged, he knew that We had survived smallpox and childbirth, so he wanted to see if We were still acceptable. He stopped in Florence and took a look on his way to Rome to make the financial arrangements with the pope about resigning his bishoprics and other ecclesiastical benefices, and of course to negotiate with Urban VIII to the effect that the bishoprics should go to his nephew Leopold Wilhelm.” Claudia stopped, wrinkling her forehead. “You haven’t met him yet. He’s Maria Anna’s younger brother.”

  The grand duchess lapsed into a more informal style of speaking. “Leopold had debts coming out of his ears and really needed a Medici dowry––marrying me offered him a partial escape from the financial miseries that had been hounding him ever since he borrowed so much in an attempt to claim the Jülich-Cleves-Berg inheritance that’s been such a misery for so many families in the Germanies for the past quarter-century––but he was still determined to keep the income from his sinecures as long as the church would let him.”

  Marcie preferred not to contemplate the thought of marrying a man who stopped in to take a look at you on his way to Rome to resign as the pluralistic bishop of Passau and Strassburg. Down-time Catholicism was...different, to say the least.

  “I didn’t really expected to remarry after Leopold’s death. I expected to be in widow’s weeds for the remainder of my life. Even after Federigo died, there were those who thought it would be more appropriate if I retired to a convent than lived a worldly life. I was very grateful for the intervention of my late sister-in-law Maria Maddalena, who was also Leopold’s sister. If a person doesn’t have a religious vocation, from age twenty-two to death can seem like a long, long, time to be cloistered.”

  Marcie nodded.

  “Leopold was a political bishop, but quite pious, educated by the Jesuits, even though he was never ordained as a priest, and there were no troubles about mistresses. He loved to hunt, even though he was was terribly fat. He was always going to spas to try to lose the weight his physicians told him he should. I hunted with him when I wasn’t pregnant. Once, I jumped off my horse and stuck the wild sow myself––he was very proud of me. Most of the time, though, I was pregnant. He was away on government business a lot, but he was kind. The first winter after our marriage, he took me for a sleigh ride in the snow and held the reins himself. It was a wonderful treat.”

  The grand duchess blinked, put down her wine glass, and picked up her pen. “Now We are writing to Our third spouse.”

  Marcie cast her mind over things that the various guys had said about Grand Duke Bernhard. “I don’t think you’ll have mistress problems this time, either.”

  The grand duchess tried out the effect of her spousal words by reading them out loud to Marcie.

  “‘Unser hertzlieber herr unndt ehgemahl.’” Claudia tossed her head. “I do wish he spoke Italian. Italian is a much nicer language and my German isn’t very good. We always spoke Italian at the court in Innsbruck.”

  Marcie wondered if Claudia really meant “Our heartily loved lord and husband,” or if it was just one more of the standard letter formulas.

  “I have a suspicion,” she wrote Matt, “based on the way she went back to using ‘Our’ rather than ‘my,’ that it’s the latter, but I’m not sure. I really need to find out if anyone has published a manual of how to write letters here down-time. The etiquette kind that used to tell a person how to write to his congressman. You know what I mean. The university library at Fairmont had one that the Navy Wives Association published. I came across it one day when I was browsing the shelves. If there’s something like it on the market now, I’m going to buy a copy if I can possibly afford it.”

  Chapter 23 Slipped Beyond Control

  Merkwiller-Pechelbronn, Province of the Upper Rhine

  “W

  e no sooner think we have the plague under control than it breaks out again,” Gus Szymanski wrote. “How in hell do we enforce a quarantine in a place where people don’t just cross borders on the roads, where we can set up check points? They’re coming into the Province of the Upper Rhine––well, coming out of Lorraine–– through the goddamned fields. Sometimes it’s a trickle and sometimes it’s a stream, but they keep on coming, and they will as long as Gaston and Bernhard are maneuvering around. It’s as bad as trying to patrol the border with Mexico was, up-time. No way to keep out the illegals, if they’re determined enough to cross. Not every one of them is sick, but enough to keep it going.

  “Count yourselves lucky that so far the quarantines are holding and the plague hasn’t reached as far inside the USE as Fulda.”

  Fulda

  Nina Springer, against her husband’s advice and better judgment, read Gus Szymanski’s latest letter out loud to the members of the SoTF administration.

  “Is it bubonic plague or is it some other epidemic?” Harlan Stull asked.

  Nina glared at him. “Who cares? People are dying of it. Dying like flies.”

  “We can’t just keep sitting here,” Harlan Stull said. “Things are under control in Buchlenland. Over there is where we ought to be. On the front lines.”

  “The risk,” Melvin Springer said. “We’ve already lost several members of the staff here, up-timers and down-timers alike.”

  “You can do w
hat you want, Mel,” Nina said, “but if anyone else goes, I’m going with him. Or her. Or them. And if nobody else goes, I’m going to help Gus and Orville out anyhow.”

  Springer crossed his arms over his chest. “In that case, I had better go myself. I really should investigate the deaths of Hill and Pence last month. Furbee and Matowski are military, so they aren’t my responsibility. The other two were civil servants, though. I ought to make sure they were not doing anything that exceeded their authority, and lay down firm guidelines for the latest cadre of Buchenland volunteers.”

  Stull pushed his chair back. “If you don’t intend to help in some practical way, you would be better off staying here. The last thing they need right now is one more sniffing bureaucrat.”

  Merkwiller-Pechelbronn

  The pious hope of Clicquot that his semblance of a plan for Gaston’s raid might, if not give them success, at least preserve them from disaster, proved to be an entirely vain hope. Everything seemed to have slipped beyond his control. First, the plan did not take into consideration just how many USE and SoTF regiments had been sent to the vicinity, not to protect the oil fields, but to fight the plague.

  In truth, Clicquot did not know. He had gone through a very hectic spring and summer. He did point out that there was plague at the site. He even went so far to mention that by campaigning in the region, Gaston could contribute to the spread of plague by his troops.

  Gaston did not care.

  Clicquot pointed out that entering the region could accelerate the presence of plague among their own troops.

  Gaston did not care.

  “He may be a fool,” Marchéville said, “but he is certainly a single-minded fool. God, how I wish I had listened to Henri de Beringhen when he first showed up in Brussels.”

  They didn’t even get close to the oil fields.

  Gaston had less than a thousand men.

  The USE had six full regiments and parts of others.

  Gaston had no supplies other than what the riders could carry.

  The USE had a supply depot.

  Gaston had recently-hired mercenaries.

  The USE regiments had, in many cases, been drilling together for three, four, and even five years.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Cliquot informed Gaston that Puylaurens was severely injured.

  Gaston shrugged. “You and he have led me into disaster. Clearly, we cannot afford the delay that bringing him with us would cause. I need to get back to the security offered by the infantry regiments I left in Lorraine. I do have a duty to France, you know. Think what political chaos it would cause if the heir to the throne died because of some absurd altruistic gesture.”

  Without Puylaurens, the remnants of the raiders retreated rapidly back into Lorraine.

  Puylaurens rolled himself into a ditch, hoping to keep out of sight of the USE medics searching the field. He landed on top of one of Henriette’s dissatisfied mercenary captains.

  “Stay there,” the man said. “Maybe your corpse will hide me. Hey, I know who you are. We both should have stayed in Pfalzburg with the princesse. We’d have lost less in the long run.”

  “My motto these days,” Puylaurens said bitterly, “is ‘What do I have to lose?’ I’d have died more comfortably at the hands of Louis XIII’s executioner.”

  He expended his last bit of strength and rolled off the captain, so anyone who happened to look into the ditch would see both of them.

  Chapter 24 For the Benefit of the Hard-Pressed Protestant Church

  Lorraine

  “W

  ell, I see you’re not dead yet.” Hans Ulrich Rehlinger, chancellor of the County of Burgundy, was a bouncy, cheerful man.

  A shocked man, at the moment. He knew that Bernhard was sick, but the grand duke was gaunt; his eyes feverish.

  “So, what am I doing here?” He leaned an elbow on the slanted pedestal next to the bed which John had carefully prepared with paper, ink, and pens.

  “Writing a will.” Bernhard reached under one pillows propped behind him. “I have some of the provisions here. My breath comes so short that I have already dictated the routine things to John, a little at a time. Look them over. I need you for the special ones, so I can be certain they are not challenged. John would never leak them––he has my total confidence––but neither is he a lawyer capable of writing clauses that may be challenged but can never be broken.”

  Rehlinger looked the pages over while the grand duke rested. “Your war horse to de Guébriant?”

  “He’s the only other man who will ever be able to ride him except Captain Starschedel, who can’t afford a war horse. I’m leaving him money, which he does need.”

  “Point taken.”

  “More important than those. For the county... the army.”

  Rehlinger stifled his natural bonhomie.

  “If the grand duchess should be with child,” Bernhard started. He gave Rehlinger a half smile that was frightening on his skull-like face. “And I assure you that we did all in our power to bring that about, so it is a quite real possibility.”

  The chancellor nodded.

  “If the child is a boy, there is no problem. Except, he is not to be taken from his mother. Make that very plain. I appoint co-guardians and co-regents with her”––Bernhard pulled another sheet of paper out from under his pillow, this one written in his own hand rather than the secretary’s neat script––“but he is to stay with Claudia and she with him. Nobody is to take another child away from her. I trust her to keep the promise she made in the marriage agreement, that sons will be reared in the Lutheran faith. Hortleder and Gerhard––they shall choose his teachers. Hortleder, if he will, shall come to Burgundy and supervise the boy’s education.”

  Rehlinger reached for the list.

  “If the child be a girl...” Bernhard stopped. “In the marriage agreement, I did not think far enough. I should have, since Gustavus has only Kristina to follow him, but I did not. The time was short and there were so many other things that needed my attention.”

  Rehlinger nodded. He had been in Besançon, not in Schwarzach drafting the pre-nuptial contract. He didn’t have much confidence in Forstenhauser, the army’s chief counsel in Breisach, who had negotiated on behalf of the grand duke. The man rarely saw the broader implications.

  “I agreed that daughters should be reared in their mother’s church.”

  Rehlinger winced. All this work, to turn the new county over to the...well, to the persecutors. The papists. The Jesuits.

  “Having made that promise, I will not break it. But...”

  The chancellor waited.

  “Neither does the marriage contract have any explicit provision for a daughter to succeed me.”

  Rehlinger sat quietly.

  “Understand this. If I survive, so that this will is not needed, and yet the grand duchess learns of the next provisions I am making, she will hate me until death most mercifully does us part? This must be held in the utmost confidence.”

  “I swear it upon my very life.”

  “If I should die and the grand duchess delivers a daughter, then the child is to remain with her mother. Mother and daughter shall have my entire personal fortune. It is not that great, but what there is, they shall have. Your uncle and Vikfoort in Amsterdam––they will know.”

  Rehlinger made the appropriate notes.

  “I will not and cannot betray my faith in order to benefit the seed of my own loins. I will keep my promise to expel from Burgundy only those who do not keep their oath of allegiance to me, regardless of their religion, but there is no trusting the Catholics to keep faith. Mazzare in the USE is only one man. We have seen the exiles from Austria and Bohemia. Some of my officers are among them. The up-time encyclopedias tell us of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.”

  Rehlinger looked up, his eyes sharp.

  “If I die and the grand duchess delivers a daughter, who shall be named Dorothea both for my mother and because a daughter is a gift of God as much as
a son, then the county of Burgundy shall go to my brother Ernst.”

  Bernhard reached out and grasped Rehlinger’s arm urgently.

  “If the child is a boy and dies with no heirs of his body, Burgundy shall go to Ernst. Make sure of it. Wilhelm cannot take it; Albrecht could not hold it. Ernst will be a careful steward of any land and people entrusted to his care. If the time has come for me to die, Ernst shall be my heir and he will keep my faith.”

  Two hours later, the grand duke signed, in the presence of numerous reliable witnesses––as many as could be called to the palace.

  His hand was shaky, but he was clearly compos mentis when he signed.

  Then, though, he closed his eyes. “Zum wollstand der betrangten evangelischen Kirche,” he murmured, “unnd zu des Evangelischen Bundes unnd gemeinen vatterlands diensten.”

  Rehlinger, carefully keeping the document folded that so no one might see the contents, sealed it, secured it in a portable safe, and then placed that in the grand duke’s own locked trunk that remained in his bedroom.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “What on earth was he talking about?” Moscherosch asked. “For the benefit of the hard-pressed Protestant church and in service of the Protestant League and our common fatherland?”

  “I suspect,” Chaplain Rücker said, “that he was remembering the ideals he had when he first became involved in this war.”

  “He doesn’t pay me to write about those. My salary comes from the revenues of the County of Burgundy.”

  “Just as well,” Michael John said. “Forget about what he said. Keep your mind firmly fixed on the subject of which side of your publicistic bread is buttered.”

  Chapter 25 Against All Reasonable Expectations

  Brussels

  “W

  hat is Aldringen like?”

  Maria Anna looked at Nicole.