Ring of Fire - 1635_ The Legions of Pestilence

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by Virginia DeMarce


  He rose. “Not to mention that she will still be available, in the immediate vicinity of Burgundy, to annoy my baby brother.”

  Hermann smiled. “It’s just as well Michael Stearns is not in the room this morning. Just as well he isn’t serving as prime minister any longer. He would never have understood.”

  Philipp Sattler nodded. “We understand, but he would never have understood. Not on his own. And since the emperor just sprang it on us, Rebecca wouldn’t have had time to explain. At the very idea of deliberately setting up a brand new independent principality on the USE border, he might have said something that would have undone all the hard work that’s gone into the modus vivendi.”

  Saarbrücken

  It was a working lunch.

  Coal. Steel. Corporate law. Agreement that the papal split between Urban and Borja was, at least for the time being, a problem for people other than themselves. Most likely a problem for people other than Grand Duke Bernhard and Johann Aldringen. Sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof.

  Henriette de Lorraine-Vaudémont, ruling princess of Pfalzburg, or princesse de Phalsbourg if one preferred French, glared at the newspaper over her bowl of cold soup. She wasn’t fond of the things, with their nasty cartoons and rude editorials, but sometimes, at least, they provided advance warning of looming disaster.

  “They plan to marry me off again,” she said. “I have no desire whatsoever for a husband who will rule over me, but it looks like the damned Swede has it set up so I either give up Phalsbourg or give up my freedom.”

  “For various reasons which I’m sure you understand,” the deputy administrator of the Province of the Upper Rhine said, “I do not want a wife at all. However, a wife who lived somewhere other than with me and had interests of her own would certainly be the most tolerable of the category.”

  “One advantage of marrying a widow is that they”––Henriette gestured vaguely to indicate the existence of the generic “they” who made a person’s life such a hassle––“can hardly send midwives to examine the female party to the marriage for evidences of virginity in the case that someone should challenge the validity of the union on the grounds of non-consummation.”

  “Johann Friedrich of Pfalz-Veldenz is in Mainz.”

  “He’s not likely to hurry.”

  “Yes. It should be several days at least before he and that damned Sattler get here.”

  “The Swede has already signed the modus vivendi. Do you suppose that Wettin would rather see my principality’s resources handed over to Pfalz-Veldenz or inside the borders of the USE?”

  “If it were a fait accompli, I have little doubt that he would prefer the USE placement.”

  A couple of shrewd people could get a lot done during a working lunch.

  On the Eastern Front

  Mike Stearns looked at the newspaper with a certain degree of glee.

  He was really rather pleased that it was Wettin rather than himself who had to co-sign the modus vivendi with Bernhard in regard to Burgundy.

  His eyes lit on the last paragraph of the article. “What in hell is this provision about some dinky little new principality that Gustavus set up inside Lorraine?”

  Frank Jackson snorted.

  Francisco Nasi’s eyes twinkled behind his spectacles.

  Magdeburg

  “To be honest,” Amalie said to Wettin’s wife, “there’s a considerable amount of Schadenfreude going around inside the Fourth of July party, even if Bernhard’s various annexations actually did take place on their watch. After all, in the next USE election, there should be plenty of conspiracy rumors going around to the effect that somehow the Crown Loyalists were complicit in the loss of part of Swabia because of their leader’s family connections.”

  Eleonore Dorothea, wife of the prime minister and sister-in-law of Europe’s newest grand duke, moaned dramatically.

  Kunigunde Juliane, Eleonore’s younger sister, shook her head. “Bernhard and I used to go wading together when we were little. The nursemaids were always having to pull us out of the creek by Hornstein and dry us off. I’ve never understood why Wilhelm gets so irritated with him. He could always come up with something new to do. I thought he was a lot of fun.”

  “‘Something new to do’ is what everyone is afraid of,” Eleanor said repressively.

  “Tell me more about what he’s like, Kuni,” Elisabeth Sofie ordered––most inappropriately for a girl her age in the presence of her elders.

  They looked at her with disapproval.

  “Well, I need to know. If Ernst ever has time to come home, pretty soon I’ll be Bernhard’s sister-in-law, too.”

  They gave her “that look” again.

  “Well, I will,” she said. “I’ll be sixteen next month and Ernst will be thirty-four in December. I don’t want to wait to get married until he has one foot in the grave, for heaven’s sake.”

  “The last letter I got from him,...” Kuni said to Elisabeth Sofie. “If you’re as pleased with the married state as he is, you’ll be okay.”

  The looks turned to her.

  “You have been writing to Bernhard? All these years since he broke with the emperor?” Eleanore was clearly horrified.

  Kuni put both hands out, palms up, in the universal gesture of placating angry deities. “I’ve been writing to Bernhard since I learned how to write. Nobody told me to stop. We’ve always been friends. I like Bernhard. Philipp liked him, too. They were exactly the same age.”

  Philipp was––had been––Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel’s younger brother, Hermann of Hesse-Rotenburg’s older brother, killed in action at Lutter am Barenburg under Christian IV. Everybody had expected that he and Kuni would get married some day. After nearly ten years, Kuni didn’t show signs of wanting to marry anyone else.

  So many dead young men since this war started...

  “It will work out,” the abbess of Quedlinburg, aunt or cousin of them all and imperial politician of note, said. “Things may be uneasy right now, but we can work them out.”

  “Don’t we hope,” Eleonore muttered, only half under her breath.

  Chapter 30 My Well-Born, Especially Well-Beloved, Lady and Friend

  “Wollgeborene insonders vilgeliebte Herrin und Freundin.”

  Besançon

  “S

  o, my well-born, especially well-beloved lady and friend, it is finished. Signatures, radio announcements, newspaper reports, satirical engravings, and all the trimmings that accompany major treaties.”

  “I was a little surprised that you delegated Erlach to sign for you.”

  Bernhard shrugged. “It just seemed that it would be, maybe, simpler for Gustavus and my brother Wilhelm if I weren’t there to make them feel like I was grinding their noses in the manure once I had the apology in hand.”

  “That was kind of you.”

  “Kind? Kind? Claudia, my lady, I am not kind! I am never kind. ‘Kind’ is not within my repertoire of emotions. Aside from not turning up for the actual signing, every provision in that modus vivendi ground their noses just as far as I could push them down into the shit.”

  She shrugged in her turn.

  “I just wanted to soften them up before I hit them with the other.”

  “What a thing to say about impending fatherhood.”

  “I will particularly enjoy Gustavus Adolphus’ reaction to the official announcement that we are going to be parents and Burgundy will have its heir.”

  He gave a short, silent, private prayer of thanks that he had been in a position to burn the only copy of the will he had made the previous summer. Of course, Rehlinger knew... That was an uneasy thought. He shrugged it off. For now.

  “We’ve known for quite a while, but I really didn’t think it would be prudent to let the news out until after His Exalted Emperorship had signed on the dotted line.”

  He whirled her around the room. “Call your Monster. Let’s go visit Magdeburg. I do want to see their faces for that one.”

  Jena, Saxe-Weimar Cou
nty, State of Thuringia-Franconia

  “It was a lovely wedding.” Duke Albrecht of Saxe-Weimar and his duchess Dorothea beamed.

  Friedrich Hortleder bowed deeply. “You honor our house by your attendance, Your Graces.”

  “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” Albrecht said. “Delightful. Far less strenuous than my own. I thought all day long that I would swallow my Adam’s apple.”

  Dorothea smiled at the groom. “Not to mention Bernhard’s wedding.”

  Gary Lambert wondered what to say to a duchess.

  He was saved by the appearance of the next-ranking guests waiting to pass through the receiving line.

  The dignified count of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt pumped his hand. The pretty young countess kissed him on the cheek.

  Dean Johann Gerhard was letting Rolfinck, the dean of the medical school, go ahead of him, although the primacy properly belonged to theology. Probably, Gary thought, because he himself was associated with the Leahy Medical Center in Grantville, which worked cooperatively with the medical school. But what did he know? The Hortleders had worried about the protocol.

  “Not too many more, now,” Anna Catharina said, tucking her hand into his arm and her head against his shoulder.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “I do wonder about Lorraine, though,” Anna Catharina said after the distinguished guests had departed and only family and close friends continued to stand around in the parlor.

  “In what way?”

  “Well, at least the worst of the plague season is over, so we should all be thankful for that. But, everyone has talked about this new marriage for the Duchess Nicole as if––well, you know. As if nothing would ever come of it except that General Aldringen will keep the French out of Lorraine.”

  “So? That’s why they made the match, after all.”

  “Oh, honestly.” Catharina Barthin, Hortleder’s wife, looked at the group in exasperation. “Men! What the girl means is that Duchess Nicole is still only twenty-six. She looks like she was born middle-aged, but what does that signify? She’s only a little more than a year older than Queen Maria Anna, she’s several years younger than Grand Duchess Claudia, and General Aldringen––I suppose I should call him a count, now––isn’t exactly in his coffin. They may not need to rely on the ex-cardinal. She could very well produce her own heirs.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “Now that all the gossips are gone,” Anna Catharina said, “and you don’t have to give the ‘varnished version’ for Duke Albrecht, what did you really think of the signing ceremony for the modus vivendi, Papa?”

  “Mainly, I was surprised that Bernhard did not attend. Even though he has dreamed of ruling a principality of his own for as long as I can remember, he wasn’t there.”

  Gary shook his head. “I’ll never understand that kind of ambition––I’ll be perfectly happy to spend the rest of my life as the business manager of the Leahy Medical Center, doing a good job in the station to which I feel that God has called me. I simply believe that it’s where I belong.”

  Anna Catharina hugged him. “It is where you belong, and I love you just the way your are.”

  “Belonging. That is, in itself, a grace of God,” Hortleder answered. “Especially for those of you who have been so roughly transferred by the miracle of the Ring of Fire, it is a grace for you to have found it. I do not think that Bernhard, born into a life of considerable privilege though he was, whatever his accomplishments are, has ever truly felt that he belonged.”

  SECTION II Situation Normal

  Chapter 31

  Besançon

  April-May 1636

  The Monster landed well outside the city. The terrain around the Doubs River was generally inhospitable for airships.

  “Ron Stone has notified me,” Henri de Rohan said to the grand duke as they waited for it to descend, “that Grand Duchess Claudia will be accompanied by a member of his own family to serve in your smallpox vaccination campaign. Or as a ‘mascot’ for it, as Kamala Dunn put it to me.”

  The plague of the previous year having subsided to routine levels, Bernhard’s nurse Kamala Dunn and Claudia’s three plague doctors had set their sights on new frontiers of public health.

  “Just as well,” Bernhard grumbled. “I asked for Nichols. My publicists could have developed a splendid campaign if we had Nichols. ‘He’s busy,’ they said. ‘Much too busy.’ They told me that the administrator of the Leahy Medical Center, what’s his name? Lambert. Yes, Lambert. Lambert would be a decent second option for a ‘poster child’ and he’s also been in Burgundy before. I agreed. Now, they say, he ‘has other commitments.’ They’ll send a substitute for the substitute. Don’t they appreciate how much I have done for them by the assistance that I provided in Lorraine? Don’t they realize that they owe me?”

  The craft touched down with a flurry of air from its skirts. The ground crew pushed a set of mobile steps to the entrance. Grand Duchess Claudia emerged, followed by a nurse who was carrying her infant son, followed by...

  Gerry Stone. His red hair shone, his freckles glowed in the sun, and he smiled.

  Several people in the grand ducal entourage tried to hide their own smiles. August von Bismarck whispered to Henri de Ruvigny, “The mountains were in labor and they brought forth a mouse.”

  “Morning, Your Grace,” Gerry said cheerfully to Rohan as the grand duke bore his spouse and heir away without granting the slightest acknowledgment to this undesired and by every definition inadequate poster child. Child indeed!

  “Since you’re here to meet me, I guess Ron radioed that because the Prague trip with Dad and Magda already ruined this semester anyway, he thinks I might as well be useful and come be the ‘public face”’ for universal, or at least as universal as the grand duke can get it, smallpox vaccination in the County of Burgundy. Being as the grand duke says he’ll pay for it and Kamala Dunn says she’ll organize it. Also since I’m a member of the Lothlorien Pharmaceuticals family and all that.”

  “We’re delighted to have you.”

  “Honestly?” Gerry asked. “Do you mean it? This face? I’m sure some maire is going to be thrilled off his gourd when a kid with a pointy nose wanders into his village and announces, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.’ Anyway, the supplies are all in the Monster. The crew will be offloading them and know how to handle the refrigeration. Just let me know where you want them taken. I’m ready to talk to your publicity guys.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “Unfortunately,” Kamala said that evening, “there’s been a glitch and nobody notified Ron that there has been a glitch. In fact, some cowardly bureaucrat somewhere in the administration didn’t notify the grand duke that there’s been a glitch. Now we have you, we have the preliminary supplies you brought, but all the rest of the project has slid through some bureaucratic wormhole – or, more likely, has been deliberately sabotaged by someone on the staff who has swallowed the anti-vaccination propaganda, and nobody is ready to start on the local level. We can probably reach most of the population right here in the city in order not to waste what you brought with you, but.... Oh, well, I’m sure that Moscherosch can spin it as a pilot project, but that won’t really need your participation.”

  “Oh, double-disgust. What a pain. Err – how could any ‘someone’ manage it?”

  Kamala shook her head. “The grand duke was still pretty weak when he got back from Lorraine last September. When you come down to it, he spent most of the winter recovering. Looking tough in public and barely managing to make it to a chair without falling over once he was in private. That was an acutely serious illness he went through.”

  “You really think he was sick? Not poisoned?”

  “Honestly, none of us who were taking care of him think it was poison. Possible – on the outside edge of possible – but not probable.

  “Anyway, he wasn’t working at his usual pace up until the last month or so. He has Rohan, but the Huguenot hasn’t been involved with the plague fi
ghting or anything else to do with public health. He has the officers in Der Kloster, but they’ve either been running the occupation in Lorraine or watching the frontiers. The rest of his staff pretty much had to focus on administrative consolidation and money. There’s never enough money. Guarinonius, Weinhart, and Gatterer were still coordinating the plague quarantines. The government of the County of Burgundy is still a structure with enough holes and cracks that a lot bigger issues than smallpox vaccinations could fall through it.

  “I’ll deal. Rather, Dr. Guarinonius will deal. Come on. I’ll take you to dinner. You can talk to some of the rest of the up-timers who are here and I’ll introduce you to a couple of local guys I know.”

  “SNAFU,” Gerry said philosophically. “Maybe even FUBAR. Situation normal.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The food wasn’t bad. Somebody had introduced one of the local taverns to barbecued ribs. He suspected Lisa Lund, who’d married a down-time butcher and been living in Besançon, working for Bernhard, for a while.

  The local guys weren’t bad company, either, even though they were pretty old from the perspective of Gerry’s 17 years, probably all of them over 25, some of them maybe over 30. Not as old as Ms. Dunn and Ms. Lund, who were really old, old enough to be his mother without even getting knocked up in high school, but a lot older than Gerry.

  And all of the up-time kids were really just kids, most of them little kids. The closest to his age was Shae Horton, who was just about two years younger than he was. Then Dominique Bell a year or two younger than that, he guessed, with Ms. Lund’s husband’s little sister Maria about the same age. The three of them were sitting at the other end of the table, giggling, absolutely not interested in anything the adults were saying.

 

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