J.D. Blackwood (Joseph Dean on his personnel records, though no one except new teachers had called him Joseph since he was a month old), from the USE Military Medical Department, briefed her on what he knew about plague, which amounted to, “not a lot of it right around here so far this season” and provided an even more succinct verbal report, accompanied by a sealed, written one for her to send on to her husband Frank, about just how much refurbishing and re-equipping Bernhard had been doing for his regiments over toward the French border since the money started flowing again shortly after the new year. The short answer: lots and lots.
Henry Sims’ boy, Henry G. Jr. and usually addressed as Junior, had been sent by the SoTF National Guard. He’d been mostly up around Merkwiller, was worried sick about plague hotspots still in that region and in Swabia, and was more of the opinion that watching Bernhard’s regiments was somebody else’s problem and not his.
“Honest, Diane,” he said. “I don’t mind being out in the field, but I really should get back to Grantville pretty soon and get back into school. I was an EMT already before I got out of high school; I finished my CNA and RN in the new system before they activated me and sent me over here. It was supposed to be an emergency posting but it’s dragged on for two solid years. I need that MD. Can’t you give them a poke to find someone else? They’ve got to have processed several dozen down-timers as far as the RN by now. Let Julie have the military glory. I just want to do my own thing.”
“You were told, you know, that in addition to teaching quarantine measures to the regiments in Burgundy you were also to be keeping an eye out on what Bernhard is doing from a military standpoint.” Diane’s voice was calm, considering what she had just heard.
“I don’t understand military stuff,” Junior protested. “In the SoTF National Guard, all I ever did was medic stuff. You know, ‘go here and patch up the wounded, then go there and patch up the wounded.’ A lot of the time, nobody even bothered to explain who wounded them or why. A couple of times, I was pretty sure they wounded themselves while they were playing with explosives. But I do agree with J.D. that Bernhard seems to have found money again. He’s stockpiling medical supplies.”
When they talked about it a bit at supper that evening, Gerry said thoughtfully, “David Bartley and Judy Wendell used ‘OPM’ to name their investment firm. That stands for Other People’s Money. The trick is, like the way Ron arranged the financing for the pharmaceuticals business in Hesse-Kassel, is that you get other people to put their money in the pot, but you control the pot, at least as much as possible. Pay them their dividends and keep them happy, but don’t let them poke their sticky fingers into the way you want to run things. What Bernhard is spending has to be other people’s money, too. Someone else’s money. The real question is whose. And what that ‘who’ expects for it.”
J.D. wrote a brief supplement to his written report after he went to his tent that evening, to give to Diane before she went on her way.
Gerry, still in the mess area, using one of the tables to play chess with Waldemar by the light of one of the new, brighter, mantle lanterns now available, leaned back and twisted his cap in his hands. “You know,” he said, holding the cap up and looking at the front of it. “With all we know about the way war spreads disease, the way soldiers and camp followers just trail it after their movements, typhus and dysentery as well as plague and smallpox when Chip came up with this logo, he really ought to have added a peace sign above the slogan, even if it might look sort of at cross purposes with the War on Plague motto. We’re going to need peace if we’re ever going to beat plague and the rest of them. It’s like we’re fighting whole mercenary legions of pestilence.”
Waldemar pulled off his own cap, staring at the logo in turn. “But what do people like me do, if there aren’t armies for them to be officers in? If there isn’t any place for them to serve in honorable careers?” He looked down at the chessboard for a few minutes, apparently pondering his next move. “What would all the ordinary soldiers do, if there weren’t wars to fight?”
“You’d probably better talk to someone like Bartley about expanding economies, Wally,” Gerry answered. Then, very slowly, he added, “and maybe redefine your definition of what is an honorable occupation and what isn’t.”
✽ ✽ ✽
When J.D. caught up with Diane to hand over his report appendix, she said, “I didn’t want to ask with all of them around, but... Do you have any idea how successful Grand Duke Bernhard is being at mentoring young Waldemar? He never seemed to me to be quite...well prepared...for that task. And he’s left him behind....”
“I’ve never seen them together, of course. I don’t move in those circles. I think everyone knew all spring that the kid was just crazy to get over the broken leg he got during that adventure on the ship traveling to the Low Countries–get his leg back to full functionality and start the physical part of his military training. He was pretty much trapped in a classroom with his tutor for the first three months after he got here. He’s been a pretty good sport about the vaccinations, though....” J.D. barked out a sudden laugh. “If Bernhard can’t or won’t deal with him, maybe they should hand him over to Harry and his Lady Eva. She might even make another successful book out of it: Harry Lefferts and the Half-Blood Prince. That’s sort of catchy. It’s surprising that no author ever thought of something of the sort before.”
He passed that on to Gerry at breakfast, being fairly pleased with his own joke.
Gerry grinned. “Or hand the idea over to Rompler and Moscherosch. Wally wouldn’t even really have to be with Harry and Eva. They could just make it all up.”
✽ ✽ ✽
“I liked that series,” Shae said later on when Gerry repeated the joke to her. “If I have a grudge against the RoF, it’s that I have no idea how that series was going to turn out. I really liked those books. It sounds like a title that J. K. Rowling might have made up, though.”
CALLS THE TUNE
Chapter 52
Burgundy
April-May 1637
The tiny, but extraordinarily healthy and very loud, little Grand Duchess Dorothea Maria, was born at Dôle. There, frustrated by her mandatory seclusion, Claudia spent the last days of April and early May soothing the ruffled feathers of the local officials by proxy. They were upset because Bernhard had moved the parlement and made Besançon his capital. Through her confidante and personal advisor, the childless and therefore always-available-for-public-appearances Renée du Bec-Crespin, she promised that the university would stay at Dôle. Well, as far as I know, she consoled herself. Right now, Bernhard certainly doesn’t have the money to build a new campus in the new capital, no matter what he promised a couple of years ago.
Renée held seemingly endless meetings, mostly listening, trying to figure out what other types of oil the grand duchess should be pouring upon the troubled waters of Burgundy’s local administration once she could appear in public again. She accepted long petitions of grievances, a technique that had stood rulers in good stead for centuries. As her husband, Grand Duke Bernhard’s friend Jean Baptiste de Guébriant, said with good cheer when the aggrieved were busy compiling lists, they were not, usually, busy using catapults to launch heavy items in the direction of the castle walls.
Renée also introduced a new technique learned from Carey Calagna, the up-timer Bernhard had hired to teach his officials how government had functioned in 20th century West Virginia. “Public hearings,” Carey had said. “They’re not usually as organized as your petitions and the complaints aren’t funneled through local officials. Instead of a king on a throne, you have several people at a table in the front of the room. Then you just invite people to come and vent. Give them a certain amount of time, five or ten minutes is usually enough, and let them yell. In a few months, if nothing has come of it, hold another one and let them yell again and let off some more steam. The trick is to avoid promising that you’ll actually do anything about the problems. A lot of congressmen used the public hea
ring gambit successfully for years. City councils, too.”
After all the tumult at the end of the conclave in mid-May, Claudia gnashed her teeth because she could not yet return. Among the other tasks she performed from the limits of her confinement, she sent a letter to Cardinal-Protector Mazzare of the USE requesting information in regard to up-time customs in regard to the churching of women after childbirth, asking how rigidly it had been enforced in the post-Vatican II world.
As soon as she was churched, she promptly came back to Besançon. She left Ernst Wilhelm and Dorothea Maria, with their entourage of nurses, wet nurses, nannies, noble governesses, and bodyguards in Dôle, however.
✽ ✽ ✽
“Plague was in England last year.” Dr. Guarinonius folded his hands across his stomach.
The central office of the plague campaign was now located in what had once been Besançon’s Carmelite monastery. It might someday be a Carmelite monastery again, but Grand Duke Bernhard and his wife, after jointly reviewing the unsatisfactory results of Cardinal de Granvelle’s attempted reforms in the middle of the previous century, had rather abruptly informed the Provincial of the order in France that they would be, for the foreseeable future, using the structure for other purposes. As Claudia said, a half century of trying with little doing implied to her that the local chapter of the order had not been trying very hard to comply with the measures adopted since the Council of Trent and might find a nudge from the secular arm beneficial. Moreover, while the Carmelites contemplated their deficiencies, she would have a suitable building at her disposal.
“Old news,” Dr. Gatterer answered. “There were some severe outbreaks last summer, worse than usual.” He picked up a sheaf of reports from the table. “It’s all right here. At least one city lost close to half its population. But....”
“New news, Christopher,” Guarinonius contradicted him, picking up a small pile of yellowish notes. “It must have wintered over in some places, because it is back in the English ports this spring. That is firm information, received this week. Since England will not stop seaborne trade, can’t afford to stop seaborne trade, it has now backlashed into the Netherlands and the North Sea coastal cities. If the Low Countries can’t contain it, it will move up the Rhine. Amsterdam’s not so major a problem, given the sanitary measures the CoC put in place and maintain, but the northern provinces of the Low Countries have a lot of coastline, a lot of ports. A lot of smuggling, if I dare mention it.
“If the USE’s Hansa cities can’t contain it.... What if it gets into the shipyard at Lübeck? How many skilled workers will it carry off? What will that do to Gustav’s naval plans? People aren’t paying close enough attention.”
“Not everyone is as plague-obsessed as we are, Poli,” Gatterer answered. “Grand Duke Bernhard pays us to be plague-obsessed.”
“And Grand Duchess Claudia.” That was Paul Weinhart. In addition to fighting plague, he was her personal physician. And the personal physician of her children in Tyrol, which caused him a great deal of back-and-forth shuttling between Besançon and Bolzen.
“Ah, Christoph.” Hyppolitus Guarinonius was responding to Gatterer. “True enough. But there is Frau Jackson. Like a constant rat-a-tat-tat in the background of the USE’s politics, reminding them of plague recurrence. Where? How much? What is being done to contain it?”
“What do we hear from France?”
“Not enough.”
“I wish,” the up-time nurse Kamala Dunn interrupted, “that just once we could bring forth a triumphant celebration of medical progress. Rather, we have an undertone of constant worry. At least this summer should get smallpox reasonably under control in Burgundy. And Strasbourg.”
Guarinonius perked up. “What about Strasbourg?”
“The Stones persuaded the city council to run a parallel campaign to Burgundy’s, for the city and hinterland both. So we won’t, hopefully, have to contend with an unvaccinated reserve population there just because the political map has put an independent city that’s also a major trade center right where it is. Also, Kanoffsky has agreed to make a major push over in the northeastern section of the county that he’s running for the grand duke.”
“Good, good.” Then Gatterer repeated himself. “What about France?”
“Who knows?” Weinhart answered. “If things come to major military movements.... Armies carry plague like mothers carry their infants in their arms.”
✽ ✽ ✽
“In spite of the fact that the wedding has been planned for a year!” Grand Duke Bernhard waved a sheet of paper in the air. “They obviously don’t care that we sent our acceptance to Johann Philipp and Elisabeth six months ago.” He slammed a fist on the window sill.
Michael John, his secretary, sat calmly. He was accustomed to Bernhard’s temper and had long-since learned to live with occasional tantrums.
“I care....” Bernhard continued. “Yes, I do care. I would like to be present when Ernst finally marries Elisabeth Sofie. Which will be next month. In an unquestionably elaborate ceremony that Elisabeth Sofie’s parents have been organizing for a year, at least, now that she’s finally of marriageable age. He’s the best of my brothers. I actually...admire him. And they’ve been betrothed since she was a child.”
“How old is she, exactly?” Grand Duchess Claudia asked.
Bernhard thought for a minute. “She’ll be 17 in October. Ernst is 35; he’ll turn 36 on Christmas Day. His birthday always got a bit lost in the heap.” He laughed, more than a bit sarcastically “Of course, it was more important, then, to carefully cultivate the ties between the Saxe-Weimar and Saxe-Altenburg branches of the Wettin line. Before the Ring of Fire came and turned half of the family into commoners for purposes of political expedience as they work their way through the nooks and crannies of Gustav’s USE. Now it’s all turned upside down. Johann Philipp has made a fortune in mining and it’s all Albrecht can do to keep himself and Wilhelm from turning paupers.”
Paupers, Claudia thought, was a relative term. “I wonder if Elisabeth Sofie is going to renounce her rank? Eleonore Dorothea was clever enough not to, even when Wilhelm did.”
Bernhard stamped a foot and waved the paper again. “Which does not change that Duchess Nicole and Aldringen have called a very important meeting in Nancy for July, which means that we will need to leave here in June to get there in time for the preliminaries, which means that we will not be attending the wedding.”
“My dear husband,” Claudia said tentatively. “If you would even consider entering an aircraft....”
“I might enter one on the ground,” Bernhard said. “If I needed to inspect it. Do not dream that I will ever remain in one when it rises up into the air. The whole concept is...just so dreadfully wrong. I flinch every time you use one and can never persuade myself that you will come back to us, to the children and to me, safely.”
Chapter 53
Magdeburg
May 1637
The general consensus of the cabinet was that Hermann could do it. He wasn’t serving in the government any more, but he could go to Lorraine and fly the USE flag for them at this conference that Duchess Nicole and General Aldringen were convening. It would be a lot closer for someone to go to Lorraine from Hesse than for someone to go from Magdeburg, not to mention that everyone in Magdeburg was extremely busy.
Hermann not only could do it, Ed Piazza thought after supper, but, with a reluctant sigh born of conscientious duty, he would undoubtedly agree to uproot himself and go do it. He had been supremely relieved when Rebecca Abrabanel succeeded him as secretary of state for the USE. He had been called and he had served. Served under Stearns. Served under Wettin. Done his best, even if he would much rather have been doing something else. He had obliged his half-brother, the late landgrave, and then his sister-in-law, the landgravine-regent, by being a Hessian presence in the upper administration of the federal government.
Then, “like Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, even if he was not a soldier,” the emperor said, he h
ad happily resigned and gone home to his farm.
Ed, who had never given much thought to the etymology of the name of the city of Cincinnati, Ohio, and did not have the kind of family tree that led to membership in the Society of the Cincinnatus, had just let the Gustav’s classical reference float past him as not worth spending time to look up. He suspected that the emperor had been privately delighted – that he considered Hermann to be second-rate, while now he had Rebecca Abrabanel in the slot, who was first-rate.
But Hermann would do it. He would pick up his crippled foot and go to Nancy for them.
That much, at least, the Ring of Fire had done for him. Instead of the iron foot with which he had limped through life in another world, Grantville had given him one constructed of fiberglass and with a spring, similar to the model they produced for Eddie Cantrell. Hermann thought it was as great a miracle as the Ring itself.
Hermann had gotten married in...Ed closed his eyes, thinking back...about 1633, just about when the CPE was turning into the USE. His wife hadn’t moved to Magdeburg. She had stayed home to mind the farm, otherwise to be described as the Hesse-Rotenburg estates, which in this case actually didn’t amount to much more than a decent-sized American farm. She was a noble, of course, but a country girl. Deeply into cheese production, Ed remembered vaguely. Anxious to make her husband’s minimal personal estates at least self-sustaining and perhaps even profitable, since the population of what had once been his little independent territory now paid their taxes to the administration of the Province of Hesse-Kassel rather than to him.
“Annabelle,” he called into the next room. “Does young Hermann, the guy who used to be secretary of state, have children?”
She stuck her head through the door. “I sent sympathy notes. A stillborn son, about a year after they married. Then a baby girl. She was born very prematurely and died after just a few days. If I’m recalling correctly, someone said that the boy was a preemie, too. The landgravine says that Sofia Juliana, they call her Juliane, is expecting again, so we’ll all pray for a better outcome this time.”
Ring of Fire - 1635_ The Legions of Pestilence Page 39