by Eric Flint
“We didn’t punish them. Beyond that, what can a person do?” Raudegen lifted his good hand, counting off on his fingers. “If we left a horse with these people, we would be short a horse and perhaps that would cause us to fail in our charge. If we left a horse in this village, there would still be other villages, behind these hills”—he gestured to the left side of the road they had come in on—“and behind those”—he gestured to the right—“where the people are living in equal misery. You can’t help them all. You can’t even find them all.”
His logic was, in its own way, inexorable.
“I’m wondering about that maire,” Gerry continued. “The one who told us that all the estate inventories that he recalled included guns. Just how many inventories do you think he’s seen, this past year, with the plague and stuff? When it comes to defending their villages, dead men can’t shoot guns, even if they owned one when they were alive.”
“In the matter of weapons,” Susanna gave Tancrède a nudge. “Now, before you have to go up to bed.”
“I’m sorry, Gerry.” Tancrède clasped his hands behind his back and dropped his head. “I told you a lie. I didn’t really lose the harmonica you loaned me. I just didn’t want to give it back.” He looked up. “That’s stealing isn’t it? But I took very good care of it. I hid it so that nobody else could find it.” He looked down again. “But I almost did lose it, because when Susanna and Marc came to take me away from Paris, I just barely had time to get it and stick it inside my breeches.”
“You’re a hero, kid,” Gerry said, his voice rough. “Thank you for being polite and apologizing. That’s the right thing to do when you’ve made a mistake. Keep the harmonica with my compliments. You may need to save the day again some other day.”
It was the duchess who took the boy up to put him to bed. She often did, if an inn was decent.
Gerry watched them go. “We’ve turned into a team, I think,” he mused. “We ought to start calling ourselves something. Teams always do in RPGs and comics, or most of the time, at least. I don’t suppose that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would do.”
“What’s an RPG?”
“What are those, whatever you called them?”
“One up,” Bismarck said with glee. “I’ve seen a comic. It’s like a whole bunch of broadsides bound together.”
“Turtles?”
“Hey, Dad was opposed to bourgeois culture, but we went to public school. He didn’t try to homeschool us or anything. I know just about as much about Raphael and Donatello and Michelangelo and Leonardo as anyone else. Not to mention Splinter. I loved Splinter. He sort of reminded me of Dad.”
“Those,” Marguerite said, “are famous artists. Not Splinter, whoever he is, but the rest. Italian painters whose canvases cost a lot if you want to buy one from a dealer. Not turtles. I have at least that much education.”
“The turtles were named for famous artists. They’re still turtles. Mutant turtles.”
This required about an hour of discussion. At the end, Gerry was still of the opinion that the name would not do. He looked around the table. “We could call ourselves the Carrot Tops, after Corporal Carrot, but I’m the only one who’s really carrotty. The rest of you have more decent shades of red heads.”
“What do carrots have to do with red hair?” Susanna asked. “Carrots are white, or sometimes purple.”
“Up-time, carrots were orange. Mutations along the way, maybe.”
“What’s a mutation?”
“Remember what I told you about the turtles?”
Gerry scratched his head. “Now there was some Sherlock Holmes story that Dad read to us. He likes the writings of A. Conan Doyle and his philosophy of reading out loud was that it had to be something that he enjoyed reading, too. The Red Headed League. That’s it. We can borrow that. Doyle won’t mind; he was dead even up-time. Maybe we can make Corporal Carrot our mascot.”
“Should we make Cinq-Mars an honorary member?” Marc asked with a grin.
“Why on earth?”
“Well, you said that he did assist us, if only by lounging around backstage and not alerting anyone that Gerry was making off with Marguerite and that the duchess was heading for the hills.”
* * *
“Since this whole project is basically about who Marguerite is marrying, or not marrying,” Gerry said the next evening, “we ought to take stock. What’s the status of the rest of us marrying? Maybe we could do one of those mass marriages some day, all lined up one after the other, like the Moonies.”
“Moonies?”
Gerry found himself with more explaining to do. “There was this preacher from Korea. I saw pictures in the papers. He’d arrange marriages between men and women who followed his cult and then marry them off to each other, hundreds at a time, all the guys in suits and the women in fluffy white dresses.”
“Where was Korea; in America?”
“I thought up-timers were supposed to marry for love!”
“Mass polygamy?”
Gerry rapped on the table for attention. “No, guys. Korea’s somewhere south of China. Was then; still is, I suppose. No polygamy; one husband to one wife, but he married hundreds of couples in the same ceremony. And yeah, generally speaking, at least in the US of A, people were expected to marry for love, but we weren’t all clones of each other.”
“What’s a clone?”
“I’m pretty sure that German doesn’t have a word for it. Nor French. Nor the folks over the channel in England in this day and age, for that matter. It’s like this…”
By the time he finished with that, it was time for the adults go go up to bed.
The next night after supper, he persisted. “Start with Ruvigny. Henri, what are your preferences in a bride? Prerequisites?”
“A dowry—150,000 livres would be nice, but what do I have to offer in exchange?”
“There is sure to be some banker somewhere,” the duchess said. “Some noblesse de cloche, who would regard friendly ties to the Maison de Béthune as a quite sufficient compensation for a penniless son-in-law.”
“Noblesse de cloche?” Gerry wrinkled his forehead. “Bell nobility? I’ve never heard of that. In Rudolstadt, at the Latin school, they instructed us about the difference between noblesse d’épée and noblesse de robe.”
“It’s not a legal term like the others,” Marguerite said. “It’s what you call slang. Wealthy townsmen, rich urbanites, social-climbing bourgeois. Men who live within hearing range of the bells in the steeples of city churches.”
“Do your best,” Ruvigny assured the duchess. “Given the right girl with the right dowry, I’m perfectly prepared to go into matrimony with good intentions and live in amicable fidelity for the next forty-plus years.”
“Er! Okay. What about you, August?”
“God-fearing. Ah, nice and plump, if I can take my choice. Ideally with a equally nice dowry.”
“Define nice in comparison to Henri’s nice.”
“Where I come from, it’s a trousseau and usually about four thousand to five thousand Thaler, to be paid in installments, but you have to calculate in the reality that dowries and dowers are hardly ever paid in full. You can use the promissory notes as security for loans, though, even if they haven’t been paid out. When collection time comes, the lender has to deal with your father-in-law, because a betrothal contract constitutes a legal obligation. Four to five thousand is plenty if you’re farming in the Altmark. It wouldn’t go very far to support the lifestyle of a colonel, if I ever get that rank. But I’ll probably still be a captain when I die or retire, whichever comes first, so the question is moot. I can’t afford a wife.”
“Candale?”
“Not until old Epernon dies. I can’t afford a wife on my own funds and he’s too tight to fund another try after the fiasco with the duchess of Halewijn. That cost him a bundle and the family didn’t get anything out of it in the end, neither a title nor heirs.” He turned to Raudegen. “Anything to contribute?”
“I
had one, once. She died a long time ago, in Bayreuth, before I joined the army. The baby was stillborn. My mother arranged it, but everything was all right. Our families were friends and we were friends. There wasn’t any money involved because all of us were refugees from Lower Austria and there wasn’t any money around. Ferdinand II confiscated everything when he drove the Protestants out.” He shrugged. “I’m hardly likely to marry again.”
Not even Gerry had the nerve to ask anything on the order of what was her name? Raudegen’s expression did not invite further questions. He stood up and disappeared in the direction of the stairs.
After a short period of silence, Marc opened his mouth. “I don’t suppose you have to speculate much about my marriage.” He winked at Susanna. “I give it five years, more or less. But what about you, Gerry? You started it all.”
Gerry winked back at him, grinning at Bismarck. “God-fearing is good, but since I’ll probably marry a pastor’s daughter, it’s not likely to be a problem.”
“Why a pastor’s daughter?”
“Because most of the girls I’ll meet will be the daughters of pastors. It’s propinquity. It’s hard to marry someone you haven’t met.” He looked at Marguerite and cleared his throat. “Unless you’re a member of a royal family or such. Or a Moonie. Plump isn’t bad, but I think ‘willing to put up with me’ would top anything else. I don’t have to worry about it yet, because it will be at least fifteen years before I can go looking for a wife—longer, if I keep getting yanked out of school to do this, that, and the other for Dad and Ron.”
“Let’s set up a wager,” Ruvigny said. “Each of us makes up a list of the order in which we think we’ll wed, and throws some money in the pot. We’ll invest it. Marc can take care of that, or get Cavriani to do it. Then when the last of us ties the knot, or dies unmarried, we’ll open the envelope that we deposited with the money, compare the lists, and the winner who was closest to right will collect the pot.”
“Great idea,” Bismarck said. “As long as it’s cash that we get from the investment. A part of the widow’s dower assigned to my mother, all specified in the marriage contract, consisted of annual allotments of Wispel of rye—nineteen Wispel of rye. By the time the last of us marries, that would be a lot of rye piled up.”
“What’s a Wispel?”
“Um.” Bismarck ran his hand through his hair. “About twenty-four American bushels, I think.”
“What on earth did she do with it?”
“She had it ground into flour and we ate it. Brandenburg is really strong on rye bread. Rye bread, cabbage soup, and pork sausage. That’s a meal that breeds up real men.”
Every French person in the room shuddered.
* * *
“Henri,” Marguerite asked. “Do you ever think about Jericho?”
“What?”
“Jericho. It was one the stories that Grand-mère Rohan used to read me from the Bible. When the Chosen People marched around the walls for seven days and they fell down. Then Joshua’s men killed everyone in the city except the harlot who helped them and her family. You know it, don’t you?”
“I know it.”
“Have you ever stopped to think about La Rochelle? And Magdeburg? The sieges and the sacks? It was the Catholics who were outside the walls. It was the Huguenots and the Lutherans who got massacred. Could God be trying to give us a hint about something? That we’re on the wrong side, maybe? Is that why God let Louis’s armies defeat Papa and Uncle Soubise and send them into exile?”
“Trust me, little seed pearl. If God talked directly to Tilly or Richelieu, nobody heard him.” This is way above my pay grade. “Ah, who else have you talked to about this concern?”
“Nobody. Nobody ever listens to me. Hardly anybody else ever listens to me at all, and I couldn’t very well ask Susanna, because she’s Catholic. And she doesn’t know any more about her religion, honestly, than I do about mine. As far as I can tell from things she’s said, not discussing theology but just talking about how she lives, for her it’s mostly habits and actions; smells, sounds and colors. Habits of going to mass on certain days, actions like the incense censers going down the aisle and smells like the incense burning in it; sounds like the bells they ring with the incense; colors in the stained glass windows and the idolatrous statues of the saints. And, especially for her, because she loves fabrics so, the brocades and tapestries, the embroideries and laces, on the paraments and vestments. She’s used to it and when she goes to church it’s like she is pulling a warmed blanket around her on a cold day and cuddling in. Calvinist churches aren’t cuddly.”
“They aren’t supposed to be cuddly, little daisy. They are designed to be spare, to focus our minds on God’s Word as expounded from the pulpit.”
“I’m not sure that Susanna even connects what Richelieu and Tilly did with what she feels when she goes to mass.”
* * *
“It has to be tonight,” the duchess said to Candale. “I’ve deferred to your preferences this far, but we’re getting too close to Burgundy. Once we pass the border, it will be far harder for us to slip away and getting back out through the grand duke’s border posts without being stopped would be a very chancy matter. In any case, the escort I arranged before we left Paris will be waiting for us on this side.”
“Assuming that they have arrived in a timely fashion, which isn’t a very safe assumption given the travel conditions I’ve observed.”
“Be reasonable, Candale. They are men traveling on horseback; they won’t have had to concern themselves with carriages and the various other delays this party experienced. They’ve probably been waiting for several days, spending my money on wine.”
“Are you still absolutely sure of this?”
“I am utterly sure of this. There will be nothing for me to accomplish in Besançon. I have no connections in the grand duke’s picayune little court, the archduchess is Catholic and Italian to boot, and Rohan will keep me sidelined from his concerns. I belong in France, where I intend to see that Soubise does not garner any glory that may still be available for our cause and that we collect every ounce of advantage that we can from the new king’s political uncertainties. Even though we have still heard no news, there are bound to be political uncertainties. Bah, I hate that German colonel. But even without fresh news, I can be certain that there are political uncertainties because the world hasn’t come to an end yet.” She took a deep breath. “We evaluate, and we throw Rohan’s influence behind the party that appears most likely to triumph. I belong in France, and so do my children.”
“On the basis of candid observation thus far,” Candale said, “it is not easy to travel with children. It will particularly not be easy to travel with the boy sans Susanna. Having him will slow us down immensely—delay us as much going as he has delayed us coming. He can’t ride—the plan was that all of us would ride once we rendezvoused. If you bring him, your escort will have to find a carriage again. Marguerite will not come voluntarily: I’m more than sure of that. In any case, if you take her, willing or not, Rohan will never stop his pursuit. Do you want Raudegen, Ruvigny, and Bismarck on our tails all the way?”
“Tancrède, then. Please Candale? Just let me bring Tancrède.”
* * *
They all woke up no more than an hour after the last of them had gone to bed, to the banshee wail of a six-year-old blowing on a harmonica just as loudly as he could. Susanna jumped out of bed and dashed toward the cot in the corner of the chamber where he was sleeping. Or, more precisely, had been sleeping. Bleary-eyed, she tried to make out shapes in the darkness. The harmonica howled again. She scurried faster, grasped an arm that was much too long to belong to a child, and bit the attached hand. Hard. A soprano scream joined the shrillness of the harmonica as the hand’s owner tried to shake her off.
Tancrède untangled his legs from the sheet and started kicking.
Susanna got an arm around his waist. “Don’t kick me. Kick him. Kick her. Kick the other person.”
Marguerite woke up in the adjoining room she was sharing with her mother and, still half-asleep, managed to light a lantern. The men poured out of the rooms across the hall, at first trying to break through the inside bar to the room where Susanna was, until Marguerite yelled that the door to her room was unbarred and open, so they could enter through that. Three of them headed that way, but by the time they arrived, the intruder was gone through the window and Susanna remained in possession of the prize.
A few minutes later, the duchess wandered in, clutching together a long, loose cloak thrown over her nightclothes. “What’s all the excitement? I had to go to the necessary.”
“Are you sure,” Marguerite hissed, “that you didn’t just find it ‘necessary’ to pay a visit to M. de Candale’s room?”
Susanna unbarred the second door. Candale, who had been standing outside it, came in. “No, she did not. Nor do I think she appreciates your impertinence.”
“Just what happened, anyway?” Marc asked.
“I wasn’t asleep,” Tancrède said. “But I’m not supposed to get up and wander around at night, so I didn’t. Not this time—sometimes I do, when I’m at home with the LeBons and know my way around, but I don’t know my way around any of these new places. I was just lying there, playing with my harmonica. I sleep with it under my pillow. Somebody opened up the window. I thought it might be an interesting monster, so I just waited. But it was a person and the person tried to pick me up, so I blew and blew and blew and blew and…”