Ring of Fire IV

by Eric Flint

  “Don’t pick a dumb one,” Gerry advised. “It’s like breeding horses, if you don’t mind my saying so, Your Grace. Look at every single one of the possibilities and ask yourself, ‘Would I mind having a grandson just like this guy?’ If your answer to yourself is, ‘I’d rather have a pig,’ then he’s not the right choice, no matter how many political connections his family has.”

  “So,” Bismarck said. “One requirement on the list is, smart.”

  “Smart, kind, and reliable,” Gerry qualified. “You can vary the proportions but you need all three of those. At least, if you’re honestly trying to make a decent marriage for her, Your Grace, and not just using her as a pawn in your political games.”

  Ruvigny looked at Rohan uneasily. People, at least most people, didn’t say things like that to dukes. At least not more than once.

  Rohan ignored the up-timer completely, going back to his original train of commentary as if the boy hadn’t said anything. “Not one of these possibilities is acceptable.” He slammed his hand down flat on the table again. “I can’t identify a single French nobleman of suitable rank who would place Rohan first. Not with any certainty. And she needs someone to be Rohan for her.” He frowned down at the papers in front of him.

  “I’m here, you know,” Marguerite grouched at her father. “Sitting right here at the table.”

  Gerry, blithely indifferent to the peril in which he kept placing himself, ignored her and kept on talking to the duke. “Yeah, I can see that, Your Grace. Politically, I mean.” He gestured toward Marguerite with this thumb. “For some important guy, she’ll just be a territorial annexation, so to speak. Land and money walking on two feet, to add glory to him. The tail that some dog would be wagging. As an even better analogy, she’ll be a commodity on the futures market and her husband will be speculating that she’ll retain her value—survive childbirth and not have anything happen to cause the French crown to seize the Rohan estates.”

  “There’s a story that Gerry told me and the young duchess,” Bismarck whispered to Ruvigny. “About some emperor and some new clothes and a child who calls it just the way he sees it.”

  Gerry was still full steam ahead. “But some unimportant guy doesn’t have the clout you want.” He leaned back. “Maybe there really isn’t anybody suitable. Like there wasn’t for Queen Elizabeth of England last century.”

  Bismarck shook his head. “She needs a husband. On that, I agree with the duke. Otherwise, she won’t have the heirs she needs. That Rohan needs. That queen of England got it wrong. She’d have been better off to find some guy, even if he wasn’t ideal, and have a half-dozen kids, than let Mary of Scotland’s son take the throne after her.”

  “I’m here, you know,” Marguerite grouched at Bismarck. “Right here at the table, guys.”

  Gerry glanced at her. “Yeah, I know you’re here, but I wouldn’t count on any of them—your father and his advisers—listening to you. Face facts. It’s not as if you actually have any say in the matter. Not even if you think you should or I think you should. You know all of us guys in the Red Headed League better than you’ll have a chance to know the man you eventually marry before you have to stand up in the church to say ‘I do.’”

  He turned back toward Rohan. “But why does any guy you pick to marry her have to be Rohan for her at all?”

  The duke popped his head up from studying the papers. “What do you mean?”

  Before Gerry could answer, Bismarck gestured. “Why can’t she be Rohan for herself? She has us, Your Grace, if Grand Duke Bernhard will accept our resignations in your favor. Just give us a few years. Ruvigny for her Secretary of State, so to speak. Raudegen, when he gets back, as Chief of Security.” He nodded at Marc. “Head of the intelligence service.” At Susanna. “The voice of common sense I suppose. I nominate me for her commander in chief.” He started to nod at Gerry. “Uh, chaplain? You could always convert to Calvinism. I’ll have to if I become her general. It won’t be that complicated—the Brandenburg Electors are Calvinist already: they just didn’t force their subjects to give up Lutheranism, but they’ll be pleased enough if one of them does. She’ll have your whole Red Headed League, with Raudegen and Marc as bonuses.”

  “Nope,” Gerry preempted him. “I’m going to be a Lutheran pastor and as soon as this is over, I’m going back to Jena. Finally!”

  Marguerite looked at him. “Are you sure?”

  “I am, Your Grace. I know who I am and I know what I am. Out at Lothlorien, where I grew up, we had lots of vinyl LPs and a lot of those were Pete. He sang it, ‘Keep your eyes on the prize.’ You have to hold on and keep an eye on where you’re going. And there was Horton.”

  Nobody else in the room had the vaguest idea what either vinyl or and elpee might be. This wasn’t Grantville. It wasn’t even Magdeburg or Bamberg. Neither did they know who Pete might have been. Nor Horton.

  “Horton?” Marguerite asked.

  Rohan tried, though. “Horton. Frau Dunn’s late husband, the one who was involved at Suhl. You know the up-time nurse that Grand Duke Bernhard brought here, don’t you? She prefers that we not speak of him.”

  “Not that Horton.” Gerry nodded his head. “The other Horton. ‘I meant what I said and I said what I meant.’ That Horton—the elephant who was faithful, one hundred percent.”

  Rohan finally broke the ensuing silence. “A fable perhaps, similar to those composed by Aesop?”

  “I tell you,” Gerry said. “We had a lot of books out at Lothlorien, but Dad bought them at yard sales and flea markets, so they were pretty beat up. So we didn’t give them to the State Library. They’re still out at the dome. I’ll have Ron go find Horton for you, when he hatches the egg and when he hears the who. ‘A person’s a person, no matter how small.’”

  Murmurs of translation fluttered around the table, along with the making of lists of topics to be investigated further.

  Bismarck thought that even though Gerry had so casually refused the jocularly offered ducal chaplaincy, a prize which almost any cleric of any denomination would grasp with both hands, there might yet be, in the form of this scrawny, unprepossessing, boy, someone, finally, who would give thought to providing a moral compass for a girl who certainly would need one. Still…

  “Are you sure,” he asked Gerry after the others left, “that your true desire is to serve God for pure love of him? Are you sure that you aren’t trying to atone for what you see as your own unforgivable transgressions by following this path, relying on works rather than faith and grace? Are you sure that you aren’t following the same mistaken path that Luther took when he vowed to become a monk?”

  * * *

  During the last course of that evening’s dinner, Marguerite leaned her chin on her hand and asked dolefully, “Do any of you care what I think about it? Anybody? How can I be Rohan for myself if nobody listens to me?”

  “I’m listening, little daisy. What do you think?”

  She sat up straighter. “Don’t indulge me in that soothing voice, Henri. Do even you really want to know what I think?”

  “I do.” That was Bismarck.

  “Me too.” That was Gerry.

  Susanna and Marc waved from the other side of the table.

  “Well then.” She pushed back her chair and stood up. “If Papa won’t divorce Maman and marry again to have more heirs, I think that he should make Uncle Soubise get married. He can put on ‘crusty old bachelor’ as what Gerry calls his public face as much as he wants to, but he’s several years younger than Papa—not too much past fifty. If he had children, then it wouldn’t all depend on me. And it shouldn’t all depend on me, because I’m a girl.”

  “Girls can do things for themselves,” Kamala Dunn, the up-time nurse who had joined them for dinner, began with the almost automatic up-timer’s reaction. She started to say more…

  Marguerite pressed her hands together. “I know that I’ll have to marry the man Papa chooses…and…and get pregnant…whether I want to or not, because it’s my duty
under God. If my husband is kind, like Gerry said, then it shouldn’t be so bad. But what if I die in childbirth, the first time? What if the baby dies with me? What will become of Rohan then?”

  Nobody answered.

  She reached up blindly, clasping the wall tapestry behind her in her left hand and squeezing it into pleats. “What if I’m like Maman? What if I become pregnant time after time after time and I watch the babies die? And die, and die, until my husband tires of it and says no more, so that I will know that God has cursed me because I have failed in the only reason women are on earth, to give male heirs to their husbands? And then she had Tancrède, after Papa said there would be no more childbearing, and he was a boy and was healthy and he lived and she thought it was a sign that God had forgiven her for being a daughter of Eve, for as the preachers say, the pains of childbed are God’s retribution on us for her sin?”

  Marguerite’s voice rose higher and higher in a pathetic wail. “So Maman loves him and she at least tried to take him with her when she went her own way this time, but she left me behind. She didn’t even try to keep me. She just left me behind.”

  Letting loose of the tapestry, she sank back down in her chair. “But I am a daughter of Eve, too, so my babies will die and die, and the preachers will tell me that I must humbly accept God’s will. And then there will still be no more Rohan!”

  She looked at them, almost desperately. “Do you know what it’s like, to have your brothers and sisters die, and die, and die?”

  Bismarck shook his head. “Our family has lost none.”

  “Nor ours,” Gerry said. “Presuming that Frank and Giovanna are okay, that is. Wherever they are by now.”

  “Yes,” Susanna said. “I’m from my father’s second marriage, so I mostly didn’t see it. But almost all the children of my father’s first marriage have died, seven out of eight. I remember two of them besides Maria, who is still alive. My full brother and sister also died. I barely remember them at all—I was just four when Ercole died and five when Lucretia’s time came. It’s my half-brothers Giuseppe and Gian Armando that I miss. I was eight when Seppi died and twelve when the smallpox took Mando.”

  Ruvigny bowed his head. “You know that only Maximilien and Cirné died. Max was already in the Royal Guards. The other four of us are fine.”

  Gerry thought of slipping out, but the radio room was at the top of the citadel. No reasonable person would climb up the citadel in the dark if he didn’t have to. He’d try tomorrow.

  Which he did, really, really, the first thing in the morning, Ron wasn’t home, but he got a response from Missy.

  “At this hour?”

  “It’s important. Honestly.”

  “Oh, all right. I’ll trek over to the State Library, see what I can find, and get back to you.”

  He waited for an hour an a half for the response, climbed back down the path, and then wandered into the breakfast room.

  “You know that Catholic nonentity your father keeps harping on, little duchess?”

  Marguerite, who had been staring miserably at her griddle cakes, raised her head.

  “He wasn’t entirely useless. You had six kids. Four of them lived and had kids of their own. I don’t know why the duke didn’t think to mention it to you. He obviously has that same article about your family from the EB1911 that Missy just looked up for me, or he wouldn’t have known who your husband was.”

  Marguerite pursed her lips. Her eyes lit up with new interest. “Who was he?”

  “Uh. I forgot to ask her.”

  * * *

  From: Gerry, in Besançon

  To: Ron, in Grantville

  Dude, just a second thought. When you go up to Lothlorien to hunt for those Dr. Seuss books I asked you to send, can you dig out Yertle the Turtle, too? I’m pretty sure we packed it in the same crate. I’ll give it to Ruvigny and Bismarck to think about. I’m not sure the rest of these guys are anywhere near ready for Yertle yet, much less Max.

  And if Pratchett’s Guards! Guards! is in there, send it, too, please.

  Say hi! to Dad and Magda for me, if they’re around instead of off somewhere saving another section of the world.

  Greetings and salutations and all that, Bro. See you soon, I hope.

  Gerry

  * * *

  “Don’t let Maman get custody of Tancrède,” Marguerite warned her father. “She’s an intrigante. She’ll try to use him, somehow. Don’t let Candale have him, either—that would be tantamount to letting Maman have him.” She bit her lip. “Especially if you do die in two years, my lord father, which I most sincerely hope that you do not.”

  “What are you thinking?” Ruvigny pushed away from the wall.

  “That she might use him to become regent of Rohan for a far longer time than she will be if I inherit. I’m almost nineteen.”

  Bismarck looked doubtful.

  “She could, you know. Now that I am out from under her control, if the has Tancrède she can invent some fairy story about how he is a legitimate heir. She could peddle it to his advisers as how she and Papa hid him, for fear of the evil machinations of Richelieu. Now, under the magnanimous generosity of a new monarch, there is no reason to fear. She can bring him out of the shadows into the protection of the royal sunlight. I could practically write it myself, and Benserade most certainly can write it. Heroic. Sentimental. Shocking. Touching. The Epic Poem of the Protective Mother and her Defenseless Son.”

  Marguerite flicked her finger. “With a chorus of lawyers. If nothing else, Papa, if you are so sure in your heart that you will die soon, then put a very explicit, unmistakable, unarguable statement into your will that the kid is a damned bastard and no way and under no circumstances should he be acknowledged as your heir.”

  “He should be safe from her right here,” Rohan said. “Or safe from her ambitions, which amounts to the same thing.”

  “I won’t have him here.” There was a certain air of focused menace slithering around the room. Most of it was slithering out of Marguerite. “I won’t have him in my household.”

  “It’s my household,” Rohan pointed out.

  “I won’t have him in any household where I am.”

  “We can’t send him back to LeBon in Paris,” Ruvigny pointed out. “If Gaston’s supporters get hold of him…That would cause more complications than even the improbable scenario that you are predicting, my panicked little puppet. I had planned to take him up to Leiden. Board him anonymously with a university professor who would bring him up to be a specialist in ancient linguistics or something,” Ruvigny said. “It was an actual plan. It was a workable plan before everything went sour in France.”

  Marguerite glared. “I take it that you developed this plan before you actually met the little demon.”

  “I do agree,” Bismarck said, “that he scarcely comes across as a prime candidate for a career in Babylonian linguistics or anything of the sort. I don’t think the sciences would be a prudent choice. I hate to think of what he could achieve in an alchemical laboratory.”

  Gerry cleared his throat. “We can take him.” He waved his hand vaguely. “Marc and I. We’re leaving anyway. We can take him with us.”

  “Why?” Rohan asked.

  Gerry looked at Marc. There were limits to what you ought to say to a duke and he had reached his.

  “He means,” Marc said, “that we’ve got something that as far as we can tell is pretty much missing in the whole French upper class. We both have fathers, good ones, with experience in bringing up boys. Either one would take him—Dr. Stone or my dad.”

  “I think that Magda would like to have a kid,” Gerry said. “It looks as if she’s not going to have any of her own. But she’s Lutheran, like me. If you want him brought up Calvinist…” His voice trailed off.

  “Then I can take him to Geneva,” Marc inserted. “Being a Cavriani will probably be enough to keep him busy when he grows up. Um. I agree with August that he’s not likely to turn into a pedant. Being a Cavriani is enough to k
eep even a kid as energetic as Tancrède busy.”

  He thought, enough to occupy even a boy as naturally ambitious as the child of a certain sneaky French count and that conniving French duchess is likely to grow up to be.

  He didn’t say it, though. Instead, he looked at the younger Marguerite. “Busy enough that you won’t always have to be thinking of him as a threat just over there on the horizon—on the margin of everything else you have to think about.”

  Ruvigny nodded. “Busy, and well out of the way of anyone who might be considering how to use him as a pawn in some power play.” He thought of the elder Marguerite. His voice firmed up. “Anyone at all.”

  * * *

  “I should stay here,” Susanna said. She and Marc were standing in a not-very-busy hallway, his arms around her waist and hers around his, their foreheads resting lightly against each other. “Not go with you. Here as the dressmaker for the duchess. I should work for la petite Marguerite. Not Archduchess Claudia.”

  “Why?” Marc tried for a judicious, impartial, tone of voice. He wanted to take her with him. To Geneva or wherever came next.

  “Because I haven’t learned enough,” she answered. “Brussels was a very Catholic court. It’s just as Catholic as Vienna was, at least when you’re down in a dressmaker’s workshop. When you’re there, you know that the alliance with Fredrik Hendrik exists, but it’s really kind of abstract. You don’t see it or experience it. I never went up to Amsterdam or Rotterdam or…or Leiden, or…the Hague. Not to any of those northern cities. So I need to be where I’m working directly with Calvinists. To find out, you know, if I can stand living among Protestants. The way you found out in Naples whether you could stand living among Catholics. See what happens with the grand duke and Archduchess Claudia, now that they have a child.” She wrinkled up her forehead.

  “I’m not sure how much you will learn about living among ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the world’s Calvinists by working for the little duchess,” Marc said. “I don’t think anyone could reasonably describe the Rohan family as typical of the breed. You could just come to Geneva with me. It’s full of Calvinists.”