Ring of Fire IV

by Eric Flint

  She’d begin a new chapter. The book was coming along quite well, she thought.

  * * *

  “So that’s it,” Ron Stone concluded. He set the papers he’d been using as speaking notes down and looked around at the five other men sitting at the table. “Any questions? Comments?”

  The men looked at each other. Then, Reichart Hümmel cleared his throat. He and the man sitting across from him, Jost Bresch, were the two most prominent apothecaries in Hesse-Kassel.

  “You are not proposing a consortium, then?”

  Ron shook his head. “No. As it stands, I’m twisting the Sherman Anti-Trust Act into a pretzel—never mind; it’s an up-time reference—but I draw the line at forming an outright cartel. If there isn’t some real competition between the different pharmaceutical companies, we won’t expand the industry fast enough.”

  He pointed to Hümmel with his left forefinger and Bresch with his right. “The two of you will each form separate companies. Call them whatever you want. The only conditions I place are two: First, you have to found them and maintain them here in Hesse-Kassel. Two, you can’t collude with each other once we get the industry up and rolling.”

  Watching her husband, Missy was simultaneously pleased with the way he was handling the meeting and—being honest—a bit disconcerted. Another man might have added stern warnings to the effect that he’d catch Hümmel and Bresch if they tried to collude. But Ron didn’t think that way. His silent and supreme self-confidence that he could enforce his provisions was ultimately far more intimidating than any snarling would have been.

  In the short time they’d been married, two things had already become clear to Missy. As young as he was—he’d just turned twenty-one in December—Ron had the makings of an extraordinarily capable chief executive officer. A very large part of that talent was due to the fact that money as such meant almost nothing to him. He looked at money the same way a potter would look on a pile of clay. Just a raw material that wasn’t useful until it was molded into shape.

  Thankfully, that meant Ron was also not given to letting greed determine any of his decisions. The decisions themselves could sometimes be pretty cold-blooded—as, indeed, was the purpose of this very meeting. But however rich they might eventually become, Missy was pretty sure she’d never be greeted on a Christmas morning by a waif named Tiny Tim gazing at her reproachfully.

  Well… Gazing at her, maybe. This was the seventeenth century, after all. Waifs abounded. But reproachfully, no.

  “In exchange,” Ron continued, “I will provide you with the formulas and the procedures we’ve developed to manufacture chloramphenicol—”

  There was a slight hiss in the air from the sound of indrawn breaths. Chloramphenicol was almost a magic word nowadays. It was the American miracle drug, which could even—not always, but very often—cure someone of the plague. It was also effective against a number of other diseases.

  The formula for the drug was no longer much of a secret, and hadn’t been since Mike Stearns had surreptitiously released it to the Spanish besiegers of Amsterdam two years before. But a formula was one thing, the exact procedures for turning that formula into medicine…something else. Those were the product of trial and error, long effort and experience.

  “—and what we’ve so far discovered about the process of making vaccines against typhus and typhoid fever.” He made a self-deprecating little shrug. “I’m afraid we’re longer on theory there than we are on some of the practical issues involved. But we’re still a lot closer to being able to manufacture those vaccines in quantity than we are to mass production of penicillin or streptomycin.”

  He leaned back in his chair, now looking at the three other men sitting farther down the table. One of them was a representative of the Berenger Bank, founded in Hamburg almost half a century earlier. The other two men were from the Fugger financial interests. The Fuggers were backing Hümmel; the Berenger Bank was financing Bresch.

  “I think we should now get into some of the marketing issues,” Ron said.

  Oh, joy, Missy thought to herself. She spent the time that followed by reviewing in her mind the library filing system she intended to propose to the landgravine for the new science library that would be attached to the University of Marburg. It was basically the Dewey decimal system, but with modifications from the Library of Congress as well as, for some purposes, the classification system used by the up-time U.S. Superintendent of Documents.

  Had the men in the room been able to follow her thoughts, they would have been even more bored than she was. Suum cuique, as the Romans said. To each her own.

  * * *

  “The Americans have an expression,” said Litsa. “‘The elephant in the middle of the room,’ they call it. What it means is—”

  Smiling a bit ruefully, the landgravine of Hesse-Kassel waved her hand. “Yes, I’ve heard it—and I know what it means. The great subject that a conversation avoids by focusing on smaller issues. You are referring, I imagine, to Hesse-Kassel’s landlocked status.”

  Litsa nodded. She had her hands clasped together on her lap, in order to keep them from flying about the task she’d like them to be about, which was taking copious notes. But it had taken her almost a month to get this interview with Amalie Elizabeth, and she didn’t want to risk irritating the landgravine. Rulers in the early seventeenth century were not accustomed, as were their late twentieth-century counterparts, to having inquisitive journalists writing down every word that came out of their mouths that might be of interest.

  So, Litsa would have to rely entirely on her memory. Unhappily, it had not occurred to her on any of the several occasions when she’d visited Grantville to see if one of the fabled up-time “tape recorders” might be available for purchase. She had been told the things were not especially bulky—and the sleeves of her bodice were full and loose. She could have probably attached the device to her forearm using some of the equally fabled “duct tape” and then—a few quick motions of Litsa’s nimble fingers when the landgravine wasn’t looking—and she could have recorded the entire conversation.

  But, at least on this occasion, it was not to be. Happily, Litsa had a very good memory and when she wanted to be was an attentive listener.

  “Yes, that issue,” she said. She did not, of course, add what she could have, which was: your husband having spent many months last year trying to seize one of the cities on the Rhine by main force and failing completely…

  Most unwise. Especially in view of the recent demise of said husband fighting the Poles—a task at which he’d also fallen short.

  “It’s not as big a problem as you might think,” said Amalie Elizabeth. “Hesse-Kassel still holds the town of Dorsten on the Lippe river, which gives us access to the Rhine.”

  Litsa was impressed by the landgravine’s self-assuredness. She wondered how much of that was sheer bluster. It was true that the Hessians had kept troops stationed in Dorsten ever since they captured it in February of 1633, and she’d heard that they were even improving its fortifications. But since the formalization of the provincial structure of the USE at the Congress of Copenhagen, Dorsten was a town in the province of Westphalia, not Hesse-Kassel. At the moment, the Danish prince Fredrik who had been appointed as the province’s ruler was presumably preoccupied with the chaotic political situation that had resulted from Gustav Adolf’s incapacitating injury at the battle of Lake Bledno. But sooner or later he was bound to turn his attention back to his province’s affairs, at which point Hesse-Kassel was likely to be unceremoniously ordered to vacate Dorsten.

  But even if the Hessians held Dorsten, the river on whose bank it was situated was hardly suitable for industrial purposes. Litsa would investigate, but she was pretty sure the Lippe was only navigable with rafts and small boats.

  Of course, if the pharmaceutical project now underway here in Kassel bore fruit…

  She’d have to ask Ron Stone if the Lippe would be adequate as a transport route for medicines and medical supplies.
>
  No, better to ask his wife Missy. She was less likely to be reticent and more likely to know the answer anyway. It was a bit eerie, how much information a really devoted librarian possessed. Nothing to suggest an actual pact with the Devil, of course. Still…

  Chapter 7

  The details of the assault on the Tower of London led by Captain Lefferts in his successful effort to free the American envoys held captive by King Charles were long obscure. The reason for that, it is now clear, was the need to keep the participation of Julie Sims and her husband Alexander MacKay hidden from the sight of the English power. But since the famous riflewoman made her own escape from Great Britain early in 1635, that issue is moot. Her husband’s father had already been murdered by the British king’s assassins before they fled Scotland, so there is no need to fear further retaliation for the role played by Sims and her husband in the escape from the Tower.

  And what a role it was! When the assault began—

  * * *

  Eva had ignored the continuing sounds of the horsemen in the courtyard, but a new voice broke through her concentration.

  “Nous sommes ici, Capitaine?”

  It was the voice of a very young girl, speaking French. Her accent was thick with rural origin—it had sounded more like noos sumb izi, Capitan? although the meaning had been quite clear. “Are we here?” But the title of her address had been unmistakable and Eva knew of only one captain.

  Well, actually, she knew several. But there was only one who concerned her.

  She set down the pen, rose and went to the window. Looking out onto the courtyard, she saw Captain Lefferts lean over and hoist a girl into his arms. She looked to be perhaps eight years old, and so skinny it was no effort at all for a man as strong as Harry Lefferts.

  “Yes, we’re here,” he said, smiling at the girl. The captain’s French was fluent but he normally spoke with a Parisian accent. Eva was not surprised at all, though, to hear that Lefferts was shading his voice with an accent closer to that of the girl’s. It was the kind of thing his phenomenal linguistic skill would enable him to do—and something he would do, from that deep if so often hidden wellspring of kindness that she knew abided in the man.

  She felt a sudden, very powerful surge of emotion—which she hurriedly suppressed without examination. Eva was usually given to introspection but on this subject…Caution was called for.

  “Captain Lefferts!” she called down.

  Still holding the girl, the captain looked up at her and smiled. “Meet Barbeline Cayel, Eva,” he said, lifting her a bit higher. “Barbeline, this is Her Serene Highness Eva Katherine von Anhalt-Dessau.”

  Like the girl herself, her face was thin, coming to a pointed chin. At the moment, the expression on her face was a frown.

  “She’s a princess?” The girl sounded dubious. “I didn’t think princesses got sick.” Her little hand stroked her cheeks. “The scars—that’s smallpox, for sure, Captain. I’ve seen it.”

  Several different possible responses came to Eva but within less than a second she chose the one that her instincts guided her toward. Perhaps it was the captain’s influence, too.

  “No, we get sick just like everyone,” she said. Eva stroked her own cheeks in a gesture mirroring the French girl’s. “I got the pox when I was very young. Younger than you, even.”

  Now the girl’s expression was sympathetic. “Did it hurt a lot? I got the plague and it really hurt.”

  “That sounds awful. Come up here and tell me all about it, Barbeline.”

  “Do I call you Princess or Serene Highness? I’m not sure because I never met any royal people.”

  “You can call me Eva.”

  * * *

  “I found her in southern Lorraine,” Lefferts explained, looking over at the bed where Barbeline was sleeping. The girl had been very tired after the long journey. As soon as she’d had something to eat after coming up to Eva’s room in the inn, Barbeline had started to nod off. Eva had told the captain to place the girl on her bed.

  By then, Ron and Missy Stone had come up to the chamber. They were also curious to hear how the captain—Harry Lefferts, of all people! was the way Missy put it—had come to informally adopt an eight-year-old girl.

  “We heard about her—me and Vincente—when we were passing through the area on a scouting expedition. She’d become something of a legend in the villages in the area. She lived in a hut she’d made for herself, eating nobody could figure out what, and spending all her time tending a grave.”

  “Tending a grave?” asked Ron.

  The captain’s expression, heretofore full of amusement, became suddenly somber. “Yeah, a grave. Such as it was—just a pile of rocks she’d put over the place where the guy got buried after he died. In a field some twenty yards from a dirt road.”

  “Her father?” asked Eva.

  “No. Not her father. Her father was long dead by then. Like almost all the people in her village—and she herself, damn near—he’d already died from the plague.”

  The captain now looked at his two fellow Americans. “She was tending Jeffie Garand’s grave, guys.”

  “Oh, hell,” said Ron.

  Missy stared at the girl on the bed. “She’s the one?”

  “Yeah, she is.”

  Eva must have looked puzzled, because Missy looked her way and then shook her head. “You probably never heard the story, Eva, but it was all over Grantville before we left. Jeffie Garand was one of the Americans who went to the Rhineland to help fight disease. He ran across a little girl who’d come down with the plague and been abandoned by everyone. Just been left alone by the side of the road. Jeffie insisted on breaking quarantine and staying with her. Then he caught the plague and died.”

  She looked back at Barbeline. “Everyone just assumed the girl had died also.”

  “Not everyone,” said Lefferts. To Eva’s surprise, his voice now had an undertone of anger. “After she recovered, Barbeline tried to go to Fulda to let Jeffie’s wife—he must have told her about his family—know where he was buried.”

  “That’s—what?” Ron shook his head. “Must be a hundred and fifty miles.”

  “More like two hundred, the way the roads go,” said Lefferts. “She didn’t realize how far it was. No way she could have made it all on her own, an eight-year-old girl, especially not in winter. But she didn’t get any farther than Merkwiller-Pechelbronn, about thirty-five miles up the road. The Americans who’d been staying there had already left, but everyone had heard about Jeffie dying because he tried to save a dying girl. Stupid bastards blamed Barbeline for it, I guess. They refused to talk to her, wouldn’t let her stay there—some of the village kids even threw stones at her.”

  Eva grimaced. Village children were notorious for petty cruelty. Being fair, children who lived in palaces were no saints, either.

  “Anyway,” the captain continued, “eventually Barbeline gave up and went back. She’s been taking care of Jeffie’s grave herself since then. Don’t ask me what she’s been eating or how the hell she stayed alive in that little hut she built, in the middle of winter, because I have no idea. Probably by stealing.”

  He gave the small figure curled up on the bed an affectionate look. “That is one tough little girl, take it from me. The only way I talked her into leaving Jeffie’s grave was by making a deal with her—I’d have a real headstone made up by a mason, if she’d come back here to Kassel with me. I didn’t stint on the cost, either.”

  Still looking at Barbeline, he shook his head. “I think what clinched the deal is that I had the mason carve an inscription into the stone along with Jeffie’s name.”

  “What’d it read?” asked Ron.

  For just a brief moment, the captain—a man for whom the term “abashed” Eva would have thought completely foreign—looked uncomfortable. “It read, ‘Good-night, sweet prince. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’ It’s from Shakespeare.”

  Ron and Missy stared at him.

  “Yeah, I know,�
� said Missy after a moment. “It’s from the end of Hamlet. But since when—”

  Lefferts chuckled. “Since when did I ever read Shakespeare? Not in high school, for damn sure. Believe or not, it was after I burned down the Globe Theater. Ms. Mailey made such an unholy fuss about it—you want to talk about carrying on and on—that I got a little curious. Off and on since then I’ve been reading the guy. Whoever ‘the guy’ really is, and I’m not getting anywhere near that wrangle because what difference does it make anyway? But I like that part at the end of Hamlet so I guess it stuck with me. I had to give the mason the words just from memory but I think I got it right.”

  “Yeah, you did,” said Missy. “I always liked it too. And let me say here and now, Harry Lefferts, that I take back any sarcastic thing I might have ever said about you—although I reserve the right to say some sarcastic stuff in the future, should you give me cause. Which, knowing you, you probably will.”

  He grinned at her.

  “What are you going to do with the girl now?” asked Ron.

  Lefferts looked back at Barbeline. “I don’t really have any idea. Take care of her, I guess, until I figure something out.”

  Ron and Missy looked at each other. Then Ron shrugged and said, “If you want, Harry, me and Missy could probably look after her.”

  “Thanks, guys. But I think we’d better wait and ask Barbeline when she wakes up. Trust me—this is not a little girl who’s going to agree to anything she doesn’t want to agree to. Like I said, she’s tough. Think ‘pocket battleship.’”

  * * *

  When Barbeline awoke, some time later, the issue was placed before her. Her response was immediate and granite-sure.

  “No,” she said. “I want to stay with the captain.”

  “You should say ‘thank you’ to them,” said Lefferts.

  The girl seemed dubious again, but looked back at the Stone couple and added, “Thank you.”

  Chapter 8

  That night, several hours after sundown, Eva laid down the pen and decided to quit for the night. She’d gotten most of another chapter written on the escape from the Tower of London, but there were several details she was not clear about. There was no point in continuing until she’d had a chance to talk to the captain again.