by Eric Flint
"Ms. Isabella," the husband said, "I'm not really what you'd call a religious person. But you never know-and while I'm willing to risk the devil, I'm not willing to risk the chance that I might run into my parents in the afterlife. Anywhere in an afterlife, heaven or hell or anything in between. My mother finds out I brought a gun into the presence of a lady, I'd never hear the end of it for eternity. And my pa-this is guaranteed-would whip my ass for a good portion of it."
The meeting went quite well, to her surprise. Very pleasant, in fact, more often than not.
Partly, because they made no attempt to negotiate anything of political substance. There was no point in that, really, under the circumstances. Everyone in the room-probably half the people in all the Netherlands-understood that everything now waited until a young prince of Spain could finally make a decision.
Isabella had simply wanted to get a sense of the woman, beneath the reputation. And, after two hours, thought she had done so.
The key was the husband. From almost the moment he'd come into the room, something about him had nagged at her memory. It took two hours, however, before she could finally bring it into focus-and when she did, she felt a catch in her throat.
Twelve years, now. They didn't look the least bit alike. But there was something there that reminded her of Albrecht. A quiet gentleness-say better, considerateness-beneath the massive appearance. In the young husband's case, the physical mass; in her husband's, the mass brought by titles and position. But both of them were men who would take that extra moment to consider what their actions might do, to those around them, before they shifted the mass.
She could not imagine such a man, married to an ogress. A ruler, yes, even a ruthless one as all rulers must be at times. And that Gretchen Richter was a ruler was no longer in doubt, to Isabella. Titles were ephemera, in the end. The Christ had said so himself, in terms which were unmistakable to anyone not willfully blind. The young woman already wielded more in the way of real power in Europe than most princes, did she not? She'd even bullied Isabella's great-nephew!-and Pieter's attempt to put a philosophical gloss on the matter could go into a chamber pot, as far as Isabella was concerned.
The archduchess could live with that, well enough. It would be hypocrisy, if nothing else, to feel otherwise. She, too, had been what most people had considered the dominant partner in the joint sovereignty she'd exercised with her husband. By his nature, Albrecht had been too… considerate, to be able to do what was sometimes necessary. But he'd always been there, for her; her bulwark, when she needed it; her restraint also, when she needed that. She often thought that only his memory had enabled her to continue after his death. For sure and certain, she'd only been able to make the great and fateful decision she'd just recently made after many hours spent on her knees in the chapel, consulting his spirit as much as she prayed to the Lord they both worshipped.
There was only one ugly moment, at the very end.
"It has been most pleasant," she said, when they rose to leave. "I would ask you to visit again, but…" She sighed, half-caressing the arms of her wheeled chair. "It's not likely I'll be alive long enough to do so."
Richter's face turned to stone. A very pretty young woman-almost beautiful, actually, and Pieter had certainly been right about that magnificent bosom-transformed, in a instant, into something so harsh it was almost cruel.
"You are what? Sixty-five?" she demanded.
Startled, Isabella replied: "Ah… no. Sixty-seven."
"My grandmother is not so much younger. Do you know my history?"
"Ah… yes. Basically."
"Do you know hers?"
"Ah…" Isabella had never even considered the possibility that someone like Richter would have a grandmother in the first place. "No."
"When the soldiers came, she was too old to be raped. So she was able to protect my younger sister while they murdered her son in front of her eyes and raped me. In the two years that followed, she lived through torments that you have never seen outside of paintings."
Like an ancient heathen idol, that face was now.
"Many times I've heard her complain about her age. Bores everyone to tears, sometimes, going on and on about her aches and pains. But I've never once heard her sighing like a stupid sheep and whining about her inevitable imminent death. Stop it, woman. I despise cowardice-and you have no excuse at all."
With that, she turned and left. On his way out, following her, the young husband paused at the door and looked back. With that same sweet smile with which he'd entered.
"Yeah, I know, she's rougher than a cob, sometimes. Sorry 'bout that. But she's still right."
And he was gone, too. Isabella gaped at the empty doorway. No one had spoken like that to her…
Ever, so far as she could recall. Not even her father. And he had been the ruler of the world's mightiest empire!
"The impudence! I can't believe-!"
For a moment, she considered summoning the guards.
But… Well, she had promised safe conduct. And as quickly as she imagined the Richter creature was striding, she'd probably reach her room before the guards could catch up with her. With that horrid pistol in it, which Isabella had no doubt at all the monstrous creature would use before letting herself be arrested.
Her husband's shotgun, too, which might well be worse. Isabella had heard tales of the destruction those up-time weapons could deliver, at close quarters. Higgins himself was even famous for it, apparently. But it hardly mattered. Albrecht had been but an indifferent armsman, but had anyone ever come for Isabella they would only have reached her over her husband's corpse.
So, she let it pass. But she was livid for the rest of the day, furious for three, and sour and disgruntled for a week thereafter.
That night in the chapel, though, when he said his evening prayers, Bartolome de los Rios y Alarcon added a prayer for the soul of Gretchen Richter. She was Catholic herself, after all, even if mostly a lapsed one. But Bartolome would have prayed for her soul even had she been an outright heathen. He was quite sure the ogress had just added five years-three, for sure-to the lifespan of the archduchess.
Chapter 25
Southwark, England
"Well?" asked Harry Lefferts, after George and Juliet Sutherland had brushed the snow off their coats and hung them up. "Do we need to start planning how to get rid of that crime lord of yours?"
Looking even more placid than usual, George glanced around the large central room of their lodgings, where most of Harry's wrecking crew were sprawled about. The assortment of furniture that served them for the purpose could most charitably be described as "modest." Like the house itself, the furnishings were old, often ramshackle, and looked to have been assembled in a completely haphazard manner.
Not bad, though, by the standards of Southwark. Although Southwark was now legally part of London, under the formal designation of "The Ward of Bridge Without" and the more commonly used term "The Borough," it amounted to a separate city in most practical senses of the term. It dated back at least to the time of William the Conqueror and hadn't been officially incorporated into London until 1550. And, for centuries, it had been divided from the larger city just across the Thames by long established customs and traditions.
Southwark wasn't exactly the lawless part of London, but it came rather close. It was where England's capital perched its most disreputable establishments, like the theater, and was the city's largest and most active red light district. Much of the area was simply slums, but nestled here and there were any number of more prosperous dwellings. If there was a lot of poverty in Southwark, there was also quite of bit of wealth-and some of it highly concentrated.
Harry wasn't sure yet, because he hadn't moved about much himself since they'd arrived two days before. But he thought he was going to love the place. It reminded him of Las Vegas. Not the boring and oh-so-damn-proper adult amusement park that Las Vegas had become in his lifetime, once Big Respectable Money started erecting their huge theme casinos on
the Strip, but the fabled city of vice and sin that his father and uncles had told him about.
It was too bad, really, that he hadn't rented one of the fancier houses in the area. He could certainly have afforded it, with the money they'd finagled out of a semi-legal art deal they'd pulled off in Amsterdam before leaving for England.
Regretfully, he'd concluded that would give them too high a profile. And there was always the possible awkwardness of having to explain to Mike Stearns exactly why a commando unit which was officially part of the USE's army-even if most of that army's officers would have been surprised to discover the fact, and a fair number would have been positively aghast-had found it necessary to spend money on lavish digs while in the middle of a Desp'rate Feat of Derring-do.
Well… he could probably razzle-dazzle Mike himself. But there was no way he'd get the explanation to fly past Don Francisco. The Sephardic nobleman who served as Mike's head of intelligence was not only very shrewd, he was so wealthy himself that simply handwaving references to the need to spend a lot of money wouldn't make him blink.
Yes, I understand that. What I fail to grasp is why you needed gold cufflinks instead of silver ones. The last time I checked the market-just yesterday-
No, not a chance. Besides, this house was suitable enough. It wasn't actually falling apart anywhere, and the furniture worked even if some of it was weird looking. Better still, the location and the design of the house made it very private, with no way for a nosy neighbor to see what they were doing by just leaning over a fence or peeking through a window. And best of all, the house was situated almost directly across the Thames from the Tower of London. With a simple eyeglass, a man could keep the Tower under close observation so long as the sun was up.
"We'll not have to be concerned about him," said George. "It turns about that Johnny Three-Fingers fell afoul of the authorities last year. And I doubt if his ghost will bother us any."
"Hung him, did they?" said Sherrilyn. She shook her head, somehow managing to combine disapproval and admiration in the same gesture. "You can't accuse the courts in this day and age of coddling criminals, I'll say that much."
"No, no." George made a dismissive motion with his hand. "Not those authorities. The authorities. In Southwark, I mean."
"Ah," said Harry. Seeing that Sherrilyn was looking puzzled, he added: "I think what he means is that Johnny Three-Fingers pissed off the local equivalent of Al Capone."
George knew who Al Capone was, so he'd catch the reference. In fact, the whole wrecking crew had a long-running friendly argument over which of the movie versions was the best. It was a fair split between Rod Steiger's 1959 portrayal and Robert De Niro's in the much later The Untouchables, with George plumping down firmly for Steiger. All of them, of course, felt that both movies were a pale imitation of the great gangster performances by Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson-but since none of their films had technically been about Al Capone, they were disqualified from the debate.
"Not exactly," said George. "You Yanks have a shockingly casual attitude about such things. The authorities here are more like the original Sicilian fellows that your Yank gangsters were trying to imitate. Be that as it may, Johnny Three-Fingers is in no position any longer to avenge his brother. Neither is his other brother, for that matter, since the authorities felt it wise to dispose of him at the same time." He gave Sherrilyn a reproachful glance. "And they certainly didn't hang them. Barbarous business, that is, sometimes a man lasts for minutes. The authorities are far more civilized." He illustrated his definition of civilization by drawing a finger across his throat.
That was something of a relief, if a minor one. But by the time George had finished, Harry realized that his wife was looking rather distressed.
"What's wrong, Juliet?"
"I'm not sure if anything is wrong. But we also ran across an old friend of mine. Liz Lytle, her name. A very close friend, when I lived here. But…" She gave her husband an uncertain look.
"She seemed very distant," George finished for her. "As if she were distracted by something. Odd, that was. Liz was normally as cheerful a woman as you could find. 'Outgoing,' as you Yanks put it."
George had taken to calling Americans "Yanks" from watching too many of those same movies. More in the interest of precision than because he really cared, Harry had once tried to explain to him the none-too-fine distinctions between a New Englander and a West Virginian, but George had waved off the matter. "Might mean something to you Yanks, but to us Englishman a Yank is a Yank."
Naturally, the first thing George had done once they set foot on English soil was bestow a very disapproving look upon Harry. "And, indeed-just as I was warned. Here the Yank is, himself. Overpaid, oversexed and over here."
Harry had ignored the quip. It was silly, anyway. Oversexed, he'd grant, and "over here" was a done deal. Overpaid was ridiculous.
"Not like her at all," Juliet said, looking a bit drawn. For the first time, Harry realized that the Englishwoman was actually quite upset. Juliet had a temperament that was, if anything, more placid than her husband's. For her, this amounted to a screaming fit.
"You really think something is wrong? With her personally, I mean. Keep in mind that from everything you told us last night the whole city's been in an uproar ever since the queen got killed."
Juliet sneered. "Who cares about that silly French bitch? Nobody in Southwark, I can tell you that."
Her husband smiled. "Not until the lord chamberlain finally remembers to order the theaters closed for a period of mourning, at any rate. But she's got the right of it, Harry. Westminster is in an uproar, sure enough. Rumors are flying all over the place, even here in Southwark. But it's not as if any of London's commoners will shed a single tear over the accident. That would have been true even if the whole royal family had been killed. They'd be more likely to throw a celebration, come to it."
Harry wasn't surprised. The Stuart dynasty had spent the three decades since it came to power steadily squandering away whatever goodwill it might have started with. Constant clashes with Parliament, the incredibly excessive favoritism showed to the duke of Buckingham by both James I and his son Charles, the son's asinine attempt to marry a Spanish infanta with that same Buckingham as his sidekick, the list went on and on. Charles I hadn't been popular even before he brought in Wentworth and imposed direct royal rule, using mercenary companies from the continent paid for with a very mysterious and suspicious source of money.
Juliet nodded. "Elizabeth and I were very close friends, Harry-and we hadn't seen each other in several years. But she acted as if she just wanted to get rid of me."
The first thought that crossed Harry's mind, of course, was to wonder if that was because this Lytle woman had figured out why they were in England. But he dismissed the notion almost instantly. None of the crew had left the house since they arrived except George and Juliet. Since they were natives and knew Southwark particularly well, Harry had sent them to cruise about to get the sense of things. There was no way Lytle could have deduced anything simply from the fact that the Sutherlands had reappeared in England.
"See what you can find out, then," he told her. Then, seeing a questioning look from Gerd, he shrugged. "Why not? We can't do anything more until we get in touch with Julie and Alex. Speaking of which-"
He glanced up the stairs, where Paul Maczka was setting up the radio in one of the upper rooms. "It's probably about time for one of us-"
"It's your turn, Harry," said Matija. He held up his hand forcefully. "Don't argue about it! I've kept the records."
Harry scowled. "Where the hell did this idiot tradition get started that everybody in the crew shares equally in the manual labor? Dammit, I'm the commanding officer."
George cleared his throat. "Well, actually, you started it. If you'd been an Englishman, you'd have more sense. But you Yanks are besotted with that silly egalitarian business." He started putting his coat back on. "Come on, Juliet. Let's see what's up with Lizzie dear."
She looked a bit startled. "Right now? It's getting dark out."
"Yes, I know. That's why right now. A man my size creeps about better in the dark than he does in broad daylight." He gave his heftily built wife a look that was both measuring and appreciative at the same time. "So do you, for that matter."
***
After they left, Harry climbed the stairs. He didn't quite trudge the steps, but that was only because he felt he had to maintain a certain august demeanor as the commanding officer. Even if all he was going to be doing was the coolie work of cranking the pedals to fire up the blasted radio so Paul could get in touch with Amsterdam.
Luckily for him, they had a good window that evening and they got all the reports relayed sooner than usual. So, it was with light and airy steps that Harry came back down the stairs.
"Gentlemen!" Then, with a little bow to Sherrilyn: "And lady. I am pleased to announce that we've gotten in touch with Julie and Alex Mackay. Indirectly, at least-but it won't be necessary to use the Amsterdam relay any longer."
"They're that close to London?"
"No." Harry struggled to make his grin cheery instead of savage. "They're not 'close.' They're here." He pointed to the wall of the house that faced the west. "Apparently, they're taking in the theater tonight. Julie insisted she wanted to see the Globe Theater while she was in town. Seeing as how she probably wouldn't have the chance again."
"Harry," said Sherrilyn. "Stop grinning. You'll scare the children."
His grin widened. "Don't be silly. There aren't any kids here in the first place."
She covered her face in the peekaboo manner a child uses. "Fine. You're scaring me."
"Me, too," said Felix.
Harry went alone, since he saw no reason for a large party. He spotted Julie and Alex Mackay as soon as they came out of the Globe. It wasn't hard, since they were almost the first ones out.
He angled across to intersect them. Alex spotted him coming before Julie did, and his hand moved down to the hilt of the sword at his waist. In the dark, of course, Harry would just look like any man.