1635-The Tangled Web

by Virginia DeMarce

  Friedrich's expression brightened. "There's an idea. You give me permission to renounce my title and I'll run for the House of Commons for you, one of these days."

  The morning and the evening of the fourth day

  "I could scarcely have humiliated von Glasenapp front of a group of junior officers," Brahe said. "He would lose all of his authority and he doesn't command very much respect as it is. Most of his men despise him."

  "True. But . . ." Botvidsson shook his head.

  "I humiliated him in front of his fellow colonels. Sufficiently, I believe, that there's not likely to be an equivalent occurrence among the soldiers under him in the future. Or among the soldiers under the others, for that matter."

  "I'm afraid that's not going to be enough."

  "It isn't, but it has to be. Sometimes one finds oneself in such a situation."

  "I wasn't about to have Rohrbach flogged publicly," von Glasenapp muttered. "Not when those infernal Württembergers and Donner were howling that I had to."

  "Might have been better if you had," von Zitzewitz said. "I have to deal with them—Captain Duke Eberhard and his brothers. They're on my staff. Probably as retribution for my sins."

  "I had him flogged privately. Hard. Not that Brahe left me any option. Don't tell those boys, though. I'm not willing to give the impression that I'm a man who caves in to public pressure. If I see an article in the newspaper even hinting that I had Rohrbach flogged, I'll be looking for the leak until the day I die and the leaker will be sorry."

  "Might be better if I did tell them. Quietly, of course."

  "I mean it, Zitzewitz. Don't tell them. Let junior officers think that they can influence you and that's the end of military discipline. That goes double and triple for junior officers who have a higher rank in the nobility and their own ways of getting the ear of General Brahe."

  "What are you doing, Reichard?" Justina looked at the market order her husband had just drafted. "We won't need a lot of food for Sybilla's wake. She didn't have many friends. She was a whiny, unpleasant woman, even if she was a loyal daughter to old Hans and a CoC member."

  Ursula Widder nodded. "She was only fourteen when her mother died. She took over keeping the house and assisting in the shop. Most of her parents' friends are dead. Her younger brothers and sisters are dead or gone. Married or not, she never had any children. Old Hans can't afford to hire mourners. There won't be many people."

  Donner shook his head. "It will be a big funeral. Simrock and Theo are getting other students to come. Boys that age eat a lot."

  "Reichard," Justina said direfully. "Reichard, what are you up to?"

  "Recruiting, my darling treasure. Recruiting."

  The newspaper came out early that morning, well before the funeral was due to begin.

  Somehow, the lead story featured the brutal death of a native daughter of the city, an honorable and faithful daughter of the city, also the hard-working only caretaker of her aging, invalid father.

  Yes, the brutal death of a native daughter of the city at the hands of an equally brutal soldier quartered upon its civilians. A brutal soldier from Mecklenburg, a province which was far distant from the Rhineland, not to mention full of brutal Lutheran heretics.

  In passing, the reporter mentioned, just in case his reading public had forgotten, the Swedes were all Lutheran heretics, too—Lutheran heretics who had confiscated the historical Johanniskirche to use as their own.

  "Damn you, Simrock," Reichard Donner exploded.

  "I said I'd get a story in the paper for you," Simrock protested. "A story that would get the people aroused. Mainzers by and large just don't get very aroused by Spartacus's theories. Sorry about that. My cousin wrote what he thought would work. My uncle was delighted to publish it. You want a crowd, you get a crowd."

  "Simrock, you have no common sense at all. The last thing we need is a religious riot. The Committees of Correspondence advocate religious toleration, remember. Repeat after me, twenty times, toleration. Have you gotten that word into your head?"

  Simrock shrugged. "My uncle's not exactly a fan of the CoC. Sometimes you have to take what you can get."

  ". . . sorry we weren't here when you arrived." Reichard Donner distributed another round of beers. "We were all at the funeral." He waved toward Kunigunde and Ursula, who were sobbing at a corner table as they made quick work of the contents of their mugs.

  "The riot," Eberhard added.

  "Paying our respects to the dead and debating Montaigne," Theo added.

  "Dodging flying rocks." Justina glared at the boys. "Evading the city watch. Running for our lives."

  "You've read Montaigne, of course," Simrock said to their guests from Fulda.

  Jeffie Garand's response was, "Errr . . ."

  Joel Matowski, somewhat more articulately, replied, "I don't believe that I have."

  Joel actually didn't believe that he had even heard of anyone named Montaigne, but didn't think that it would be tactful to say so right at the moment, since the author, whoever he might be, was clearly near and dear to the hearts of the Mainz CoC, who seemed to talk about him a lot more than they talked about Spartacus and the other people who were writing pamphlets for Gretchen Richter.

  "But you're up-timers," Simrock protested. "You have all those books. Everyone's heard about your libraries. Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essais has been in print since 1603. That's thirty years. Longer than any of us have been alive."

  He looked over at the senior Donners—parents, aunt, and the aunt's friends. "Longer than most of us have been alive. You must have read it."

  Reichard Donner intercepted the glance. "Eat up, everybody. There's plenty of food left from the wake."

  "The wake that didn't happen," Justina said. "The wake that didn't happen because somebody . . ." She glared at Simrock. ". . . somebody planted an article in the paper that caused a riot and the city council called out the watch and the soldiers to put it down and they wouldn't let anybody at all come to the Horn of Plenty afterwards."

  Jeffie was still thinking about Montaigne. "I think the people who stuck with Mrs. Hawkins's French classes at high school until the fourth year read something by that guy. They read it in French, though."

  "So you have read the Essais."

  "Well, no, I didn't take French. I took Spanish. It was kind of complicated. My dad came from Baton Rouge and was Cajun and he and Mom were divorced, so she didn't want me to learn French."

  Theo, sublime in not caring that he was no more familiar with the concepts "Baton Rouge" and "Cajun" than Jeffie Garand was familiar with the Essais, turned to his sister and whispered, "Montaigne also wrote, 'I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.' Maybe that's the variety of up-timer we've got here."

  "Well," Simrock said, "it's still true whether you've read the book or not. Every person, no matter how high-born, is still what one of your up-time writers called a 'work in progress.' You're not finished until you're dead. As Montaigne wrote, 'How many valiant men we have seen to survive their own reputation!' In your world, Gustavus Adolphus seems to have acquired a remarkably bright and shiny reputation. It remains to be seen what he's going to end up with in this one."

  Both Duke Eberhard and Corporal Hertling shifted a little uncomfortably and looked around. Aside from the two up-timers, though, only the regulars were in attendance. Reichard's recruiting scheme had proven to be a singular failure.

  "Montaigne also says that ambition is not a vice of little people," Friedrich said. "Ambition isn't necessarily a bad thing. 'Since ambition may teach men valor, temperance, generosity, and justice . . . ' "

  Eberhard hoped that his brother was just trying to be helpful, rather than to fan the flames. He himself found political debates a little unsettling, even though his tutors had, obviously, trained him, as a future ruler, to take part in them. And, of course, Montaigne himself had written, "There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody a
grees."

  Jeffie Garand leaned over and whispered to Joel, "Remember that musical we did in high school about the English girl? The one where she sang about the two guys who talked all the time and finished up, 'I'm so sick of words?' I think these guys have got a words monopoly."

  He picked up a stack of flyers that were lying on the table. "What are these?"

  Corporal Hertling moved over to the up-timers and looked over Jeffie's shoulder.

  "Cartoons by Crispijn van de Passe," Simrock said. "The older Crispijn, that is. He's famous. He's been working out of Utrecht for the past several years."

  "He's also as old as the hills," Reichard griped. "He must be nearly seventy. Can't you kids ever talk about anyone modern?"

  "I've heard of his daughter," Joel said. "Magdalena. She works for Markgraf and Smith Aviation, the ones who are building the Monster. She's Dutch, I think."

  "Oh, yeah." Jeffie nodded. "I've heard about her, too. Never heard of her father, though." He frowned at the cluttered design and dark, heavily hatched background of the engraving. "Not exactly Doonesbury. Not even L'il Abner. I don't like it."

  A declaration of Arminian principles at a conclave of Counter-Remonstrants could not have caused a more violent eruption of indignation. The up-timers learned far more than they had ever wanted to know about the scene that van de Passe had most recently depicted—the archbishop-elector of Mainz, the archbishop-elector's conflicts with Nils Brahe who was Gustavus Adolphus's military administrator, the archbishop-elector's attempts to mediate some kind of an ecumenical version of religious tolerance with a man named Georg Calixtus.

  Theo, upon noting that neither Jeffie nor Joel had ever heard of Calixtus, was profoundly struck by the glaring gaps in their education. "He's a professor at Helmstedt, of course. For the last couple of years, he's been advocating religious discussion between representatives of the various confessions based on the Holy Scriptures and the proponents of Catholic doctrine. He seems to think that if people just went back to the early church, before Constantine, everything would work out and the world would be full of sweetness and light. He's even been to Jena, lobbying Gerhard and the other orthodox Lutheran theologians."

  Chaplain Pistor would have been proud of the disgust dripping from his son's tongue.

  "He's a Philippist," Simrock's voice was mild. "An extreme Philippist. The Flacians hate him."

  "And Helmstedt is what and where?" The derisory tone of Jeffie's voice was designed to disguise the fact that he really didn't have the vaguest clue.

  "I'm not so sure that Montaigne had the right of it about peasants," Theo whispered to Margarethe. "They just plain haven't been educated sufficiently at all."

  Hertling looked over Joel's shoulder. "Who are the two guys so loaded down with olive branches that they're staggering under the weight?"

  "Well, one of them's the count from Rudolstadt, over by Grantville." Jeffie grinned. "You can tell him because he's wearing a gimme cap with the bill turned backwards. I don't know the other one."

  "Heinrich Friedrich von Hatzfeldt," Margarethe said. "He's the oldest brother of the prince-bishop of Würzburg. The Catholic bishop of Würzburg, in Franconia, where the people just voted to join the up-timers." Margarethe's voice was much calmer than her brother's had been. She was sitting in the taproom looking like a misplaced, very small, medieval Italian madonna, with dark brown eyes, straight dark brown hair, and a perfectly oval face.

  Simrock interrupted. "Their mother's a von Sickingen. Their father worked here for the archbishop of Mainz most of his life in various kinds of administrative jobs. He's a canon at St. Alban's—you can look him up, if you want to, because he's right in town still. He didn't leave when the Swedes came in. Franz, the bishop, is in Bonn with the archbishop—this archbishop—and Ferdinand of Bavaria, that's the other archbishop, most of the time."

  "They don't call this part of the Rhineland 'priests' alley' for nothing," Reichard Donner muttered.

  Margarethe tossed her head. "This man, the bishop's brother, goes back and forth. People say he's trying to broker some agreement for Franz to go back to Würzberg and work along with the up-timers, sort of like the prince-abbot did in Fulda."

  Walther Hertling grinned. "I don't suppose the archbishop—the Mainz archbishop, not the Bavarian in Cologne—would complain if the Swedes let him come back to Mainz, either."

  Joel turned around and looked at Hertling. "Don't hold your breath. For the deals to get anywhere, they'd both have to do what the abbot did—drop the 'prince' part out of their titles."

  "In that case," Duke Eberhard said, "I certainly won't hold mine."

  The morning and the evening of the fifth day

  "At least," Jeffie whispered, "the town's small enough that we can pretty much see it in one morning. Be grateful for small favors."

  Simrock, assuming the duty of host since he was a local boy, had just explained as much as he knew—as much, that was, as his teachers at the Latin School in the city had known—about Mainz's "Roman stones," which turned out to be forty-seven still-standing columns from a long-gone nearly five-mile-long aqueduct, not to mention every other relic of antiquity he was aware of.

  Jeffie proved to be only minimally enthusiastic about educational tourism. He kept whispering to Joel. "I could see some point if it was still carrying water, but a batch of rock pilings is a batch of rock pilings, no matter now old they are. I could have looked at pilings back home."

  Reichard Donner, who had come along out of sheer curiosity, overheard him. "Yes. Too old, too old."

  Ulrich hopped down from on top of one of the pilings, landing with a solid thunk. "Well, if this is too old, let's try the cathedral."

  "It's Catholic," Theo said.

  Ulrich swung himself into place next to Jeffie Garand, but looked at Theo. "You do 'glum' pretty well. 'Morose,' too. Fifty years from now, I'll be laughing at you because you're such a cantankerous old man."

  The cathedral, which they had seen from a distance on their way into town, since it was far higher than any other landmark, proved on closer inspection to be, in Jeffie's whisper, "a great big pile of red brick with a lot of gingerbread." He looked at it critically. "It's not any prettier than St. Mary's in Grantville."

  Joel snorted. "It's Romanesque. That's why St. Mary's looks the way it does. Mr. Piazza told us that back in CCD classes. St. Mary's is neo-Romanesque. American architects copied this stuff. St. Mary's is just smaller and the bricks are yellow instead of red."

  "You need to look at the bronze doors," Simrock said. "They're old."

  "As old as the rock piles under the aqueduct that's not there any more?" Jeffie grinned.

  Simrock counted to twenty. "Not quite. About nine hundred years newer, but they're still old. They're about seven hundred years old."

  "Too old," Reichard said. "What's remarkable is that they're still here, seeing that they're bronze. Over time, almost anything cast in bronze has gotten melted down in one war or another to make weapons. That's one of the perks that artillery companies have when they take a town. They get to confiscate the church bells to melt them into more cannon, so they can demolish more towns."

  Simrock nodded. "It's really astonishing that the doors have survived."

  "We should go inside and look at the stained glass," Joel said. "Colored windows with those Gothic pointy tops and curlicues worked into the glass are always cultural, as Ms. Mailey would say."

  "As in, 'Don't you barbarians have any culture at all?' " Jeffie said to Ulrich. "I wish I hadn't grown too responsible to climb up on those pilings with you."

  "Responsible?" Joel snorted. "You?"

  "That's 'Sergeant Garand,' now, if you please."

  "The windows are idolatrous," Theo protested. "Well, they are. Graven images."

  Everyone else ignored him.

  "Who is, or was, Ms. Mailey?" Simrock asked. To Eberhard, he whispered, "She may have had a point. I'm pretty sure she did."

  The party inspected the stained glass
windows. Joel cocked his head. "I think the ones in St. Mary's are prettier. Imported from Austria, you know. The coal barons really did our church up right."

  "I thought there weren't any barons in America," Eberhard said.

  They explained coal barons on their way to the party's next destination.

  "The Johanniskirche," Simrock said. "St. John's. The Swedes have turned it into a Lutheran parish church for the city. The canons in the chapter at the cathedral are complaining, of course—not to mention the canons from what used to be the Johanniskirche. General Brahe told them that they should be happy that he took the smaller church and left the cathedral to the Catholics."

  Theo inserted a mutter about the lack of a Calvinist parish church.

  Reichard pointed with pride to the service being provided to the Calvinists of Mainz by the public room of the Horn of Plenty.

  Simrock diverted them down another street over-built with half-timbered Fachwerk houses. "Now here, going through the Kirschgarten, and coming to the Leichhofstrasse . . ."

  "You've got a 'Graveyard Street'?"

  "Well, it does go to the cemetery." He shrugged. "And this is the hospital."

  Jeffie cocked his head. "How on earth old is that?"

  Simrock chewed his upper lip. "Four hundred years, I'd say. Give or take a few in either direction."

  Jeffie cocked his head and whispered to Joel, "The accumulated germs would give Dr. Nichols nightmares, I bet."

  "Where did Gutenberg invent the printing press?" Joel asked, masking that comment. On their way to that sacred spot, he asked again, "What's the big building site?"