"There can be no toleration of idolatry," Traill screamed.
"There obviously is," Rohan pointed out. "In spite of the storms of destruction that our co-religionists visited upon stained glass windows, statues, and paintings in the previous century, very large numbers of them do still survive. Artists create more day by day. I would think that you would have noticed this during your various tours of Italy. I see no real sign that God is busily striking them down."
"Not in a Reformed household, though," Hamilton said, trying to shake the girls off his arms. "In Ulster, we have been very scrupulous about repressing the mistaken practices of the surviving natives."
"This Reformed household," Rohan said, "happens to be mine rather than yours."
He beckoned the footman, who, with some relief at having an order he should clearly obey, took the box away from Hamilton and then looked around blankly, wondering what he should do with it. "Give it back to the girl."
Rohan waved in Susanna's direction. "Take it up to your bedroom and leave it there."
Susanna curtsied and backed out of the hallway as fast as she could.
Rohan looked at his uninvited Scottish guests. "Has either of you, perhaps, ever heard the name ‘Leopold Cavriani?' "
****
"It's very hard to focus on serious scholarship in the middle of all this domestic turmoil," Rohan said. "However, in regard to the third major section of Les Futuriens, I believe I will subdivide it into several subsections. The first will be headed: Underlying Moral and Ethical Presuppositions. I will begin with this subsidiary story about Gertrude McFuzz and the repudiation of worldly vanity."
"It was scarcely universally accepted up-time any more than it is down-time," Carey commented. "This can be documented by the amount of time that girls spent in shopping malls. Susanna . . ." She paused. The duke had a lot going on. "Do you remember who Susanna is?"
"The little Italian Catholic girl whose nativity scene caused such a fuss."
"Yes. Well, her reaction, when she read the story with your daughter, Dominique, and Shae, was very hostile to the whole underlying premise. Well, after all, she is a court dressmaker. After objecting, she requested permission to draw copies of some of Gertrude's more fantastic feathers, which she planned to send to M. Cavriani for forwarding to the silk weavers of Lyon, thinking that they might make lovely designs for brocades."
Rohan cleared his throat. "I have recently paid some of Marguerite's bills for various feminine fashions. My household was much more economical when I lived in two rooms and her mother paid her bills. Conclusion: the moralists of the up-time had no more success with this premise than those of the Hebrew prophets, those of classical antiquity, or those of our modern day, although this record of unblemished failure did not keep them from trying."
****
"My Lord Duke," James Traill began. His voice was quivering with barely restrained outrage. "My young master"—he gestured at Hamilton—"has observed that you permit your daughter's dressmaker to leave this house on the Lord's Day in order to attend the blasphemous Catholic mass. It is bad enough that the Grand Duke has not closed all of the Catholic churches in this city but rather permits them to continue to be used for this unacceptable purpose. It is worse that he allows his wife to have a Catholic confessor and to maintain a private chapel in their residence itself. But he is a Lutheran, and therefore, what could a person expect in the way of zealousness?
"However, it is worse that you, a professor of the true Reformed faith, do not require this young woman to attend the Lord's Day observances in your own household in order that she may hear scriptural sermons and be informed of her errors." His general squawks of outrage continued for quite some time.
"If we want la religion prétendue réformée to be tolerated in France," Rohan commented, "which for my part I most certainly do, I think it behooves us to extend some toleration to the practices of others."
"Certainly not!" Hamilton exclaimed. "It is one thing for us to require that errorists tolerate truth, but quite another for those of us who hold to the truth to tolerate error. Just let me tell you a little about the superstitions of the native Irish peasants with whom my father has to deal." Which he did.
"I assure you that the lands of this Irish Catholic chieftain that my father claimed—for that matter, also the ones that Hugh Montgomery obtained and the ones that Con O'Neill kept—lands in Upper Clandeboye, more around The Great Ardes and around Castle Reagh, were entirely desolate and gone to waste."
"I don't suppose," Rohan asked, "that their condition might have in any way have been the result of the English wars against the Irish during the fifteen years preceding your father's settlement? Non?"
"Well," Hamilton answered, "the Irish had resisted all the prior efforts at Protestant settlement, so the condition of the land was their own fault. Queen Elizabeth's agents had to put down the resistance, obviously. The region was almost without population. Therefore it was only right for the king to confirm grants to men such as my father who were willing to bring in Protestants from Scotland, settle them, and once more assure a flow of rents to the landlords and taxes to the royal treasury.
"In fact," he barreled on, "I believe that it would be only fair to say that the successful efforts of my father and some other Ulster entrepreneurs served as the pattern that encouraged King James to authorize the plantation of Jamestown in Virginia and other ventures in the Americas. Therefore," he beamed at the up-timers, "your nation and your very existence were?, are?, will be?, actually the result my father's enterprising nature. Part of what Mr. Traill has made me study is the nature of the "Scotch-Irish" settlements in West Virginia. My opinion is that all of you owe due gratitude to the Hamiltons."
"A little bit full of himself, maybe?" Shae asked later that day.
"What I would like to know," Dominique didn't answer directly, "is why he has been spying on Susanna closely enough to know that she goes to mass. Isn't he supposed to be listening one of Mr. Traill's properly Calvinist discourses on Sunday mornings?"
"He's probably trying to trap her and rape her," Shae said. "That's what villains always do in novels. They ravish the maidservants."
"I don't think so," Susanna said. "Young Master Hamilton is following me around, but I believe that he is looking for my nativity scene, so that he can destroy it. He did force his way into the bedroom where I sleep, but I wasn't there. Neither was my crèche. I hid it better than that."
****
About the Faces on the Cutting Room Floor, Number Three: Thomas and Sherrilyn: Frenemies Without Benefits
By Charles E. Gannon
After Thomas North shared the grim secret of his crucial absence during Liam Donovan's tragic loss, there remained the matter of whatever unresolved personal tensions—both positive and negative—existed between him and Sherrilyn Maddox. However, their eventual conversation on the matter of the emotions that existed between them—or not—was not able to occur until they were approaching the wharves in the Italian town of Nettuno:
Sherrilyn settled herself on top of a duffle of clothes that had been soiled during their journey around the heel of Italy's boot: the softest seat she should find. North remained perched upon the smallish, locked chests that held their up-time shotguns, field stripped for later reassembly.
She glanced at North, who was looking out at the broad bay with a strange fixity. She looked that way as well. "So," she said.
"So," he answered.
More silence. Well, this was going well. Sherrilyn decided that a subtle icebreaking question was in order. "So why do you still treat me like an unwashed sewer-cleaner when anyone else is around?"
North swallowed. "I'm sorry for my—attitude—toward you. But you should not be here."
"Whaddya mean? On this mission? Why? What the hell did I—?"
"No. You should not be on any mission. You should not be a part of the Wrecking Crew, Miss Maddox."
She was ready to tear Thomas North a new one, but she stopped, cons
idered his tone and face: they were somber. Pained, even. No anger, no denunciation. So she decided to see if honey really did attract more flies than the shitstorm she wanted to unleash at him. "Why shouldn't I be here?"
"Because you are a woman."
Okay: that did it. "Listen, asshole; just because I'm a woman doesn't mean I can't pull my own weight. Hell, in this sorry bunch of—"
"You misunderstand. I do not question your skill. Truth be told—and I will deny this if you report it to the others—I think you are the best soldier of the whole group."
Sherrilyn, all ready to Fight The Old Fight against gender bigotry, felt her forward momentum—the charge that she would have rammed right down North's chauvinist, machismo-spouting throat—waver and break. "What—what do you mean?"
"Exactly what I said. You are the best soldier in the group."
"And how is that a problem?"
"Again, for exactly the reason I said: you are a woman."
"So, I'm better than I should be, for a woman?"
North sighed, hung his head. "No, you still do not understand. Mostly because I am not making myself clear. Damn it all, I'm not sure I can make myself clear."
"Well, try. Real hard. And real fast."
North looked over with a grin, saw that the same had crept onto Sherrilyn's face, despite herself. "Yes, ma'am. Actually, that's the root of it, you know. That I should be calling you ma'am."
"Well, if that's all—"
"No, no: that's not all. That's merely the tip of the iceberg." He turned on his seat, so that his body now faced her. "Miss Maddox, I know that in the world you came from there was, by my standards, tremendous informality between the sexes. You dressed similarly, socialized similarly, played the same sports, pursued the same activities."
"And this bothers you."
"Let us say instead that it unsettles me. But I have adapted. Or so I thought."
"So you draw the line at female soldiers, is that it?" Well, in all honesty, that wasn't so different from a lot—maybe the majority—of male attitudes from the up-time world into which she had been born. "You acknowledge we have the necessary skills, but are more comfortable keeping us barefoot and pregnant, anyhow?"
"Not at all! Not me!" He raised his hands as if to ward off a terrible threat.
"So, we women should stay barefoot and pregnant for other men? Just not for you?"
"Yes. Well, no. Damn it. Now see here: I don't feel any woman should be barefoot or pregnant unless she wants to be."
"How enlightened of you."
"And I have become—mostly—a convert to what I have seen in Grantville: women with truly equal political and professional standing. Oh, of course, there weren't really many laws against it in England—well, not that many—but it just wasn't done. Wasn't proper. But one of the reasons I left the Green and Pestilential Land was because I'd had a bloody belly-full of ‘proper'. So I can hardly criticize another culture that snubs its nose at many of the same old, odious proprieties and charts a new course of its own. That's rather like what I did myself."
Sherrilyn could feel the puzzled frown pulling her scalp and face downward, knew it wasn't exactly her most beguiling look, but at the moment, didn't give a damn. "So, if my ears still work, you actually sound like you approve of women as equals, are comfortable with it."
"Approve? Absolutely. Comfortable? Well…that kind of change takes a little longer, in my experience. Old, oppressive conventions have this to say for themselves: they are familiar, and make their long-established internal ‘logic' well known to all who live subject to them. New behaviors and traditions don't feel comfortable because they can still catch you up, surprise you. As in this case."
"Okay. So what's the surprise, the catch, in this case?"
North looked back out over the water, which seemed ready to simmer in the early afternoon heat. "Miss Maddox, I grew up assuming that, as a gentleman, I would encounter damsels by rescuing them from distress, not by heading into it alongside them."
Sherrilyn's frown flew off her face; she tried to keep the reaction an expression of her surprise, without revealing the strong undercurrent of delight she felt. Well, bless his old-fashioned heart; cynical, smart-mouthed Thomas North was, at his core, still a chivalrous knight-errant when it came to fair maidens. And that courtliness extended to Sherrilyn, too, evidently. Because she was certainly no longer young enough to be reasonably described as fair—and she hadn't been a maiden since she was sixteen.
For his part, Thomas North was still looking out over the water, his hands clasped in a tense knot. "Well?"
"Well what?"
"Well, aren't you going to lambaste me, now? Or—to follow the maritime motif in which we find ourselves—keel-haul me?"
Sherrilyn leaned over and kissed his cheek. "You're an idiot," she pronounced.
Thomas turned wide, perplexed eyes upon her, his hand moving slowly to his cheek. "I confess, I had not seen that coming."
"Me neither," Sherrilyn admitted. "But you are an idiot, you know."
"So I have been told. And have often proved, I suppose. I was not aware, however, that this was one of those occasions."
"Well, it is. Look, Thomas: most of us up-time women don't want men to stop making a fuss over us. We just don't want the price of that fussing to be our equality."
North nodded, carefully. "But—may I speak frankly?"
"You haven't been so far?"
"Well, I have been honest. But not exactly frank."
"And the difference is?"
"Hmm. I would put it this way: being honest simply means telling the truth. Being frank means going a bit further, involves expressing the frustrations and uncertainties that may underlie those truths."
"Oh. Yeah, okay. So what is making you frustrated or uncertain about twentieth century sexual politics? Because I can assure you that the men and women of my time had it all worked out. No misunderstandings or frictions. It was all sweet reason and clear sailing." She smiled wickedly. "In a pig's ass."
North's responding grin was broad and sudden, and Sherrilyn realized that, back in the Val Bregaglia, Miro had been right: North likes me—really likes me! But then why—?
North was nodding, though. "Very well. I shall be frank. About all the fuss that you up-time women still enjoy: isn't it a bit of a double-standard, then?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, let us speak plainly. What are the origins of courtly behavior? Of chivalry? Of what you call—I think—pedestalization?"
"At the very root of it? I guess because we can bear babies and you can't. Makes us worth celebrating. And makes us tougher, too." She stuck out her tongue at him.
His smile came back even wider, if that were possible. "But still, it implies certain vulnerabilities as well, doesn't it?"
"I suppose so, particularly right at the end of the pregnancy. And there's the breast-feeding stuff." Sherrilyn repressed a shudder. She'd never been hugely enthusiastic about the possibility of becoming "Mommy" and the notion of nursing had, for whatever reason, been particularly unappealing.
"Yes, all told, bearing children is a rather profound encumbrance."
"Yeah, well, that's why we fee-males look for good providers and are nesters. Or so they say. I'm not much minded that way, myself."
"So I've noticed—which is a point to which I will return. But I suspect that all of what you've outlined is why you had been dubbed ‘the weaker sex' as well as the ‘fairer sex'."
Sherrilyn shrugged. "I suppose so. That, and male upper body strength. I was a gym teacher, buster, and I remain no slouch when it comes to what I can do with these muscles. But facts are facts: men bulk up bigger and with less effort than women in the top half of their bodies. Not that we can't give you a good run for your money, but we're the underdogs in that contest."
North nodded. "And so men evolved a tradition of protection."
"Which quickly became—or maybe started as—an excuse for oppression and inequality."
"No argument. But it creates the whole ‘damsel in distress' motivation for men."
"Yeah, and in order to play the part, we women have to be weepy, delicate beauties who faint or take the vapors at the drop of a hat or the leer of a villain. No thanks; not for me. I ain't waiting for a rescue; I'm kicking my captors in the balls, if I get a chance."
North smiled. "Well of course you would. Which is why I find you so remarkable."
"Huh?" That sounded positive. "But I thought you're making a case for the damsel in distress, here."
The Englishman shook his head. "Were that it was as simple as that. I'm making the case that all of us are—to one degree or another—prisoners of what our culture has foisted upon us. In my case, I was brought up to believe that a ‘proper lady'—the kind to which a young man should address his attentions and whose favor he should pursue—should not be aggressive, should not be self-sufficient, should not take matters into her own hands. Which is probably why I have remained a bachelor and long ago dismissed the possibility of matrimony from my mind: because I have never had the faintest interest in such ‘proper ladies.' And in the society of my birth—by which I mean not merely my nation, but my class—these young women were the almost unexceptioned rule. And any young lady who veered too far from the ranks of these demure schemers and back-biters was usually hidden away in the attic or sidelined in an even more creative fashion."
Sherrilyn was not afraid to admit that she was now fully perplexed. "I am now fully perplexed," she said. "On the one hand it sounds like you want to rescue a damsel in distress, but on the other—"
"Miss Maddox, sometimes it is not so easy to know what you want as it is to know what you don't want. I do not want a useless, drooping creature who has no power or will to extract herself from danger or crisis."
"Well, good for you, Thomas North."
"But on the other hand, I am baffled by women such as those I find in Grantville: women who want some displays of chivalry, but not all of them. And who care more about those displays at certain times and in certain places more than at others. What am I to make of this? Do you secretly wish to be damsels in distress? Is there a bit of hypocrisy about it all: wishing, even insisting on privileges and special considerations on one hand, while insisting on absolute equality in all other things? For a man of my origins, Miss Maddox, I must confess that I, too, am fully perplexed."
Grantville Gazette, Volume 65 Page 14