by Eric Flint
"Who cares?" That was David Thornton, also a reluctant singer and dancer.
Amber ran her fingers through her gray-streaked hair. She thought that part of the problem was that Kurt and David, like Lorie Lee Carstairs in the back of the room and close to a half-dozen other of this year's up-time kids, had been left behind in Grantville to finish out the semester, parked with uncles and aunts or family friends, when their parents went off to do other things. Kurt's and Lorie Lee's folks were in Magdeburg; Dave's in Bamberg. In some ways, this year's class was having its growing-up even more disrupted by Grantville people starting to fission off into the rest of the United States of Europe than their older brothers and sisters had been by the Ring of Fire itself three years before.
None of which solved the problem. "Michelle, please take it again from the beginning."
The next try wasn't any better.
"Want a little help, Mistress Higham?"
She looked over at the open door. A couple of boys stood there. Fifteen or sixteen, maybe? She raised her eyebrows and beckoned them in. "You know me, but I don't think that I know you."
The taller boy nodded. "We just came from Master Saluzzo. Your headmaster. We are traveling with an English playwright who greatly admired our grandfather. We have been on the continent for some months—he is with the King's Men company, but concluded quite some time ago to travel and see what might be found. Since in the very nature of things, traveling players must earn their keep by playing, it took our little company some time to get this far."
The other boy picked up the narrative. "He has come to use the libraries here. After experiencing those 'some months' of our company, Master Massinger has decided that for as long as we remain here, we shall go to school, so he will not need to fret about what we may be doing while he pursues his studies. Particularly since many of the classes are taught in English. Particularly since the National Library is in this building, so he can escort us to it in the morning and ensure that we leave with him in the evening."
With immaculate timing, they traded off again. "Since our grandfather was an actor, Signor Saluzzo thought we might well enjoy the drama class. Most particularly since it has no 'prerequisites.' While he has found us to be far from lackwits, it appears that we are most sadly deficient in 'prerequisites,' at least as far as mathematics and natural philosophy are concerned. Nor does Master Massinger know how long we will be remaining, so the headmaster doubts the wisdom of trying to remedy the situation. So, mistress, aside from some more Latin, of course, which one's mentors always find to be an excellent thing, and the literature of France with Mistress Hawkins, since our French is already tolerable, we are at your service. In your service, indeed. Should you need a set painted, a costume created . . ."
The shorter boy broke in. ". . . a ditty sung, a few words smithed to fit a new scene, a female part played . . ." He stopped, looked over the class, grinned. "Not, it would appear, that you will be in need of that particular talent of mine, although unlike my brother I can still squeak a fine falsetto. Nonetheless, on our way down the 'corridor,' we heard your song." He sighed deeply. "Now, I am Tom. That one next to me is Dick. Had our parents produced yet another son, methinks that he likely would have been Harry, but I fear that we must borrow someone else."
Amber looked at them. Down-time English, obviously, from their accents. Slightly built, both of them. The taller couldn't be any more than five feet six. The other stood shorter by a couple of inches, but he also appeared to be younger, so he might still have a growth spurt. Straight hair, barely a couple of shades apart. For the taller, it was light brown; for the shorter, dark blond. Faces with small, neat, features. There was no sign of any incipient jutting jaw. Neither would ever model as Conan the Barbarian. They should have looked like a couple of budding bank tellers, but . . . they didn't. With the cocky angle of their heads, the little banty rooster strut with which they walked, they looked more like budding . . . buccaneers? She could imagine them on the deck of one of Drake's ships, laughing as they chased a Spanish galleon.
Boys from a troop of traveling actors? Boys unafraid of the stage? Amber motioned them to the center of the room. "We have quite a few Harrys in this town, but not of an age to take sophomore drama."
A solemn nod. "Ah, yes. Harry Lefferts. We have heard of him."
Amber wished that they hadn't. "So . . ." She looked at the three couples who were still standing in the middle of the classroom.
Kurt and David sat down, leaving a down-time boy named Zacharias Schaupp to sing as "Harry." Lorie Lee shoved sheets of paper with the lyrics into the hands of the two new kids. They took a hasty look. Michelle played through the tune a single time. Juliana Ostertag started out on Cole Porter's interpretation of Bianca's dilemma, with Mikayla Tito backing her. Tom cut in with the line containing his own name. Dick did the same. One light—still very light—tenor. But Grantville's high school, thank goodness, was still in a position to put lapel mikes on its student performers at need. One fairly strong baritone. Good timing. The result wasn't a polished performance, but it was a performance rather than a struggle. A performance delivered with a glee that pulled the other students along. Amber grinned. The semester's prospects were looking up. These two boys, Zacharias . . . if she could just talk Lisa Beattie into letting Wolfgang Fischer off farm chores long enough to rehearse . . . Plans bubbled up in her mind.
* * *
"So there they are. Tom and Dick."
"The Smothers Brothers?" Lady Beth Sawyer laughed.
"The Quiney brothers, if you want to be prosaic. But they do have that same glint of irreverent mischief in their eyes. Every teacher who gets one of them, let alone both together, is going to have to scramble to stay on top of things. Would you believe that they've actually performed in The Taming of the Shrew?" As Kate and Bianca. They like Kiss Me, Kate better, they say. They've really taken to the concept of the musical play. The play with music woven into the action rather than just performed on the side or during interludes."
"You sound positively invigorated."
"I wasn't even going to try to put on Oklahoma! this spring. There just weren't any boys who could carry the roles. But now. I have Curly and Jud. Just you wait the end of until April."
"By April, I'll probably be in Magdeburg."
"Oh, gosh, Lady Beth. That's right. I'm going to miss you like crazy."
Grantville,
March 1634
"So you think it's odd?" Michelle Matowski frowned.
"Not odd here, so much." Tom Quiney shook his head. "You're lucky, you fair young maidens, that you landed in the Germanies and not in the comparably fair Isle of Albion."
"Why?"
"Our grandfather, we've said, was an actor."
"It shows."
"A man of many words as well. He was a scribbler like Master Massinger. But although he made his living from words—a good living from words—he left our aunt and mother unlettered. Illiterate, as you have Latinized it in your American English."
"You mean that your mom can't read or write?" Michelle waved the rye roll with Bratwurst that the high school cafeteria was offering for this day's lunch right under his nose, only to find it plucked out of her hand from behind."
"Hi, Dick," she said without even turning around. "Give me that. Give it back. Now. Don't you dare take a bite."
"There are more where it came from."
"I don't have any more lunch money and they don't take credit cards. Give me that Bratwurst!" She lunged up just as he started to run, managing to grab the back of his belt.
Tom leaned back and started to whistle a theme which reminded them both that the farmer and the cowboy should be friends.
* * *
Michelle hadn't given up. During rehearsal after school, she cornered Tom again. "Did you really mean that your own mom can't read or write?"
"Yea. Forsooth. All that sort of Elizabethan English stuff."
She frowned. Tom and Dick had picked up American English really
fast, but Tom had the mannerism of retreating to something that sounded like the King James Version of the Bible when he was uneasy and then pretending that he hadn't done it by making fun of himself.
"Well, why not?"
"At home . . ." He paused. "Back in England, that is . . ." He shrugged. "Princesses are tutored, of course, as are the daughters of many of the great and powerful nobles. But among the merchants, among the artisans . . ." He stopped again.
Dick, Lorie Lee trailing after him, plopped himself down on the other side of Michelle. "One thing I have learned, here in Grantville, is that the middle class is rising." His left hand waved through the air in an upward direction. "According to Mr. Edgerton, the middle class is floating through history almost like one of your balloons, ever following an updraft."
"So?" Lorie Lee focused her eyes on his nose to the point that they crossed.
"The members of the German middle class, while thus rising, school their daughters. Aside from a few peculiar Puritans, the English middle class does not. Our aunt married a physician, very upright and prosperous. He finds it neither strange nor undesirable that she is unlettered."
Tom nodded. "Nor can we truly endorse the endeavors of the Puritans, given that they only wish their daughters to read pious literature and have done their best to extirpate our very calling."
"What he means is that most true-born Englishmen cherish an ignorant damsel." Dick winked. "They are more like to be horrified than pleased by the schooling of females. More like to be scandalized than enchanted by those who are both fair and learn'd. It is far from all English men who share the admiration that Browne expressed for the late lamented dowager countess of Pembroke."
Michelle opened her mouth.
"We, of course, share it to the full," Dick continued quickly. "Don't we, Tom?"
"Oh, verily. Without the slightest shadow of a doubt."
Michelle twirled a strand of hair around her finger. "You could sound a little more convinced. Are we stopping at the Freedom Arches once the rehearsal is over? I'm starved."
* * *
"Mistress Higham . . ."
The woman perched on the edge of the orchestra pit in the high school auditorium looked up.
The man moved back a little. "Mistress. My most humble apologies. I had expected Mistress Higham."
"Mary Simpson's in town for a few days, on her way to the Upper Palatinate. Amber's extremely busy meeting with her, meeting with the other arts people, taking notes about what everyone is saying. I told her that I'd supervise the rehearsals this week." She extended her hand. "I'm Annabelle Piazza. Pleased to meet you."
He backed up even farther, startled that the wife of the president of the State of Thuringia-Franconia, the new name proclaimed only a couple of weeks earlier, would have accepted such a task.
"No, stay. You must be Master Massinger. Amber told me that you would be coming."
A couple of hours later, she asked, "What do you think?"
"The style of the acting is much different from that customary in England. The acoustics in your theatre are excellent. Much of the humour is truly mordant."
"But . . . Master Massinger?" Annabelle raised her eyebrows. "I hear 'but' . . ."
"I do not care for the music. That is the truth. Although Tom and Dick like it very well, I find it dissonant. Discordant. Perhaps it is suitable to the message of the piece, though. The play itself is most certainly relevant to the current situation in Franconia. According to the information in regard to the probability of a peasant revolt that we are receiving by way of the newspapers, of course. They certainly comment very freely, compared to the censorship that is imposed in England."
"Censorship?"
"Why, of course." He smiled. "It is a rare man among us actors and playwrights, who has not spent at least some brief time in His Majesty's gaols for something he has written or spoken. It was not, as you say, 'politically correct' of me to write a play in which the protagonist was a Jesuit. One worthy of admiration. It led to accusations that I was a recusant. A decade ago—nay, eleven years ago, now—my play about a slave revolt in the ancient Greek city of Syracuse, although safely situated in antiquity and thus detached from modern politics, was found displeasing by some persons in authority. This . . . who knows? Perhaps I shall pen something inspired by it. Yet another New Way to Pay Old Debts. Perhaps Sir Giles Overreach may have some parallels among the imperial knights." He gestured:
Now, for those other piddling complaints,
Breathed out in bitterness; as, when they call me
Extortioner, tyrant, cormorant, or intruder
On my poor neighbour's right, or grand encloser
Of what was common to my private use ;
Nay, when my ears are pierced with widows' cries,
And undone orphans wash with tears my threshold;
I only think what 'tis to have my daughter
Right honourable ; and 'tis a powerful charm,
Makes me insensible of remorse, or pity,
Or the least sting of conscience.
Annabelle shook her head. "It never occurred to me that Oklahoma! had anything to say about what's going on in Franconia. It's way older than I am. I just thought of it as one of the standard musicals that Amber has put on regularly ever since she started teaching. About every four or five years, depending on whether or not the student body has enough dancers available to carry it. It needs more than something like Guys and Dolls. Maybe that would make an assignment. I'll suggest to her that she could have the kids do essays on the topic."
* * *
"Essays," Amber said. "Essays. Annabelle, you would not believe what Dick Quiney has done."
"After a week of supervising 'rehearsals with Dick,' I'd believe almost anything. But I hope it wasn't caused by the topic I recommended."
"No, no. That went fairly smoothly. But then we moved on to this year's take on Arthur Miller's The Crucible. We always taught that, anyway. It's more relevant than ever, now, since I can tie it right into the theme of connections between up-time and down-time. Going from Kiss Me, Kate! as an up-time version of a down-time play to The Crucible as an up-time take on a down-time historical phenomenon. This year, I got Veronica Junius to come and give them a talk. That ties it even closer to 'real life' for these kids, since she was caught up in one of those persecutions five or six years ago. Before she came to Grantville, anyway. But . . ."
"What did Dick do?"
"See for yourself." Amber pushed several sheets of paper across the table. With the disappearance of staples and paperclips from ordinary life, they had two holes neatly punched in the upper left corners and were tied together with a short piece of string.
"What on earth?" Annabelle started to giggle.
"Yes. Master Massinger assigned Dick to write five pages the same week that I assigned the class to write five pages on witchcraft in Massachusetts. Dick, ever ready to kill two birds with one stone . . ."
"I rather like it. At least, it's the first historical analysis of Arthur Miller in blank verse that I've ever come across. How is it for content?"
"Not bad," Amber admitted. "Really not bad at all. He's a bright kid."
Grantville,
April 1634
Kurt Washaw struck a couple of chords on his guitar, with Michelle following on the piano.
Lass' die Ritter und die Bauer Freunden sein!
Lass' die Ritter unde die Bauer Freunden sein!
Amber Higham laughed. Among the four of them, the Quiney brothers, Zacharias Schaupp, and Dave Thornton had translated several of the songs from Oklahoma! into German—into what amounted to a down-time political cabaret based on the farmers' revolt that was breaking out south of the Thüringerwald . Instead of cowboys and ranchers, now the imperial knights and the peasants were supposed to strike up a friendship. To be friends.
Not patrons and clients. Not lords and serfs. Friends.
Aside from Oklahoma!, she had gained most of her knowledge of the range wars of the O
ld West from a couple of novels. Maybe she ought to look up what had gone on. If she ever had time. She tilted her head toward Master Massinger.
"Have you read any novels by Zane Grey? Or Louis L'Amour? I'm pretty sure that the National Library has nearly complete sets."
* * *
"Mr. Quiney, why do always talk about the middle class as if you don't belong to it?" Oliver Edgerton settled his spectacles on his nose.
Dick, no longer confused by the elderly man's preference to address his pupils with titles of respect ordinarily only directed at adults and social superiors, nevertheless took a moment to think.
"Well, we're not. In one way, maybe. But not in the other one."
"Could you elaborate?"
"Partly, when you talk about the middle class, you mean what this school calls 'economics.' Whether a family has attained a certain prosperity or not." He made a statement, but there was a question in the way his voice rose at the end of the sentence.
Edgerton nodded.
"In that way, probably, we are middle class. Not wealthy, but my grandfather did well and invested his income in property."
"So you are middle class." Dick looked around. There were a couple of boys from the next grade level in this class. That was Romeo Frost, son of the former police chief, who had spoken. Dick wanted to laugh every time he heard the name, but carefully did not. Guests should be courteous to their hosts.
He wasn't sure if he should continue. It could reflect badly on Master Massinger. But he felt a need to explain and it was easier to say these things directly to a fellow student than to say them while he was facing Mr. Edgerton.
"Middle class also means respectable, Romeo. As in 'middle class values,' as our teacher puts it. Players, actors as you call them, are not respectable in England. Not respectable by definition, no matter how well-behaved. And our own family, Tom's and mine, has not been all that well-behaved. I never knew my grandfather. He died a couple of years before I was born. But I do know that even though my mother was born a quite respectable span of time from the wedding date, she was preceded into this world by her sister, who was born a scant half-year after the marriage of my grandparents. I scarcely remember my grandmother. She died when I was not yet six. But from what I recall, I can't imagine why he, uh . . ." Dick paused, looked at Mr. Edgerton and the up-time girls, and quickly substituted another, mildly similar, word for the one that had been in his mind. ". . . uh, bothered her. She was old when I knew her, of course—not that far off three score and ten."