by Eric Flint
"Thanks. Thanks a lot, really. But I don't know how much I'll get out of reading it. I'm not a soldier, Your Grace. I'm not planning to be one. I'm… an embryonic businessman, perhaps."
"Ah, that interests me. Scarcely the thing that a French merchant would say to a representative of the ancient nobility. They all make at least some pretense to gentility, no matter how transparent that pretense may be."
Ron swallowed again. "I really do believe in what Thomas Jefferson wrote, Your Grace. Maybe I'm not as sophisticated about it as someone like Ms. Mailey. But…"
"Ah, yes. Your 'Declaration of Independence… that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator…' The grounds it adduced to justify the American Revolution made fascinating reading, given how many years my brother and I were in armed revolt against our duly constituted monarch. I thoroughly enjoyed the biography of George Washington that Leopold Cavriani sent me, as well. It is in a way humbling to think that a mere member of the rural gentry was so much more successful than my brother and I. Or, indeed, that some few years from now in England, Cromwell, of much the same class in society, would also succeed far better than we did. Such events serve to remind us that all outcomes are in the hand of God."
"Oh." Ron had a feeling he was running out of acceptable things to say to a French duke. Even an exiled ex-revolutionary Protestant French duke.
Rohan turned to a small chest on the floor next to his chair. He opened it and drew out a sheaf of papers tied with red tape. "If not the Parfait Capitaine, then perhaps this would interest you more. I finished it this spring. The manuscript is at the printer's now. This is an extra copy completed by my secretary. It contains many of my thoughts in regard to the administration of Cardinal Richelieu."
"I… well… do you have much in common?"
"A surprising amount. He and I both agree that the public interest, the raison d'etat, must always be the ruling force in government affairs. Our differences are more a matter of how we interpret what the public interest is. But still. A ruler may deceive himself. His advisers may become corrupt. Even men of good will may misunderstand what the public interest is. But that interest itself, whether it is understood well or badly, can never be at fault. And the king, in the long run, in the last resort, remains responsible for his own actions, and those of his subordinates, before God. If he chooses his delegates poorly or does not supervise them thoroughly…"
Ron's next, panicked, thought was, no nobleman is going to speak this kind of treason to a foreign kid unless the kid's next scheduled stop is having his head chopped off. Then he pulled himself together. Rohan had already said he was having the book printed. So he must be willing to stand behind it, unless…
And he and his brother had fought against Louis XIII at least as long as Washington had fought against George III. "Are you having this printed under your own name, Your Grace?"
Rohan smiled again. "Ah, then you are not politically insensitive. Yes. Under my own name. But in Geneva, not in France. Most certainly not in Paris."
Ron nodded.
"You will not find it surprising, perhaps, that as a Protestant I believe that France's public interest lies in opposition to the Spanish monarchy. You probably, if you have thought of it, find it more surprising that Richelieu has allied with the Protestant English and Danes in the League of Ostend. However, the interests of France remain the interests of France. Note which navy bore the brunt of the Battle of Dunkirk. At this point, an equilibrium in Europe can only be to France's advantage. The recent change in the balance of power among the various branches of the Habsburg dynasty, especially the developments in the Netherlands…"
"Did you come to bed at all, last night?" Gerry asked.
"Yeah, but it must have been two or three o'clock in the morning."
Joachim Sandrart looked at him questioningly.
"The duke was in a talkative mood."
Chapter 3
Grantville
State of Thuringia-Franconia
Henry Dreeson, Grantville's mayor, stood on the sidewalk outside City Hall leaning heavily on his cane, watching the garbage collection wagon rumble by on its iron-rimmed wheels. Yesterday's parade had generated even more trash than usual. People had been in a pretty exuberant mood because of the final peace settlement reached with the Spanish in the Netherlands. Especially coming on top of the thorough trashing that the USE had given the League of Ostend still earlier in the year.
The marching band had stepped out to "Hey, Look Me Over." Henry liked that song. Peppy. There'd been a couple of down-time tunes then, that Marcus Wendell had worked over to make them marchable, so to speak. Finished up with "High Hopes." He liked that one, too. They'd stopped still and stepped in place to play the SoTF anthem. Marching along to "Jerusalem, Du Hochgebaute Stadt" would take a miracle as big as the Ring itself. Not that the "Star Spangled Banner" had been any better, when it came to rhythm. Not if they sang it right and didn't mangle it.
The Jerusalem song fit in well enough with American history, though, Mary Kat Riddle said. Something about a city on a hill. Henry looked around. "Down in the Valley" would make more sense for Grantville.
Not Riddle now. Well, probably still Riddle. Mary Kat had gotten married last winter, to Lisa Dailey's brother, but girls were mostly keeping their maiden names these days, just like the down-time women did. What was Mary Kat's husband's name? Utt. Derek Utt. He was over at Fulda.
There had been a float made to look like one of the ironclads. One with Benny Pierce fiddling and Minnie Hugelmair singing. They'd labeled another one "Narnia," with costumed characters from the books and a girl representing Princess Kristina. The folks at St. Mary's were so dizzy with joy over Larry Mazzare's being made a cardinal that they'd managed to build a float that looked like a big red hat. It had been the biggest parade since the Ring of Fire.
He wondered if the folks at St. Mary's-the up-timers, at least-would still be feeling so joyful once they realized that Larry's new honor meant that he likely wouldn't be coming back from Italy to be their parish priest again. He'd be going to Magdeburg. Ed Piazza had pointed that out to Henry. It would be one more upset to smooth over. Sometimes it seemed like every success they had brought along its own set of new problems and the changes never stopped.
Henry glanced back, up at the door he had just come through. Sometimes it seemed like every time he had to go up and down these steps, it took a little more out of him than it had the time before. He prayed that his wife Ronnie, wherever she was, was safe. He wished really hard that Ronnie would come home pretty soon. Sometimes, he admitted to himself, he wished even harder that she had never gone off on this trip with Mary Simpson. They'd have been able to get by without her first husband's money, whatever was left of it.
If, of course, there had not been the problem of college tuition for Annalise. He'd said to Enoch Wiley more than once that Ronnie had piled too much on Annalise's shoulders this summer, between trying to manage Gretchen's orphan collection, some of them nearly as old as she was herself, and running the St. Veronica's Academy schools. She was barely seventeen. Idelette Cavriani, the Genevan girl staying with the Wileys, was the same age and had agreed to help her, but Henry was not certain that two heads were better than one when each of the heads was seventeen years old. The theory seemed to be that adding a Calvinist to be Annalise's assistant, even with the bookkeeping part, would prevent people from seeing the academies as Catholic parochial schools.
A thought that made Enoch rather grumpy. Enoch did not approve of the ecumenical movement. He was quite as sure that the pope was the anti-Christ as any seventeenth-century Scots Presbyterian in Grantville. But Henry had married a Catholic-sort of a Catholic, so to speak. Ronnie and Inez had become friends, which had led to Annalise and Idelette becoming friends. So Enoch made the best of it.
Gretchen made Henry feel a bit grumpy himself. She ought to come back, too. Generously adopting a crew of orphans during the stress of war was one thing. Life-affirming, he guessed
his daughter Margie would have said back before the Ring of Fire. What had Melissa Mailey called her? A chooser of the living.
Well, Gretchen had chosen those kids. Much as he hated to say it, choosing to stay home and bring them up appeared to be something else again. First, she got involved with those Committees of Correspondence. Then, off she went to Paris and Amsterdam. Sure, the kids were better off at his house than they would have been in a mercenary army. They were clean, dry, and well fed. They were going to school.
But he had to work, Annalise had to go to school herself and work, Gretchen and Jeff had been gone for over a year, and now Ronnie was away. He didn't see that they were getting much parenting staying home with a housekeeper and the cook. He'd said so to Enoch.
"Parenting" had been one of Margie's words, too. Some days he missed Margie and her kids more than others. This was one of them.
Stress, Enoch called it. He'd learned that word from Henny De Vries, the Dutch nurse. Back before the Ring of Fire, she'd specialized in nut cases. It was one of her words.
When Denise's father, Buster Beasley, caught Minnie and Denise starting to teach Missy Jenkins and Pam Hardesty to ride the hogs-not that catching them was hard, since they made no attempt to hide the project and started the experiment by having their pupils ride around the rental storage units on Buster's lot on the little dirt bikes-he announced that anything worth doing was worth doing well, intervened, and took over the instruction. But he made sure to tell the girls that they had been doing a good job considering their own level of experience, and they should assist him so that eventually they would be fully capable of teaching others.
Considering that Missy and Pam didn't have cycles of their own and only had time to come out to the lot two or three times a week, he told Denise, they were making pretty good progress. Though neither of them would ever be the kind of pip she was.
Father and daughter smiled at one another in close harmony.
Pam Hardesty looked up from her perch on a high three-legged school. Since she had taken this job, the sign over her head had been changed from "National Library of the New United States" to "State Library of Thuringia-Franconia."
It was the same library, of course, in the same part of the high school building. But when their little "nation" confederated with the CPE had become one more province in the United States of Europe last winter, the congress had prudently demoted the library's title, just in case the word "national" might give the USE's ruler, who was something of a cultural imperialist, the idea of removing it to Magdeburg. Or even Stockholm.
Gustavus Adolphus had removed quite a few books to Stockholm during the years he had been campaigning in Germany. And a couple of whole libraries, like the one in Wurzburg. As the boss, Elaine Bolender, had said in her recommendation to the SoTF congress, it paid to be careful when you were dealing with that man. Not quite in those words, of course.
Pam had started at the library as a page, in the spring of 1633. Before that, she'd been an ESOL aide at the middle school. She had kept on ESOL-aideing in her spare time, of course. They always needed people and when a girl was entirely on her own it was sometimes hard to make ends meet.
This fall, she was starting training to manage the circulation desk some day. She'd already "interned" here at the state library, at the public library, and at the high school. With a week or so each at the elementary school and the middle school, to give her a "taste" of librarianship at that level, Elaine Bolender had said. Then Elaine had given her a choice between specializing in circulation and training for reference. Well, and staying a page, of course, which was what she'd been doing before. She'd picked the desk. She liked meeting all the new people who came in and seeing who was interested in what better than she did wandering through the closed stacks looking things up.
She grinned at Missy Jenkins.
Missy, now, she was the reverse. She liked looking things up, even though she was a few years younger, eighteen to Pam's twenty-one. Pam had been the same class as her older brother Chip, not with Missy.
When Missy graduated from high school on the accelerated schedule they'd set up after the Ring of Fire for the kids who could hack it, of course her mom had stuck her right into teacher training and ESOL-aideing at the middle school. With no universities or colleges that took girls and Missy definitely not wanting to be a nurse, Debbie Jenkins had regarded teaching school as the only game in town.
This year, a couple of new games were starting to be developed out of town, if you looked at it that way. A women's college in Quedlinburg that would open this fall; the Roths' co-ed university way over in Prague that was getting organized.
That was this year. Missy had graduated in August a year ago. Pam suspected that with Chip in Jena, her folks wouldn't have been thrilled to have her go off to school somewhere else anyway. Her dad kept trying to get her interested in his businesses, and she did quite a bit of office work for him, but she seemed to shy away from getting really involved with it. She'd never said why, at least not to Pam.
Then, the middle of Missy's first year in the teacher training program, her mom took over running it. Missy had groaned dramatically.
Pam thought, a little wistfully, that it might be nice to have a mom who ran a teacher training program. Instead of… Velma.
Maybe it looked different from Missy's perspective. The end of the year, last spring, Missy had transferred out of teacher training and ESOL-aideing, over here to the state library.
She was training to be an information librarian. What they used to call a reference librarian, Pam suspected.
Anyway, Missy had turned out to be a good friend.
Chapter 4
Grantville
State of Thuringia-Franconia
Jacques-Pierre Dumais did not care for garbage, as such. However, the Garbage Guys did not merely collect Grantville's garbage. Even this long after the Ring of Fire, a fair number of people still tossed out things for which other people might have some conceivable use, not even going to the trouble of taking them to the recycling center themselves. So the people who worked for Garbage Guys separated the trash themselves, as soon as possible after collecting it, in order to find as many items as possible that they could resell for a profit. Very little of Grantville's garbage was sent to the incinerator.
Objectively, Jacques-Pierre did not find the collection of garbage to be a desirable task. The separation of garbage, however, he found to be very helpful to his goals.
He had heard someone describe a device called a paper shredder. That invention was enough to make a man shudder. It was most fortunate that few of the Grantvillers had owned such a thing at the time of the Ring of Fire. It was too bad that one of them had been owned by the Kellys, the would-be aircraft manufacturers, who still used it and thus made it unnecessarily difficult for Jacques-Pierre to access information about their technology.
But a spy could scarcely hope for life to be full of free gifts, after all.
Like almost every other French Huguenot descended from members of the diaspora that had spread across Europe during the Wars of Religion of the preceding century, Jacques-Pierre had found the widely circulated accounts of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes that had occurred-
– or would have occurred, or will occur-
– some verb tense, in any case-
– in the year 1685 fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. As, of course, did Duke Henri de Rohan.
It turned out, according to the American history books, that the Edict of Nantes issued in the year 1598 by the French king Henry IV, which established many religious and civil freedoms for France's Protestants, would be revoked less than a century later by the still-unborn Louis XIV, son of the currently reigning French monarch, Louis XIII. That would happen in October of 1685, a half century in the future. Thereafter, almost all of France's Protestants-usually called Huguenots-emigrated from the country.
So when Laurent Mauger, from a Huguenot family but now a merchant in Haarlem, had appro
ached Jacques-Pierre about the possibility of going to Grantville to gather further information that could be used to benefit the Protestant cause in France, he had agreed with only the most perfunctory raising of difficulties. Only enough difficulties to improve the remuneration that Mauger first offered. Not to have done so would have raised Mauger's suspicions immediately.
After the two of them had reached an agreement, of course, Jacques-Pierre immediately notified Duke Henri. The duke was Jacques-Pierre's real employer and he knew that Rohan had already, for some time, been seriously concerned about what some of the Huguenot extremists might do. In which, God only knew, he was justified, considering the information that had come from Venice during the spring in regard to the activities of Michel Ducos and his gang of fanatics. Not to mention the news that had come from the duke's Venetian contacts in Rome last month. That it was Ducos who had attempted to assassinate the pope.
Duke Henri de Rohan did not care for assassinations. Or assassins. His father-in-law had been a close friend as well as a counselor of the late, most unfortunately assassinated, King Henri IV of France. Sully had been one of those who had advised the Huguenot Henri de Navarre that Paris was worth a mass, thus possibly contributing to the circumstances that had led the madman to storm the royal carriage with his knife. It bore on his conscience.
Although he had so advised his friend, Sully had never brought himself to make such a… transition… in the practice of his faith. At the king's wish, he had married his daughter to Rohan who, himself, like his mother, his brother, his wife, and his father-in-law, remained a Calvinist.
This time, perhaps, history would be different. At the parade, everyone in Grantville had been celebrating the overwhelming defeat of the forces of the League of Ostend. Jacques-Pierre smirked. Most of them didn't bother to think that they were celebrating the overwhelming defeat of the French regiments under the command of that idiot de Valois, with only the Huguenot Turenne coming out of the campaign with any glory at all. That would do a lot to undermine the position of Richelieu. Richelieu, the villain who had so strengthened the French crown at the expense of the Estates that in another half-century a French king had been able to revoke the Edict of Nantes.