1635:The Dreeson Incident (assiti shards)

by Eric Flint

  She pulled the girl into the living room, turned her head, and waved at the couch. "Sit down, Dorothea, for goodness sake!"

  Dorothea sat.

  Pregnant, Henry thought. Annie sat down that way when she was carrying Margie. Margie sat down that way when she was carrying all three of her kids. A kind of bottom-heavy thump, like her rear end couldn't wait to meet the chair.

  "Hell," he said. "Let me call Jenny Maddox. I'll waive the waiting period for the license and we can take care of it after supper, over at city hall. Run into the kitchen, will you, Annalise, like a good girl, and tell Martha that we're going to have two more at the table, so she can set places. Then come back and explain about civil wedding ceremonies to them." He grabbed his cane and stumped back out into the hall to use the phone again before she could object.

  When he got back into the living room after he'd gotten Jenny to agree to go back to the Bureau of Vital Statistics as soon as she had finished eating and fetch a marriage license, the girl-Dorothea? Yep, Dorothea-had slid off the sofa down onto the floor. She was rolling a ball back and forth with Gretchen's two-year-old Joey. Annalise and the boy-all right, young man, somewhere in his mid-twenties, probably, but he had one of those eternally boyish faces-were talking a mile a minute about civil weddings. He was a Calvinist, not a Lutheran, and Calvin had originally been in favor of having weddings be civil, it seemed, because marriages were legal contracts. It was all right with him.

  Henry looked at Dorothea on the floor. She was Catholic, Annalise had said, but it didn't look like she was the kind to argue with her future husband. After he'd gotten the two of them good and tightly married, Annalise could call someone over at St. Mary's, explain it all, and let them worry about fixing the situation up with the priests. Seemed to him that this was one of those better to beg forgiveness than ask permission situations. If they could fix it up. He wasn't sure what the Catholic church rules were, either up-time or down-time. Jesuits were supposed to be good at figuring the angles, though.

  Dorothea was still rolling the ball with Joey. Will came in from the back yard. He watched a couple of minutes, walked over, and leaned against her shoulder, his blond hair falling against hers. She kept rolling the ball with her left hand and put her right arm around the older boy's waist.

  Family. Annalise's cousin, so Gretchen's cousin, too. Knew how to deal with kids.

  "I'd like to invite the pair of you to stay with us, here at the house," Henry said. "Not for just a few days, but until Nicholas here finds a job and the two of you have a chance to look around and get settled permanently. No hurry about that. You're welcome to stay as long as you like. It's a big old house. We've got plenty of room."

  Laurent Mauger climbed down from the wagon. The driver had set out the set of portable folding steps he took along when he traveled, so he managed it with considerable dignity. He stretched his legs, crooked a finger at the porter outside the Higgins Hotel, and walked in.

  It was such a wonderful world in which a man's dutiful service to the Huguenot cause had the side effect of allowing him to stay in the Higgins Hotel in Grantville on quite legitimate business, which he could expense to the company.

  Quite legitimate business. He was a wine merchant. While the local wines grown around Jena weren't bad, and the Franconian wines were really superb if one liked a dry white, there was a lot of money in Grantville now. Some of that money belonged to people who were convinced that Rhine wines, Moselle wines, sometimes even Italian red wines, but above all French wines, were better. Or, if not better, at least more impressive when a man served them to his dinner guests.

  Down-timer money, mostly, when it came to wine marketing. Most of the up-timers preferred beer. The men, at least.

  Money to be made. That was how he had come to know Isaac de Ron in Frankfurt. Money to be made quite honestly, along with the thrill of doing something a little devious, perhaps, for his fellow religionists. And a town with a class structure so peculiar that nobody thought it odd to see a wine merchant talking to a garbage collector as long as they had made it known to anyone who cared to listen that they shared a common church affiliation.

  He huffed his way up the steps. In deference to the local creek's tendency to flood, the ground floor of the Higgins Hotel was devoted to service area. The splendid reception room was on the first floor, some distance above the street.

  All this, and a hot tub, too.

  Mauger felt no obligation to identify "my contact" as the host of Zum Weissen Schwan in Frankfurt. Then his own mouth betrayed him by speaking the name. "De Ron." Merde! Conspiracy wasn't as easy as it might be. He might as well keep going, now that Dumais knew who the intermediary was.

  Paranoia. What a wonderful word. A wonderful thing, too. It made the life of a field agent so much simpler. Jacques-Pierre Dumais stretched out on his pallet, propped his feet up on his trunk, and started a mental diagram. It didn't look quite like a spider web. More like two webs, blown together by a strong wind, not meshing, but intersecting in certain areas.

  Henri de Rohan, the duke, in the center of one. For whom Isaac de Ron in Frankfurt worked and for whom Jacques-Pierre worked himself. Not via de Ron, but directly. Two different threads. However, he had, in that trunk right under his feet, well hidden in a secret compartment, authorization letters that would permit him to call upon de Ron if he should need him.

  Ducos, the madman, in the center of the other. Well, Ducos and Delerue both. Dumais counted down on his fingers. For whom Guillaume Locquifier worked. For whom in turn de Ron worked, or at least pretended to. For whom Laurent Mauger worked-at least he worked for "de Ron in his guise as Locquifier's man" but not for "de Ron in his guise as Rohan's agent." For whom Jacques-Pierre Dumais worked. Or pretended to.

  Their own rampant and paranoid security had broken a link in the chain that would have enabled Ducos' men to make the critical connections. With any luck at all, Locquifier would never learn that Jacques-Pierre was Laurent Mauger's Grantville informant. So neither Locquifier in Frankfurt nor Ducos nor Delerue, wherever they might be by now, would have a chance to connect one Jacques-Pierre Dumais, a garbage collector, with the Jacques-Pierre Dumais who was otherwise known to them as one of Henri de Rohan's footmen.

  One hoped, at least, that the link was well and completely broken. It would be unfortunate if Ducos found out. Potentially quite dangerous, also. Ducos and his fanatics were a murderous lot.

  Ducos might find out, of course. It was not beyond the realm of the possibly that he would. Ah, well. C'est la vie!

  PART TWO

  September 1634

  Under amazement of their hideous change

  Chapter 6

  Grantville

  Ed Piazza looked at the packet of papers that Martin Wackernagel had just dropped directly into his hands.

  Wes Jenkins was very conscientious. He hadn't sent them by SoTF government mail. Like Henry Dreeson, he thought of this project as a "politicking trip," Ed supposed.

  And he wouldn't have wanted to put them in the mail. That was probably prudent. The mail was a great thing for inquiring after the health of your great-aunt Gladys, but the fact remained that under the postmastership of Johan van den Birghden, the USE postal system was not exactly impermeable to snooping. Any more than the imperial system under the Thurn und Taxis family was impermeable to snooping.

  So Wes had paid a private courier, like almost everybody else who wanted to be as sure as possible that confidential or sensitive information got from here to there without an intermediate detour into the hands of someone else's spies.

  "He paid you at the other end?"

  Wackernagel nodded and smiled.

  Ed thought that he'd never let that smile anywhere near his daughter. How the man had managed to remain a bachelor this long, in a world that didn't have effective contraceptives and did have shotgun weddings…

  Ed might be as straight as a stick himself, but that didn't mean he couldn't recognize a guy with the masculine equivalent of c
ome hither when he saw one.

  The courier waved and walked out the door. Ed waved absentmindedly in return.

  Now all they had to do was talk Henry into going on a tour of Buchenland and coax it into a solidly pro-Fourth of July Party stance before Mike called new elections. Which they should be able to do. The news had arrived a couple of days ago that Mary and Veronica had reached Basel and were safely in the USE embassy with Diane Jackson.

  Plus, the word from Franconia was that the Ram Rebellion had pretty much wound to its end with the face-down of Freiherr von Bimbach by Anita Masaniello.

  Which left the problem that some group of unknown recalcitrants had kidnaped more than half of the SoTF administrators in Fulda, including Wes Jenkins himself.

  Which was where Henry would be going.

  Wes must have sent the paperwork before they got him.

  Ed got up and walked over to the window.

  Nothing he could do about Wes and the others from here. Anyway, the folks over in Fulda had already managed to get Harlan Stull and Roy Copenhaver back. They'd radioed that in yesterday. Plus Fred Pence and Johnny Furbee. That had come in this morning, barely in time for him to get a news release out.

  Ed would have to work on faith that they'd do as well with Orville and Mark. And Wes and Clara. And the abbot. He'd spent a lot of time these last few years doing that-working on the faith that the people he'd sent out to do an impossible job would accomplish it.

  If Derek Utt and his people didn't find the others. Well, then Buchenland would need something like a visit from Henry Dreeson more than ever.

  He picked up the phone. "Chad, can you get hold of Joe, Tony, and the rest of the crew? See if we can meet with Henry for lunch? Somewhere quiet, so not the Gardens. Not Cora's. See if the back room at Tyler's is free."

  "Basel's better than 'somewhere in Bavaria,' " Henry admitted. "But it's still not exactly 'right here in Grantville.' "

  Arnold Bellamy, who was twirling his knife in his fingers, said, "You're weakening."

  "I've talked to Tony Jr.," Tony Sr. said. "Well, we've sent a lot of Morse Code back and forth since he first raised up Bernadette and told her that the ladies were there."

  "Not a little bit proud of that boy of yours, are you?" Joe Stull grinned.

  "Not a 'little bit,' no," Tony answered agreeably. "He's pretty sure we'll be able to get them out of Basel. So I figure," he looked at Henry, "that we might as well go ahead and do the planning for your trip. Then, when we get the actual news that Horn or somebody else on our side has collected them, you'll be ready to go ahead and start out."

  Henry pushed his plate back and leaned forward, elbows on the table and fingers steepled. "I've still got that house full of kids to deal with. Jeff and Gretchen are still in Amsterdam and I don't mind saying that I'm getting sort of exasperated by the whole thing. Not that Will and Joey and the older ones aren't pretty well behaved as kids go, but they're her job. Not mine. Not Annalise's. And really not Ronnie's." He leaned back. "Now that I've gotten that off my chest.. ."

  "How're you going to handle it?"

  "Well, with Ronnie's niece staying with us now, it's a different kettle of fish than it was a couple of months ago. Thea and Nicol are grown-ups. In their twenties and married and expecting a baby. So they can house sit. Babysit. Plus, I've talked to Enoch and Inez. They've agreed to supervise. Sort of at a distance, with Nicol and Thea on the spot. Since the Cavriani girl staying with them is Annalise's best friend, they'll have plenty of excuses to drop by and sort of cast an eye over the way things are going."

  Arnold started twirling his knife in the opposite direction. "Knew you were going, didn't you?"

  "Yep." Henry nodded. "Even before I admitted it to myself, I guess. Haven't done any traveling since the Ring of Fire-never been farther than Jena-and it's sort of a pity to waste what amounts to my first and only trip to Europe, I suppose. I'd better go see something outside West Virginia County and the middle of Thuringia before this hip gives out, if I want to see it at all."

  ***

  "Good news about Orville Beattie and Mark Early."

  Ed smiled broadly. "I really enjoyed that phone call I made to Lisa this morning. And I have to admit that I stood right there while Tanya radioed it into Mike Stearns' office in Magdeburg, pretending that I could hear Susan stand up and shout. I was principal when Mark and Susan graduated. Three years apart, but my stint covered them both. And all three of Orville and Lisa's kids. Shane-he's the youngest-was finishing his sophomore year the spring that the Ring of Fire hit and I had to turn things over to Len Trout."

  He paused a minute.

  Arnold raised an imaginary glass. "Absent friends."

  Ed nodded. "So, yeah, it felt real good." He looked at Arnold. "Real, real, good. Thanks for coming down from Magdeburg to back me up on handling this. Did Tanya get the press release out?"

  "First thing. And I phoned Henry. Any word about Wes and Clara? Or the abbot?"

  Ed shook his head. "No. Well, not yet."

  "Do you think we really ought to let Henry go if things don't calm down over there in the next couple of days? The people who did this-some of them, at least-could still be in Buchenland County. Could make another try. The mayor of Grantville would make a tempting target."

  "Right now, I don't think we could stop him. He's gone into his old-fashioned stump speaker mode. Even…"

  "Even what?"

  "Tried to talk young Muselius from over at Countess Kate's into going along to translate for him. Henry's not one to overestimate the quality of his German. Muselius can't go. The beginning of the school year is too busy. But he's persuaded one of Kastenmayer's sons, Cunz, the one who's about to finish up his law degree at the University of Jena, into doing it. Muselius also talked the boy's exam committee into accepting a paper analyzing the trip as his honors thesis in constitutional law under Arumaeus, so he won't have wasted a semester."

  Bellamy shook his head. "I'm not surprised. I've met Muselius, several times. Golden-tongued, that young man."

  "Is young Kastenmayer?"

  "What?"

  "Golden-tongued?"

  "The boy knows a half-dozen different languages, they say. That wouldn't mean he's a good public speaker, necessarily. But going into law, with his dad a preacher… he might be. The way they do the schools here, he's at least bound to have had a lot of debate practice. Disputations, they call them."

  Ed nodded. "If so, he can double up as the PR man. Run the press conferences."

  Johann Conrad Kastenmayer, generally known as Cunz for all purposes other than his formal, legal, signature, was surprised that he had been invited to this meeting.

  He had met Charles Jenkins the Younger, of course. He was the one who was always called Chip, much as he himself was called Cunz. Chip was also a law student at Jena. The law school was not really very large. All the students knew one another.

  Now he was in Chip's father's parlor, with Chip's sister holding out a tray and offering him a choice between coffee, hot chocolate, tea, and beer. He thought a moment. She was named Melissa, like the famous Ms. Mailey, but everyone seemed to call her Missy.

  Really, he would prefer beer. Probably.

  However, he had never tasted oriental tea and might not get another chance to taste it for quite some time. It was very expensive. The Kastenmayer household in the rectory at St. Martin's in the Fields could not afford to do expensive, as the up-timer young people expressed it. Neither could the Kastenmayer sons in Jena afford to do expensive. So, in the interest of furthering his liberal education.. . He reached out and took a cup of tea.

  In some ways, visiting Grantville was almost like taking a miniature grand tour. Which he would also never be able to afford to do, he supposed. As soon as he got his degree, he would have to find a job-take some of the burden off his father and start making a positive contribution. It was noble of his oldest brother Matthaeus to follow a vocation into the pastorate like their father. But it didn't pay very much. M
artin's position as an assistant city clerk didn't pay much more. And with Andrea's elopement, which meant that this year the parish was going to have to pay for a second teacher in the primary grades, there was no prospect that Papa was going to get a raise. But this… Visiting Erfurt and Frankfurt didn't precisely constitute a grand tour, but maybe a mini-tour. They were larger cities than he'd ever seen before.

  One thing you could say for going into law, it usually paid pretty well. Cunz pulled his mind back to the conversation swirling around him. Only to discover that someone was asking him what he thought about it. Which was certainly not something for which he had prepared himself. It was much more surprising than his being invited in the first place.

  What was the it about which he had been asked?

  He uttered a few reasonably coherent sentences on the theme that Mayor Dreeson's trip to Buchenland should have great value in making the former Franconian territories feel themselves more of an integral part of the State of Thuringia-Franconia. He added a few comments in regard to the outcome of the Ram Rebellion. He prayed that he hadn't made a total fool of himself.

  Apparently not. The man who had asked, Herr Stull, nodded and turned to someone else, who said, "He'll do."

  Missy Jenkins, who had astonished him by sitting down between himself and her father as soon as she had distributed the beverages, leaned over and whispered, "Good save."

  He made a resolution to be attentive at all times for the remainder of this tour.

  "There's no reason at all to make that big a deal out of it." Henry Dreeson, being a small town American at heart, with the resulting conviction that he really didn't need any such thing as a bodyguard, or whatever the military types wanted to call it, was taking a stand. "I don't need a fancy escort to make the trip over to Fulda. All I'm going to do is talk to a few city councils about my experiences in local government and then meet Ronnie. The government of West Virginia County has agreed to loan me an ATV and they'll provide enough fuel to get me there and back, as long as the party's willing to reimburse them for the expense. I'll need to find a driver. My hip's not up to driving any distance on these down-time roads. I won't get lost, either. For one thing, we'll be sticking to the main roads. In case we have to detour, I'm going to take Wackernagel, the courier, along with me in the ATV. He makes the circuit all the time, so he knows the roads well, and I'm pretty sure that he'll have a hoot riding in a car rather than riding a horse for a change." He smiled at everyone else in the room. "Why, Wackernagel might even enjoy learning to drive."