1635:The Dreeson Incident (assiti shards)

by Eric Flint

  If she hadn't phoned him, he would still be alive. Taking care of his Princess Baby.

  From now on, she would be taking care of herself, forever and ever and ever.

  Dealing with the boys at school, without the threat of Buster Beasley in the background. She might have to change the way she handled them. Mom wasn't… quite the same thing as Daddy.

  She wasn't really too worried about that, though. Daddy had made sure that she could take care of herself.

  Was this speech of Jenny's going to go on forever? After that, there was going to be music, because Johnnie Ray thought there ought to be. Even though Daddy would rather have been put out in a garbage bag.

  "Let Benny pick," Johnnie Ray had said. "We've known each other all our lives. Old men. Way older than Henry and Enoch. Let Benny decide what's right."

  Benny Pierce was sitting on the theater's little stage. Jenny had brought him a chair. Minnie stood by his side. She had a fiddle of her own, now, but she held it loosely by her side, waiting for him to play. Once he started, her voice joined in:

  'Tis a gift to be simple,

  'Tis a gift to be free,

  'Tis a gift to come down,

  Where we want to be.

  That wasn't one of Benny's songs. Benny hadn't picked that. Minnie had! Minnie knew that she was a sucker for that song. How dared Minnie pick that? How dared she?

  Denise hadn't intended to waste any of her energy crying. She could hear his voice now. "Don't get mad; get even."

  Don't worry, Daddy, I plan to. Minnie saw the guy who started it. Killing the mayor and the preacher, I mean. The reason I had to call you. Don't worry, Daddy. I'm your Princess Baby. I'm your pip. Minnie saw him. We'll take care of it. Starting as soon as possible.

  "Don't get mad; get even." Denise ignored her tears. But Daddy had never said anything about "Don't get sad," now that she thought about it. Maybe he wouldn't have minded. It had never come up.

  Gerry Stone, who had walked all the way from Rudolstadt, loaned her a clean handkerchief. Then another. He had remembered to put a half dozen in his pocket that morning, he had said before the service. She had wondered why.

  Minnie's voice went on.

  After Jenny's people had removed the casket, Christin thanked everybody for coming. Especially Ronnie and Inez, considering the circumstances, and that the ambulance had to bring Inez downtown again.

  There wasn't going to be a graveside service. Christin had told Jenny to take care of the rest of it without any fuss.

  It had been a considerable shock to Christin's parents, Mike and Amina George, when they read the obituaries and biographies, to find out that she and Buster actually were married and had been for years.

  They showed up at the memorial service. They waited in the lobby afterwards.

  Christin was in no mood for a reconciliation. "If you weren't willing to accept me with Buster when you thought he was a live bum, you don't have any business trying to claim some of the reflected glory now that he's a dead hero."

  "Mom," Denise said.

  "Plus the first thing you'll say is that if I need to, I can bring the kid home and you'll support me. I know the business as well as Buster did and can damn well keep on running it myself. I don't need you, or anybody else."

  She hadn't fought it, though, when Benny, with Louise and Doreen, and Minnie, had taken Denise over to meet her grandparents. Christin herself refused to have anything to do with it, but she hadn't fought it.

  Benny introduced Denise to her grandparents, her aunt, and her aunt's husband Bob Atkins. She vaguely recognized her cousin Amina from seeing her at school, but she hadn't known that they were cousins. Amina was almost two years older and separated by three grades. She nodded at her cousin George Atkins, who was older.

  It was all pretty stiff. It was unsatisfactory for everyone.

  She didn't offer to shake hands. Both of her hands were hanging onto Gerry's elbow. Then she went back to Mom, who asked Minnie to please ride her cycle home, because she wasn't sure she could handle it safely right now.

  Christin was perfectly calm. West Virginia women were not given to wailing in public.

  "Do you need a lift?" Louise asked her.

  "We'll be all right," Denise answered. "I have my cycle here. I'll take Mom home in the sidecar. But if you like, you could follow us and pick up Minnie after she drops Gerry off at Lothlorien and garages Mom's, so I don't have to bring her back to town. I'd-well, I'd really thank you for that."

  The general Grantville reaction was of two minds. The ones who thought that Mike and Amina had meant well and that Christin's way of looking at it was a little bit skewed. The ones who thought that Christin had hit it right on the nose. Either way, it was pretty clear that she wasn't going to change her mind.

  There wasn't a lot of "give" in Christin George.

  Most people agreed that Denise had quite a bit of her mother in her, and not just the good looks, either. That was the consensus at Cora's, anyway.

  Chapter 51

  Erfurt, March 1635

  Mathurin Brillard always enjoyed his morning paper.

  This morning's was truly fascinating. Being a stranger to Grantville, he had not realized at the time that he had not merely assassinated the mayor of Grantville, precisely as Locquifier had told him to do, and the Calvinist minister, more or less as a bonus, but that it was significant that he had fired those two shots in the general direction of a dozen or so middle-aged to elderly ladies standing next to a rolling cart and on the steps of the synagogue. Given his marksmanship, the women really hadn't been in any danger. But he realized now that the residents of Grantville didn't know that, so their fury was all the greater than if he'd simply shot the two men.

  The group of women included…

  In addition to the Calvinist minister's wife: Annabelle Graham, the wife of the SoTF president, Ed Piazza; Eleanor Jenkins, who was now the SoTF Red Cross president, and her daughter-in-law Deborah, who was wife of the increasingly prominent industrialist Charles Jenkins who had just won election as West Virginia County's senator to the SoTF congress. It appeared that Jenkins' wife also ran the town's teacher training program and was the daughter of Willie Ray Hudson, well known as the first president of the Grange movement. Not to mention Veleda Riddle, the mother of the chief justice of the SoTF Supreme Court, who was also the president of the SoTF League of Women Voters and reorganizer of Grantville's Episcopalian Church; her daughter-in-law Kathryn, wife of the chief justice of the SoTF Supreme Court; Mary Jo Kindred, the wife of Grantville's senior newspaper publisher; Claudette, the wife of the Reverend Al Green of the First Baptist Church, and Linda Bartolli, organist at St. Mary Magdelene Catholic Church.

  That was the purely factual information he gleaned from the most staid of the newspapers. The more gossipy added additional information, such as that Mrs. Bartolli had gone to early mass specifically in order to have time to attend the Red Cross meeting. And that Veleda Riddle, in the opinion of Frau Veda Mae Haggerty, was there because she was not about to let Eleanor Jenkins run anything without keeping her nose in the tent to make sure what was going on.

  Brillard reflected as he ate his morning bread.

  The Grantville powers-that-be were very angry. It was entirely possible that shooting the two men while they were near the women had been a mistake in judgment. Possibly he should have waited until the men moved somewhere else. But that was water over the dam. At the time, he had no way of knowing who the women were.

  He paid his bill and started north on the trade route. Still walking.

  Grantville

  Press Richards looked like he hadn't slept for two days. For good reason. "I don't know where our training went wrong," he said. Again.

  "Stop agonizing," Chad Jenkins advised him. "We're going to have to make the up-timers come to terms with the fact that for the town's new citizens, 'restrained response' to civil unrest is a relative term. Which most of them are doing. Yeah, Maurer shot first, out at the hospital.
There aren't a half-dozen people in town who have complained. Just because a couple of bleeding heart liberals like Linda Jane Colburn and Rachel Hill have big mouths, it doesn't mean there's some kind of a 'groundswell of opinion.' Not even Gerry and Tami Simmons are making a fuss. Forget it. Or call Dan Frost, talk to him for a while, and then forget it."

  "Not to mention," Arnold Bellamy added, "that Maurer is dead. So's Bill Magen, who was the only person in the line who was talking to him right before it happened. Which means that there's not going to be any long-drawn-out investigation, agonizing about his motivation. That always helps. Least said, soonest mended."

  The Grantville police kept on doing police-like things. Investigating. Arresting. Questioning. Putting people in jail. And, since this more than strained the capacity of Grantville's rather small jail, putting people other places where they could be watched.

  "What I really wonder," Pam Hardesty said, "is where they ever got those slogans against vaccination. The ones that were on the placards at the hospital demonstration. The placards that they were hauling out of Veda Mae's garage. There's got to be some kind of a connection."

  "I'll check through the reference materials and see what I can find out," Missy said. "But I sure don't remember that we have anything like it in the state library."

  "Whereas I," Pam said, "will have another little heart-to-heart chat with Veda Mae."

  "Hey. You volunteered. You don't like to look things up, remember? You're a people person. That's why you picked circulation instead of reference. Think of Veda Mae as a people. Well, as a person."

  "That's a damned hard thing to do."

  A couple of days later, they had the data. They gave it to Cory Joe who, on behalf of Don Francisco, filed off the serial numbers and gave it to Preston Richards. Who, in turn, sent Marvin Tipton to talk to John Daoud, the chiropractor, who fingered Jacques-Pierre Dumais as the only person he recalled who had come to him seeking information on the topic.

  "I really wish," Preston Richards said, "that I knew how you do it."

  "Oh," Cory Joe answered mildly, "Don Francisco has his sources."

  Chapter 52

  Magdeburg, March 1635

  The election results were finally certified, for the nation as a whole and each of its provinces and imperial cities.

  Nationally, so far as the popular vote was concerned, the Fourth of July Party had gotten forty-four percent of the vote; the Crown Loyalists, forty-eight percent; and the remaining eight percent had been divided between the various small parties.

  So far as the provinces were concerned, there were not many surprises. As expected, the Fourth of July Party swept the province of Magdeburg and the State of Thuringia-Franconia. In the case of the SoTF, splitting the vote in alliance with the Ram movement.

  The Crown Loyalists enjoyed equally lopsided victories in Hesse-Kassel, Brunswick, Westphalia, and the Upper Rhine.

  They also won a majority in the Province of the Main and Pomerania, but the results were much closer. The Fourth of July Party won a similarly narrow victory in the Oberpfalz and a wider one in Mecklenburg.

  Also as expected, the Fourth of July Party was very strong in the imperial cities. They won clear victories in four out of the seven: Magdeburg-that was another landslide-Luebeck, Hamburg and Frankfurt. They also won a majority in Strassburg, although just barely. The Crown Loyalists won the election in Augsburg and Ulm without any difficulty. No surprises there either. All of the imperial cities were actually small provinces, with a considerable amount of hinterland attached to the city itself. That was particularly true of Augsburg and Ulm, which meant the rural vote in those imperial cities was not really that much smaller, proportionately, than it was in most of the Germanies.

  Although the popular vote was rather closely contested, the Crown Loyalist victory was much more pronounced in terms of seats won in the House of Commons. They would wind up with a clear majority of the seats. Not much of a majority-fifty-two percent-but enough so that they wouldn't need to form a coalition government with any of the small parties.

  Again, that was no real surprise. The Fourth of July Party had a pronounced advantage in the cities and bigger towns, while the CLs enjoyed an offsetting strength in most of the rural areas. There were some exceptions, like Franconia and much of Mecklenburg, but not many. What that often meant, however, was that much of the FoJP victory in the cities was effectively wasted. It didn't matter whether a district was won by fifty-one percent or eighty-one percent, after all. Either way, it was still just one district.

  So, often enough, the FoJP would win a single seat in a city by a landslide, only to see it offset by a much smaller margin of victory by the CLs in a rural district.

  To some extent, the results were a reflection of the compromises that Mike Stearns had made with Gustav Adolf when the USE was created in the beginning, in the fall of 1633. The emperor had been able to force through a number of provisions that would obviously be to the advantage of the more conservative areas and sectors of the new nation.

  Still, there was no point in complaining or crying foul. The fact remained that the Crown Loyalists had won more of the popular vote than the FoJP, even if they hadn't won an outright majority and even if the political structure of the USE favored them in terms of seats. They had every right under the democratic principles that Mike Stearns advocated and championed himself to replace him as the head of government with one of their own-and he said so in a short and gracious concession speech once the election results were finally announced. The speech was played live over the radio and reprinted in every newspaper in the nation.

  ***

  "We were planning to stay longer, this time, Ronnie. Honestly, we were."

  "Still, you are going. Without the children."

  "I'm willing to plead. I'm willing to grovel." Jeff grinned, in a desperate sort of way. "Gretchen has to get back. It's a crisis now, but it could get a lot worse. There's plenty of blame being flung around, and some of it's landing where it doesn't belong. Spartacus is trying to be a voice of reason. Hell, he is a voice of reason. But.. ."

  Jeff stopped and started over.

  "Nobody knows who had Henry and Reverend Wiley killed. Or why. So if it was just that, it wouldn't be too hard for her to keep a handle on it. But the synagogue demonstration was worse, because it wasn't a one-time thing. There's been agitation for years and it hasn't stopped. Whoever is churning those pamphlets out is still churning them. Somebody's got to identify those guys and put a lid on it. Pretty permanently. And it's not being made easier when a lot of the Crown Loyalist partisans keep giving interviews saying that as soon as Wettin comes into office, he's going to roll back this reform and roll back that reform. Not always agreeing with one another either. It depends on what he promised to who, and when he did it."

  "When are you going to take the children?"

  "After the transfer of power, maybe. That's June. If the transfer goes smoothly. If it looks like Wettin can manage the guys who keep howling about 'backward, turn backward, o Time in thy flight.' If.. ."

  "If you are not away in Gustavus Adolphus' great war on the eastern front. If you are not dead in his great and magnificent campaign. You are in the army. Which I have not forgotten. You could well be dead by then. If Gretchen has not been dragged down in this political crisis. If…"

  Nicol reached out and put a hand on Veronica's shoulder.

  "Tante," he said placatingly. "Tante, if those things should happen, then it is far better that the children should be here with you. With us. Not lost with them."

  Veronica turned and left the room.

  Francisco Nasi sat on the train. Reading, in spite of the rough roadbed that caused him to push his glasses up every few minutes.

  While he was in Grantville, he would have to see McNally and get the frames adjusted. He made a note on a small pad.

  Then he went back to reading. Ed Piazza was conscientious about sending all the information that the Grantville police had gathere
d. Magdeburg had some advantages, in the sense of being the center, for the time being, of his web of contacts. Sometimes, though, there was nothing quite as good as being on the scene oneself.

  Chapter 53

  Grantville

  Bryant Holloway heard about it all, of course. He'd been busy at work, but no one could have missed it. It had been all over the radio and papers last week. He'd even been interviewed by a reporter in Naumburg, for the "up-time reaction" to it.

  He'd told the reporter that his reaction was, "damn the Krauts." Attacking the hospital, attacking the synagogue, killing Mayor Dreeson and Reverend Wiley.

  It was all the fault of the Krauts. Just like the vote about moving the capital of the State of Thuringia-Franconia to Bamberg.

  For which he had received an official reprimand. Representatives of the USE Fire Marshall's Office should not say such things for publication.

  "That's how Stannard would have it. Sure. 'The Krauts are our allies. The Krauts are our fellow citizens. The Krauts are our friends.' Talk about a party line. Talk about being expected to hew to the party line."

  So here he was, driving back into Grantville in the fire department's pickup truck that he used on out of town assignments, and practically the first thing he saw was Lenore, coming out of the administration building, standing in the street, talking to one of them. A man. A young man. A Kraut. For a married woman, going to work was nothing but a chance to find men and a chance at extracurricular sex.

  He would take care of that this evening.

  Lenore saw Bryant looking at her as he passed. She remembered what she had promised, turned, and went back to the office.

  "Almost everyone in the office is a woman," Lenore said. "Count them, Bryant."