“Call me Staci.”
“Thank you, Fräulein Staci.” He bowed again.
“But enough of me,” he continued. “What is happening with you? What is new in the musical life of Magdeburg since I left?”
“We’re going to perform Handel’s oratorio Messiah either in late December or early January.” Marla pointed at him. “You should either be in the choir or in the orchestra. I know you said you play.”
“Orchestra,” Johann said. “Viola.”
“Good. Come by the house tonight and talk to Franz. Meanwhile, we’ve got to get back to school and you’ve got a whitesmith to talk to. We’ll see you later.”
“’Bye, Herr Bach,” Staci said as they walked away. “It was nice to meet you.”
Johann watched them move off, Marla setting the pace. Just before they turned the corner, Staci looked back over her shoulder and smiled.
Johann stood for a moment, thinking of a pair of dancing hazel eyes. Then he shook his head and took off down the street. Once he got to the Gustavstrasse, the wide boulevard that bisected the Altstadt, the old part of the actual city of Magdeburg, he turned north.
In a few minutes he was crossing the moat again, this time into the Neustadt. He smiled at the thought of calling that part of the city “new.” It was also surrounded by the city walls, and was older than his grandfather.
He hadn’t learned every street in Magdeburg yet, but he knew enough to find the building he was looking for. He knocked on the door.
“Yes?” A young man answered the door.
“Herr Johann Bach, to see Master Phillip Luder.”
“Come in, Herr Bach.” The youth gave a slight bow as he opened the door wide. Johann stepped through into a wave of heat. “The master is at the forge at the moment, but will be with you very quickly.”
He conducted Johann to a chair set to one side, then stepped over to the forge set against the back wall of the building and spoke to a man of middle years who was stirring something in a crucible set above the coals. The man looked over his shoulder, handed the ladle to the younger man, and bustled toward Johann.
“Herr Bach! I am Phillip Luder.” The master wiped his hands on his leather apron and extended one to Johann. Johann stood to clasp hands with the man. Master Phillip had a strong grasp, but didn’t attempt to crush Johann’s fingers. As a musician, he appreciated that.
“And what can I do for you, Herr Bach?” The whitesmith’s eyebrows climbed his forehead for all the world like two bushy caterpillars. Johann had to bite his tongue for a moment to keep from grinning at him.
“Pipes, Master Luder. I need pipes—many pipes.”
The master’s eyebrows contracted downward. “Pipes.” A vertical line appeared between the brows. “For water? For oil? For…” He looked expectantly at Johann.
“For music, Master Luder. I need pipes for a pipe organ.”
“Ah!” A concerned expression appeared on the whitesmith’s face. “Are you the one who will build the new pipe organ in that fancy new building that is beginning, or are you the one who will be rebuilding the organ in the Dom?”
Johann was taken back. “Rebuilding?”
“Oh, yes.” The whitesmith nodded. “You are not from here, so you may not know that that black-souled Pappenheim, may he rot in Satan’s hands, favorite tool that he is…” Luder spat into the forge. “Where was I?”
“The organ in the Dom?”
“Right. Pappenheim stripped all the metal work from the organ and sold it off to a jobber before he fled like a jackal with his tail between his legs.”
Johann was horrified. “I hadn’t heard. Was not that a Compenius instrument?”
Luder nodded again. “Aye, built by old Heinrich himself—the son, not the father—thirty years ago, they tell me. And a sweet instrument it was, although I’m no musician to say so. But no more, no more, thanks to Pappenheim eviscerating it…” The master’s voice trailed off into muttered curses.
“I have met Master Heinrich the younger,” Johann said. “He came to visit his son Ludwig, who lives in Erfurt. I learned much from the two of them.”
“Ach, well, according to the word in the halls of the Dom, Herr Christoff Schultze, him who used to be Möllnvoigt for the archbishopric and is now the hand of Ludwig Fürst von Anhalt-Cöthen, Gustav Adolf’s administrator, has been in contact with the Compenius family, trying to get either Ludwig or his older brother Johann Heinrich to come and lead the repairs.”
“If all the pipes were stolen, it will be more like building a new organ.”
“You would know better than I would,” Master Luder smiled. “But your name is Bach, not Compenius, so now that I think about it, you must have something to do with the new organ rather than the old.”
“Indeed.” Johann smiled back.
“Should I congratulate you or commiserate with you?”
“I will let you know in a few months, but probably the latter.” The two men laughed together. Johann decided he liked Master Luder.
“So you come to me to talk about pipes.”
“To talk about making the pipes, yes.”
“Hmm. And how many pipes are we talking about?” One of those expressive eyebrows climbed a level, but the grin was still in place.
“Three thousand, maybe a bit more.”
The eyebrow dropped and the grin faded. “Three…”
“Thousand. Maybe a bit more.”
Master Luder stripped off his apron and threw it on a peg on the wall. He rolled down his shirtsleeves, took down a jacket from another peg, and crammed a hat on top of his bristling hair. “Come. This needs ale.”
Johann followed the craftsman out of his shop and down the street. Luder said nothing until after they entered a tavern—it was the Green Horse, Johann noted—and ordered their ale.
“Three thousand pipes.” Master Luder began as they sat down at a table.
“More or less,” Johann replied.
“All different sizes, I suppose.”
“Many sizes, yes, but not individually unique, no. Many pipes can be made and tuned from one size.”
“Good. That will speed the work. Do you know yet how many sizes you will have?”
“Not yet. I may use wooden pipes for the largest ones, and I won’t know how many metal sizes there will be until I make that decision.”
“Pipe metal? Tin and lead alloy?”
“No. No lead in it. It dulls the sound. I want a bright sound to the pipes, so I want only tin, the purest tin you can get. English tin if you can get it.”
“I can get it.” Master Luder pursed his lips as his eyebrows crouched close together. “But enough for three thousand pipes will cost you. And I can’t get it all at once.”
Johann shrugged. “It costs what it costs. And as long as the pipes are done when I need them, it doesn’t matter when the tin is available. But do you know how to make pipes?”
The craftsman took a healthy swallow of ale, then wiped his mustache and beard. “I do. I was a journeyman in Leipzig when my old master provided repairs to the university church organ. We had to replace a number of the pipes. I still remember what we did.”
“Good. Then how much to put to use what you remember?”
Johann took a swig of his own ale as the bargaining began.
* * *
Marla looked up from the piano keyboard at a noise in the door. School was done for the day and she was relaxing a bit by playing.
“Hi, Staci. What’s up?”
“Nothing. I just stopped by to see what you were up to.”
Marla smiled as she always did when she heard Staci’s voice. The powerful contralto was so surprising coming from her tiny frame. She waved her friend into the room. “Come on in.”
Staci Matowski hesitated. “I don’t want to interrupt anything.”
“You’re not interrupting. I was just improvising a little.”
“Improvising?” Staci stepped over to the piano.
“Yeah. You take a mu
sical theme, then try to make music out of it with variations and stuff.”
“Sounds hard.”
“It can be. Hey, what was your phone number?”
“Huh?”
“What was your phone number in Grantville?”
“534-3468. Why?”
Marla picked notes out on the piano keyboard. “G-E-F-E-F-A-C. There. That’s the notes for your phone number.” She set both hands on the keys and played with the resulting melody, adding chords and rhythms to it. After a minute or so, she brought it to a close.
“That was cool,” Staci smiled.
“I’m not very good at it, so I work on it as often as I can.”
Staci stepped back from the piano. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you,” she repeated.
“No problem. What do you want?”
Staci turned away and walked over to the window. She stared out for a moment, then she turned to face Marla. “This Johann Bach…what do you know about him?”
Marla leaned over and rested her arms on the music rack of the piano. “Not a lot. A good musician by anyone’s standards. Seems to be a nice guy. Probably related to the Bach, but he hasn’t heard from the researchers in Grantville to prove it yet.”
Staci turned back to the window. After a moment, she asked, “Is he married?”
Marla’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “No, not that I know of. Not all down-time men wear wedding rings, though, so it’s hard to tell for sure.”
“Franz does…wear a ring, I mean.”
Marla blushed a little. “Yeah, well, Franz isn’t your typical down-timer, either.”
“Yeah.” There was a long silence. Marla wasn’t sure what Staci was getting at, but she was willing to wait for her to get to it in her own time.
“Marla…”
“Yeah?”
“Do you believe in love at first sight?”
Oh, my. “Um, maybe,” she responded with caution. She didn’t want to sound too out-in-left-field, here.
“I mean, when did you first know you loved Franz?”
Marla wasn’t able to suppress the smile she always got when she thought of their first meeting. “Okay, you got me. He had me the night we met and he showed me how his hand had been crippled.”
Staci turned with surprise on her face. “Pity? That’s how it started for you?”
“No,” Marla said with heat that surprised her. She calmed down. “No, it wasn’t pity or sympathy. Empathy, now, that was probably a large part of it.”
Staci tilted her head to one side. “What do you mean?”
“Understand that Franz lives for music. He is music, you might say. And that had been ripped away from him. You could see it in his face, in his eyes. There was a raw hole in his soul that he was bleeding from. I could see the pain in him, could feel it. And I knew that pain, because I thought I had lost the music when the Ring fell.” She swallowed, reliving that moment. “It wasn’t a moment of decision, of thought. I just…”
“You just stayed with him.”
“Yeah.” Marla nodded. “I stayed with him after that. Mind you, I don’t think he was that fast to recognize it.”
“But he did, eventually.”
“Oh, yeah.” Marla smiled a bit at the thought of that night as well.
There was another long moment of silence. Marla broke it with, “So, are you feeling…something…for Johann?”
Staci looked back out the window. “Something, I guess.”
* * *
“So the wind trunks come up from the wind-chest,” Alfonso Parigi mused, tracing his finger over the rough drawing Johann had just done, “and feed into the small wind-chests under the manuals.”
“Right,” Johann nodded.
“Where does the wind go from there?”
“The player has to open one or more stops to open up passages from the small wind-chest to the pipes. Pulling the knob pulls the slider out and aligns holes in the slider with holes in the top of the chest and the bottom of the wind trunks to the pipes.”
“Hmm.” The architect pulled on his little spike of a beard. “So the routing of the wind in an organ is not unlike an exercise in fluidics.”
“So I’ve been told.” Johann smiled. “At least if this system springs a leak, nothing floods.”
Parigi chuckled. “True.” He tapped a finger on the papers. “So how have you progressed in moving from the concept to the reality?”
“The carpenters are ready to begin the main wind-chest, but that will have to wait until we are closer to the completion of the chamber that will hold it. I still have not found a reliable man to make bellows.” Johann frowned at the thought. This was on the verge of becoming a problem, which he did not need this early in the life of the organ design and build.
“They mentioned using an electric fan,” Parigi reminded him.
Johann sighed. “I know. But I do not know anything about that. I am not certain how to incorporate that into what I do know.”
“A not uncommon problem for those of us born in this time,” Parigi chuckled. “The building project has an electrician assigned to it. Talk to her.”
“Her?”
“Her.”
Johann grimaced and shook his head.
* * *
“Excuse me, please? Are you the electrician?” Johann had been pointed toward a table where coils of wire and odd metal fixtures were piled in haphazard towers that leaned in various directions.
“You’re talkin’ to her.” The head that was bowed over a contraption on the table didn’t move.
“I am Johann Bach.”
The head rose, and eyes blinked at him from behind small rectangular glasses. “Oh. You’re the organ guy, right?”
“Yes.”
“Just a sec.” The head bowed back down for a moment; a screwdriver was twisted. “Ah, that’s got it.” The contraption was pushed aside as she looked up at Johann. “What can I do for you?”
The woman looked familiar to Johann, but he knew he’d never seen her before. He pushed that thought aside. “I need to move air to fill the wind-chest for the organ. In other times I would use bellows, several of them. But now they tell me I should use an electric fan. And…”
“And you need to know what one is, right?”
“Yes.” Johann suppressed the irritation that flared from being interrupted.
She picked up a flat piece of metal and waved it at Johann. He felt air stirring against his face. “That’s a fan, right? It moves air?”
Johann’s irritation flared again, and he had to step on it harder. “I understand that, yes.”
“Sorry, didn’t mean to be patronizing.” The electrician set the metal piece back on the table. “Okay, now an electric motor can turn very fast.” She picked up a tool from the table and squeezed a trigger, which produced a whining sound as the pointed end began to spin rapidly. “Like so.”
“And if one can figure out a way to attach a fan to that motor,” Johann pointed to her now quiet tool, “one can move a lot of air rapidly.”
He was rewarded with a bright smile. “Right.”
“So what would it take to build one, and how much air would it move?”
“How much air gets moved would depend on the size and speed of the fan. We’d need to talk to an engineer about that. But I can’t see that building one would be all that difficult. A medium-sized electric motor with a fan-blade assembly on it wouldn’t be hard.”
“An engineer. You mean like Herr Otto Gericke, the mayor of Magdeburg?”
“No, I was thinking more along the line of Herr Haygood.”
“Ah, Frau Haygood’s husband?” Johann was aware of the oddness of the up-timers, where the wife would take the husband’s surname when they married.
“Right.”
“But who would build this for me?”
The electrician steepled her fingers. “I can get the motor, once we know what we need to build. Who builds it depends on what you make the fan part out of—wood, sheet metal, even ti
n.”
Johann nodded. That made sense. And wood would probably be the cheapest material and the quickest to work. He nodded again.
“So, I need to consult with Herr Haygood.”
“Yep. I can’t help you with the calculations for designing it.”
“Good. I will seek him out.” Johann gave a short bow. “Thank you very much for your assistance, Fräulein…” He realized he didn’t know her name.
“Matowski. Melanie Matowski.” She stood and offered her hand.
Johann grasped it, to have his own firmly shaken. “Are you related to Fräulein Anastasia Matowski?”
Another bright grin. “My sister Staci. She’s the teacher, I’m the hands-on person.”
Fräulein Melanie was perhaps an inch or two taller than her sister, and her face was somewhat rounder than Fräulein Anastasia’s heart-shaped visage, but now that his attention had been drawn to it, he could see the resemblance.
“My thanks again.”
“No problem.”
Johann glanced back for a moment, to see that Fräulein Matowski had resumed her seat at the table and was again head-down over her work. An…interesting young woman, he mused to himself as he walked out of the workspace.
* * *
“Hey, Bach!”
Johann looked up from where he had stooped to enter the Green Horse. He saw a hand being waved and waved back. After collecting a mug of ale, he made his way toward the table.
“Hey, Johann,” Marla said. “Pull up a chair and sit on the floor.”
Johann stopped halfway down to the bench, frozen as he untangled that thought in his mind. He decided after a moment that it was more of the ubiquitous but slightly off-pitch up-time humor, and continued his descent to his seat. The others nodded or waved a hand at him, and he nodded back.
It was Marla’s usual crew, the musicians who accompanied her in her singing, plus a couple of extras. Johann’s eyes lit upon two familiar faces. At the other end of the table sat the two young women who had accompanied Frau Marla several days ago. He considered them over the rim of his mug. Fräulein Stevenson was laughing, leaning across Franz Sylwester to say something to Frau Marla. Fräulein Matowski—Anastasia Matowski, he reminded himself—sat across the table from them with a slight smile on her face, fingers laced around a coffee cup.
1636- the Flight of the Nightingale Page 16