1635-The Tangled Web Read online

  "My husband went bankrupt. Nobody can blame the Ring of Fire for that. He went bankrupt before it. He died in April 1631. Because of the bankruptcy, he didn't leave me any money to live on. He didn't leave a business for me to fight with the guilds about over whether or not a woman can run it. All of this was in Arnstadt, though he was born in Stadtilm. His father was born in Badenburg, which is how I came to meet him and marry him. I am from Badenburg. I married and went away from my family. Now I am a widow, childless, and do not want to go back and live on the charity of my brothers and sisters. I have used up my dowry. I want work, my own income."

  She nodded emphatically. "I also consider myself qualified. My husband was a councilman before he failed in his business; my father is a councilman. I presume that one of my brothers will succeed him on the council. I know politics—more widely than most, since I have ties in three cities, and through my brother Dietrich and the problems with Herr Newhouse's land, have come to know a fourth, your own. I can also help the administration figure out where the disputes are between the Fulda city council and the abbey, I think. There are bound to be a lot of old grudges."

  She paused and smiled, reaching through the slit in the side of her skirt for her pocket. "And I carry the constitution of the New United States with me, everywhere I go. I have learned it by heart. As well as anyone, I can tell your administrators in Fulda what the abbot can and cannot do, under the down-time law. I will be very happy to tell the abbot of Fulda what he can and cannot do under this constitution."

  Ed got up, walked to the side of the room, and moved an upholstered office chair from its place near the wall. "Have a more comfortable seat," he suggested.

  Johann Bernhard Schenk von Schweinsberg was not happy. He was nearly fifty years old and had never before heard of such a thing. He glared at Ed Piazza.

  "It's 'take it or leave it,' " Ed said. "The condition of our permitting you to go back to Fulda is that you take along our appointee to serve as a liaison between you and the NUS administration there."

  "It is wholly inappropriate," the abbot of Fulda said. "Utterly inappropriate."

  "My name is Clara Bachmeierin," the woman said. "Widowed Stade. I am from Badenburg. I am Lutheran. We have dealt with the up-timers since they first arrived. You have not. You have been away, among the imperials. We have learned to understand their politics. You have not. Stop making a sour face at me. I have reached an age at which no one will consider my presence scandalous or shocking. I am thirty-six, no girl. I will share the quarters of Mrs. Hill. She has an apartment upstairs. Her son-in-law, Mr. Pence, has an apartment downstairs in the same building, which he shares with two other men. He thinks it is safer for Mrs. Hill to be upstairs."

  "You are a Protestant."

  "That's what I just said," she answered.

  "A Protestant and a female. Not a suitable advisor for a Catholic ruler. Not a suitable advisor for an abbot."

  "Listen, Schweinsberg," Ed Piazza interrupted them, "at least half of your former subjects were Protestant, when you became abbot in 1623 and began a stronger enforcement of the Counter-Reformation. That is, half of them were still Protestant after the last three or four abbots had been using their authority over the past half-century to try to coerce them into becoming Catholic again, using differential tax rates, forbidding Protestants to hold public office, giving them the option of conversion or exile."

  "It is our duty to bring people back into the fold of the church," Schweinsberg said. "It was our guilt that the Protestant revolt occurred in the first place, damning so many souls to hell. Since you are supposedly Catholic yourself, Herr Piazza, you should be doing the same."

  Ed leaned forward. "You're going to be learning a lot of new lessons. The first one is about separation of church and state. If you want the people of Fulda to be Catholic, you will have to entice them. Persuade them of the rightness of your doctrines. Feed them barbecue at revival meetings, I don't care. But you may not force them to convert. You may not compel them to hear your missionaries. All carrots, no sticks."

  Schweinsberg scowled.

  "Remember. They are not your subjects." Ed paused between each of those words for emphasis. "You no longer exercise legal jurisdiction over them. You are the church; the NUS is the state. I am quite sure that Mrs. Stade will be happy to explain it to you. The two of you will have plenty of time for conversation between here and the border, so she can tell you how the system works."

  Clara Bachmeierin, otherwise known as Mrs. Stade, smiled blandly.

  Ed Piazza continued. "There are ways that you can take advantage of our system, no doubt, but only if you work within it. If you try to go around it or subvert it, somebody in authority is going to think about the appropriate penalties for collaborating with the enemy. When you leave here, you're going to be carrying a written notification to that effect, signed by President Stearns."

  Game Board

  Fulda, January 1633

  "Why can't they all at least be happy Catholics together?" Harlan Stull asked plaintively. He was looking at a complaint from the Franciscan Order that some sixty years before, a former abbot of Fulda had given one of their buildings, which they had abandoned and were no longer using, to the Jesuits, who still had it and were using it for a school. The Franciscans wanted it back now. The Jesuits thought that possession was nine points of the law.

  "Why," Wes Jenkins said, "is not up to us Methodist good old boys to figure out. 'Ours not to reason why.' Though I sort of wish that they had sent us a couple of Catholics from Grantville to help us understand it, instead of shipping them all down into Würzburg and Bamberg. But I don't think that this is a religious problem. They're all Catholics. I hereby declare officially that it's a land title problem. Put it into Andrea's in-box and let's move on to something else."

  "But," Harlan was practically wailing. "Why does it make any difference to them that the abbot and these guys who are supposed to be monks here, the chapter, are Benedictines but they squabble with these other monks who are Franciscans and who say they aren't monks but friars and both of them are jealous of the Jesuits? Aren't they all in the same bathtub together?"

  "They weren't up-time," Wes pointed out. "Ed Piazza and Tino Nobili were practically in a boxing match half the time about stuff that went on at St. Vincent's, with Father Mazzare refereeing. Or trying to."

  Andrea tried to think of something that would be helpful. "Think of the Middle Ages. Before the Reformation. They were all Catholics then—well, except for the Jews and Saracens—and they fought each other all the time. Remember what Melissa Mailey said about the Norman Conquest?"

  "I think it's this way," Fred Pence said. "The Yankees and the Dodgers and all those other teams all played baseball, but that didn't mean that they weren't in competition with one another. For one thing, baseball was the way they made their living, so they were competing for the same pot of dough and the same fans. Like these guys. They're all playing the same game, but that doesn't mean that they're all on the same team. Sometimes they hate each other more than they do the people who play football or basketball. That's how I'm laying it out, for voter registration. The Catholics are football; the Lutherans are baseball; the Calvinists up on the border by Hesse are basketball, and the occasional oddballs are soccer and ice hockey."

  Harlan stared at him.

  "Well, it works," Fred protested. "Hey, guys, I'm a Nondenominational Evangelical. Or I was, when there was a church for me to go to. We don't have one in Grantville, even. I've been having to make do with the Baptists. This is even weirder for me than it is for you Methodists. But I think that I'm starting to understand it."

  "How?" Wes asked hopefully.

  "I got the pewterer downtown to make some molds and pour me baseball and other players, like little Monopoly markers. Then I've got a big map of Fulda and all its little outliers that are mixed up with Isenburg and Hanau and imperial knights like the von Hutten family and whatever. Not a decent topo map. The places are just little six
-sided pieces of paper, like a game board. And I got some paint for the players. So a Lutheran is a baseball player and if he's an independent imperial knight, he's got a blue bat instead of a green one. A Jesuit is a yellow football player; a Franciscan is a red one, and if she's a nun, she's pink. The Benedictines here at the abbey are orange. Stuff like that. And I've got them set down on the spots where they belong. It's all on a table in my office. You should come by and look at it some time. By the time we get around to holding elections, I should know which precinct is what and where the trouble spots will probably be. Andrea's putting her land title markers on it, too."

  Andrea cleared her throat. "Speaking of land titles . . ."

  "Yes?"

  "I've made one great discovery. The monks took the archives, but most of the local district administrators and provosts of the abbey's estates kept duplicate copies on the local level, because it would take all day for someone to run over to Fulda and look something up. So if the budget has money for me to hire some clerks, we can reconstitute a working administrative archive. Not the historical papal bulls that were five hundred years old and stuff like that, but land documents and surveys from the last half century or so."

  "The budget," Harlan said, "is very tight."

  "Consider it an investment." Andrea reached up and pulled out the pencil she had stuck in her hair earlier in the meeting. "If we don't figure out who owes us how much in the way of taxes and rents and dues, there won't be a budget at all."

  "Anything else?" Wes asked.

  "We have a petition from a convent of Franciscan nuns here in the town of Fulda itself, phrased in such a way that it appears to be presented on behalf of the women of the town in general, on the subject of women's property rights. It's rather interesting." She picked up a piece of paper and started to read. "A laywoman who was a member of their Third Order . . ." She looked up. "That's sort of like a lodge auxiliary, by the way. Or it would be, if they were Disciples of Christ, like me." She went back to reading, ". . . made during her lifetime a contingent donation to them that was to take effect after her death. She has since died and her stepson, who does not deny that she had a right to make a gift while living, challenges her right to make a post mortem donation on the grounds that it is equivalent to a bequest . . ."

  Harlan Stull's eyes started to glaze over. His definition of "interesting" rarely involved probate law.

  "Andrea," Wes said. "Hire a lawyer. A local lawyer. Full time. That's an order."

  Variant Visions

  Grantville, January 1633

  "We ought to give him some kind of a send-off," Linda Bartolli said, looking at the rest of Grantville's quondam St. Vincent's and current St. Mary's worship committee. "After all, he is an abbot and Fulda is really historical. I looked it up in the encyclopedia."

  "It should be your call. You're the organist, so most of the extra work would fall on you," Denise Adducci said.

  "Well, on Brian, too," Linda said. "And the choir."

  "How's it going for Brian now? Is Tino still making trouble?" Noelle Murphy asked.

  Linda sighed. When her brother agreed to take on directing the St. Mary's choir after the Ring of Fire, its former director having been left up-time, Tino Nobili had made a great big fuss. Brian's wife Debra was Methodist, which in Tino's view disqualified him for exercising anything that might be considered a public office in the church. What with Tino's wife Vivian being the parish secretary and her and Brian's parents now being full-time parish volunteers, things could get a bit touchy now and then.

  "Tino seems to have settled down some. It helped that the only other person who volunteered to be choir director was Danielle Kowach. He likes the Kowaches and Mahons even less than he likes us, and having Danielle would have meant that both the organist and director would have been women."

  Johann Bernhard Schenk von Schweinsberg assured himself that he supported the endeavors of the Jesuit Order and favored all its efforts in spreading the faith. The Jesuits were so—what was the English word?—dynamic. Not to mention incredibly numerous. They and the Capuchins—those two orders multiplied like rabbits, these days.

  Nonetheless, he still found it somewhat disconcerting that the Jesuits seemed to have thrown themselves so very enthusiastically into the Grantville parish. Plus, of course . . . von Spee came from a respectable family, but . . . Athanasius Kircher was certainly an intelligent man—some people said that he was an outright genius—but by no means was his family upper class. Schweinsberg knew this perfectly well, since Kircher's father had been a minor civil bureaucrat from Geisa who worked for the abbots of Fulda and tried to support a large family on a small salary. Of course, the father had earned a doctorate, but the family's more distant ancestry consisted entirely of commoners. Quite ordinary ones.

  "I would point out," Kircher was saying with some humor, "that it is also something of a stretch for men born into families of ordinary imperial knights to sit in the diet as princes of the empire. You and your predecessors have been there by virtue of your election as abbots, not by right of birth. The church provides this 'social mobility' for you, too."

  "But the statutes of Fulda provide that none but men of noble birth may be accepted as members of the chapter."

  "The statutes of Fulda," Kircher answered gently. "Not the statutes of Saint Benedict, if you would bother to read them, nor even the statutes as established by your founders. Not Saint Boniface; not Saint Sturmius; not Saint Lullus. That provision developed during later history, and can be changed. If you do not want to ossify and have Fulda cease to exist for a lack of recruits, it even should be changed. Even now, it is the conventus of commoners among your monks that serves the parishes of the Stift, not the noble chapter monks. How many parishes are there? Fifty?"

  "About that many. Parishes, that is. But no one would dare to challenge the statutes. Why, that might lead to a commoner being elected abbot some day."

  "Banz did. That abbey also had these requirements from the middle ages that only nobles could be accepted in the chapter. When so much of Franconia became Protestant, there were no longer enough surplus sons of Catholic nobles to fill the slots. More than half a century ago, they obtained an exemption from the bishop of Würzburg that they could accept commoners, both as members of the chapter and students at the school."

  "The bishops of Würzburg—" the abbot began.

  "Yes, I am entirely aware of the conflict," Kircher said patiently. "After all, my father was working for Abbot Balthasar von Dernbach when Bishop Echter conspired with the knights and nobles of the Stift to expel him because of his efforts to impose Catholic reform. The commitment of Bishop Echter to Catholic reform was unquestionably genuine. However, if by getting rid of a reforming abbot, he might extend the authority of Würzburg over the abbey and its territories . . . with the full intent of reforming them himself, of course . . . Well, bishops are not angels. Echter was a great man, but he is not likely ever to be sainted, I suppose."

  "I will never compromise Fulda's independence by asking the bishop of Würzburg to authorize a change in our statutes. Even if I could, as a practical matter, since Hatzfeld has opted to remain under the protection of the archbishop of Cologne rather than to return to his see and come to terms with these allies of the Swede."

  "You could always just ask the pope himself," Kircher suggested. "That would not affect the legal independence of Fulda from Würzburg in any way. Presuming, of course, that you are willing to defy your fellow nobles and their desire to drop extra sons into sinecures with guaranteed incomes."

  Brian Grady had given a fair amount of consideration to the music for the special service, had beaten the bushes for people who were willing to sing just this once and scheduled four extra rehearsals. They were using the good choir robes, too. And he had a right to do something Irish, he thought.

  A couple of years before, he had gotten a copy of How the Irish Saved Civilization with a medieval-looking dust jacket for Christmas. He suspected that his sister had
gotten it out of a discount bin at the grocery warehouse in Fairmont, but, hey, in a family the size of the Gradys, the motto had to be, "Affordable Christmas presents are where you find them." He'd read it. He agreed with every single word, so he had given it to the new national library. Other people ought to read it, too, and understand the importance of being Irish.

  Besides, he didn't intend to read it again. It was sort of out of his field. When he wasn't directing the choir, he taught physical education.

  "Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart,

  "Naught be all else to me, save that thou art;

  "Thou my best thought, by day or by night,

  "Waking or sleeping, thy presence my light."

  Basically, he was using the version that appeared in most hymnals, set to the "Slane" melody, which he loved.

  "Be thou my wisdom and thou my true word,

  "I ever with thee and thou with me, Lord;

  "Be thou my great Father, and I thy true son;

  "Be thou in me dwelling, and I with thee one."

  He had thought that the abbot might like it, since he came from a family of knights and knights went around fighting in armor. Tournaments and jousts and stuff like that. He'd heard the story, of course, that the only reason that the guy was here in Grantville now, getting a special service, was that he hadn't been killed in the same battle when the king of Sweden was killed, up-time.

  "Be thou my breastplate, my sword for the fight;

  "Be thou my whole armor, be thou my true might;

  "Be thou my soul's shelter, be thou my strong tower:

  "O raise thou me heavenward, great Power of my power."

  So take that, Martin Luther, you blasted German, Brian thought. A good Catholic Irishman wrote a fine Irish Catholic version of "A Mighty Fortress" seven centuries before you were even born.