1635-The Tangled Web Page 3

  "Riches I heed not, nor man's empty praise:

  "Be thou mine inheritance now and always;

  "Thou and thou only the first in my heart;

  "O Sovereign of heaven, my treasure thou art."

  So far, so good. The choir was on key. Brian threw a smile to his sister Linda at the organ, who pulled a few stops. Then for the final verse he broke the choir out into the other arrangement he had, not in the hymnal—John Leavitt's, the one set to "Thaxted" from the Jupiter movement of Gustav Holst's "The Planets."

  "Great God of heaven, my victory won,

  "May I reach heaven's joys, O bright heaven's Sun!

  "Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,

  "Still be my vision, O Ruler of all.

  "Great God of heaven, my victory won,

  "May I reach heaven's joys, O bright heaven's Sun!

  "Amen!"

  * * *

  "Outrageous, of course," Tino Nobili said to Schweinsberg after mass. "I'm sure that you agree with me. A woman as organist and women in the choir! Irish folk music and modern composers rather than plainsong. Trust me, sir, this is not the direction the entire church had gone, not even in the up-time world. I was a member of the Pope Pius X Society. I have their mailings. I will give you some of them to take with you, to read."

  The abbot thanked him gravely. Personally, he had enjoyed the music and no one expected a parish in a small city to follow all of the liturgical prescriptions for the choir of the Sistine Chapel, of course. Or even those for the choir of the Abbey of Fulda.

  Fulda, February 1633

  "Do you prefer to be called Mrs. Stade or Miss Bachmeier?" Wes Jenkins asked.

  Clara thought a moment. "I am a widow, so I am certainly not Mrs. Stade, even though Herr Piazza calls me that. Caspar has been dead for almost two years. How about Ms. Bachmeierin? I understand that Ms. covers every marital status for your people. And I do prefer the feminine form of my family name. I am a woman, after all—not a man. Being called Bachmeier sounds very odd to me."

  "That'll do fine," Wes said, leaning an elbow on the mantel.

  They were all standing up. The cleaning crew had taken the table and chairs out of the conference room so they could mop and wax the floor.

  She was leaning against the window sill. The administration building had windows with sills. The immediately past abbot, a guy named von Schwalbach, had torn down some medieval monstrosity about twenty years ago and built a nice little renaissance-style palace with corridors and paved floors and big windows with clear glass panes.

  The afternoon sun came in at an angle, making a bright narrow stripe across her hair and face. And body, above the waist. He found himself thinking that whatever she called herself, she was definitely a woman. A fine-looking woman. He hoped that the late Caspar had appreciated his good luck. Then he realized that he hadn't cared what a woman looked like since Lena was left up-time.

  "If you don't mind," Andrea Hill said, "since we will be sharing an apartment, I will call you Clara. And call me Andrea, please."

  She looked at Wes watching the German woman and thought, chaperone time? Lenore, Wes's older girl, wasn't much younger than her own daughter Kortney. She'd have to ask Kortney, next time she wrote, if Lenore and Chandra had their fingers in whatever pie led up to shipping Ms. Bachmeierin over to Fulda. She knew they had been worried about having their dad walking around like one of the living dead for so long.

  Well, she couldn't blame Wes. She'd felt that way herself for quite a while after her husband Harry died back in 1997, but gradually the world had turned itself back right side up. She had felt it worse when her first husband left her in 1965. Harry, at least, had not wanted to go. But if Bob hadn't left, she wouldn't have gone back to school and gotten the A.A. degree that led her to this job, or married Harry, or had her two girls, so . . .

  "When's the abbot due?" Harlan Stull asked.

  "In about a half an hour. Maybe I should have asked you first, but I thought it was reasonable to agree when he wanted to go to the monastery first, before he came over to meet all of you. He's supposed to be in charge of it, after all," Clara answered.

  "Supposed to be?"

  "I'm not sure how much support he has. Neither is he, really. That's one thing he wants to find out."

  "Brief me," Wes said, thinking he might as well find out sooner than later what caliber of person Ed had picked.

  "Well, he was elected abbot in 1623. Three years later, he brought in some reformed Benedictines from someplace in Switzerland to help him reorganize the abbey. The year after that, that was in 1627, after he got their report, he talked the pope into sending the nuncio—that was Pietro Luigi Caraffa back then—as a papal visitor, a kind of inspector to conduct a visitation of the abbey. Caraffa issued a whole batch of reform decrees that pointed out that according to the rule of Saint Benedict, authority belonged to the abbot. They were pretty critical of the way the noble-born monks in the Fulda chapter had encroached on it. After Caraffa left—he couldn't very well stay here permanently—the provosts, the monks who administered the abbey's property, got up a rebellion against the changes."

  She paused for breath.

  "I can see," Fred Pence said, "that I'm going to end up with stripes and checks and spots on my orange helmets."

  Clara looked at him, then ignored him. "The monks who are in Cologne now mostly belonged to the opposition party. The pope confirmed the changes, but it didn't make much impression on them. The chapter seemed to be absolutely dead set on keeping the privilege of only admitting nobles. I didn't get a very clear view from the abbot as to whether they object to praying in the same room as ordinary people or if they just object to sharing the abbey's income with them. If the latter, the New United States has probably solved one problem for him."

  "From what I hear," Orville Beattie said, "the party of his monks that headed off to Cologne probably won't be too enthusiastic about the fact that he's reappeared. The leader of them, a guy named Johann Adolf von Hoheneck, would have been elected as abbot by now if Schweinsberg had gotten himself shot on schedule, so to speak. Hoheneck is feeling a bit deprived, they say. Just gossip, you understand."

  Orville had been sent up from Würzburg by Johnnie F.—Johnnie Haun, that was—to run Steve Salatto's brainchild of a "Hearts and Minds" program in Fulda. Up-time, Orville had worked for the state and farmed part time, but he was in the military down-time. "Hearts and Minds" was a military program. Having another up-time military person in Fulda made Derek Utt feel better, even though Orville spent most of his time out of town. Although Orville was Presbyterian, which made the liaison guy from the landgrave of Hesse, Urban von Boyneburg, feel better about things too, he seemed to be finding his feet pretty fast in dealing with Catholics and Lutherans.

  "Okay, Hoheneck in Cologne. Probably one of the bad guys." Harlan Stull made a note.

  "That's where they took the archives," Andrea said. "Can Schweinsberg get them back?"

  "I don't know," Clara answered honestly. "We can ask him to try. But Hoheneck is on very good terms with Ferdinand of Bavaria, who is the archbishop and elector of Cologne. Through him, of course, he can get support from Duke Maximilian of Bavaria and the Leaguists and the Imperials. That probably means that he isn't going to pay much attention to long-distance instructions from Schweinsberg here in Fulda, vow of obedience or no vow of obedience."

  "You know," Orville was saying, down at the other end of the room where a different conversation had broken out, "one thing that we really ought to do, when we get a chance, is ask von Boyneburg to come in and give us a briefing about dealing with the imperial knights. Apparently, here in Fulda, they have a legal status that's different from the knights in Hesse. More like the ones in Franconia."

  Harlan Stull sighed. "I'll try to fit it into the agenda one of these days."

  "Well, if your supporters followed you when you went off with Tilly's army, and Hoheneck's bunch ran off to Cologne with him, carrying the archives, who were t
he monks we found at Fulda when we got here?" Wes Jenkins thought this was a reasonable question.

  "The Saint Gall monks," the abbot answered. "In the abbey. The monks who belong to the conventus of commoners don't reside here permanently. They are parish pastors and only come to the abbey for meetings and special events. And, then, some lay brothers, who do things like caring for the gardens, are still here."

  "That means what? Who are these Saint Gall monks?" Wes wondered if Schweinsberg missed having the administration building as a palace. He was living over in the abbey dormitory these days.

  "In 1626, I asked the Benedictine Abbey at Saint Gall, that's in Switzerland, to lend us some of their monks to reform us here at Fulda. That is, to show us how to conform more closely to the rule of Saint Benedict. They kindly sent us several, to serve as models for chanting the offices and following the church year, things like that. When the rest of us left for fear of the Swedes and Hessians, they stayed."

  "Reform you?"

  "Introduce the Tridentine reforms. The prescriptions of the Council of Trent. That was about, oh, seventy years ago. It went on for years. The council, I mean. The abbots have been trying to bring Fulda into conformity ever since, without a lot of luck. The noble families are thoroughly entrenched in the chapter. The younger sons they send us are usually fairly hard-working when it comes to doing things like administering the abbey's estates. That's what nobles do, after all. But they rarely have much enthusiasm about performing specifically monastic duties."

  "What's the problem?" Wes was genuinely curious.

  "We've tried, goodness knows. The Jesuit school. The seminar for future priests. And we've made some progress. Getting rid of the concubines, for example."

  "Concubines?"

  "Wives, really. Instead of living in little monastic cells, seventy-five years ago the chapter monks mostly lived in their own houses in town with their wives and children. Not that it was legal for them to have wives, of course, which is why they were called concubines by the reformers."

  "Didn't Catholics get a bit uptight about married monks?"

  "The laity? No more than they did about married priests in general, really. Not as long as they did the rest of their work okay. It's the hierarchy that disapproves of clerical matrimony, mainly, not the people. At the time of Trent, even the dukes of Bavaria tried hard to get the pope and cardinals to accept married priests."

  Wes shook his head.

  "The part that is properly in Franconia is called the 'Rhön and Werra' canton of the imperial knights." Urban von Boyneburg looked at the up-timers and pointed to the wall map.

  Derek Utt had made a blown-up map on a dozen pieces of paper taped together, from a little one in a down-time atlas. Ortelius, it was called. Ed Piazza had ordered a dozen copies of the atlas and distributed them around. It wasn't a very good map and the original had been made fifty years ago, so it was out of date, but it was better than any other map of Fulda that they had.

  "That's basically over here. You do know what an imperial knight is? And where the Werra River runs?"

  Wes Jenkins nodded.

  Boyneburg continued. "Most of the Franconian imperial knights are Protestant—Lutheran, in fact. Their families accepted that confession almost a century ago and they have been able to maintain it in spite of pressure from the bishops. So are the ones here in the Fulda region, in what we called the Buchenland or, in Latin, Buchonia. Most of the abbot's own family is Protestant, for that matter."

  "What's a 'Buchen'?" Fred Pence asked.

  Boyneburg looked blank. He could point to a Buchen if they asked him to, but . . .

  "A beech tree," Orville said in English. "This region is heavily wooded with beech trees."

  Boyneburg resumed the lecture. "In October 1631, right after the battle of Breitenfeld, the imperial knights of the Fulda region had a meeting right here in the city and decided that they would like to join with the Franconian knights as the 'Buchen Quarter.' Since then, they have negotiated with the king of Sweden. He has been willing to recognize them as immediate, with no territorial lord standing between them and him, as long as they pay him tribute. Which is plenty, by the way. The Ebersburgs are expected to come up with twenty imperial Thaler monthly, the von Schlitz have to pay forty Thaler a month. Even the Buchenau family, which isn't very prominent or prosperous, is being assessed thirteen Thaler monthly by the Swedes, to support the Protestant cause."

  "Where does Hesse-Kassel stand on this?" Derek Utt asked.

  "Well, you must know that Hesse does not have any imperial knights within its lands. The lower nobility of Hesse, its Ritterschaft, is subject to the landgrave. Not reichsfrei. They are landsässig, vassals of the landgrave rather than of the emperor. Or of the king of Sweden, since he has now put himself in the emperor's place, for all practical purposes."

  Wes Jenkins nodded.

  Boyneburg went on. "I'm afraid that my lord the landgrave rather alienated the imperial knights of the Buchen Quarter last year, by moving to make them landsässig in Fulda. That was before your town's arrival of course, when he hoped to be able to attach Fulda as one of his permanent possessions. Of course, the abbot of Fulda would also like to make the knights within his territory his vassals. Any territorial ruler would, naturally. It's just that Hesse and Württemberg have been more successful at mediatizing them—well, at mediatizing us, since I am a member of the Hessian nobility—than most other principalities."

  He paused. "The imperial knights of Buchen, ah, resist the idea of giving up their freedom and liberties to become the subjects of a territorial ruler very strongly."

  "So, at the moment, they are still classified as free knights, but they are paying through the nose for the privilege. A lot more than their taxes would be if they were subjects of the abbot," Wes Jenkins summed up.

  Boyneburg nodded his agreement.

  "Clara, since the NUS is sitting in the former chair of the abbot as Fulda's head of state or civil government, where do you think we stand as far as our relations with these guys are concerned?"

  "These knights in the Buchen are in a little different position than those in Hesse. They do, most of them, have some lands that are allods. That is, lands that they own in their own right and for which they do not owe any feudal dues. Just taxes to the emperor. Or, now, to King Gustavus Adolphus. But most of them also hold other lands as fiefs from Fulda. So the New United States is, I think, their feudal lord, their Lehensherr, for those lands, as well as being their Landesherr."

  "We don't want to be anybody's f . . . never mind, feudal lord," Harlan Stull exploded.

  "Well, it doesn't matter what we want," Andrea Hill said, "until the New United States gets around to changing the land system, we are. Not as individuals, but the administration is. So we are, collectively, as representatives of the government. That's pretty clear from the land title stuff that I've collected."

  Fulda, February 1633

  "I'm it, I think," Mark Early said. "The whole Special Commission on the Establishment of Freedom of Religion in the Franconian Prince-Bishoprics and the Prince-Abbey of Fulda. At least as far as Fulda is concerned. That's what my orders say. It's what my wife Susan says, too, and since she's working directly for Mike Stearns, I guess it's for real."

  "How do you intend to do it, on top of all the rest of your work?"

  "If you want me to do it, Wes, Derek's just going to have to make someone else bookkeeper and paymaster. Either pull one of the kids into the job or use a down-timer."

  "Derek, do you see any options to that?"

  "No, to tell the truth. They say that they'll send Joel Matowski out to help Mark, but he can't be freed up until late summer or early fall, probably. And when he does get here, he'll have a steep learning curve."

  "That's the down side. Is there an up side?"

  "Fulda's a lot smaller than Würzburg or Bamberg, so maybe one guy can do it," Andrea offered.

  "I don't think so," Wes said. "Even if we free up Mark, he's going to nee
d help and it obviously isn't going to be an up-timer. Do we have any down-time staff who could lend a hand, at least with scheduling the hearings and taking the minutes? Filing the records. Stuff like that."

  Harlan Stull shook his head.

  "What about Clara?" Derek asked.

  "Clara?"

  "Well, it looks to me like a lot of what this Special Commission is going to be doing is trying to get the Lutheran imperial knights and the Catholic abbot and chapter at the monastery to coexist and leave the ordinary people who belong to each other's religion alone. She's already been working with the abbot, so she should have a head start, so to speak. Then if we can get someone local . . . Andrea, did you ever hire a lawyer full time?"

  "I did. But the Special Commission can't have him. I'm not just paying him full time. I'm using him full time. Maybe he can recommend someone else."

  "Oh, sure, they always can," Harlan said. "A younger brother or a nephew or their cousin's brother-in-law."

  Roy Copenhaver shook his head. "Aren't we supposed to avoid nepotism?"

  "Hey, until we get an actual civil service, it works as well as any other hiring system. The trick is to make sure that we fire the incompetents who don't work out, and even with a civil service they didn't manage that, up-time. Neither West Virginia nor the feds."

  "Are you a cynic?"

  "I'm a realist. Okay, I'll ask Clara about it; see if she'd be willing to," Harlan said. In addition to his other duties, he was personnel manager.

  "How about Herr von Boyneburg?" Clara asked.

  "But he doesn't even work for us," Mark Early protested. "He works for the landgrave of Hesse-Kassel."

  "But it would be a good idea for someone who works for the landgrave of Hesse-Kassel to learn about separation of church and state. Wouldn't it?"

  "Yeah, I guess so. When you put it that way," Harlan answered. "Seems weird, though."