1635-The Tangled Web Read online

  Roy looked around. Andrea's little domain was buzzing, with a half dozen clerks clustered around ledgers and box files. Harlan had complained a lot about the cost of reconstituting the records. It was way over budget. She had looked at him and answered, "Well, if the original estimates were realistic, nobody would ever authorize starting any project at all. You have to break it to them gradually."

  The clerks were jabbering away in the standard means of communication, which was German with a bunch of English terms thrown in. Terms like "paper trail" and all sorts of acronyms. The up-timers did the same thing when they spoke English. There might have been English words for technical terms like landsässig and Stift that von Boyneburg had taught them, but it was certain that not a single one of the Grantvillers in Fulda knew what they were. Anyway, mostly, except when the Grantvillers were by themselves, they all spoke German. Or Gerglish. Or Amideutsch.

  Andrea was wearing the down-time full skirts that went right to the floor. She said they were warmer. The one she had on today was a sort of dull gold color, like the shade that used to be in the crayon boxes. She was also wearing a gray knit sweat shirt with a hood and a wool up-time ladies' suit jacket. It was pink. Because she spent her days with pens, pencils, and dusty ledgers, she had added, in this world without dry cleaning, a set of down-time removable linen cuffs to keep the pink wool clean at the wrists. Roy couldn't have described this ensemble to his wife Jen in any detail if she had asked. He could and did stand there hoping, inarticulately but profoundly, that the ensemble did not represent the wave of the future as far as fashion was concerned.

  Andrea shook her head. "Ask Harlan. We do the titles, not the collections. This office just figures out who owes us and sometimes how much. Not to mention how far the payments are in arrears."

  "You don't mean it," Roy said.

  "Well, it's not as if I have a budget for a property management staff," Harlan protested. "It was the only thing I could think of that made sense. So I contracted it out."

  "The abbot's collecting them?"

  "Straight percentage."

  "Is he scamming? Skimming? Doing any of the other stuff with which West Virginia state employees are so familiar?"

  "I don't think so, but how the h . . . heck should I know. It's not as if I have a staff of auditors at my disposal."

  "Wes is going to have a cow."

  A Bunch of Damned Anarchists

  Fulda, December 1633

  "I tell you," Wes proclaimed, "these imperial knights are a bunch of damned anarchists. I've never seen anything like it. Each and every one of them thinks that he's a little universe all to himself and not bound by anything that anyone else decides. Certainly not by a majority vote. Not even by a majority vote of their own organization that they set up themselves and voluntarily joined."

  "That is," Clara said, "their definition of liberty, after all. That no one else can tell you what to do. Or, for the Reichsritter, liberties. Not to be subject to someone else. To determine one's own destiny freely."

  "What have they done now to set you off?" Fred asked.

  "I was over at the Buchen Quarter meeting. They're still trying to decide what they want to do about the election next spring. Some of them, like Ilten, are willing to take part in it. He was actually radical enough to say that he would accept a majority vote. Some of them, von der Tann right at the head of them, don't want anything to do with it. The Till von Berlepsch guy got up and talked for a good hour about how they defied the abbot back in 1576 and his ancestor was involved. Riedesel, over on the western border—he has lands at Eisenbach and Lauterbach—won't have a thing to do with anything that might put him under Fulda. His family has been fighting the abbots for centuries, it sounds like. Fighting as in armies and such. When his ancestor introduced the Reformation, it just gave them one more thing to fight about."

  "It's not as if they ought to be worried that the NUS administration is going to try to make them Catholic again, just because we're working with the abbot on some stuff. Haven't we managed to make that clear?" Fred's frustration was plain in his voice.

  Urban von Boyneburg, who was still in Fulda keeping an eye out for any possible advantages that might accrue to the landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, started another mini-lecture. "It's clear to them that you won't. And that for as long as you are around, Schweinsberg won't. But even though they're anteing up a lot of money to Gustavus Adolphus, they're trying to hedge their bets in case he doesn't win the war—keeping a weather eye out on what the imperials and the Leaguists are doing and the possibility that this abbot could be tossed out and replaced. It's not as if there's no precedent, since they tossed one out themselves, back in grandpa's day. There are several of them who think that if there's another tilt and the emperor comes out on top, they could plead 'coercion' for making the tribute payments to Gustavus Adolphus and get off lightly, but not for formally voting themselves into the USE and State of Thuringia. Or even for letting themselves be voted in."

  "So what did they do, finally?" Fred asked Wes.

  "Tabled it and adjourned until after New Year's."

  Fulda, January 1634

  "Great party," Fred said. "Post-Christmas, pre-New-Year, whatever you want to call it. I'm really glad that Kortney and Jared could come over to Fulda for the holidays. It was nice of the nursing school to let her take a whole month off from her classes."

  "Well, they're calling it an internship and they got an exchange," Andrea answered. "She's substituting here for Gus Szymanski so he and Theresa could go home and spend Christmas with his sister Garnet. She's had a lonely life. Gus will be talking to the EMT students about his experiences during a year of actual field practice."

  "True. Kortney was up before I was this morning, heading out to the barracks to check on people."

  "Where's Jared?"

  "Clara took him with her over to the abbey. One of the novices is going to show him around, and he'll write a report for having done a field trip, since he's missing a couple of weeks of school."

  "Did you watch Wes dancing with Clara?"

  Fred grinned. "Cheek to cheek and all that, for all that they are still officially on 'last name' terms. They had so much trouble prying their hands apart that I suspected Jeffie Garand of daubing their palms with super glue at first. Do you suppose Wes thinks that nobody has noticed that he is the only one of us who doesn't call her by her first name. We ribbed him about it. He says that he's 'way too old' for her to be interested in him."

  "Well," Andrea said. "I had fun at the party. Wes danced with Clara. Johnny danced with Antonia. Jeffie danced with Gertrud. You danced with Kortney. And I got to dance with all the other guys. I was the belle of the ball. Too bad it didn't happen forty years ago, when it would have been more exciting."

  "Yeah." Fred got up. "Better get to work, I guess. It's too bad that Eden and Jen couldn't come for the holidays too, but at least Harlan and Roy get to go over to Grantville occasionally to deal with the budget people."

  "That fruit candy was good. Nice change from the usual stuff," Harlan said.

  "Where did it come from?"

  "Andrea's lawyer ordered it from Frankfurt. He knows someone down there who imports it. The fruit is called currants."

  "Wes didn't eat much."

  "He was too busy dancing with Clara."

  "Would you call that dancing?"

  "Wes is like me." Harlan grinned. "Methodists of the generation who still suspect that dancing is sinful, but think that God won't really be offended if you just get out on the floor and walk around, without actually performing a dance step. And ignore the music. If you have no rhythm at all, you're practically not dancing."

  "Clara looked good at the party," Roy said. "She dresses a lot sharper than Andrea."

  Fred grinned. "According to Kortney, her mom doesn't have any fashion sense at all."

  "That," Roy said, "is really a relief to hear."

  "How long do you suppose it has been since Wes asked a girl for a date?" Derek asked
.

  "He started going steady with Lena in high school," Harlan answered. "And he's what? Fifty, maybe? Fifty-two? Enough older than me that we were never in school together."

  "Do you think," Andrea asked, "that Wes would be 'way too old for you' to marry?"

  Clara looked at her. "If Caspar were still alive, he would be several years older than Mr. Jenkins. Plus, he would be much sicker."

  Andrea raised her eyebrows.

  Clara shrugged. "Caspar was always having a physician in to bleed him or going to the apothecary for a dose of medicine. If a disease existed that was not fatal, Caspar had it. At least, he thought that he had it. After thirteen years of that, I was really rather surprised when he actually died. It was his mother's fault, I think. He was her only child who lived and she was always afraid that he would die." Her eyes twinkled. "I am pretty sure that Mr. Jenkins is feeling quite healthy. He never takes time off work to be sick."

  Her face became more serious. "I wish, though, that he was not always so angry. Not at people. To us, who work for him, he is kind. For all of the people in Fulda, he is anxious. Concerned. But angry at the world. At the things that happen."

  "Wes didn't want this job. Ed Piazza twisted his arm to get him to take it. Grantville doesn't have that many people with degrees in public administration. I sat in on some of their arguments, before we came over here. Wes pointed out that he didn't handle this kind of thing. He was a manager, but he was deputy director of the Marion County parks department. The worst threats he faced on the average day were cracks in the asphalt on tennis courts or vandalism to the catchers' cages on the baseball diamonds. Anything worse than that, he called the sheriff's department and let them take care of it. He had a staff that worried about scheduling conflicts when more than one family reunion wanted to use the same shelter on a Sunday afternoon."

  "But he does it wonderfully. This job. I admire him so very much."

  "But he thinks that he's a fake, Clara. Every morning he gets up thinking that this will be the day that some Leaguist with a lot more regiments than he has figures out that he's just blowing smoke and moves into the spot on the map that he's responsible for, slaughtering and raping his way across it. That's why he's so uptight about everything. Because it's his duty to protect it now, and he's not at all sure that he can."

  "Perhaps he can't. But he tries his best, every single day." Clara crossed her arms across her chest, shivering a little, as if she were cold. "That's one of the reasons that I certainly would not object . . . But he should not marry me, you know, because I am barren. He has daughters, but if he marries again, he should choose a woman who can give him sons."

  "What's the other reason you would not object?" Andrea was genuinely curious.

  "Oh, there are many. He has a good job, his social position is suitable, my family would not protest, all of those. But the main one . . ." Clara winked. "When I dance with him, I do not think that he is 'way too old' at all."

  Andrea looked down at her daughter from her perch on the desk. "Why do you suppose?"

  Kortney shrugged. "It doesn't make sense. It just is. Line up a couple of hundred men and let a woman take a look at them. In front of a hundred ninety-nine, every internal organ from her eardrums to her kidneys will get together and announce, 'I would rather kiss a toad.' Perfectly nice, reasonably good-looking, reasonably sober, reasonably hard-working guys, a lot of them. Not losers. No obvious way to tell them apart. Then there's the one for whom the same organs all stand up and shout 'Boing.' "

  "Maybe it's an anti-promiscuity gene," Andrea said. "But I know what you mean. It's probably the reason that the ladies who eat lunch at Cora's back in Grantville repeat the sentence 'I just can't tell what she sees in him' as often as they do. Bunch of gossips."

  "Well, that's true. Because if you take the hundred ninety-nine leftovers and let another gal look them over, she'll react to one that the first one ignored completely. Some girls miss out on it, of course. They're mostly the ones that we keep seeing at the clinic, over and over."

  "Clara's never said a word against her husband. But you pick up things, rooming together as long as we have now. To use your word, I have a suspicion that he was a platter of deep-fried toad, served up by her family, and she just made the best of it. So she hasn't had much experience with these kinds of feelings. And, of course, she's handicapped by wanting what she thinks is best for Wes instead of just wanting what she wants."

  "Which is Wes." Kortney giggled.

  "And even though he was obviously going 'wow' the first time he saw Clara, somewhere deep in his heart, Wes thinks that he's still married to Lena. And he's such an upright citizen."

  "And you say the ladies at Cora's are gossips, Mom. We aren't?"

  "Well, not malicious. Just trying to figure out a way to dig them out of this impasse."

  Kortney frowned. "Did Clara ever have a gyne exam? That is, did the doctors or midwives or whatever have any idea why she never got pregnant?"

  "You could ask her, I guess." Andrea folded her arms and stuck her chilly fingers up her sleeves. "That is, if you have the nerve."

  "That's one thing you learn in nursing school, Mom. Not to be afraid to ask embarrassing questions. They really ought to make it a prerequisite for being admitted."

  "Well, I don't think that she will be embarrassed. That's one thing that I've been learning this year. I guess I just assumed that since back in Victorian times, people were more prudish than we are, then a couple hundred years before, they would be even more prudish. It doesn't work that way. People in the seventeenth century haven't gotten to Victorianism at all yet. Honest to God, some of the things that Clara says just make me blush."

  "Well," Kortney said, washing her hands, "I can't tell on the basis of a regular gyne exam that there's any reason at all why you didn't have children. All your organs are there, in the right place, healthy, no polyps, no obvious endometriosis, none of the stuff that we look for first. Maybe it was your husband's problem."

  She launched into the next set of embarrassing questions.

  "You've got to be kidding. On the average?" Kortney snorted her coffee. "Every three months?"

  "Well, the first five years that we were married." Clara said. "After that, less often. You understand that Caspar was afraid that spilling his seed too often would weaken his vital humors and they were not strong to begin with. I know that one physician did tell him that it would improve his likelihood of begetting heirs if he increased the frequency to what was recommended in the Old Testament, but he changed doctors."

  "I didn't even know that the Old Testament recommended anything."

  "Twice a week, except during a woman's courses. At least, that was what the physician told us. Although he added that he himself, on the basis of experience, thought three times in the week was preferable for couples who desired offspring. Perhaps in these latter days men's vital forces are weaker than they were in biblical times. After all," she said seriously, "the Old Testament patriarchs lived much longer, too. It was not until much later that things became worse, so that today 'our years are seventy, or eighty if we have the strength.' "

  Buchen Quarter, January 1634

  "It's an interesting concept," Ruprecht von Ilten looked at the other imperial knights of the Fulda region. Unfortunately, the questions that they had tabled before Christmas could not remain tabled indefinitely, so they were having another meeting.

  "Why do we all have copies of the constitution of the New United States?" Johann von der Tann was stomping around the room.

  "Because Herr Wesley Jenkins sent them to us, to read before he makes his presentation."

  "Are you trying to be deliberately naive, von Ilten?"

  "Apparently, in the spring of 1632, when its representatives met with the king of Sweden, the ambassadress, the Abrabanel woman, made this point." Claus von Berlepsch was representing his brother.

  "Which point?" Eberhard von Buchenau asked.

  "That the purpose of the constitutio
n was not to take away rights, but to establish them."

  "Her name is Rebecca, the Abrabanel woman. Rebecca the deceiver, who misled Isaac into granting the blessing to the wrong son. They can't expect us to believe this," von der Tann protested.

  "It's an interesting idea. If, of course, it is true." Von Ilten rather hoped that it was true.

  "I'm not ready to commit myself to anything," von der Tann said.

  Von Buchenau echoed him. "None of us are."

  "This is quite true," Wes Jenkins said. "Under the constitution of the New United States, there are no 'subjects.' Only 'citizens.' Because we know that you have been seriously concerned that your status under the law might be diminished by such developments as the landgrave of Hesse's efforts to reduce you to the status of Landsassen within Stift Fulda, several members of the administration have cooperated to produce this special presentation. I assure you that we are sincerely grateful that the imperial knights of the Buchen Quarter are devoting so much of their valuable time to considering our modest efforts."

  Wes continued his introductory remarks, thinking to himself, "drone on, Mr. Jenkins, drone on" to Woody Guthrie's tune. He loathed these apparently endless speeches, but had resigned himself to the fact that he now lived in a world in which brevity was equated to rudeness on formal occasions. At least he didn't have to write them. Andrea's lawyer, upon request, had dredged up a nephew who was willing to write his speeches, among such other duties as might from time to time be assigned.

  "How could it possibly work? That we would be incorporated within this new state—the State of Thuringia—if this election decides that Franconia will join it, but not be mediatized?"

  "The idea is really strange. But it seems to be true. I certainly was able to buy copies of the constitution of the original 'United States'—the one they came from—with no problem at all. Just ordered them from Frankfurt, the way I would any other book," von Ilten said.