A lot of the things that Reece said made Matt feel awfully guilty. He knew that he should have been working on the commission stuff. It was assigned to him. But . . . he just didn’t have time.
* * *
Vince Marcantonio handed Matt a handful of pamphlets. From Jenny Hinshaw, back in Grantville, he said.
The letter in the package explained things. Her husband, Guy, had just been sent off on some kind of special detached duty. She knew that he had written a briefing paper for the Bamberg team earlier, since he had been stationed in Bamberg up-time and had explored a lot of Franconia while he was there. Picking up tourist brochures, which he had squirreled away. She had stumbled across them the week before while she was looking through some boxes in the closet. There might be something useful; maybe not. In any case, they were welcome to use them, but she would like them back, please, when they were done. They were, after all, Guy’s souvenirs. But she thought she would send the originals. Who knew? Maybe even the photos might be of some help.
One term caught Matt’s eye. And one name. War of religion. You would think that even when people changed jobs, they would at least stay on the side of the same religion. Sometimes, it seemed, it was just a matter of personal advantage. Or ambition. One guy, an artillery general, Count Johann Philipp Cratz von Scharffenstein, had been in and out of Kronach in 1632 in his capacity as Emperor Ferdinand II’s artillery general.
Back then, up-time, in 1633, he had been commander at Ingolstadt, took offense at something Duke Maximilian of Bavaria did or didn’t do-the pamphlet wasn’t very clear on that-and conspired to turn the Bavarian fortress over to Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. Who, up-time, had still been fighting for the Swedes. The whole thing got extremely confusing. Scharffenstein’s plot didn’t succeed, but he managed to get away. The upshot had been that in 1634, Scharffenstein, who had helped set up Kronach’s defenses when he was on the “Catholic” side had switched sides and turned up as a commander in the “Protestant” army that put the city under siege.
More and more, these days, Matt had a bad taste in his mouth.
Kronach, August 1633
Carl Neustetter did not know where the plague had come from. It had started the month before. Plague, certainly. Over a hundred people had died, already. If the observers outside the walls were keeping track, they should be counting the funerals.
It certainly did not help that there was no place to bury the dead except inside the walls.
Unless, of course, they wanted to open the gates.
The besiegers had offered a parley. They had not, naturally enough, offered to allow the city to send out its dead for burial. Or to allow the living to leave. The standard way to handle plague was to quarantine it as far as possible.
Neustetter wanted to open the gates. Wolf Philip von Dornheim did not. But, then, he was no longer the bishop’s relative. The bishop was dead in his exile. Neustetter had not received any news by way of a human being for nearly three months, but he had always kept a loft of carrier pigeons, as did one of his old friends in Bamberg.
So Dornheim could not veto. It would come down to de Melon. To surrender now, while possibly most of the city’s people could be saved by the up-timers’ possibly legendary medicines. Or to open the gates after they were dead.
Plague was plague. A fact of life. De Melon was not anxious to open the gates. Not yet.
Kronach, September 1633
Stewart Hawker came up himself, to tell Matt the news about how the Bamberg city council had ordered the flogging of Wilbur Thornton and Johnnie F. And the rest of it.
It wasn’t Matt’s fault. He had to be told that that. Vince Marcantonio agreed. Matt was having a hard time of it, watching people die inside Kronach. Cliff Priest hadn’t given him the easiest job going, this year. How did the folks back in Grantville expect him to do the Special Commission on Religious Freedom work on top of it?
Well, he’d tried. Both of them had, in a way, working with the Catholics and Protestants up here in the north. But up here in the north wasn’t Bamberg city, and nobody could be in two places at once.
Vince and Cliff needed Matt here.
* * *
“You know, Stew,” Matt Trelli said. “I just wish that I could figure out the hat colors.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Like in westerns. The good guys always wore the white hats. The bad guys always wore the black hats. These guys . . .” He shook his head.
Stew nodded.
What really hurt was that in a lot of ways, the people forted up in Kronach were the kind that a West Virginian would want to admire. Even if they were subjects of a prince-bishop, they were at least commoners. Tradesmen and workers, mostly; that was how they made their livings. They’d had a shooting club for nearly two centuries, already, in the town. The citizens were armed. Those were good things. Grantvillers knew in their bones that they were good things.
And, in a lot of ways, their opponents were the kind of people a West Virginian would want to loathe. Noblemen. Petty rulers who extracted the last penny out of the peasants who were their subjects.
“I think,” Matt said, finally “that maybe the right words are ‘tormented and afflicted.’ For what they do to each other, I mean. The words are in a lot of hymns.”
Who’s Calling This Race?
Virginia DeMarce
April 1633: Wurzburg, Franconia
Anita Masaniello-who had kept her maiden name when she married and had some decidedly feminist views otherwise, as well-looked at the group gathered around the conference table. A Grantville girl in origin, she had worked in the Baltimore county public library system before the Ring of Fire; she and her family had been caught up in it because they were attending her parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary party that Sunday afternoon. In Wurzburg, she was in charge of figuring out the land tenure system.
Steve Salatto, her husband, was not a happy camper. “Is this religious freedom commission on top of us, under us, or flying somewhere out at a lateral? Just when we were, sort of, starting to figure out what we’re doing.”
Anita wasn’t surprised at his grumpy tone. Her husband had been appointed “Chief NUS Administrator for Franconia” in overall charge of the administration of Franconia, right after the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus had turned it over to the New United States in the fall of 1632. They had come to Wurzburg scarcely a month later, that October, six months ago now. Despite being a bureaucrat by training and background, Steve wasn’t much given to petty fussiness and turf wars. Still, no administrator likes to discover that he’s been saddled with a “special commission” which stands outside of the clearly delineated chain of command.
“Lateral, I think,” Scott Blackwell said. “But we’ll end up having our feet held to the fire for whatever they do.”
If Scott Blackwell had a family motto, Anita thought, it would have been: cynicism is the best alternative. Several months as the chief NUS military administrator in Franconia hadn’t helped his mood.
“Who’s coming?” That question came from David Petrini, the economic liaison. Most of the Franconian cities didn’t have an economic liaison, but in so far as Grantville had been able to muster a cadre of high-powered administrators, it had blessed Wurzburg with them.
Steve Salatto grimaced. “Well, we-Wurzburg, that is-are being endowed with three would-be but not-yet-quite-hatched lawyers, a legal clerk and three security guys. Specifically, for the commission members: Reece Ellis, Paul Calagna, and Phil Longhi. With Jon Villareal as clerk. And Lowry Eckerlin, Jim Genucci, and Hugh McAndrew for security.”
“Oh,” Petrini said. “Joy.”
“Hey, wait. Those three security guys have decent MP training. Them we can use.” Scott’s mood had actually brightened a little. “If only they would send us some staff . . .”
“Yeah,” Steve said. “Really, I could use all four of the guys that they’re sending to be this commission. If, of course, Congress had been so kind as to appropriate enough money into our budget that Mike could have sent them to work for me. But, at least, they’re sending them. For Bamberg, they’re just piling the commission function on top of what Walt Miller and Matt Trelli are already doing. In Fulda, Mark Early gets the job and they’re sending Joel Matowski out from Grantville to help him, as soon as they can get him detached from what he’s doing now.”
“Joel Matowski is what? Twenty-four years old?”
“Can it, David,” Anita said. “All of us were twenty-four, once upon a time. People can’t help it. But-why Reece Ellis?”
They all looked at one another.
It was a good question. The sections of Franconia that Gustavus Adolphus had assigned to Grantville for administrative purposes were almost entirely Catholic. Somehow, most of the administrators sent there by Grantville had turned out to be Catholic, with just a large enough salting of Protestants to indicate that these assignments were not entirely based on religion.
There had been a vague hope that sending Catholics would be a conciliatory gesture, perhaps. Or that it would make more of an impression upon the residents of Franconia if the news about changes in the wind was brought to them by their fellow-religionists. Or . . . Who knew? In any case, Anita thought, most of the people sitting around the table had known one another for a long time at St. Mary’s. The people in the commission seem to follow pretty much the same pattern. Except for Reece.
Scott Blackwell wasn’t Catholic, true, but he had recently gotten engaged to a down-time woman who was. Steve’s deputy, Saunders Wendell, was Presbyterian-but his wife Jessica was Catholic. Saunders was not in the meeting because he was out arbitrating a dispute between two claimants to a mill pond. The stream of water in question formed the boundary between two Aemter. The Amtmann, the local administrator, in each of them had issued a decision that favored the man from his own district; the dispute had been appealed to higher authority. Saunders, armed with a sheaf of paper from Anita’s down-time clerks that laid out the course of the claims for the past three generations, had set out in the sure knowledge that no matter what he decided, at least half of the people involved would be unhappy and resentful at the end of it.
Reece Ellis. Well, aaah. He’d married Anne Marie Robinson, who was a member of the parish. No one knew quite why, except for the obvious, of course. For Anne Marie, the Rite of Holy Matrimony was also the Only Path to Sex. Anita sometimes wondered whether Anne Marie ever regretted having walked down that path with Reece, but if so, she had never admitted it.
Reece hadn’t converted. He took outspoken pride in not having converted. He seemed to mention at every opportunity that he hadn’t converted.