“I want to introduce you to somebody. One of the printshop owners. Frau Else Kronacher.”
Noelle raised an eyebrow. “A woman? Heading up a printshop?”
Johnnie F. grinned. “She’s having a battle royal with the guild. As you can imagine. Although that seems to have settled down, this past week. As you can also imagine.”
Both of Noelle’s eyebrows were up, now.
“Oh, yeah,” said Johnnie F. “I’m not sure yet, but I think she’s real close to the ‘Ram.’ Helmut himself, unless I miss my guess.”
They’d reached the entrance to one of the shops. Johnnie F. turned to face Noelle squarely, his face very solemn.
Johnnie F. was never solemn.
Noelle rolled her eyes. “Let me guess.”
“Yup. Your mission, should you decide to accept it…”
“Cut it out, Johnnie!”
“Mindrot comes in lots of flavors. I loved that show. Should you decide to accept it…”
Chapter 3:
“The Natives Are Restless”
Wuerzburg, Early October, 1633
Meyfarth stood watching. He had furnished the auditors with temporary quarters the day that they arrived. Now they were standing impatiently outside the doors of considerably more spacious ones. The Special Commission on the Establishment of Freedom of Religion in the Franconian Prince-Bishoprics and the Prince-Abbey of Fulda was preparing to wind up its work and return to Grantville with its wagon load of accumulated paper.
Well, two wagon loads. The commissioners should have left the first week of September. However, Phil Longhi’s prediction of the need for a wagon and team to transport paper had turned out to be inadequate. Paul Calagna had only budgeted for one wagon. When they started to load, they had to scrounge around for a second wagon and team to transport the paperwork that their efforts had generated. Finally, however, the teamsters were bringing out the last crates and barrels.
Relations between the two sets of officials would have been more strained if the special commissioner who provided inadequately for its transport needs hadn’t been Willa’s son-in-law. As it was, Estelle and Maydene had bowed to the need to be understanding about the delay.
It was Meyfarth’s opinion that the up-timers’ theories about administration and the way it really worked among them in practice were far from the same. Ties of blood appeared to be as effectual for them as for the down-timers.
The three women were talking in English about what happened to Willard and Johnnie F. in Bamberg the month before. The five men were talking in German about what happened to Herr Thornton and Herr Haun in Bamberg. It seemed as though everybody in Wuerzburg was talking about Bamberg.
Meyfarth had to do some serious thinking about Bamberg. And some serious praying. He would schedule it into his daily routine.
* * *
After Willard Thornton recovered from the flogging, he went home to Grantville. Not permanently, but the bigwigs in the LDS church there wanted to hear from his own mouth what had led up to it.
Johnnie F. Haun, after introducing Noelle Murphy to Frau Kronacher, just went back to work. Harvest time was not the right season for an ag extension agent to be lollygagging around as an invalid. He pulled his “hearts and minds” team together and sent them out into the villages to demonstrate improved techniques in hand threshing. He would love to have them demonstrate threshing machines, but there weren’t going to be any threshing machines in Franconia for a long time yet. There were, however, easier and faster ways to separate the grain from the chaff than beating it with a flail.
* * *
Johann Friedrich Krausold found it difficult to work with these up-time women. He had a clear vision of the duty of an auditor. It was to make sure that the government received every Pfennig in dues, taxes, and labor services that was coming to it, while preventing local administrators from siphoning any of it off into a project of making their private fortunes.
The women had no objection to that. Indeed, Frau McIntire showed an admirable concentration on tracking down graft and corruption, wherever it might be found. She told him that before the Ring of Fire, she had been a “data input clerk” for the Fraud Division of the “IRS.” This Internal Revenue Service would be well worth a man’s time to learn about. When he advised her where, in a given Amt, the siphoning would most likely be occurring, she burrowed into the records until she found it, documented it, and drew up a report on it. Krausold did not yet clearly grasp what a “data input clerk” might have been, but he found her descriptions of the internal culture of the “IRS” fascinating. Their conversations were most illuminating.
But Frau Fodor! She had another vision in addition to this auditing assignment, apparently formed by her background in her husband’s “small business.” As she went around from Amt to Amt, she constantly told merchants and artisans, farmers and landlords, ordinary subjects, that they should be careful not to pay the government one more red cent than it was entitled to by law.
Frau Utt was, if anything, even worse. It appeared that she had for some years of her life worked for a corporation whose whole purpose was to minimize the tax obligations of the government’s subjects. With handbooks from this “H amp;R Block,” she conducted seminars, after her regular work day, designed to teach ordinary people to understand the “rights of citizens” under the tax code.
There was no doubt that their ideas were contaminating the four trainees. Krausold couldn’t do anything about it. Under the terms that Herr Bellamy had established for this project, he was the auditors’ subordinate.
He could, however, collect his grievances and send reports on them to the proper Duke of Saxe-Weimar. To Wilhelm Wettin, as he was calling himself now. He also complained a lot to Johann Matthaeus Meyfarth who could, as a fellow down-timer, be expected to understand.
* * *
Meyfarth understood, all right. He also summarized every conversation with Krausold and, with Steve’s approval, sent the summaries on to Arnold Bellamy and ultimately, he presumed, to Don Francisco Nasi or to Michael Stearns. His proper duke had been Johann Casimir of Saxe-Coburg, who had assigned him to these up-timers. The old duke had died just recently, in July. Meyfarth had regretted not being able to attend the funeral. Childless in his body, Johann Casimir had been a true father to his subjects.
Childless. Meyfarth’s mind wandered. His own wife and children had died in Coburg the previous year – the summer before the NUS administrators came to Franconia. Plague. Because of that, he had been free to come. No hostages that he had given to fortune. No one, any longer, on whose behalf conscience could make a coward of him. It had been good to have a demanding new task. More than a year now, his family had been gone. To a better place, he reminded himself firmly. More than a year..
Since the duke’s death, however, Meyfarth served no master. He worked for the government of the New United States. It was a strange feeling, in some ways. Naked and unprotected. Liberating.
* * *
The two wagons that the Special Commission was using pulled out of Wuerzburg. There were guards up in front, and a hired driver for the first wagon. The Special Commission’s personnel were in the second wagon, which had considerably better springs, with Reece Ellis driving. He let the others ride in peace for a couple of miles. Comparative peace, anyway, since Paul and Lynelle’s two-year-old was squalling her little head off. The two older kids were playing a game in the back. Finally, Reece decided that he couldn’t put it off any more. Shifting the reins to his left hand, he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, brought out an envelope, and said, “Guys, I’ve got news for us. Sealed orders, but I know what’s in them, pretty much. We’re not going back to Grantville.”
Phil Longhi said, “What the hell?”
“Matz Meyfarth brought the idea up. I took it to Steve and he took it to Arnold Bellamy. Whence the orders. It’s too good a chance to miss. We’re spending the winter in Coburg.”
Phil reached out to take the envelope.
“Why?” Paul Calagna sounded only mildly curious.
“Because Matz’s duke died.” Reece was the only one of them who had gotten on first-name terms with the German clergyman. “He didn’t have any children. The heir to the property will be his brother. That’s Duke Johann Ernst, the Saxe-Eisenach one. But he’s sixty-six years old and doesn’t have any children either. When he goes, both little duchies will be up for grabs among the other Wettins. If we let them be.”
“What do you mean, ‘if we let them be?’,” Phil asked.
“Matz was explaining about oaths. These German states being what they are, there isn’t any of that business about, ‘The king is dead; long live the king.’ When even the emperor dies, for goodness sake, if they haven’t already elected an heir, it’s up for grabs. Even when the duke or count who died does have a son to inherit, it’s not absolutely automatic. The new guy makes a tour all around the county or duchy and his subjects come in and take something called a Huldigungseid. I guess the closest thing would be an oath of allegiance. It doesn’t have anything to do with knights or fealty or stuff like that. A Huldigungseid goes right down to your ordinary farmers and artisans. They come in to a big meeting and promise to obey him; he promises to protect and shield them; then they all have dinner. Usually, it’s a big outdoor picnic, really. Then he goes on to the next Amt and does it again.”
“So?” Lynelle asked.
“So, at the moment, old Johann Ernst has been too tired and sick to come over and collect oaths. The people in Saxe-Coburg aren’t oathbound to anyone, right now. We’re not going to be messing around with the Wettins’ properties. They keep their money and their estates. But we’re stepping in and taking a Huldigungseid from everybody in Saxe-Coburg, directly to the constitution of the New United States. And if it works-okay, I know that’s quite a bit of an ‘if,’ but if it does-we’ll do it again in Saxe-Eisenach when Johann Ernst dies. And, gradually, beyond. Just like we did for the folks who got themselves annexed to Grantville because the count of Gleichen had died without heirs. Remember Birdie Newhouse and the people in the village where he’s farming now? If we keep at it, slow but sure, eventually the NUS won’t be this loose confederacy with lords and things. We’ll have something like a country, with every single person owing allegiance to the constitution, not to some lordship.”
Paul Calagna reached for the squalling kid and said, “Smooth.”
“So we’re going to Coburg and we’ll spend the rest of the fall, maybe into the winter, collecting these oaths. The wagon up front,” Reece nodded, “actually does have the Special Commission’s stuff. You didn’t really miscalculate, Paul. This wagon has stuff for the Coburg project. We sort of sneaked it into the storeroom. Steve didn’t want any leaks. Lynelle and the kids can go on to Grantville with the first wagon, and . . .”
Lynelle said, “Over my cold, dead body.”
Reece stared at her.