“About the boys . . .” Noelle waved her hand at the curtain. “Once things settle down a bit, why don’t you send them to Grantville to learn the new printing technology? It’s not covered by the guild regulations.” Yet, she thought. There was no real reason to assume that the guilds wouldn’t be scrambling to catch up. There was also no real reason to bring that up at this very moment.
“The whole reason for what I have done is to keep this business for my sons.”
Noelle ran a hand through her sandy blonde hair. The basic truth was that Frau Else didn’t really want to overthrow the system. She just wanted to be part of it. “Could you-maybe-just think outside the box for a minute?”
That required quite a bit of explanation.
Ending with a repeat of Frau Else’s protest that she couldn’t send her sons away because no trained journeyman printer would work for a woman who was not a master. And since she was not a master, she could not accept apprentices even if there were parents who were willing to send their sons to her. Not that any reasonable parent would be willing to waste money paying a master when the boy would not be eligible to enter the guild at the end of not. Not to say . . .
Blast it! Luckily that was inside Noelle’s head and not coming out of her mouth.
“Ah. Well, maybe we could kill two birds with one stone. Something to keep Melchior and Otto occupied. Someone to work for you in the shop.”
“There’s no way.”
The world does not end at the borders of Bamberg. Noelle hadn’t said that, either. Though she had come close.
“I’ll see about having them organize a Committee of Correspondence in Bamberg. Maybe, given their age, a kind of ‘junior chapter’ with a lot of training involved. They’ll need mentors. Something like Boy Scout leaders, I guess.”
Martha looked skeptical. “Where would these mentors come from?”
“That’s the other end of my idea. I’ll see if they”-she left “they” undefined quite deliberately-“can send a couple guys down from Magdeburg. CoC members who are printers and will be willing to work for Frau Else. Create a liaison with Helmut. Organize a junior chapter at the same time.”
Frau Else crossed her arms over her ample chest. “I will not turn my shop over to any other master. Not to one from Magdeburg any more than to a guild master from Bamberg.”
“Journeymen. Working for you. There won’t be any masters from Magdeburg who are interested in a project like this, anyhow.” Noelle laughed. “It’s the nature of revolutions to be rather short on wise old elders. Mike Stearns is seriously frustrated at the shortage of Red Sybolt types.”
That required more explanation also.
By the end of the conversation, Noelle wasn’t too sure about just how far this fledgling Franconian revolution was going to go. Her mind skipped to the passage in Ezekiel where God told the hapless prophet to “prophesy to the breath.” In her limited experience, it just wasn’t exactly a snap to put flesh on dry bones. Much less raise the dead.
A second image rose up. She saw herself fanning the flames of a wood fire in an old-fashioned cooking range to make them burn more hotly. Blowing upon them. Someone would have to breathe more life into this revolt before anyone could prophesy to the breath.
Frau Else marched back through the curtain with a firm, “I can’t just stand around talking all day. There’s work to be done.”
For one morning, Noelle thought, she had probably done as much as she could.
Martha rubbed her temples again. “I won’t marry one of them, either.”
“What on earth?”
“If you bring journeymen from Magdeburg. I won’t marry one of them, either. I don’t intend to be anyone’s sacrificial lamb.” She glared at Noelle. “Not for my brothers. Not for anyone else, either.”
“Look, honey.” Noelle put an arm around Martha’s shoulder. Martha was a little older, twenty-five to Noelle’s “going to be twenty-three next month.” Equal stubbornness was the main foundation of their rapidly growing friendship. “People are just teasing when they call you the ‘ewe lamb’ and say that since your mom is the Ewe, you’re destined to marry Helmut. Whoever he may be in real life. Nobody really expects you to marry him. Or one of these guys, whoever they turn out to be.”
“Some of them are serious.” Martha circled her shoulders. She had spent most of the morning cleaning display cases. “I’ve got to be realistic. Mutti has turned into a revolutionary. That’s fine, I suppose. We need a revolution. About some things, at least.”
Noelle laughed. Martha was far less of a flaming radical than her mother. Whose radicalism also had very sharp limits. “Realistic about what?”
“Well, people do tend to marry inside their own trade. There’s some marrying across guild lines, but especially in the highly skilled trades-glass making, printing, lens grinding, and the like-families are a lot more likely to arrange marriages into the same trade, even if it means looking outside of your own town. We-the family, I mean-aren’t really printers any more in the sense that we’re part of the guild. We’re revolutionaries. So it’s not that odd that people are thinking that she’ll find a revolutionary for me to marry. That someone like Helmut would make a suitable match.”
“So what do you have against the idea?”
“He’s… Well, I don’t care whether he’s been to the university or not, he’s just crude,” Martha proclaimed. “He can speak Latin, but he’s just as crude in Latin as he is in German. Not all the time, but a lot of it. When he’s not being a public person. He’s been teaching out in that village in the Steigerwald so long that he’s practically become a peasant himself. That’s… I don’t want a husband like that. I want one who is just as cultured at home as he is when he’s speaking in the city council chamber.”
“Cultured?”
“Music,” Martha said. “You know. Poetry. Literature. I know that Helmut does lesson plans, and he’s smart. Shrewd. He did the annotated version of Common Sense that we published.”
She elaborated, from her point of view. Helmut was not only crude, but loud. If Martha wanted loud, all she needed to do was stay home with her mother and brothers, who were loud enough to drive a person mad. Helmut had a voice that boomed. Which was good for giving speeches to large numbers of people in open fields, but would become terribly tiring if it were inside a small house.
Inadvertently, by listing all the reasons she didn’t in the least want to marry Helmut, she gave Noelle more information concerning the Ram than any other up-timer had. Everything, practically, but his name and the exact location of his headquarters.
* * *
Walking back up the alley, Noelle checked to see that it was Melchior rather than Hanna on the ladder. She wondered if she was legally or morally obliged to share what she had just learned with Vince Marcantonio and Steve Salatto and their various official subordinates. By the time she had reached the episcopal palace which was serving as administrative headquarters, she concluded that she wasn’t. What they didn’t know, they wouldn’t feel obliged to do something-anything-about. After some reflection she decided that she didn’t think she would even tell Johnnie F.
The Ram movement needed a little breathing room, was her sense of things. That had certainly been the gist of the private messages she’d gotten from Mike Stearns, when he’d been the President of the NUS. Now that he’d moved up to Magdeburg and become the prime minister of the new United States of Europe, she no longer had any direct contact with him. But the two messages she’d gotten since from the new President of whatever-the-NUS-would-wind-up-calling-itself, Ed Piazza, made it clear that nothing had changed.
Well, some subtleties, perhaps. Stearns had been more prone to relying on the Committees of Correspondence than Piazza seemed to be. But that hardly indicated any new formalization of affairs, as far as she was concerned. Ed Piazza simply substituted working through the Genevan fellow Leopold Cavriani instead. It had been Cavriani who had obtained, no doubt through his usual tortuous means, the duplicating machines.
It was obvious to Noelle that Cavriani often worked closely with the CoCs, in addition to being a revolutionary of some kind in his own right. So, she was still working very much in what, in a now-gone uptime world, would have been called “gray operations.”
Steve Salatto wouldn’t approve of what she was doing, of course. He’d be especially irate if he found out she was doing it behind his back. But his position made him oblivious to a lot of things, anyway. The real problem was Johnnie F., who wasn’t oblivious to much of anything.
On the other hand…
Johnnie F. was also a past master at the art of looking the other way, when it suited him. Noelle was pretty sure he’d do it again here, if he found out.
Grantville, Late November, 1633
At first, the LDS church in Grantville had more or less decided that Willard Thornton ought to stay in town for the rest of the winter. It wasn’t the best traveling weather. That suited his wife Emma just fine. She would even be glad-delighted, ecstatic, and enthusiastic, she told her friends-to listen to him hum “Dry Bones” just as often as it crossed his mind. Just as long as he was home and safe.
Then the letter came from Bamberg. Frau Stadtraetin Faerber reported that her husband had been disabled by a stroke. She believed that it was apoplexy, brought on by the events of September. She had saved Herr Thornton’s bicycle, with the many copies of the Book of Mormon in the saddlebags. She had taken the liberty of giving some of them to her friends, since she knew that Herr Thornton had been giving them away.
The Frau Stadtraetin wrote further that she wished that the missionary would return to Bamberg. She and her friends would benefit from further explanation of many passages in the book. If she might be so bold, she advised that, if possible, he should bring his wife, since a woman could go many places that a man could not-at least, that a man could not go without arousing suspicion. She made an offer, and a joke. She would gladly be a Lydia to their Paul, providing them with hospitality in her home.
Howard Carstairs read the letter to the whole congregation. Because of his army service in Germany, he had become sort of Johnny-on-the-Spot for things like this. Reading the letter aloud, he realized that Willard’s reports had left the umlaut off her name, and it was not Farber. It was Faerber. Dyer. Symbolic.
No one said anything. His father and Willard’s father looked at one another. Those two, Levi Carstairs and Harold Thornton, were the senior men in the church. Logically, they should have been making the decisions. More and more, though, it seemed like they looked at one another and then looked at Howard.
They looked at Howard. Monroe Wilson looked at Howard. Amos Sterling looked at Howard. As did Alden Blodger and Leland Nisbet. Ted B. Warren was looking at him. Myles Halvorsen was looking at him. All the other men were out of town.
Howard said, “We should pray about this over night.” Everyone seemed to find that acceptable. He prayed; then he slept.
In the morning, he knew what they should do. That seemed to be happening more and more, too. Henceforth, the LDS missionary standard would not be pairs of young men, but pairs of mature married couples. Even if it was more expensive. The other men agreed; clearly, that was what they should do. It was obvious, now that Howard had mentioned it. The down-timers respected maturity; they would not pay much attention to boys not old enough to have finished their journeyman years.