Martha pushed through the curtain and hugged her. “I’m so glad you could spend Christmas with your family. Everyone else is down at the city council meeting, listening to the debate about the missionaries who have come to town. Pastor Meyfarth and the up-timer. Thornton, his name is. After they’re done, Mutti will bring them home for dinner. The two missionaries, I mean. Not the city councillors.”
Noelle tipped her head to one side. “Is there enough in the pot for a couple more?”
“You and…”
“I brought you someone to help keep a lid on Melchior and Otto until I can get some CoC printers for Frau Else. He stopped at a street vendor’s grill to get some breakfast, but he should be here…”
The door opened again.
“…right now,” Noelle finished. “Martha, this is my friend Egidius Junker. We call him Eddie. He’s been studying law at the University of Jena. And economics. He’s also spent a lot of time in Grantville, so he can sort of help explain things. Back and forth. Between, oh…” She paused. “Between people for whom explanations would come in handy. So I want him to meet your mom and brothers. He’ll also get started on a couple of projects for me.”
Martha looked doubtful. This Egidius Junker did not appear to be old enough to control her brothers. Though Noelle could make them pay attention and he was, perhaps, about the same age as Noelle.
* * *
“Eddie will work for you as an in-house translator,” Noelle said to Frau Else between bites of sauerkraut.
“I can’t afford…” Frau Else began.
“Don’t worry about it.” Noelle’s tone was sharp. “Eddie will work for you as an in-house translator. That’s why he’s in Bamberg. That’s what his letters of introduction say. That’s the way it is.”
Martha didn’t look up, but glanced around the table while keeping her head down. First at Noelle, whose face was suddenly pinched and older than her years. Then at the up-timer, Thornton, who was talking to Pastor Meyfarth. Then at Pastor Meyfarth. Again at Pastor Meyfarth. She had looked at him before. At a break in the theological discussion, she asked, “Will your families be joining you soon?”
Willard Thornton smiled. “My wife Emma is already on her way to Bamberg. She should arrive any day, if the group she is traveling with isn’t seriously delayed by this weather.”
Meyfarth shook his head. “I am a widower. My wife and children died of the plague in Coburg, nearly two years ago.”
Martha extended her sympathy. Wondering a little why she didn’t feel as sorry as she should and then not wondering. Meyfarth was a very attractive man. Perhaps twenty years older than she was. Mature. She liked that.
“Have you found a place to stay?”
Herr Thornton answered first. “We will be with Frau Stadtraetin Faerber until we can find something more permanent.”
“For the time being, I am at an inn,” Meyfarth added. “I can’t afford to remain, of course. As soon as I have taken a census of those persons who are likely to become my future parishioners, I will see if one of them is in a position to rent me a room.”
At the head of the table, Frau Else looked up. “I know someone,” she said. “A very respectable widow and her house is conveniently located. I will be happy to introduce you to her.”
Meyfarth thanked her solemnly.
Most of the conversation was political.
“Thanks again for the dinner, Frau Else,” Noelle called back as she went out the door.
Martha followed her. “Umm.”
Noelle grinned at her. “Everyone in Wuerzburg says that the pastor is a really nice guy. And he’s a poet. Very cultured. Everyone says so.”
“We, ah, sort of stopped being Lutherans back when I was a teenager. Because of the bishop, you know.”
Noelle raised her eyebrows. “That’s one of the beauties of freedom of religion, Martha. There’s nothing to say that you can’t start being Lutheran again. If you’re interested in theology, of course.”
“Oh.” Martha looked back a little nervously at the door where Pastor Meyfarth and Herr Thornton were still standing, talking to Egidius Junker. “Oh, of course. Theology. Err, Noelle.”
“What?”
“That ‘respectable widow’ Mutti mentioned to Pastor Meyfarth.” Martha squirmed a little. “She’s the mother of Judith Neideckerin. The woman you asked if I could find some way to put you in touch with. The woman I wrote you about. The one that Helmut mentioned the last time he was here.”
“Freiherr von Bimbach’s mistress, you mean?”
“Yes. Her. Mutti has talked to her mother. The one with the room to rent. She can put you in touch with Judith. If you still want to be, that is.”
Noelle thinned her lips, pulling them in between her teeth. “Oh, yes. I would very much like to be put in touch with Judith Neideckerin, if Helmut is willing. His Bimboship presents problems. Judith Neideckerin may offer opportunities.”
Wuerzburg, mid-January, 1634
The rector of the University of Wuerzburg had come to talk about libraries. Specifically, the wonderful library of the late Bishop of Wuerzburg, Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn. Before Gustavus Adolphus had assigned the prince-bishopric to the New United States in the fall of 1632, the king of Sweden’s troops had managed to pack up the library. The rector had last seen it crated up, on wagons, on its way to improve the cultural ambiance of Stockholm.
The rector’s message, Steve Salatto noted ruefully, was quite clear. He wanted the library back. Or, if the up-timers could not get it back, an equivalent library. Which would cost a lot of money. Which he wanted the administration to provide.
Steve’s new chief of staff, Georg Rodolf Weckherlin, cleared his throat significantly and started to discuss the removal of the library of the late Elector Palatine from Heidelberg to Rome at an earlier stage of the Thirty Years War. Weckherlin was the son of a Wuerttemberg bureaucrat. Although he had spent time in England even before the marriage of the luckless Bohemian Winter King whose adventurism had been the trigger that started the Thirty Years War, to Elizabeth Stuart, his ties to the country had been strengthened through that marriage and he had worked for the Electress Palatine for a while.
The rector brought up the Peace of Augsburg and the fact that the Calvinism of the late elector had made him an outlaw within the Holy Roman Empire in any case, whereas this was a clear case of theft of property from an institution which followed a religion that was legal under the constitution of that empire.
“Recriminations,” Steve said, “will get you nowhere. I can’t guarantee you any money. You know what the budget looks like just about as well as I do. But there is one thing that I can guarantee, which is that if you keep raking up old grievances, there won’t even be a budget request.”
He looked at Weckherlin. “That goes for you, too. If you want to keep your job.”
Weckherlin smiled back quite cheerfully.
* * *
Steve thought for a while after Weckherlin left to show the rector out. “Tinker to Evers to Chance.” Oxenstierna to Stearns to Piazza, who had sent Weckherlin to Franconia. Steve had not had anything to say about it. He wouldn’t have any more to say about getting rid of him.
At least, being a poet like Meyfarth, Weckherlin was more than willing to write propaganda pieces. And Steve couldn’t complain that they had stuck him with an incompetent. Weckherlin had studied law and been a low-level diplomat as well as writing poetry. He had married an English girl, the daughter of the Dover city clerk, in 1616; she was here in Wuerzburg with him and they had a couple of kids. He got full-time employment in the English government in 1626, became an English citizen in 1630. The entry under his name from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, kindly provided by Ed Piazza, indicated that up-time, he had joined the Parliamentary forces during the English Civil War, becoming John Milton’s predecessor as “Secretary for Foreign Tongues” under the Commonwealth. In this world, he had caught a boat from Dover to the continent in a timely fashion, before the royal troops who had nabbed Oliver Cromwell caught up with him.
Well, a poet. Not a poet like Meyfarth, though. Replacing one man sitting in your outer office, the poet who had written “Jerusalem, Thou City Fair and High,” with another man sitting in your outer office, the poet who had written “Seduction in the Garden, or Love Among the Cabbages,” took some getting used to; a bit of readjustment, so to speak. Not that Weckherlin had gotten this job because of the cabbages, or the roses, or the girls with too-beautiful eyes who populated most of his verses. He owed this job to his sonnet in praise of Gustavus Adolphus.
The one that addressed him as a “king whose head and fist were alone adequate to conquer the world, a ruler whose heart and great courage were adorned by fear of God, justice, strength, moderation, and wisdom, whose sword was the terror of persecutors and drove lamentation, fear, and danger away from the persecuted.” And that was just for a start. Somewhere before “Mars, of divine descent and from the blood of the Savior who was worthy to triumph over pride and tyranny.” The more that Steve read, the more he suspected that it would be pretty hard for any propagandist to get to a level at which the USE’s current emperor would consider effusive praise to have reached the point of overkill.
Weckherlin was a competent chief of staff, but a very different man from Meyfarth. Steve would just have to adapt, he supposed.
The thing was, for all his tendency to be a poseur, the man did goddamn well believe that there was such a thing as “Germany.” A Germany, moreover, that could and should be a decent place for human beings to live in. One without the “anger, arrogance, treachery, disloyalty, servility, injustice, and superstition” that had destroyed “freedom, laws, and divine worship.” If Weckherlin really did, for some reason, believe that Gustavus Adolphus could reverse all that, teaching “the enemy to turn his madness and splendor into repentance, the ally to turn his suffering into joy,” maybe it was worth putting up with the rest of the poem.
Not, Steve thought, that he was likely to ask his mother-in-law to cross-stitch a copy of it for him to frame and put up over his desk. His mouth quirked then. He reached across his desk for a pen and clean piece of paper and wrote a note. With a copy of a sonnet. Folded them together, sealed the packet, and addressed it to Grantville. Anita’s mom could cross-stitch it for Mike Stearns and send it to Magdeburg. It would fit right in with the rest of the decor of his office, from what Steve had heard.
Better that Mike had to put up with all that garbage than himself.