“I’ve seen her. Hefty, but good looking. Clear skin and strong teeth.”
“Bimbach must feed her well enough, then,” Old Kaethe said sourly.
Ableidinger’s mind wandered. What looked like “hefty” to a skinny teenager whose standard of comparison was Old Kaethe might look… well, “voluptuous” to a thickset middle-aged man like himself.
He called his mind back to order. Clearly, he had remained a widower for too long.
“Her position is privileged, in a way.” Vulpius waved his hand. “If it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be many advantages to contacting her. Not many advantages to us, that is. She has the freedom to go wherever she will in the castle. That doesn’t mean that she has any affection for the Freiherr.”
“Practical of her,” Ableidinger said.
“I doubt,” Vulpius warned, “that she’s given any thought to political theory. Or has any ideals about it.”
* * *
Frau Lydia Faerber, although no longer a Frau Stadtraetin since the late councilman’s death, was nonetheless still, by the standards of Bamberg after a decade of war, a well-to-do woman. She found a guide for Willard Thornton and paid him. In spite of the season, Willard alternated his time-a week in Bamberg, talking to the women there to whom Frau Faerber had given copies of the Book of Mormon and sometimes to their friends; three weeks out in the countryside, distributing not only LDS literature but also Meyfarth’s pamphlets.
Both of the Thorntons rather liked Meyfarth. They had gotten to know one another pretty well since he and Willard walked into Bamberg together.
While Willard was out in the villages, his wife Emma, who had to do a lot of studying about LDS history and such when she converted, wrote up a great deal of what she remembered about the church’s organizational principles into pamphlets. Willard’s friend Meyfarth translated those, adding sections on the best way to incorporate them into the existing structure of village Gemeinden, and sent them out into circulation within the ram movement as well.
Meyfarth was a funny guy, Emma thought, so terribly serious and conscientious. He had taken at least an hour to talk about the fact that his personal liking for them did not in any way mean that he was endorsing their teachings, or even that he respected their teachings. “Only,” he had insisted, “that I have come to see that if truth is to have a chance to prevail against error, then the civil authorities may not be given the right to suppress any one body of ideas. No, I do not respect your beliefs. If I respected them, I would join your church. I do respect your right to have and teach those beliefs.”
So anxious, he had been, as though he had expected them to order him to go away and never come back. “I do not respect your faith,” he had continued. “I believe that it is contrary to biblical truth. Utterly contrary, utterly wrong. As Herr Blackwell would say, ‘wrong-headed.’ But I respect that you honestly hold that faith. And, however reluctantly, I have come to accept that if the law forbids one variety of error, that of the Papists, from forbidding us to teach the truth, then the same law must also prohibit us from forbidding the teaching of other errors, such as those of the Calvinists and Anabaptists. And that we, to gain the right of free teaching, must allow it as well. But…”
“But you think that we are going to hell.” Willard had completed what Meyfarth clearly did not want to say.
“Well, yes. And I also make no claim that everyone else within Lutheranism shares my views. For which reason, if ‘We mean it’ does not prevail, I may someday lose my head. But until that day… I am here.”
Emma also talked to Frau Faerber’s friends, and to other Bamberg women. When the weather was good enough, she handed out literature at the weekly market. Someone had replaced the booth that the friar had torn down the day that Willard was beaten. She winced. She did not like to think of what Willard’s back had looked like when he came home after that happened.
She even managed to give away some more copies of the Book of Mormon. Not to mention many, many, copies of the abbreviated edition of Robert’s Rules of Order. Emma had run out of that. Meyfarth had said with great seriousness that the ram would find funds to reprint it. Or, possibly, the ewe.
When he showed her the ram literature, with Brillo, not to mention the caricature of Veleda Riddle as Ewegenia, symbol of the Franconian League of Women Voters, Emma practically went into hysterics.
Until Meyfarth introduced her to some of the men. And said that Willard’s guide through the villages was one of them; that others remained here in Bamberg to keep watch over her, and over Frau Faerber. And, Meyfarth said with a rather shamed face, over him. Although he was a Lutheran minister and should not, properly, be involved in such matters.
He also introduced her to the ewe. Else Kronacher, a printer’s widow. And to Frau Else’s daughter Martha, a formidable young woman in her mid-twenties. Meyfarth seemed more than a little in awe of her.
Frau Else, Meyfarth explained, had taught the ram rebellion an object lesson in the important of careful proof-reading. When the Twelve Points went to the printer, only the first half of the seventh point had been in the text. Frau Faerber, however, had taken it to her friend. being the widow of a print, Frau Kronacher was currently locked in battle with the guild. She had two sons, Melchior and Otto, seventeen and fifteen, as well as the daughter; she wished to run the business using journeymen as employees until her sons became masters. The guildmaster insisted that she must marry her daughter off now, to a journeyman ready to become a master and take the shop over immediately, thus excluding the woman’s sons for the lifetime of their brother-in-law. Oddly, the guildmaster had a third son who met the qualifications his father was demanding.
When the bales of broadsides came back from Frau Kronacher, they contained the second part of point seven. No one else-well, no one except Fraulein Martha, who had typeset the lines-had noticed until after they had been distributed.
“And thus,” Meyfarth said a little ruefully, “with such great foresight and planning, our revolutions are made.”
Wuerzburg, mid-February, 1634
“It’s an odd batch of demands,” Saunders Wendell said.
The administration had met to discuss the Twelve Points. Every broadside and brochure they had collected, inside Franconia and out, included them.
“And if you ignore the numbering,” he continued, “they’ve included more than twelve different ones.”
“For a down-time piece of writing, though,” David Petrini said, “it’s amazingly succinct.”
They looked at the various versions. Most started with the standard Twelve Points. Some went on and on, to specify local grievances, although mostly those which had been collected “out”-over in Bayreuth, down in Ansbach, in various villages belonging to Reichsritter and various independent Protestant lords who were exempt from the administration’s control. Even some from Nuernberg’s hinterland.
The subjects of the Freiherr Fuchs von Bimbach had thought of sixty-three points, some of them very specific, involving the allotment of hay mowed in the upper meadows and the annual worth of the acorns consumed in the Freiherr’s forests by his subjects’ hogs. All of which they announced themselves quite willing to take all the way to the imperial supreme court for adjudication.
“Fox from Bimbo?” someone asked.
Everyone else pretended not to have heard. The general impression that they drew from the sixty three points was that the subjects of the Freiherr von Bimbach were not happy campers this Anno Domini 1634. However, he was Protestant, and out of their jurisdiction, having most of his estates as an enclave over to the east of Bamberg, surrounded by those of the margrave of Brandenburg-Bayreuth.
“The emphasis on education in Latin and access to secondary education. Are those really all that important to the farmers?” Estelle Colburn was frowning at her copy.
“It doesn’t strike me as quite the ringing revolutionary cry of ‘to the barricades’ with which Gretchen Richter has been trying to inspire the Committees of Correspondence,” Anita agreed. “’Admit our sons to the civil service’ doesn’t have quite the same effect in grabbing the reader’s attention as, ‘Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains’.”
“But they do go into the civil service, if they can, Anita,” her husband Steve pointed out. “I talked to Count Ludwig Guenther’s chancellor before we came down here, way back. He’s the son of a farmer from one of the count’s villages. His father sent him to school because the pastor recommended it; he went into the count’s service straight out of the University of Jena and climbed right up the ladder. That’s not so unusual. Along with being a priest, it’s just about the only path to social mobility around, for a farm family, given how the towns and the guild trades freeze them out.”
“Gretchen’s grandma, maybe,” Maydene Utt said.
Everyone else at the table stared at her. This comment seemed to be coming out of left field.
Maydene persisted. “Ronnie Dreeson has students from Jena talking conversational Latin to the toddlers at the St. Veronica’s schools. I think she’s got pretty much the same idea.”
“Thought I heard a few echoes of what you and Willa were doing last fall, in the tax stuff,” David Petrini interjected.
All three of the auditors pointedly ignored him.
“Gretchen Richter isn’t writing this stuff. I don’t think that anyone involved with the Committees is writing this stuff,” Johnnie F. said. “The CoCs really haven’t spread much in Franconia, except in some of the industrial towns. There are Committees in Suhl and Schmalkalden and Schleusingen. The honest truth is, though, that they don’t have much interest in the farmers. They’re focusing on the cities-places where they can get hold of good-sized audiences all at once, not country villages where maybe they get a half-dozen or a dozen.”
“It sure isn’t what Spartacus is writing. It’s not intellectual, analytical stuff. The style is way different, too. They aren’t even plagiarizing him,” Dave Stannard added. “The Twelve Points aren’t like the Brillo Broadsides or the Common Sense pamphlets, either. The author has his own agenda.”
“Where is it coming from, then?” Maydene asked.
“Some of the points, from the farmers themselves,” Johnnie F. said. “Like, ‘don’t try to tell us how to divide our property when we die.’ The rest…”
“There are two kinds of revolutions,” Dave Stannard interrupted. “The ‘down with the system’ revolutions. Those are really hard to handle. Especially when the people in them don’t know for sure what they want to put in place of what they have. Then the ‘let us into the system’ revolutions. Those are a bit more manageable, generally, and that seems to be, mostly, what we’ve got here. A lot of the rest of the points, I think, from talking to the Amtmaenner and people out in the villages who are working on the voter registration lists, are what our old friend Meyfarth thinks would be good for them.”
“Meyfarth!” Scott Blackwell choked on his coffee.
Johnnie F. cleared his throat. “Stew says…”
Steve motioned to Weckherlin again. “Stewart Hawker, Johnnie F.’s counterpart over in Bamberg.”
Weckherlin nodded.