Steve looked warily at Maydene, Willa, and Estelle. “Don’t tell me,” he said, “that Emma Thornton is a member of…”
The three of them chanted together, “the Grantville League of Women Voters.”
Willa added, “So’s Liz.”
“Liz who?” Weckherlin asked.
“Liz Carstairs. Her sister-in-law. Was Mike Stearns’s chief of staff; now Ed Piazza’s. You must know her.”
* * *
Georg Rodolf Weckherlin looked down at his notes to disguise a wince. Were all these up-timers related to one another? How could a person possibly keep track of it? He doubted that he would ever forget his first encounter with that, that… creature who sat in the anteroom of the SoT’s president. She was not an Araminta. Nor an Ariadne. Nor any of the other nymphs who populated love poems. His job require him to exchange correspondence with her regularly. It was not his favorite activity. No one short of a dowager empress should be so self-confident. Certainly not that woman. She was, really, only the wife of a small town guildsman who belonged to a heterodox religious sect.
At least, he had known enough to treat her with outward respect. He had been warned about her already in Magdeburg, before he took the letter of recommendation to Grantville. Which meant that he owed a big favor to Graf August von Sommersburg. A very big one which, undoubtedly, the count realized. And would, someday, call in. Dealing with these up-timers could be a touchy business.
Chapter 9:
“Unless It Should Happen That I Am Unlucky”
Franconia, February 22, 1634
David Stannard had been quite right the previous fall when he said that down-time Amtmaenner really had lists down pat. They had the electoral lists in shape. Every Amt had just as many pre-printed paper ballots as it had potential voters, with a dozen or so to spare in case someone made a mistake. The spares were sealed. If one was used, two different election officials had to sign an explanation of the circumstances why it was needed, written on the envelope next to the opened seal. With the spoiled ballot, crossed out, put into the envelope.
In a few places, such as the town of Gerolzhofen, the election had to be conducted under military supervision. Not many, though.
The administration had given the ram its point three. Every adult in Franconia got to vote, even the people living in the little independent enclaves, just as long as they were within the general boundaries of Wuerzburg, Bamberg, and Fulda.
So in quite a few more places, the electors had to be conducted under military supervision, so to speak. Conducted from their village of residence, where some sputtering local lord was trying to prohibit voting, to the nearest functioning polling place.
Followed by a visit from the military police to the lord or Reichsritter to explain what they planned to do if they received any information in regard to attempted retaliation against legal voters.
“We mean it” did very well in the Franconian election of 1634. “Motherhood” and “Apple Pie” were not on the ballot.
The Amtmaenner had counting the votes down pat, too. The results were tallied, certified, and delivered to Wuerzburg within a week.
With a few exceptions like Bamberg and some of the industrial towns nestled against the Thueringerwald, the towns and cities had not been enthusiastic. The guilds had led a bitter opposition, largely based on the argument that if incorporation passed, the “foreigners” would impose points six, seven, and eight of the “Twelve Points.” In most of the towns, incorporation either failed or barely squeaked by.
However, eighty percent or more of Franconia’s population did not live in chartered towns.
Some villages were solidly opposed; some few were a hundred percent opposed. Dave Stannard proposed to take a look at possible undue pressure from landlords, here and there, in spite of all the precautions that he and Scott Blackwell had taken in regard to secret ballots. The simple truth was that if a precinct only had a dozen voters, if one of them disagreed with the local boss, the boss could probably find out who it was. Even with a ballot held secret, there were a very limited number of choices about who it might have been.
Overall, however, sixty-three percent of the registered voters cast ballots in favor of the incorporation of Franconia into the State of Thuringia and citizenship for its inhabitants.
Grantville, State of Thuringia
On March 5, 1634, the Congress of the State of Thuringia adopted a formal name change, subject to a future referendum, from the State of Thuringia to the State of Thuringia-Franconia. There had originally been some discussion to the effect that as a courtesy and in the name of welcome, the name of the new region should be placed first. Arnold Bellamy pointed out that this would result in the acronym SoFT, not an image which the USE or its component states wished to present to the League of Ostend just now.
Therefore, it was SoTF. Unpronounceable, of course, but also not evocative of any undesirable associations whatsoever.
Until the next crisis, which occurred very shortly thereafter, Bellamy was in an unusually good mood.
Franconia, mid-March, 1634
Several minor lords, mostly Protestant, whose lands were enclaves within Wuerzburg and Bamberg, objected vociferously to the incorporation vote. Especially the Fuchs von Bimbach family, which turned out to have not only a Protestant branch centered in Bayreuth but also a Catholic branch with estates intermingled among those formerly belonging to the prince-bishop of Bamberg.
This, Johnnie F. found out from Meyfarth on one of his jaunts up to Bamberg, was not at all unusual in Franconia. A lot of the Reichsritter, Freiherren, and lesser local nobility had split into Catholic and Protestant branches, in order to have a foot in each camp and someone among the relatives with an arguable and viable claim to the family’s lands whenever the politico-religious situation underwent a minor shift or major earthquake.
Bamberg, mid-March, 1634
“So how are the CoC English lessons going?” Janie Kacere asked.
Eddie Junker sighed. “Apprentices. Unruly apprentices.”
“’Amid gloom and doom’ is the normal situation for first-time teachers,” she consoled him.
“Most of them are just antsy and energetic. If I tell them to write a sentence using the words pink, green, and yellow, they’ll toss paper airplanes at one another – those are quite a fad, these days – but they’ll write something like, “I got out of bed, put on my pink shirt, harnessed up my green wagon, and looked at the yellow sun.’”
“That’s not bad,” Stew Hawker said.
“Yeah.” Eddie sighed deeply. “Then there’s Otto. Frau Else’s younger son.”
“He wrote?”
“The telephone greened. Green, green. I pinked it up and said, ‘yellow!’”
“I take it,” Janie said, “that he knows better.”
“Oh, sure. He’s the best student I’ve got. He’s just … Well, he knows he’s the best student I’ve got and he takes advantage of it. None of the rest of them are anywhere near to the point of making puns in English.”
* * *
Noelle shuffled through the mail that had arrived at the Bamberg Schloss in the diplomatic pouch and picked out the letter from Ed Piazza to be read first. The one from the administrators in Suhl, second. Arnold Bellamy’s went to the bottom of the pile.
Fuchs von Bimbach is going to be the key. That was the gist of Piazza’s letter.
Well, she didn’t disagree. Here on the ground in Franconia, His Bimboship maybe looked even more key than he did from Grantville. Or from Magdeburg. There was a letter from Don Francisco Nasi’s office, too.
* * *
“I have to get inside,” Noelle said that evening. She rapped her knuckles on the table in front of her.
“I don’t like the idea.” Eddie Junker was chewing on his lower lip. “Ja, Helmut has supporters among the servants there. Bimbach’s subjects don’t have any love for their lord and master. Frau Else can put you in touch. But if the bosses catch on that you’re not just one of the Ram’s people but also that you’re an up-timer, there would be hell to pay.”
“It’s not that dangerous. After three years talking mainly to Germans, my German is pretty good. Plus, with all the different dialects, accent isn’t that much of a problem. I can avoid the castle authorities. I’ll be Downstairs, not Upstairs. Even if His Bimboship’s personal staff hear me say something, it won’t be fatal. They’ll know that I’m not from right around here, but with all the population displacement that the war has caused, they’ll just think that I’m from somewhere else.”
“Do you actually trust the old Neidecker woman?”