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Heldrungen, Sommersburg County, SoTF

Summer-Fall, 1636

The older boy sat quietly on the stone bench in the chapel vestibule at the Wasserburg, the moated castle, in Heldrungen. His brother, three or four years younger, newly breeched, wriggled, wiggled, squirmed, and wriggled some more.

Gottfried Pinckert, attorney, looked at Hans Appelt, the Dorfschulze, and the two pastors, Augustin Fasch and Melchior Bretschneider.

"Meine Herren? Have you reached a consensus?

Appelt shook his head. "If only their grandfather at Mattstedt had not died. I'm certain that Stephan Dedekind had no expectation of that when he drew up his will."

"In the midst of life, we are in death," Fasch stated stentoriously.

Pinckert stifled his impatience. "Anna Ziller's daughter says that she cannot keep them any longer. She took them in along with her mother as a favor, but now, as she rightly says, it's been several months, and we still haven't reached any decision."

Matthäus Bretschneider sighed. Ignoring that the children were right there, listening to every word, he repeated what he must have said a dozen times since his friend's death. "Stephan was an excellent musician; not as great as his father, but very good. The older boy is highly gifted. Such a talent is a divine gift; something that we have a duty to ensure is cultivated. Yet we certainly do not want to send him. . . ." He paused, stumbling a bit. ". . . to send them to Stephan's relatives in Langensalza."

Fasch nodded. Under normal circumstances, that would be the solution. But Stephan Dedekind's mother, the grandmother of these two boys, had been Christine Stiefel. A first cousin of the notorious heretic Esaias Stiefel. Henning Dedekind and his wife had not been tainted by the heresy themselves, nor were their sons, but . . . Although Stiefel had been dead close to ten years now, his sect was not stamped out of existence. The dowager countess of Gleichen, widow of the last count, even yet supported and encouraged his nephew Ezechiel Meth, under the protection of the up-timers at Grantville and the emperor's misguided proclamation of religious toleration throughout the USE.

Appelt returned to the idea he had held tenaciously ever since the cantor's death. "Are you sure that none of Paul Hansen's family . . . ?"

The boy's mother was, rather had been, a Hansen–a daughter of Paul Hansen, the recently deceased steward of Kloster Heusdorf's properties at Mattstedt, over by Apolda. Childbed fever had taken her two years earlier; the cantor had not remarried, relying on the elderly widow Ziller to keep his house and care for the boys.

Bretschneider sighed again. "I am certain."

Outside, voices raised up.

Appelt heaved himself to his feet. "More of them," he groaned, picking up his musket. "The sins of the fathers shall be inflicted upon their children, even unto the tenth generation. Or at least the fourth."

For, indeed, over a century earlier, the radical leader Thomas Müntzer, revolutionary paragon of the Great Peasant Revolt, now a hero of the USE Committees of Correspondence, had been held prisoner in the castle at Heldrungen after the defeat of the farmers at Frankenhausen. Now, those who venerated him made their rowdy pilgrimages to the site.

"They might as well be pilgrims coming to the shrine of a Catholic saint." Bretschneider watched as the Schulze went to restore order.

"I'm sure that Christoph Heinrich von Mansfeld-Heldrungen is just as happy to collect the money they pay for lodgings, food, and beer as any sexton of some Bavarian fraud of a transformed pagan nymph who now supposedly grants healing or fertility is to retain the offerings heaped there by the gullible."

"Christoph Heinrich is only eight years old," Fasch pointed out reasonably. "His mother has taken him off to Rudolstadt to go to school, while she enjoys a more comfortable life at Count Ludwig Guenther's little court than she can have here."

"I don't suppose . . ." Pinckert stood up, looked out the door at the uproar, and turned back. ". . . that Countess Agnes might be willing to send these two to the Latin School in Rudolstadt along with her son. As patroness?"

"If she were, she would have said so already," was Bretschneider's pessimistic assessment.

That was, unfortunately, most certainly true, as the Shorter Catechism phrased it.

The racket outdoors notched up a peg.

"It's too early for our visitors to be drunk," Fasch said. In a wry recollection of the arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, he added, "It's only nine o'clock in the morning."

"Pastor Fasch," Constantin Christian Dedekind said, "Help me, please. Andreas is about to fall out through the archery slit."

While the men were focused on the visitors, the younger boy had wriggled and wiggled off the bench and started to climb. Young Constantin had a precarious hold on the hem of his trousers, which were beginning to slide down. Fasch retrieved him and put him back on the bench.

Pinckert went out to join Appelt and see why the noise was still increasing. Bretschneider followed him. Pinckert stifled a curse. "Appelt, what are they doing here?"

It wasn't just revolutionary pilgrims. It was revolutionary pilgrims confronting a group of well-equipped dragoons.

Bretschneider recognized the banner. "Count Wolfgang's men! What are they doing here? He's in Vienna, the Catholic traitor, along with his brothers."

"Are you sure? If it looks like the Ottomans may take Vienna, they'll probably have enough prudence to be somewhere else." Pinckert slapped his walking stick against his leg.

"In Austria, at any rate. Or close to it," Bretschneider repeated.

Appelt made his way down the steps, somewhat haltingly because of an old injury.

"Get back, old man," one of the pilgrim group yelled at him.

Instead, he stood a little straighter. "I am the Schulze, responsible for keeping good order here."

The dragoon captain brought his horse a couple of steps forward. He handed Appelt a sheaf of papers. "We have been in Erfurt and are proceeding to Mansfeld. The authorities of the SoTF are aware of our presence."

"Are you here about Vorhauer's duel with the musician in Nordhausen?"

The captain looked at him with complete confusion. "I don't know anything about a duel. I am here, my company is here, because the sister of Freiherr Christian Schenk von Tautenberg is en route to her husband's holdings in Mansfeld with her children. Because of the disruption in Austria. We are to ensure that everything is prepared along the way."

Threatening growls came from the back of the band of pro-revolutionary pilgrims.

Appelt looked at them with annoyance. "They're related to Count Ludwig Guenther at Rudolstadt and he's an ally of Mike Stearns. Go on about your business."

There was some pushing from behind, but the men in the front of the group pushed back and started them along the walkway.

Appelt turned back to the captain. "Any others?"

"Count Bruno's Spanish wife died. He's planning to remarry, but hasn't yet. He has only the one daughter; she plans to stay in Austria with her husband. Count Philipp was planning to marry, but that's been up-ended by the invasion, too. So, no; no others."

Appelt handed the papers back. "I recommend that you be on your way."

They watched until the party of riders was out of sight and went back in to find Fasch telling stories. "Run over to the school and find Diakon Michelmann to entertain you," Bretschneider told the two boys.

During the noontime meal, they chewed not only the food but also the implications of those dragoons. "Three of them!" Bretschneider complained. "Three of the sons of old Count Bruno of Mansfeld lapsed from Lutheranism to Catholicism and took service with Ferdinand II."

"They're all well up in years. Pretty optimistic, if they're counting on heirs from new marriages, if you ask me."

"Not close relatives of our own young count, at least," Appelt said with some relief. "Second cousins of his grandfather, or something of the sort. And, I suppose, now that the USE and the Austrians appear likely to ally against the Ottomans, Wolfgang has a right to send his wife to his own lands, even if they lie within the State of Thuringia-Franconia."

"Those lands are about all that Wolfgang has left." Pinckert put more mustard on his wurst. "So much for his moment of glory as administrator of Magdeburg and Halberstadt after the imperialists deposed the Brandenburger in the first and the Dane in the second! I felt a great deal of satisfaction when the Swedes chased him out again."

Appelt frowned. "Do you suppose they'll all three come back to the USE now that the emperor and the up-timers have proclaimed this religious toleration? That could lead to a lot more complications than the little fracas we dealt with this morning."

"Let's pray that they don't," Bretschneider answered. "After all, Catholics are under no obligation to keep faith with heretics. Everyone knows that. Our Lutheran emperor may tolerate Catholic counts of Mansfeld, but if they return, Catholic counts of Mansfeld will not be likely to tolerate Lutherans for very long, even if they give lip service to obeying the edict."

It would have been a rare seventeenth-century Lutheran pastor who questioned the dictum that Catholics had no obligation to keep faith with heretics. Beginning with Gratian's Decretum and coming through the burning of John Hus at the Council of Constance, hitting a crescendo with the St. Bartholomew's Night Massacre in France, but not ending there–they could recite every instance.

Eventually the conversation wound back to the purpose of the morning's meeting.

"Probably the best thing to do is check with our own county," Appelt said. "That's where the emperor put us for administrative purposes. We're in the SoTF, not Saxony. Not in Mansfeld-Anhalt County or Saxon County. In Sommersburg, not some other county. Let Count August decide what's best to be done."

Pinckert thought a minute. "The count's living in Grantville."

Appelt smiled at him, "So off to Grantville you go."

They gave the boys back to Frau Ziller for the time being, over the complaints of her daughter.

****

Grantville

Count August von Sommersburg gave a prompt appointment to Pinckert, who presented the dilemma.

The count's response contained some sharp questions. Just who were Stephan Dedekind's closest relatives, the ones around Langensalza, and why weren't they suitable?

"We believe that since the older child is musically gifted, and it is quite likely, considering the family, that the younger one will prove to be also, and that they will unquestionably benefit from a sound Lutheran upbringing, considering–well–heretics, Stiefelites, not that his grandparents were truly tainted, but still . . . The pastors believe that it is possible that they might be susceptible to the wild ideas proposed by religious enthusiasts.

"As I recall, all three of Dedekind's brothers are Lutheran pastors. Two of them, I discussed with the church patrons myself before their appointments. Benjamin Dedekind, I believe, is at Gebesee, not far from Sömmerda."

"He is," Pinckert agreed. "But he maintains quite close ties to Langensalza."

"Where, if I read him correctly, he has ambitions to rise to district superintendent. Wherefore he is unlikely to stray very far from orthodoxy's ‘strait is the way and narrow the gate,' at least in public." The count smiled. "Not to be cynical. And as for his brother Henning, he is pastor in Wundersleben, isn't he? Also near Sömmerda."

Pinckert nodded.

"A man, if I recall him properly, with a tendency more toward the stodgy than evincing susceptibility to wild religious enthusiasms."

Pinckert winced. Although he was unlikely ever to admit it, he had a brother who evinced an unfortunate fondness for the mystical treatises of Jakob Böhme. Fortunately, not in public. So one could never tell about the Dedekind brothers.

"There's a third one, you say?"

Yes, Andreas. He's a pastor over in Brunswick, in the Harz mountains, a mining community. Betrothed to the daughter of a prosperous mining foreman there, I believe."

"Oh, yes." Count August's interests were finely tuned to mining areas. "Near where one sees those three large granite blocks, die Dreibrodesteine, that have been weathered down, with a legend that they commemorate a woman who proclaimed that she would rather see her three loaves of bread turned to stones than give them to help a starving miner. Whereupon they grew into these giant stones and squashed her."

"If Stephan Dedekind had considered any one of them suitable," Pinckert maintained, "he would have named them in his will, rather than just his father-in-law."

"I will admit that the one who is not yet married would probably not be an ideal choice as guardian of young boys. The others, though . . ."

"We do have an alternative to suggest."

Count August raised his bushy white eyebrows.

"We believe that the new music school that the dukes are sponsoring in Weimar would be the best place. A preferable solution."

"Do they accept children so young?"

"It can be arranged."

"For suitable compensation, one presumes."

"We were hoping that perhaps scholarships . . . After all, both of the uncles near Sömmerda have small stipends and growing families of their own. If you, as count, might be willing to assume the expense for the boys to be in Weimar . . ."

"With proper notification to any surviving maternal relatives at Mattstedt," Count August said firmly.

****

Lüneburg, Brunswick

Among the grandchildren of Henning Dedekind's brother Friedrich, the correspondence was flying as fast as the imperial postal system could transport pieces of paper with ink on the inside and stamps on the outside.

"What do they think?" Johann demanded. "That we have perhaps become illiterate? That we are less capable of reading Daniel Gregory Mason's The Art of Music: A Comprehensive Library of Information for Music Lovers and Musicians than they are?"

A derelict copy of all fourteen volumes of Mason's 1917 reference work, the pages tattered and flaking, had turned up in a too-high-to-conveniently-reach cubbyhole in Grantville's middle school band room and been promptly reprinted, volumes 11 and 12, A Dictionary-Index of Musicians, often sold in tandem with the Handbook to the 1941 Lutheran Hymnal and eagerly mined for information on contemporaries. It only had five lines on young Constantin Christian, but those were enough.

"Not likely," Conrad responded. Illiteracy was not likely for Friedrich's grandchildren. After all, his edifying plays, The Christian Knight and The Converted Papist, were still performed. His satirical treatise on manners, first published when he was only twenty-five years old, in homage to the imaginary St. Grobian invented by Sebastian Brant in the Ship of Fools, the Latin poem Grobianus, or, Simplicity in Manners was translated into multiple languages and became immensely popular all over Europe. It was still widely used in schools because the patron saint's admonitions to boys that they really should snatch the best pieces of food from a common dish with their greasy fingers, fart and urinate in public, and vomit at will after overindulging in drink (because doing the contrary was bad for one's health) appealed to the juvenile sense of humor.

It wasn't as popular as Erasmus' Colloquia, of course. But few books were.

"The whole travesty is completely outrageous," the widowed Engela wrote to Margarethe. "Clearly, several of us have brought up our own children properly and thus demonstrated that we are perfectly capable of caring for those unfortunate orphans."

"After all," Jacob expostulated, "It is not as if we are without influence. Duke Ernst and Duke August, were our grandfather's patrons. Duke August is still alive!" Which was quite true, though the older brother of the reigning Duke Georg of Brunswick was by no means as young as he used to be; closing in on his seventieth year.

The truth was that the guardians in Heldrungen had simply forgotten all about the more distant Brunswick branch of the Dedekind family, Grobianus or not. But it was large, influential, and consisted mostly of Lutheran pastors and church musicians who were just as capable of reading about the future as the dukes of Saxe-Weimar. With relatives of their grandmother, nee Gertrud Dutzenrath, in Erfurt. And not likely to let a potentially valuable, to-become-famous-in-the-future child slip out of their hands.

They filed suit for the guardianship of Constantin Christian Dedekind and Andreas Christian Dedekind. Against those officials in Heldrungen who had placed them in school in Weimar, against Count August of Sommersburg, against Duke Albrecht, against the rest of the Saxe-Weimar dukes including Bernhard in Burgundy, against the music academy. For good measure, against any Hansens at Mattstedt who might have a claim. Against Ezechiel Meth as nephew of Esaias Stiefel; against the dowager countess of Gleichen.

They created some happy lawyers.

****

Weimar, SoTF

The new Academy of Lutheran Church Music was getting a grand new building, currently under construction. It was doing well by the travertine and slate quarries owned by Count August of Sommersburg and equally well by the technical college in Grantville, somewhat to the dismay of the more traditional architects who were being forced to incorporate ducts and spaces for wiring and piping when they would rather think about acoustics and design. For the time being, however, the faculty and students were in tight quarters, scattered here and there in the town.

Not that the Academy was, as yet, very large. Not by the standards of a prestigious secondary school such as Grimma, Meissen, or Pforta. A year ago, it had four faculty members and two dozen students.

Then, shortly after the beginning of the Saxon uprising, there had been the unexpected, unanticipated, unplanned-for arrival of two coaches full of singers and instrumentalists, several more coaches full of wives and children, a half-dozen baggage wagons for cases of instruments, and a small double-harnessed wagon full of choir boys.

The Hofkapelle of Elector John George's court in Dresden, with the encouragement of his musically-inclined namesake son, had moved out to safer quarters.

Just in case revolutionaries had no proper appreciation of music.

They hadn't all stayed in Weimar, of course–much to the relief of Duke Albrecht. Weimar, even before most of the duchy's taxes were diverted to the SoTF, had never had the wealth of Saxony. There was no hope that Saxe-Weimar County could support a professional orchestra, even if its Estates were willing to appropriate money for one. Everyone knew this perfectly well, so most of the instrumentalists and singers had soon moved on, hoping to find work in Magdeburg, Hamburg, Copenhagen, or even distant Königsberg if they could find transportation. Several of the Italians had returned south of the Alps; he hoped the rest would move on soon. Very soon–he couldn't afford to keep them, however pleasant it might be to have music with one's dinner. The two Englishmen, Dixon and Price, were long gone. Tobias Grünschneider with his Tanzgeige had headed for Grantville and a hoped-for live music gig at the Thuringen Gardens.

Still, the faculty was now double in size. As was the number of students. With no newly-completed building.

And there was a pressing need for another organ besides the one in the church. They had allotted space in the academy building, of course, but organs did not build themselves. Grand pianos. Practice organs. Practice pianos. Johann Vierdanck had compiled a comprehensive wish list; he would be fortunate if he could fulfill it before he died at a ripe old age.

Albrecht hoped that if it turned out that either his brother Ernst or Gretchen Richter should happen to decide that revolutionary Saxony still needed a Hofkapelle, Vierdanck would go back to Dresden where he came from.

Which might just happen, if Lutheranism became the established church in the new Province of Saxony and received tax support.

Or perhaps some other city would decide that it needed a first-rate organist with grandiose dreams.

Except that if this was to become the greatest academy for Lutheran church music in the USE, Vierdanck was correct and his list was not unreasonable. At least they had brought the more portable instruments with them. Trombones, lutes, violins, cornets, citterns, theorbos—those they had.

But they needed guitars and banjos, others of the up-time innovations. And people who could teach them. Preferably, theologically orthodox Lutheran men who could teach them.

There was no such thing as an inexpensive, high-quality musical instrument.

The singers needed space to rehearse.

Johann Kramer, who had assumed responsibility for the choir boys from Dresden, was a gentle, pious, and peaceable man. He got along well with Martin Rinkart, the academy's headmaster. Blessings upon his head. But he still needed additional lesson space. Not to mention that he sang bass, which meant that he urgently needed an assistant who was competent to teach and who sang in the higher ranges. Philip Stolle did what he could, but he was only 22 himself, lacking in experience. And Rinkart's aide, Peter Frank, had barely turned 20 and should be starting his theology study in Jena, but had responded to an emergency call for assistance.

Albrecht looked at the current memo. A recommendation that the academy make an employment offer to one Georg Hempel, a tenor, currently in Eilenburg.

He thought of his personal budget. Oh, well. Why not? Wilhelm, Ernst, and Bernhard would just have to make do with slightly smaller shares of the rents this year.

He stood up. His office was currently in the Rotes Schloß, built in the previous century as a dower residence by a dowager duchess. Conveniently downtown; a vantage point from which he could see all the activity. He bent his head a little and peered out the window. The castle up on the Hornstein, the one in which he and his brothers had grown up, had not yet fully recovered from the big fire in 1618. When Wilhelm, his oldest brother, had become head of the family in 1626, he had started an ambitious rebuilding project that had, alas, foundered on the problems presented by the war and an ongoing shortage of revenue. He should get it going again.

But the music academy also needed a teacher of composition; at least one specialist in Latin poetry; and there was the extra burden all these boys put on the faculty of the town's Latin School. The youngest boys had just turned eight; the oldest he could think of, Clausnitzer, was probably seventeen.

Somebody had to decide what would happen as more of these boys turned that age: were they to be sent on to Jena to train as pastors and teachers who happened to have an extraordinary gift or talent for music, or were they to be trained as musicians, primarily performers, but performers who had a special interest in theology? There was really no precedent, which was what made it so hard to integrate the remains of the Hofkapelle into the incipient academy.

Duke Albrecht chewed on his mustache.

Until he heard loud, contentious, noises from the other side of the building.

Residing in the town had disadvantages as well as advantages. One of which was that he was so conveniently available when minor squabbles arose. People were inclined to bring them to him rather than to the mayor and other municipal officials he appointed. He thought a minute and solved the problem temporarily by closing the door so he couldn't hear the noises any more.

****

"What do you think you are doing, you imbecilic hod-carrier?"

A man mixing mortar picked up a mason's trowel that some careless apprentice had left lying about and threw it at a laborer pushing a wheelbarrow.

Who, instead of either ducking the trowel or ducking his head in respect to someone higher in life's pecking order, drew himself up and retorted, "I'm doing what the foreman told me to do, you idiotic cement-squisher."

Things deteriorated from there.

The watch appeared.

Both men found time to meditate on their transgressions from the perspective of a cell in the city jail.

Anton Kolb, the hod-carrier, carried out his meditations from the perspective of a man who thought that in a world in which divine justice prevailed, he should be a farmer.

But he lived in a world in which divine justice did not prevail, so he was currently a construction worker at Weimar's new building for Papist ladies who did not live like nuns.

Anton spent a higher-than average amount of time thinking about his grievances. He was twenty-eight now; his father had died when he was five; his mother when he was eight. His half-brother became a mercenary; his half-sisters went into service; he and his younger sister were bound out to two different Vollbauer.

The land he should be farming, the lease of three lives having expired with his father, reverted to the duke, whose agent, at the recommendation of the village council, happily re-allotted it to another man who had never caused the kind of trouble his father had done by taking as his second wife a woman whose lord was over in Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, which caused the council to have to deal with one more set of officials than would have been necessary if he had married a local girl like he should have.

A woman from Quittelsdorf, to be precise. Anton's mother had been a Hercher.

Everybody in his home village had forgotten, if they ever knew it, that the Herchers from Quittelsdorf had a well-known stubborn streak. They weren't inclined to wither away into subservience.

Which meant that currently his little sister was in Grantville, married to a Scotsman. Grantville had given them a Heimat, a place they had a right to live. Even more, his cousins Lisbet and Walpurga, who were sisters, and Ursel and Else, who were also sisters, were in Grantville, all four of them married to up-timers.

Everyone knew that all up-timers were rich. Not hod carriers. Not unskilled Tagelöhner, day laborers who belonged nowhere in a world in which even Papist Englishwomen, foreigners, were welcomed and allowed to belong right here in Weimar.

He was not certain that Duke Albrecht and the other surviving brothers of the junge Herrschaften auf dem Hornstein were even his lords any more. That if he lost his job for fighting with the brickmason, he wouldn't be expelled here just as over the years he had been expelled from other towns and villages around the duchy when his yearly contract as a hired man was not renewed for some reason. Usually some reason having to do with standing up for his rights. Or saying exactly what he was thinking.

He wasn't sure whether he belonged in Saxe-Weimar, which wasn't a duchy any more. He didn't belong in any town or village; didn't have the right to reside in any of them. But were the dukes obliged to let him live somewhere in the duchy because he had been born here?

He couldn't hire a lawyer to find out; he barely earned enough to pay for food and a straw mattress in a room with five others in the loft of a boarding house. But up-timers were all rich. Perhaps, if he visited Grantville, his relatives would hire a lawyer for him.

Once he got out of jail.

Which he did, the next morning. The authorities told him to go back, push more wheelbarrows, and stay out of fights. Duke Albrecht was anxious to see the buildings completed before autumn.

****

Mary Ward and her English Ladies, the "Jesuitesses" whom Duke Albrecht had welcomed to Weimar after their escape from Bavaria, were in tight quarters, renting rooms here and there in the town for teaching, although they had managed to cram themselves into a common residence where they could keep some semblance of the canonical hours. Like the music academy, they were getting a new building currently under construction, theirs by grace of Lawrence, Cardinal Mazzare, and considerably more modest in size.

Mazzare had, with the approval of the pope, authorized the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary to operate throughout the USE. The pope had not extended his approval so far as to allow expansion beyond the scope of that one political unit. But the USE was a large political unit. It would take a while for a couple of dozen women to expand throughout it. They could, though, and they would. They had permission not to be bound by oaths of stability, which meant that her sisters would be free to establish new houses without gaining special permission. Nor to be enclosed. Not locked in, as if women were essentially dangers to the world about them. Which was, Miss Ward suspected, the real reason for the Tridentine insistence upon enclosure, rather than the ostensible one that the world presented dangers to women.

In any case, she thought, once her Institute was firmly established in a tolerant USE, its members could see about the challenge presented by an intolerant England. Meanwhile and, most immediately, this morning, there was the challenge of their one up-time postulant among the seven girls from recusant families who had been sent along from Douai.

Their up-time postulant was doing her best to adapt. She really was.

Miss Ward did her best to understand. She really did. Still. There was something about the girl. Ultimately, she was . . . Irish.

Her petition for admission had caused quite a bit of discussion. The Ladies of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary were . . . well . . . ladies. Not of England's nobility, but all most certainly of England's gentry. The English equivalent of the German Niederadel, the lower nobility. Daughters of country gentlemen, of squires. Nobody in England of lesser status (other than servants in recusant households, who had some protection provided by their betters) had managed to stay Catholic through the reigns of Elizabeth and James into that of Charles.

This petitioner's father was an artisan, for all of the nonsense about every up-timer is a noble. He worked with his hands. He performed manual labor. And was . . . Irish.

On the other hand . . . up-timer . . . who had taken first communion from and been confirmed by Cardinal Mazzare himself. Cardinal Mazzare who had positioned himself as patron of the Institute and protector of her intentions for it.

So, a year earlier, Miss Ward had gone to take stock of the situation.

Usually, at first look, anyone who met Emily Anne Mollohan, aged twenty-one, thought something like, Oh, my! What bright red hair, what fair, fair skin, what brilliant blue eyes, what an outstanding collection of freckles.

That had been Miss Ward's first thought when she went to Grantville to confer with Father Kircher and Emily's father, Louis Mollohan. A father who said that he supposed he was still Catholic–he had started out life Catholic and had never become anything else. And his wife Frannie–Frances Gahagan, who had been left up-time along with three of their five daughters–had been a good Catholic.

Unlike many others, Louis Mollohan had not remarried since the Ring of Fire. A chunky, muscular, man, not as tall as many of the up-timers, he rubbed his hand over his balding scalp. "I still just have this feeling in my heart that Frannie's alive, even if the lawyers are declaring that the ones we left behind are legally dead, for probate and things. Like she's away for a military deployment or something. When something isn't right for you, it's not right. That's all there is to it."

Yes, one thought that Emily was a fair-skinned redhead. Until one met her sister Shannon. Shannon was the oldest Mollohan child, married to Vincent Petrini. They had two children before the Ring of Fire, a third the year after. Since then, he had been away most of the time on deployment–far away, in Naples and then in Genoa.

"One visit home between the two deployments and he got her pregnant again!!!" exclaimed Emily. Who, since her graduation from the public high school in Grantville, not from a proper Catholic school for young ladies, had been apprenticed with her father at the steam sawmill corporation. An artisan. Doing manual labor.

Shannon had hair that looked like flames, eyes even bluer than Emily's, skin even fairer, and twice as many freckles.

"You can look at her and see what Frannie looked like, Miss Ward," Mollohan said proudly. He pulled out photograph albums and proudly displayed his lost family.

"I don't mind that much, that Vince has volunteered," Shannon said. "I do get most of his salary to put toward my living expenses and to take care of the kids. It's enough that by living with Dad, I can afford to be a stay-at-home mom."

"I think it's stinky of him," her little sister sputtered.

Mollohan's reaction to Emily's wanting to "try out" joining the English Ladies was, "I guess it's all right, if that's what she wants to do. Frannie would be proud of her if she was here."

Shannon's was indignation that she would be losing an unpaid baby-sitter.

Miss Ward suspected that, for Emily, no longer being an unpaid baby-sitter might be an impelling vocation toward consideration of the celibate life.

So she had set out to test the vocation. The English Ladies did, after all, conduct a school for girls. For the past year, as postulant and then novice, Emily had been assigned to assist in the beginning classes. Not to mention learning Latin.

As well, of course, as working her way through St. Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. Miss Ward sighed. Working her way through them several times under the guidance of the novice mistress. Without solitude, given that there was none to be had in the cramped and overfilled house in Weimar.

For the past year, she had persisted.

Although, in spite of the Spiritual Exercises, discernment and discretion did not appear to be a natural component of her character. Of what the up-timers would call her personality, which was more given to impulsiveness and impetuousness. Which was not always appreciated by the father of a couple of the students.

Two students; one father. The Institute, being a parallel order to the Jesuits, not an associated order, had, as informally advised by Father Athanasius Kircher in Grantville, duly imported a Catholic parish priest named Christoph Jagemann, who had been driven out of Duderstadt in the Eichsfeld a couple of years earlier, to be their chaplain and confessor, in accordance with the limitations the pope had imposed.

Archbishop Anselm Casimir had, from Mainz, approved this, even though Jagemann held a considerable grudge against Wilhelm Wettin, and possibly by extension against Saxe-Weimar as a whole, for actions undertaken in the Eichsfeld prior to the adoption of the SoTF constitution and its provisions for religious toleration. He was an energetic priest, a man in his mid-thirties. A man with a mission; a model of Counter-Reformation commitment to his cause.

Jagemann had brought with him from Duderstadt a man to open a Catholic elementary school for boys in Weimar. A lapsed Protestant-Reformed man. A lapsed Calvinist clergyman from Hesse, son of a Schultheiss, a minor official of the landgraves, who converted to Catholicism and now gave his name in the Latinized form as Mauritius Gudenus. Moritz Gude. A teacher with a large enough family of boys, aged from twelve down to an infant, that he could have saved on tuition money by opening a school for them alone. Every one of them quite frighteningly intelligent. He had named the next-to-youngest boy, a toddler, Urban Ferdinand, which only went to show where his sympathies lay. He had attracted more students than just his own sons.

Gudenus' family included two girls, too. Also frighteningly intelligent and attending the school established by the English Ladies. He did not think that Emily Anne Mollohan was a good influence on them.

Wherein lay the rub, as of today. Gudenus had filed a formal protest with Miss Ward that it was not appropriate to indicate to young girls that they might, if so inclined, become astronomers. Or alchemists. Or plumbers. Or electricians. Or railway engineers. Or builders of steam engines.

Particularly when that involved building a small, functioning, steam engine in the classroom. One that had come dangerously near to malfunctioning. Gudenus was very upset about Emily Anne's suggestion of taking the class on a field trip to Grantville to visit the steam locomotive plant.

Personally, Miss Ward thought the steam engine was rather interesting, although Emily Anne's logic of, "Well, if girls can become almost-Jesuits, then why shouldn't they become physicists?" was a little hard to follow. She had a tendency to say whatever came into her head without first checking with the novice mistress or head teacher as to whether it was appropriate.

When Miss Ward reported this to Louis Mollohan, his comment to Shannon was, "Well, if they'd bothered to ask me before they accepted her, I could have told them that she was born with a really strong tendency to leap before she bothered to do much looking. Which landed her in the emergency room more than once, as I recall. Starting with climbing out of her crib and landing on the floor with a splat well before she was a year old."

On top of which, Father Jagemann was in another feud with Weimar's town council, which necessarily involved Duke Albrecht. It was barely possible, Albrecht admitted to himself, that during the years 1632-1633, Colonel von Esleben, Wilhelm's representative in the Eichsfeld, might upon occasion have been a bit overzealous in defending Lutheran rights and reclaiming ecclesiastical property from the Catholics; that he had behaved more or less in the same way that the Jesuits had treated north Germany's Protestants during the era of the Edict of Restitution.

However, Jagemann was bringing political opinions into his homilies.

By cramming themselves into the loft and attics, the English Ladies had converted the main room of their residence into a chapel, where the priest held masses that were open to all Catholic residents of and transients in the city.

Those residents and transients included the remainder of the Italian musicians Duke Albrecht had taken in as a result of the collapse of any need for a Hofkapelle in Dresden after the Saxon Uprising. Who were now arguing with the entire Lutheran faculty of the church music academy about these matters.

Duke Albrecht commented ruefully to his wife Dorothea that sometimes a man had a charitable impulse that he subsequently came to regret.

She pointed out that by comparison to a large army, whether enemy or ally, marching through one's lands, or a major outbreak of plague, the things that were currently happening probably could be considered endurable.

He looked at her. "Do you want to help chaperone a field trip to Grantville for fifty or so girls under the age of ten?"

Because Anton Kolb was pushing wheelbarrows full of bricks for the new building that the English Ladies would occupy once it was done, he overheard several people talking about the field trip to Grantville. Grantville, where he had a sister and four cousins who might be rich enough to hire him a lawyer.

Directions had been the main obstacle to his thoughts about going to Grantville. He knew that it was near Rudolstadt, but he didn't know how to get to Rudolstadt, either, which wasn't particularly surprising. Quite a few of the men on the construction crew had served as mercenary soldiers at one time or another during the war. They freely admitted that most of the time, they had only the vaguest idea where they were. They just marched where the officers told them to and stopped when the officers told them to. There was a crystal radio in the tavern where Anton sometimes drank in the evening. It talked about a lot of interesting things, but never happened to give directions on getting from Weimar to Grantville. At least, not while he was there. He couldn't afford to drink every evening.

Maybe the authorities wouldn't like it if he went to Grantville.

But they had no idea how stubborn the son of a Hercher from Quittelsdorf could be. He did not have proper deference for his betters. He simply walked up to the up-time girl living with the English ladies and asked how to get there. For directions.

****

Grantville

The dowager countess of Gleichen, who adored her adopted son, little Immanuel Renatus, and truly believed that he was the second coming of Christ, began to wonder who would be John the Baptist for him and sent her spiritual adviser, Ezechiel Meth, the current leader of those stigmatized by orthodox Lutherans as "Stiefelite heretics," out into the wider Grantville community to ask questions.

In the course of which quest he became aware of the Dedekind boys. Stephan Dedekind had been . . . what? . . . his second cousin. That was close enough, he decided, that he had some responsibility for their spiritual welfare. He brought this dilemma to the countess, who agreed that he should go to Weimar and reassure himself that they were well cared for.

As Meth wended his way toward Weimar, fifty or so little girls under the age of ten, plus chaperones, wended their way toward Grantville.

Followed at a discreet distance by Anton Kolb, who had walked out of his job without giving proper notice.

Again.

Mary Ward had thoughtfully warned Father Nick Smithson that the girls would be coming, indicating that she would appreciate the opportunity, while they were there, to take advantage of Father Kircher's prior offer that although the Jesuits would not direct the Institute, they would nevertheless be available for consultation informally, as had been the case in the past.

Father van de Enden was dubious about the wisdom of this. He was, in fact, dubious about the Institute altogether. As was Father William Stanihurst, who had more experience in regard to the precarious position of English Catholicism than the rest of them.

"In my most recent conversations with Cardinal Mazzare," Kircher said, "he reiterated that he is not by any means so committed to the idea of full enclosure for female religious as our zealous Catholic Reformation theologians in Italy and Spain would prefer. He may even have used the word retrograde. He may have said something about trying to establish religious equivalents of Arab and Hindu harems. He may have mentioned misogyny. He may have discussed the importance of nuns in providing schools, medical missions, and social work in the up-time world. He may have mentioned Bamberg, Bernadette Adducci, and Gina Mastroianni."

He raised his eyebrows. "Your hopes that the cardinal will impose further restrictions are futile. The rules being developed for academic religious women on the faculty of St. Elisabeth of Thuringia college for women in Bamberg are even less restrictive than those of the Institute, which does, after all, follow our own rule."

"Which," Van de Enden protested, "prohibits our undertaking the direction of women's orders."

"Nor does the cardinal oblige us to do so. Quite the contrary, I recommended to Miss Ward that they choose their confessors from parish priests, and she has done so. It is some complication resulting from that which she wishes to discuss during this visit." He turned and picked up a pile of correspondence. "She is coming, but she is not here yet. In the meantime, I have this material from Sophie, Countess of Mansfeld, who has recently returned to Mansfeld-Anhalt County from Austria. On behalf of her husband and his brothers, she has been in touch with Archbishop Anselm Casimir's agents in Erfurt in regard to reestablishing a Catholic parish in Mansfeld. As she would like to see it staffed by Jesuits strongly committed to the retrieval of lost heretical souls, they have referred it to us for further investigation."

Father Nick Smithson frowned. Although he, like Gus Heinzerling, was going through the process of leaving the Jesuit order while remaining a priest, he still lived in the community at the rectory–there being, in essence, no place else in Grantville that he could possibly afford to live–even though he would be devoting his time to the Society of St. Philip of the Screwdriver and the advancement of science.

"Were the Mansfeld brothers converts from zeal or converts from expedience at the time they adopted the Catholic faith? Are they returning to join Count Wolfgang's wife? If they return, which would be worse under the current circumstances–zealots or practitioners of Machiavellian calculations? For if they would be expedient in one matter, why not in others? How deeply have they been influenced by Lamormaini's ideas during their years at Ferdinand II's court? Do they subscribe to the item of casuistry that maintains that it is not necessary for Catholics to keep faith with heretics? For all that we are doing now, in Grantville, in the SoTF, in the USE depends upon our keeping faith."

Both Grantville and the students from the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary survived the field trip.

Weimar did not escape so easily in regard to Ezechiel Meth's investigatory expedition in regard to the Dedekind children. His visit caused some public disturbances. Three Lutheran pastors denounced him from the pulpit. He and Gudenus got into a verbal brawl in front of the little schoolhouse. There was multi-party wrangling that rose from the town watch to the mayor to Duke Albrecht before several members of the ducal household politely escorted him back to Grantville and recommended to the dowager countess of Gleichen that she keep him there.

****

Brunswick

The Brunswick line of the Dedekind family concluded that their lawsuit didn't seem to be going anywhere. While still lacking consensus as to who among them would be the most appropriate custodian of the boys if their branch of the family was awarded custody, they managed to cooperate enough to hire a couple of men to go to Weimar and see what was happening.

"Approach the children, if you have an opportunity," Conrad urged. "See if they are content with the disposition that has currently been made. Surely they would prefer to be with family rather than among strangers in a school."

Which rather begged the question that the children had never met any of their Brunswick relatives before and would still be with strangers if the lawsuit succeeded.

****

Weimar

Duke Albrecht and his wife decided to consult advisers. Advisers beyond the local pastors. Albrecht, fresh from mediating the consequences of Meth's appearance in the city, thought he was getting enough unsolicited advice from them already.

It wasn't anything like a colloquy or a meeting of the local Estates of Saxe-Weimar County. It was an informal meeting of concerned citizens, with contributions by experts, so to speak.

Paul Slevogt, local boy from Possendorf and experienced gymnasium teacher, also a philologist and philosopher, came over from Jena. The weather was nice, so he and his wife made an expedition of it, bringing their five children with them. The oldest was an eight-year-old boy.

Christoph Brunchorst, born in Erfurt, was not quite so local, but a poet and writer of hymn verses, also had experience in dealing with problems in the Eichsfeld. Moreover, he was currently the pastor in Frankendorf, which was convenient, so Albrecht called him in even though the more rigorously orthodox among the Jena faculty (not to mention Oswald Griep at St. Thomas the Apostle church in Grantville) regarded the young pastor's encouragement of lay persons to engage in exercitia pietatis, or religious study groups, on their own and out from under the stern eye of the clergy, as inevitably leading to heresies further down the road.

Salomon Glaß, Dean Gerhard's favorite student, now working in Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, didn't consider Brunchorst fully reliable.

Elias Heßling, also a pastor in the Schwarzburg lands, at Großbreitenbach, and married to Professor Wolfgang Heyder's daughter Barbara, had already published several tracts condemning Brunchorst's ideas. Heßling suspected that Duke Ernst's version of Lutheran piety, involving so much personal emotion, was as close to heresy as anything that Elias Stiefel had propounded. He was no fan at all of the up-timers and their innovations, especially not of their radio broadcasts, which brought heretical ideas directly into the taverns and even the homes of the villages for which he considered himself responsible through the crystal radio sets which were so miserably easy to make and so impossibly difficult to extirpate!

Glaß wasn't invited to the meeting, but since it was impossible to keep anything of the sort secret (not that there was any real reason to keep the gathering secret) he came anyway, bringing Martin Wandersleben, who also had experience in the Eichsfeld, with him. Since the weather was nice, he also brought along his wife and children–including a ten-year-old son. Heßling showed up too–without children, thankfully, since his were quite young girls.

Daniel Pareus (born Daniel Wängler, but his grandfather had decided to go for the more prestigious Graecized academic version of his surname) wasn't even Lutheran. A product of the Palatinate, he was best known for his editions of classical Greek poets. Which was a natural enough tendency for him: his father had been head of the Reformed Casimirianum in Neustadt an der Weinstraße and his grandfather, a theologian, had been on the faculty at the University of Heidelberg during the years Pareus studied there. A man couldn't make a living by editing poetry, though, so he had a job. As school teaching did not pay as well as some other forms of employment, even though the Casimirianum was making an effort to persuade him to return and take over for his father, he had just dropped into town on some errands from Count August of Sommersburg and Leopold Cavriani.

Overall, with municipal officials, local worthies, and miscellaneous interested nosy individuals, there were fifty or so people at the Rotes Schloß, half of them from out of town.

Duke Albrecht asked them bluntly, "Who is trustworthy?"

He was already fairly certain that he couldn't trust the counts of Mansfeld, but that opinion was based on far more than their official religious allegiance. He was somewhat more concerned about the ongoing issue of whether Catholics in England owed loyalty and obedience to a Protestant monarch, which was somewhat more immediate, given the presence of Miss Ward and her Ladies in the city. The controversies over the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy under the late King James had to be worrisome to any Protestant overlord of Catholic subjects. Or citizens. Or even temporary diplomatic guests.

His advisers were unanimous that it would be a bad mistake to trust the countess of Gleichen, who was not only a heretic and a supporter of heretics, but over time had also extended protection to refugee Catholic priests and who could tell who else!

Slevogt went all the way back to the memorandum that Gregor Bruck, chancellor of Saxony in the days of Martin Luther, had written to Georg Spalatin, the elector's secretary, in regard to the safe-conduct that Emperor Charles V had extended for Luther's appearance at the Diet of Worms in 1521.

I hear two opinions from people who are favorable to Dr. Martin. Some warn us that he should by no means come hither simply on his Imperial Majesty's safe-conduct, because his Imperial Majesty's ban is ready for the condemned heretic inasmuch as he approved and sanctioned the Pope's bull. And one is not bound to keep faith with heretics. So if he came hither and would not recant, his opponents and the Romanists might find occasion to persuade the Emperor that he was not bound to observe his safe-conduct, and could not do so with good conscience, but might honorably break it.

"I seriously doubt," Slevogt said, "that for all of the pronouncements recently made by Cardinal Mazzare and Pope Urban VIII, that the majority of the adherents of the papist party have changed their minds on this."

Brunchorst contributed the thought the principle of sola scriptura was of little assistance, in that the ability of controversialists to lambast one another with 1 Peter 2:13-14 as somewhat contradicted by Acts 5:29 had proven as great through the centuries as the ability of common villagers to pound upon one another with staves for their mutual entertainment.

Pareus inevitably brought up the St. Bartholomew's massacre in France as a more recent instance.

As Brunchorst said to Slevogt after the main meeting, that instance was directed at Calvinists, who really weren't something that Lutherans wanted to go around encouraging in any case, albeit the current policies of the USE required that they be tolerated.

"I think," Duke Albrecht said to Dorothea, "that I'll have Conrad and Benedikt Carpzov attend the afternoon session." Both of them, like the Hofkapelle, had prudently left Saxony during the uprising and taken refuge in Weimar on the theory that there was, after all, no reason to tempt revolutionaries to engage in imprudent activities to the possible detriment of one's life and limb. For the time being, Leipzig was a chancy place for anyone who had attained a degree of prominence under Elector John George.

They were lawyers, at least. His question to them was not, "Who is trustworthy?" but rather the less philosophical, "To what extent can I rely on the new constitution and laws of the USE and the SoTF? And on those who have made them?"

Neither man was a fan of the innovations. Both had practical suggestions. The discussions dragged on.

The town was full of visiting wives, attendants, coachmen, and children who didn't live there, all making the most of a beautiful summer day. Every single child appeared to be running around in every available open space in the square not occupied by vendors' stalls, playing games, while their mothers and nannies gossiped in the shade provided by the Lucas Cranach house. Mixing in with children from the town schools, the music academy, Herr Gudenus' one-man schoolhouse, the English Ladies' Institute. Who could tell which boy was which? Or which girl was which, for that matter? Or even, for the youngest ones, which child was a boy or girl, as boys wore skirts until they were of school age?

The two men from Brunswick, both of them chancery clerks and neither one a married man, spotted the children their employers were interested in and approached them. With questions. Not very tactful ones. And mentioned leaving the music academy.

Constantin Christian Dedekind, never having seen them before and having been properly instructed that he should run if approached by strange men (Pastor Fasch and Deacon Michelmann having had Mansfeld Catholics rather than Brunswick Lutherans in mind, it must be admitted), did what he had been told to do: he grabbed his little brother's hand and ran, screaming loudly for help.

The two men from Brunswick gave chase, frightening him even more. Because dragging his little brother was slowing him down, Constantin screamed even louder.

The rest of the playing children started to scream and run. All over the square, in and out among the vendors' stalls, as a covey of mothers and nannies arose from the shade and ran after them.

Constantin darted into an alley.

Which ran behind the residence of the English Ladies.

Where Emily Anne Mollohan escaped from one more lecture about appropriate behavior into the vegetable garden, where she pulled off her head scarf, shook out her bright red hair, put it back into a tight braid, looked with considerable dissatisfaction at the freckles on her hands, and tied the scarf back in place. The scarf, a bright red printed up-time bandanna, was one of her little rebellions. The perpetual long sleeves, those she didn't mind so much given her propensity for sunburn, but always wearing a head-covering was coming close to driving her nuts.

She heard the screaming, opened the solid, high, wooden gate in the solid, high, wooden fence (just because the Ladies didn't practice enclosure, that didn't mean they wanted to entertain random heretical townsmen by allowing them to look at their buttocks while they were pulling weeds), grabbed the two screaming children while they were out of sight of the men chasing them, pulled them through the back gate into the garden, barred the gate, put her hand over the younger one's mouth, and said, "Shhh! If you be quiet, they'll chase someone else."

Constantin nodded at this obvious common sense. Andreas was young enough to follow his lead.

Constantin explained what he thought he knew, namely that strange men had tried to take them to do bad things.

Emily thought about it. After all, St. Ignatius' Exercises did emphasize the role of one's own mental faculties in deciding what was right and wrong

The school that the Institute ran was for girls. The house was so packed with Ladies that a person couldn't hide a rescued kitten in it, much less a couple of noisy boys.

As much as he didn't like her, though . . . there was a solution.

She presented the disguise to Constantin as a game. Found a little sack in which they could put their own clothes. Let them change in the toolshed.

Then, without even thinking to mention the problem to any of the Ladies, she unbarred the gate, stepped out holding a little girl by each hand, and walked over to Praeceptor Gudenus' house.

Where there were certainly enough boys that a couple more, in need of succor and protection from danger, could be made to vanish from public view.

When the municipal constabulary managed to calm things down, the only consensus was that the two Dedekind children had disappeared.

The report by the younger Paul Slevogt, quite coherent for an eight-year-old, confirmed by Johannes Tobias Glaß, age ten, both having attained the age of reason set for witnesses, which was seven, who had been involved in a game of marbles with Constantin Dedekind, led to the apprehension of two chancery clerks from Brunswick.

Who obviously did not have the children, for all that everybody else had to be suspicious in regard to their intentions.

So who had taken the boys? Nobody could even say definitely which way Constantin had run. The most the clerks could point out was where they had lost sight of him, more or less, when he turned a corner. They weren't sure which corner he had turned, or whether he had gone left or right.

Within two days, the outraged guardians appeared from Heldrungen. Fasch, Bretschneider, Pinckert, and most especially Appelt claimed that obviously the Catholic Mansfelders had abducted the boys; that Duke Albrecht had failed to keep them safe. Count August von Sommersburg, who had a substantial investment in board, room, and tuition, sent an agent to assist them.

They created all sorts of fuss and folderol.

Neither Emily Anne Mollohan nor Mauritius Gudenus said a word to anybody. Constantin and Andreas settled into the Gudenus household quite happily.

Emily Anne didn't say anything because, as she told herself, there were people trying to kidnap them. The chancery clerks had admitted as much; there was a lot of talk about multiple custody suits. These were just little kids. The next time she got to Grantville, she'd ask Judge Tito what she should do next. For right now, they were safer where they were.

Representatives of Sophie Schenk von Tautenburg, countess of Mansfeld, showed up to assert that she had nothing to do with it, hadn't even known the children existed, and would certainly not have had any reason to abduct them even if she had known.

"But your husband might have," was the general suspicion among local Lutherans.

Her representatives responded fruitlessly that, although it was true that the count and his brothers had been preparing to return to the USE, because of the Ottoman invasion, all three were still in Austria, in the army of the newly established Austro-Hungarian empire.

"She's probably lying," the gossip in the taverns went. "Everybody knows that Catholics don't have any obligation to keep faith with heretics."

Father Jagemann was torn between denying that this was true and thinking that, in fact, there was ample precedent stating that it was true.

****

Grantville

It took Anton Kolb a few days to locate his sister and cousins, but there were plenty of temporary jobs to be had and remarkably few questions asked. He was content to earn enough for a spot to sleep and a meal now and then.

Once he found them, they got together for a picnic at the fairgrounds, near the building that had been the refugee center in the early days after the miracle.

Anton was quite sure that they were not bothering anybody or doing anything that they shouldn't. But . . . Here came a policeman.

Hans Lauer, native of Badenburg and Grantville police officer since 1633, whose father and brother were surveyors, his father for West Virginia County and his brother for the SoTF Department of Transportation, had no idea who Anton was. Nor did he, at the moment, care.

He had, however, known of Catharina Kolb when she was a servant to a family back in Badenburg. His sense of the proprieties was offended that she, a former domestic indentured servant of unfree peasant origin, was now a clerk in the post office and married to one of his fellow police officers. That fellow James Carr, a Scot, a more recent trainee as of 1635, had less seniority than himself, to be sure.

Lauer believed, strongly, that all people should remain in the status of life to which God assigned them. Pastor Griep at St. Thomas concurred. "If you were born to be a servant, then success is serving your master well; not abandoning service to go somewhere else and take up some other occupation! And certainly not abandoning Lutheranism for Calvinism upon marriage."

Moreover, Hans found his opinions complicated by the fact that he was courting Elisabetha Maria Seiler, a friend of Catharina's who had finished high school and gotten a job as an apprentice clerk at the probate court, who was balking at making the to-him-necessary change from Catholicism to Lutheranism. Her murky origins, in that she had come into Grantville as a refugee child in the camp followers of the mercenaries, upset him. Then she had been fostered with an up-time couple associated with the septic tank maintenance company and consequently possibly of a dishonorable occupation, although the up-timers didn't see it that way. She still lived with them.

And if he, Hans Lauer, found all of this mentally distressing, it was all compounded by his brother's courtship of Barbara Kunze, the daughter of the now-richest man in Badenburg, involved with OPM. Who would by no means look favorably upon a prospective son-in-law who had even a tenuous connection with a young woman of uncertain status. Who stubbornly refused to give in to his advances and persuasions unless there was a wedding ring on her finger first. Who didn't even seem to appreciate properly what a boon it would be for her to marry a Lauer from Badenburg.

Which caused one of the up-timers on the force to mock, "Poor Rodney Dangerfield. He don't get no respect."

His manner of address to the picnickers was, perhaps, unnecessarily truculent.

Carr tried to smooth it over. The up-time men tried to laugh it off. Anton . . .

****

When Lauer called for reinforcements he got a brand-new police recruit, Johann Reichard Hohmann, from Jena in Saxe-Weimar, who turned out to be a CoC member who shared almost none of Lauer's opinions. Hohmann didn't have the seniority to make Lauer back off, but he did have a radio, which he used to call the chief.

"If Carr's wife is a serf, and she is," Lauer asserted, "then her brother is too. Which means that he's just taken off from wherever he belongs, without his lord's permission to leave."

Preston Richards reacted with a generic, "Why me, Lord?"

Anton reacted, in the longer run, once the evening had sorted itself out and they'd picked up the picnic, with, "I don't think we ought to be serfs any more. It was the lord who took away the land after our father died. Or his agents and the village council, at least. If I don't have any right to farm the land that our father leased, then the lord shouldn't have any right to me."

Then he looked at his cousins. "Or any right to you. Quittelsdorf's lands went away into a different world. How can you still be Grundhörig? There aren't any lands for you to be tied to."

"I hadn't thought about it, really," Ursel said to Derek Blount that night. "After we came into Grantville, nobody seemed to care. But maybe we ought to get it straightened out."

She took the question to the rest of the former Quittelsdorf villagers. "Just what is our Hörigkeit anymore?"

They agreed that they needed a lawyer. Although, as Derek warned them, not an expensive lawyer. In spite of the rumors that all up-timers were rich, he was still a plain old worker on the streets and roads crew with no prospects at all of turning into someone rich and famous. Especially not rich.

Johann Georg Hardegg, whom they knew because he was a member at St. Martin's in the Fields, was too busy to take them on, and they couldn't afford him, anyway, as he said frankly. He handed them off to his brother-in-law Hans Meinhard Wiesel, who was a law student at the University of Jena, saying, "I'll take a look at the information he comes up with and sign off on it if it's accurate. Call it an assignment, and you won't owe him a cent; I'll get in touch with his professor."

"While he's at it," Anton Kolb asked, "can he figure out where I have a right to be? That's why I came to Grantville."

"I suppose so," Hardegg answered. "His father's the senior partner in the firm of Waffler, Wiesel, and Finck, Saalfeld office, so it will do him good to look at something other than mining law, for a change."

To Carr and the up-timers, his comment was, "Also, through the Wiesels, he's some connection of Oswald Griep at St. Thomas. His Aunt Agathe is Griep's stepmother if my memory doesn't fail me, which will give you a tie-in to the other parish if you turn out to need the help of someone who's a member there. And Lauer's sister is teaching at St. Guenther of Thuringia school, which is part of that parish. So if Griep muzzles himself, maybe he can rein Lauer in a bit."

Johann Georg Hardegg's memory rarely failed him.

"There's someone who goes to church at St. Martin's named Wolfgang Hörig," Derek said. "He's from Sommersburg County, up around Rastenburg somewhere. Nice guy. With a wife and five or six little Hörigs. I'd hate to think that the count could just have him picked up and sent back if he felt like it. I can ask Ursel."

"His wife Dorothea's from Büttelstedt," was Ursel's contribution. "She calls it Am Arsch der Welt. I don't know whether she's unfree or not. But what about us?"

"Give me some time," Hans Meinhard Wiesel wailed.

Unfortunately for the afflicted law student, the most applicable information he could find seemed as though it would be in the records of the New United States that had governed Franconia on behalf of Emperor Gustav Adolf in 1633. Which were . . . confusing.

The NUS had abolished the "residuary obligations" of serfdom in part of Franconia, on the former estates of the prince-bishops of Bamberg and Würzburg that had come into NUS hands. But not on the estates of other lords, imperial knights, and such. Nor had they, even on those estates, abolished servile land tenures per se. Nor was it clear whether or not the abolition had anything to do with the estates having belonged to Roman Catholic episcopal domains.

Though if one asked Franz von Hatzfeld, the bishop in question, he would probably have something to say on the matter of how such an arbitrary action had impacted the episcopal revenue stream. As would his lawyers.

When Wiesel inquired directly of Frau Janie Kacere in Bamberg as to the underlying principle upon which the actions had been based, her "off the record, please" reply had been a shrug accompanied by an appropriate gesture. "Um? Toss it up in the air and see if it will fly? You might say that they were winging it."

In 1633, nothing had been done in regard to serfdom in the Thuringian parts of the NUS. Nor, for that matter, had the SoTF done anything as of the current date.

Inside the Ring of Fire, there was no serfdom. Did the medieval principle of Stadtluft Macht Frei apply in this case? Wiesel was not sure. He took it back to Hardegg, who said that since the local version of serfdom was Grundherrschaft and the girls other than Catharina Kolb had been bound to the lands of Quittelsdorf, which simply wasn't there any more, they should be all right. For intact villages such as Büttelstedt, though, there was currently neither legislation nor precedent.

"Things are a lot better here than they are on the other side of the Elbe," Hardegg concluded. "As far as the law is concerned, at least."

"I need a better explanation," Roland Worley said.

"Gutsherrschaft is more like your American plantation system in the south functioned, as I understand it, with the workers being Leibeigen, their bodies in personal bondage; Grundherrschaft is more like a lord leases most of his land to tenant farmers, but they can't leave and work somewhere else, for some other landholder, or rent land in a different place without the lord's permission, or marry without the lord's permission, and above all not transfer the lease by sale or inheritance without the lord's permission. They have to stay there, keep plowing, planting, harvesting, and above all keep paying their rents and dues. There's an entire framework, a whole set of institutions, like the heriot, the death dues, and the mandatory labor services. Which are huge in some places and hardly amount to anything in others; fixed in some places and arbitrary in others. Sure, a village functions, has its Schulz and council made up of the lease-holding heads of families, decides things. But all that with the steward or the lord's agent looking over their shoulders and making sure that he gets his. Except that in this part of Germany, the lordship rights are so fragmented that there isn't usually a lord of an estate; more like a rent collector."

Roland rubbed his chin, then his forehead, then the back of his neck.

"Well if it only applied to the Catholic bishop then," Anton Kolb suddenly exclaimed, "what does this mean about no established church? For actual people, I mean? It's all well and good to say that there isn't one. That every religion is accepted, like the English Ladies in the city of Weimar, where I was working on their building because Duke Albrecht invited them to come. Or . . . all of them . . . here in Grantville. But if you're a farmer in the rest of Saxe-Weimar, there's only one church in the village, and that church is a Lutheran one, with the duke and his consistory appointing the pastor. So do the people who live there actually have a choice? Or does no established church in the SoTF mean that the duke in Weimar, or the counts in Rudolstadt or Sommersburg, have to quit supporting Lutheran churches with their county taxes?"

Hardegg didn't know. Hadn't thought a lot about it, to tell the truth. He sent Wiesel off to do more legal research.

In the process of which Wiesel got diverted, distracted . . . followed a digression . . . into the ever-fascinating issue of keeping promises to heretics. Returning to his mentor, he asked, "If a peasant in a village decides to become a heretic, like Ezechiel Meth for example, would that, on the 'no need to keep faith with heretics' principle, cancel out his tenurial rights in the village lands of a Catholic lord? Or, really, even a Lutheran lord? Does the SoTF need to keep promises it might make to Georg Buchberger, that Stiefelite heretic who's a security guard at the High Street mansion, the administrative annex it's called now? Would ‘no need to keep faith with heretics' enable Buchberger's wife to leave him if she wanted to? There's a verse in the Bible about not being ‘unequally yoked.' If . . ."

"Second Corinthians 6:14," Pastor Kastenmayer said wearily. "It has come up more than once in the marriage court discussions in Rudolstadt and Jena, believe me. ‘Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?' More than one unhappy spouse has hired a lawyer to explore its possible applicability to divorce."

All of which led to a formal disputation in Jena. Martin Duerr, a theology student from Badenburg, not only attended but brought along his friend Hans Conrad Pohlmann, also a student from Badenburg at Jena, though in the law faculty . . . and a CoC member. Pohlman poked his nose in and gave an opinion during the public comments.

Duerr's younger sister was boarding with the Kastenmayer family while she attended high school in Grantville; she was about to go off to Amberg for teacher training at the Normal School. Pohlman's sister Jacobina was already a teacher at Countess Katharina the Heroic, the Lutheran school attached to St. Martin's in the Fields. Who naturally involved her fiancé, a young Lutheran pastor in Saxe-Weimar with a Jena degree.

Christoph Burkholtz, the fiancé, heaved the deepest of sighs. His father had been pastor in the village the Kolbs came from. He wrote to Kastenmayer and Hardegg. The Duerrs gave affidavits that Catharina Kolb had been a servant in their household in Badenburg, had come to them as a ten-year-old in 1623 when their mother remarried to Bastian Ramsberger and they could afford to take in a "bound girl." Up until then, Catharina Kolb had been bound to a peasant somewhere in Saxe-Weimar, they thought. And was by birth a serf, just as Hans Lauer maintained. They averred to have no information whatsoever in regard to the land tenure issue pertaining to the Kolbs, which was probably true.

"The bright side," Wiesel said, "is at least the disputation reached a conclusion that the bishop in Franconia's being Catholic didn't have anything to do with it. The NUS committee would have done the same things even if he'd been a Lutheran prince-bishop."

"Oh," Derek Blount said. "Joy."

"Ja," Anton Kolb agreed. "Wunderbar."

****

"All of this has been a major distraction from the problem of the disappearance of the Dedekind children," Father Kircher said at the next meeting of Grantville's clergy. "How do we get the officials in Bamberg to pay attention to all the accusations of ‘Papist perfidy' that are flying around? Refute them, if possible. At least repudiate any idea that the government of the State of Thuringia-Franconia accepts the contention that it is an article of our doctrine that Catholics do not need to keep faith with heretics. Some of the more extreme statements are demanding that no reliance be placed upon the statements of Catholic witnesses in court cases!"

The ministers from the other churches–those willing to be part of an interfaith body–winced.

"Of course, I've heard it," Al Green said to Simon Jones after the meeting. "Who hasn't?"

Jones admitted that even in the twentieth century, it was pretty hard for a man to have gone through a Protestant theological seminary and not heard it.

Athanasius Kircher had a copy of Martin Becanus' On the Duty to Keep Faith with Heretics. Unsurprisingly, since Becanus was a prominent modern (modern for the seventeenth century, at least) Jesuit controversialist. More surprisingly, he had it because the book came from the staunchly conservative Father van de Enden. But the late Maarten Schellekens van Hilvarenbeek had been Dutch and had taught theology for nearly two decades at Würzburg, Mainz, and Vienna, so it was a matter of national pride.

Based on the principles of contract law and the binding force of agreements that both jurists and theologians at the University of Salamanca in Spain had developed, Becanus had argued in favor of the duty to honor promises beyond confessional boundaries. A politico-theological premise designed to make Englishmen of conscience who had taken an oath of allegiance comfortable with deposing Queen Elizabeth in favor of Mary of Scotland if a chance came along, and then mired itself in the allegiance oath controversy begun by the late King James, was utterly disastrous if applied in the area of economics. Pragmatically, agreements were of major importance when it came to commercial transactions. If a bank in Amsterdam could not rely on a bank in Venice; if a merchant in Prague could not trust that one in London would transmit payment for goods received . . . every good merchant in Europe flinched at the thought.

Beyond the sphere of commerce, however, and although he was hostile to religious freedom as a matter of principle, Becanus acknowledged that a prince might have good reasons to grant exceptions. There were circumstances when . . . and where . . . tolerating heretical faiths might be the lesser evil.

Franciscus van de Enden had dragged the book out of his travel trunk because he was also worried that the controversy might have an adverse effect when it came to raising funds for building of the proposed Jesuit collegium in Grantville

Oswald Griep muddied the discussion by saying that, in his opinion, Lutherans didn't have any obligation to keep faith with heretics either–among whom the anti-Christ in Rome was prominent. His argumentation involved the Book of Genesis, specifically the passages involving the rape of Dinah and the response of Simeon and Levi after Jacob had given his word. Griep's sympathies were all with the two brothers.

Al Green smiled wearily at his wife Claudette over dinner. "Actually, I can't think of any Christian who is in favor of heresy, per se. I've been known to point out the error of their previous views to people who appeared to be on the verge of seeing the light. It's more a matter of how you define heresy. And how much you appreciate that a full separation of church and state protects you yourself from persecution by those who regard your own view as seriously erroneous. Thomas Jefferson went way beyond Gustav Adolf's reluctant ‘toleration' in his statement of principles. Though that's what we may have to live with in the USE as a whole, even if not here in Thuringia-Franconia, since the Fourth of July Party appears willing to compromise."

He dug out a copy of the "Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom" and persuaded Lyle Kindred to print it in a bordered box on the front page of the Grantville Times.

Kircher had the Becanus pamphlet translated into both German and, courtesy of Father Stanihurst, English; then had it printed in parallel columns along the model of the Concordia Triglotta that had caused such a sensation at the Rudolstadt Colloquy some years earlier. Printed in several thousand copies and circulated to every collegium in the USE. In addition to bookstore sales, of course. He hoped to recoup at least some of his investment.

In private, there was renewed discussion among the Grantville Jesuits about the English Ladies. Vitelleschi had agreed with Mazzare's decision, but had also been seriously injured the previous May. How long would he last? Was a split in the Order between the two popes inevitable? Would it be not only national, with, for example, Spain going one way and the Low Countries the other, but would the Order split within nations? What would be the impact on missions in England? On the English institutions in the Low Countries and Spain? What was the state of Urban VIII's health? He hadn't been seen in public since the attack in May. The non-Catholic participants had long since left Burgundy, but by and large Urban was holding the Catholics tight. What was going on?

****

Weimar

Duke Johann Philipp at Altenburg loaned Arnold Mengering, his Hofprediger and Consistorialrath, to Duke Albrecht for further consultation.

"For purely educational purposes," Mengering recommended, "everybody involved in the disputes ought to listen to a few episodes of the Pentecostal radio program if they think they have heresies now. Or read the Book of Mormon. Let me tell you what's been going on in the mining settlements around Saalfeld. Even though Weimar isn't that far from Grantville in miles, you've all been pretty isolated here. Or insulated, as the up-time construction experts would put it."

Mengering had taken advantage of his trip to inspect the construction of the building for the new music academy. Parts of which might, if everything went well, be ready for use in the fall. Which would be wonderful, because it was not good for musical instruments if students carried them out into cold weather and then back into heated spaces as they trudged from one classroom to another.

Mengering finally asked the practical questions.

• Have Catholics really kidnapped the Dedekind children?
• If they have, which Catholics? The countess of Mansfeld certainly remains adamant in her denials.
• The ones in Grantville? Why would they?
• And how in the name of all that is sacred did the legal status of serfs get mixed up in this? There appears to be no rational connection.

Duke Albrecht groaned. "What about the all-too-Catholic English Ladies right here in the city of Weimar? At present, their very presence makes my own commitment to Lutheran orthodoxy suspect–especially now that my brother Bernhard is married to an Italian Catholic over in Burgundy?"

Mengering made a face. "One presumes that one of the local Lutheran pastors started that line of thought?"

"I presume," Duke Albrecht said, "that some agent of Superintendent Tilesius in Mühlhausen started that line of thought. But it has proliferated."

Mary Ward indignantly repudiated any idea that the Institute had abducted the Dedekind children and offered to have every single one of the Ladies, the novices and postulants, the pupils, the servants, and the mice in the attics come out of the residence and school rooms to stand in the streets while the town constabulary searched for as long as it pleased them.

Skeptics in the taverns took the position that even if the Papist woman did allow that, she would smuggle the boys away and hide them somewhere else, out of sight, before the search started.

When Frau Gudenus was afraid that one of her children might have diphtheria, she insisted that her husband call a young physician that the duke and duchess had employed to care for all children in Weimar. "His name is Georg Holtz; he trained at Jena, which means that he also trained at Leahy in Grantville. He should be as good as an up-timer."

Gudenus did not really want to call Holtz because the man not only had his degree from Jena and was a Lutheran but also had been trained by the up-timers.

This might have led to an impasse, but Frau Gudenus prevailed. When it came to the welfare of her children, she was both practical and fierce. If Holtz was the best doctor to call, she was going to call him.

"If you want Catholic doctors who are that good," she ended up arguing with her husband, "you should send more Catholics to Leahy/Jena and ignore that all of the faculty at Jena are Protestants and most of the up-timers belong to unheard-of heresies."

Holtz didn't think it was diphtheria, but took a culture. He didn't have much in the way of treatment to offer beyond a croup tent, but proclaimed a quarantine that closed Gudenus' one-room school for a couple of weeks and kept the household indoors until he got a result from Grantville.

Strep, the lab at Leahy concluded.

Holtz was back and forth to the Gudenus family and ended up wondering a bit about a couple of the boys he saw there. Which he mentioned in a private note to Christoph Burkholtz; they'd been friends when they were both at Jena.

Maybe . . .

"The last thing we need right now," Burkholtz answered, "is for the Dedekind children to be found with a Catholic family. If they seem to be well enough treated, just keep it to yourself for the time being. I'll think about it."

****

Magdeburg

Helene Gundelfinger didn't get impatient very often. Today, her patience had been bent, folded, shredded, and mutilated. "It's something you'll have to deal with, not me, Ed."

"Why?" The recently installed prime minister of the USE frowned at his successor as president of the SoTF.

"Because you're Catholic, to be blunt. And, essentially, the problem is Catholic. Bring in Cardinal Mazzare, if you think you need to. I think you need to. I think you absolutely must."

"When he gets back, I assume you mean. He's still tied up in Burgundy."

She stood up and paced around the room.

"But first, read the book. Becanus, which I know you already have because I brought you a copy. And this one." She slammed a larger treatise down on his desk. "Or, rather, get someone to translate this one into English for you, fast, and read it then. That will definitely be faster than if you try to struggle your way through the Latin."

Two weeks later, his patience was in the same state that Helene's had been.

"If the damn book is so important, why hadn't I ever heard of it?" Ed Piazza slammed his fist on the table and glared at the expensively-tooled leather binding. When he opened it to the title page, the red print seemed to glare back at him. "If the cover has 1629 on it, why does the title page have . . ." He paused and pulled up his recollections of Roman numerals. ". . . 1593?"

"It was bound a long time after it was printed." Daniel Pareus, one of Leopold Cavriani's gofers and preparer of the emergency translation, leaned back. "We–my father and I–think that Erstenberger wrote it about 1580. That's according to my grandfather. He's dead now. Erstenberger, that is; my grandfather also, for that matter."

"‘Erstenberger' is not what it says here."

"It was actually written by Andreas Erstenberger. Everyone knew the book would be controversial. Franz Burkard – Franciscus Burgkardus—however he's spelled—was safely dead. Someone probably bought this copy in 1629 when the Pacis Compositio came out and bound them to match. The first edition came out in 1586, in three parts. This edition collects them together. Same printer—Adam Berg in Munich. There was another edition in 1602, and . . ."

"Munich? Duke Maximilian and his religious nut of a father?"

"Printed there."

Ed looked at the bottom of the page. " ‘Nach zudrucken verbotten.' Reprinting forbidden. Sounds like music publishers up-time. Lawyers are all the same."

Ed sent his secretary over to Mazzare's headquarters to plead for a copy of John Kennedy's 1960 Kennedy speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a group of Protestant ministers, on the issue of his religion. He set the State Library in Grantville on the project too, for backup.

Mazzare still being out of town, it took the guy in charge and his minions a couple of weeks to find it and make a copy. The State Library still hadn't found one.

Ed gathered a couple of interested parties and, having decided that this was too important to leave to secretaries and couriers, went over to Mazzare's townhouse to have dinner and conversation to accompany picking it up.

"Not that I remember the speech, of course," Ed said after he read it for the first time since he was in high school. "My parents did, though. It caused a lot of excitement at the time."

Jerry Calafano sipped his wine.

"How old were you then, Ed?"

"Nine. I think that I remember that it happened. Or, at least, I remember my parents talking about that it happened. Not what he said."

"I wasn't born for another dozen years. By then, Kennedy was history; elected and assassinated, just a Grassy Knoll in our high school American history book."

Ed looked down again at the typed sheets in his hand. "If I'm reading this right, Kennedy didn't only say that he wouldn't allow the pope to influence public policy. He committed himself to a total separation of church and state–no religious influence on government at all. Absolute secularism. This went way farther than anything that anyone has proposed for the USE; surely way farther than Gustav Adolf would ever agree to."

Jerry drank somewhat more deeply. "Back in college, I wondered what his confessor made of it. Greg Ferrara and I have talked about that a couple of times. But it's not likely that any priest who was acquainted with Jack Kennedy would have been surprised."

"To get back to the immediate issue," Ed said, "What we need is a declaration from the pope." He looked at Mazzare's locum tenens.

Who sighed. "What good would it do, really, if the Protestants are determined to believe that he, too, will feel no obligation to keep faith with heretics."

As he showed Ed and Jerry out the door, he had to think, nor is it really possible under the circumstances. The circumstances being that on May 11, Pope Urban VIII had been assassinated. He knew; he could not have continued to carry out his duties if the cardinal had left him in ignorance.

How secret was this information still? For the time being, they held the news close.

Surely Piazza knew, but neither of them would yet say it aloud, because walls had ears. Calafano almost certainly did not know.

Did the Jesuits in Grantville know? Kircher, perhaps? Or all of them?

At some point, there would have to be a public acknowledgment, if only because of the problems that the absence of a pope made for Mazzare's duties as cardinal-protector. And the problems that Mazzare's continued absence from the USE caused his subordinates in dealing with its Catholic bishops and archbishops. The vacancy in Cologne; the ambitions of Franz Wilhelm of Wartenburg and whether or not he would do his spiritual duty by the dioceses of Minden and Osnabrück to which he had been canonically elected and papally confirmed, even though there was no longer anything, financially or politically speaking, in it for him.

****

Weimar

"Shannon," Emily wrote to her sister, "something's come up that I just desperately need to talk to Judge Tito about and I don't see any way that I can possibly get to Grantville for ages and ages. Could you possibly phone him and ask him to do me a big, big, favor by coming to Weimar? I mean it. This is important. I'm not being a hysterical little girl. I need to talk to the judge."

****

Grantville

Simon Jones also had a copy of the 1960 Kennedy speech. And was willing to lend it to Athanasius Kircher, S.J. And to discuss it with him after he had read it.

"Basically, what he told them was that if push came to shove, he'd choose his political allegiance over his religious allegiance. That he was not a very good Catholic." Jones smiled. "Which he wasn't, of course. No more than his father had been."

Kircher frowned.

"Neither of them was a very good man, neither Joe nor Jack. Don't let anyone try to tell you that the up-time world was free from political corruption. To make that speech you have just read, Jack Kennedy took a break from the primary campaign in West Virginia. About which he used to joke, more than once, that he had received a telegram from Joe saying, ‘Don't buy another vote, I won't pay for a landslide.' Or in a slight variation, ‘I have just received the following telegram from my generous father: Dear Jack: Don't buy a single vote more than is necessary. I'll help you win this election, but I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide!' "

Jones moved his shoulders restlessly. "The 1960 campaign. I was nine years old that year; Larry Mazzare was five." He looked at Al Green. "You missed the whole thing; weren't even born yet."

Green nodded. "Even Enoch Wiley wouldn't have been much more than old enough to vote."

Jones winced. "Nor Melissa Mailey. Who will be happy to give you an earful about it all, if you have a chance to ask her, I'm sure. Forty years makes a big difference."

Maurice Tito came back from his visit to Weimar and dropped by the city hall to talk to Liz Carstairs. Then both of them headed over to the High Street House. Which had been the "Government House," presidential office building, before the capital of the SoTF moved to Bamberg and was now the "Administrative Annex." The location of those state offices that hadn't moved, or at least hadn't moved yet.

Those that needed computer networks, for example. With all due respect to the aqualator, the surviving up-time computers, running on Grantville's considerably more reliable electricity, were still faster than anything that had been produced down-time.

They had arranged for a secure radio link. They needed to talk to Helene Gundelfinger. And Ed Piazza.

****

Grantville

Hans Meinhard Wiesel finally got back an answer from Christoph Burkholtz, magister theologiae, Jena, now pastor in a village in Saxe-Weimar, re: the status of the children of the late Hermann Kolb. It had taken him a while to track down everyone who had been involved with the events following Hermann's death and was still alive.

The bailiff who had seen to the rapid re-leasing of the lands was dead.

So was the original new lessee; his son-in-law was farming them now.

In retrospect, nobody who had been involved was particularly proud of the way they'd handled it.

The new bailiff suggested a way out that might well hold the village harmless.

Burkholtz included two certificates of full manumission for Anton and Catharina Kolb, signed by Duke Albrecht, who had reimbursed the local landholder for whatever revenues he might be losing.

Hans Lauer mouthed off enough, outside of work hours, that Preston Richards issued a reprimand. "He's really not the best fit for the department," Press told his wife Mel, "but his father has quite a bit of influence and he's never done anything that's sufficient grounds for dismissal. I keep hoping that if I just don't promote him, some other city will hire him at a higher rank. At least Larry Karickhoff and some of the other guys gave him to understand fairly strongly that if he wasn't willing to treat Betta Seiler with more respect, he'd better back off."

Anton, Catharina, cousins, and miscellaneous talked it over for a while.

"What are you going to do now?" Derek asked Anton.

"Go back to Weimar, I guess. See if I still have a job. I've probably been replaced by now. It's not as if there's a shortage of men whose education barely taught them to read and write and weren't apprenticed to a trade."

Derek thought a minute. "I know some guys. I could probably get you onto the crew that lays railroad track, if you're willing to be trained for that and go wherever they decide to lay track next. It's just as hard work as carrying a hod of bricks, but it pays better."

Anton didn't even stop to think. "I could do that."

"Or," Ursel added, "if you really want to farm, Georg Conrath at Keilhau needs a full-time adult male servant." She looked at Derek. "What you would call a hired man." Then she turned around to Anton, who was, after all, her cousin, even if she had met him for the first time just a few weeks earlier. "If you are still wanting to farm, that is."

"Does this Conrath have sons?"

"Yes, but he and Guenther quarreled. Guenther's working as a hired man for Johann Pflaum at Lichstedt. And his daughter Barbel is married to an up-timer." She giggled. "Just like the rest of us. His stepsons are still in school, and Maria will keep them there. She worked as a maid in Grantville for a couple of years before she remarried and developed ambitions. She wants to see her sons wearing white shirts with dress suits and carrying briefcases."

"Didn't keep her from hiring the girls out as servants," Derek said with a sour face. "If you ask me, she's expecting them to pay for their brothers' schooling."

Anton thought about being a farmer. Which he had always thought he wanted to be.

He thought about a family like the Conraths. Which a man couldn't escape if he was a servant, boarding in.

"I'll try the railroad crew," he said again. Firmly.

****

Weimar

Emily Anne Mollohan was beginning to worry. Judge Tito had come, had talked to her, had talked to Father Jagemann and to Praeceptor Gudenus, and had gone back to Grantville again. Nothing had happened.

She had pulled Constantin and Andreas into the vegetable garden to protect them. She had taken them to the Praeceptor because on a certain day, that one particular day, they were in danger. Or, at least, had seemed to be. The clerks from Brunswick insisted that they had meant them no harm, hadn't even intended to frighten them.

She had never dreamed that they wouldn't be sent right back to the music academy the minute that it was clearly safe.

Which it had been for weeks, now. Given all the fuss. Nobody was going to lose sight of them again. They'd be watched over like they were solid gold.

Which a lot of people seemed to think they were.

No matter what had happened in the Eichsfeld during the last several years and no matter how awful Wilhelm Wettin's officials had been to Catholics there–Father Jagemann and Gudenus couldn't keep those kids as some kind of tit-for-tat. It just wasn't right, no matter how nice they were being to them.

They were being nice to them. Constantin and Andreas were as happy as a couple of orphans could possibly be, with Frau Gudenus being their mom and a whole collection of foster brothers and sisters, going to the little one-room Catholic school for boys.

But it still wasn't right.

Emily Anne thought and thought and thought about it. While Maurice Tito was still on the radio link in Grantville, she went over to the Gudenus house and said, "You have to give them back."

In the absence of anyone else who volunteered to suffer the possible repercussions of that action, and deciding that in some ways it was her responsibility, she took each of them by a hand and walked from the praeceptor's house over to the browning vegetable garden behind the Ladies' residence.

There she sat them down on the borders of the raised beds and explained it all, as best as she could.

They both cried, but they agreed.

She took their hands again, walked out the gate, down the alley, into the street, and to the partially-occupied music academy building.

The young man who opened the door didn't even recognize the children. He was a new employee.

"I need to talk to your headmaster," Emily Anne said.

Then she went back and told Mary Ward everything.

"You know, Shannon," she wrote that evening, "I'm beginning to think that I may not have the unquestioning obedience to superiors that it will take for me to become a Jesuitess–especially a down-time Jesuitess. Miss Ward is absolutely sure that I don't. She predicts that there are going to be widespread repercussions from what I did.

"Maybe I'd better write to Father Larry."

****

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