by Eric Flint
* * *
Sherrilyn only heard about it later, when Bastien and Terrye Jo related the story; her part was exciting enough. When the troop of soldiers approaching Miolans from the direction of Savoy came into sight—but not weapon range—of the fortress, she and de la Mothe—wearing the iron mask—burst across the bridge and rode as hard as they could in the opposite direction. It took the troop commander a few moments and a couple of harsh commands to get his men moving, but they responded to the sight, at least half of them taking off after their quarry.
In the meanwhile the remaining force approached Miolans, only to be suddenly greeted by the sight of two dozen Maddox’s Rangers, all armed with fine, well-made rifles that caught the pale afternoon sun, and all aimed at them. Their muskets were well made, but they’d have to advance close enough to fire.
That would be at least two rounds for each man on the wall, more than enough to thin the ranks.
* * *
“No one knows what happened to you, Your Eminence,” de la Mothe said a few nights later. “His Highness the Prince of Condé offered sanctuary to the young former Cardinal’s Guardsman, D’Aubisson, who managed to get out of the Châtelet. He made a public complaint at court, but it seems that His Royal Highness had no idea you’d been imprisoned.”
De la Mothe placed a wooden bowl and spoon in Tremblay’s hands and sat down next to him.
“There’s no need for you to serve any longer as my valet de chambre, Monsieur de la Mothe.”
“It is my pleasure, Eminence. Frankly, being an enemy of Queen Marie does not trouble me in the least.”
“It should. My former master—” Tremblay crossed himself—“God rest his soul—never stopped being wary of her, even after the Day of Dupes, even after she went into exile in the Low Countries. I don’t think even King Gaston should take her lightly.”
“I didn’t say I took her lightly, Eminence. I just said that I don’t care if she considers me an enemy.”
Tremblay smiled; his expression indicated that it was not something he had much practice in doing. “Very well. I see the distinction.” He took his spoon and buried it in the stew in his bowl and drew it to his lips. “Ahhh. I cannot say that I ever became accustomed to that mask.”
“I only wore it for a few hours, Eminence,” de la Mothe said. “I can’t say it was a pleasure.”
“That Dumas fellow had a vivid imagination.”
Sherrilyn came up to stand next to the two men. “He sure did. Apparently he’s a real favorite with down-timers.”
“We all like to be amused at how we are portrayed,” Tremblay said. “I shall have to become more sinister, apparently.”
“I don’t think I appear at all,” de la Mothe said. He ran a finger along his moustaches. “Though I confess that I have not read the entire oeuvre.”
“We cannot all be celebrities,” Tremblay said. “But it really does not matter—the world he described, at a distance, is one that does not exist: it never did, and never will. We have the Ring of Fire to thank for that.”
“Or curse for it,” Sherrilyn said. “In the meanwhile we’ll just have to do the best we can.”
Love Has a Wet Nose
Walt Boyes and Joy Ward
Jena, Germany 1634
Henry leaned against the tavern window, staring blankly through the tiny panes of watery looking glass at the quick rain shower coming down outside, and trying to avoid looking at the couple in the seats across from him. Too many memories, too much pain.
The couple, in their late thirties, held hands and talked softly as they seemed to fit together like a puzzle. They were dressed well, if plainly, and both completely naturally wore something like up-timer dress. He was slightly balding, and was sharing small talk with the slightly dumpy blonde woman nestled next to him as they looked out at the midsummer shower and the scenery.
Henry averted his eyes and made a point of not engaging the sweet couple. They reminded him too much of his loss, his François. He and François had been just as in love but all that was gone. He could tell no one and yet he had to watch others in their love.
Henry wiped at his eyes, hoping the couple wouldn’t see him and feel moved to talk to him. He couldn’t bear that. Their love was so evident, so palpable, to talk with them would tear him apart.
Henry’s thoughts went back a couple of years when François was still alive. He and François had traveled together under the cover of swords for hire, serving in mercenary companies for the Protestant side. It was not unusual for young men to band together to hire out as a team. The two of them had gained a slight fame among their colleagues. Both were known to have competent sword arms and were expert shots with both wheel-lock pistol and musket. François and he had become underofficers in a regiment mostly made up of French Huguenots and some English and Scots. They had fought well at Breitenfeld and other major battles and had been looking forward to a little bit of peace, now that the USE had made a de-facto truce between the Catholic and Protestant sides.
But their relationship had been much deeper than simple sell swords. Henry and François had been lovers. Occasionally they would step out with a pair of young women to maintain their cover as eligible rakes. After all, their love was outlawed by state and church. Of course, everyone knew there were powerful men who preferred men to women but those whispers were often silenced by money and power. Henry and François had little enough of either.
So they moved around, took commissions from those who could afford them and kept their love silent.
Until this past Spring when François started to complain of pain in his belly. Henry’s mind slid back to that evil day. The tavern seemed to wash away in the rain.
“Oh, le bonne Dieu!” François gasped as he doubled over on his horse. He swayed in the saddle, and then fell to the ground. Henry reined in, turned his horse around and rode to him, slid from his horse, and knelt in the stinking muck by François’ side.
“Aieee!” François gasped, clutching his belly.
“What is it, my friend?”
“It feels like a cramp, but not one. Ahhh! It is easing now.” François started to get up, and Henry helped him to stand. One of the men held François’ and Henry’s horses, and François mounted again.
“I seem to be fine, now, mon ami,” François said, waving Henry off.
It was not too bad at first, at least that’s what François tried to say. That night in their tent, François repeatedly woke up in pain, sweat pouring across his lithe body and soaking his shoulder-length chestnut curls. Nothing helped.
Henry tried to find an up-time-trained doctor but there were none in the backwater town in which they were stationed. There were only barber surgeons, and the occasional hedge woman but none could help his love, his François. They were terrified of surgery on the abdomen.
That night François died, taking Henry’s life with him.
Henry came to as he sat in the window, staring, but his eyes saw a different scene; the day he met the man who would change his life.
* * *
“You there!” The accented voice cracked like a whip. Henry spun around as a horse sidled to a stop next to him. He was working on his horse’s tack, a job he never let one of his troopers do.
He looked up, into the eyes of a tall, slender man with longish chestnut hair, worn in a pony tail.
“Yes?” Henry said, continuing to massage linseed oil into the leather.
“I am looking for Monsieur Henry Cooper,” the tall man said in fractured-sounding English.
“That would be me.”
“Ah, c’est bon! Monsieur Cooper, I am François de la Roche, and I have orders.”
Henry reached for the proffered leather message pouch. His hand touched François’ and a spark flew between them.
Henry, born in England to a cooper father, and François, born two years earlier in France to a stonemason, never thought they would be parted. Having found each other in a war, they thanked God for bringing them toget
her. They would laugh about their cross Channel union during their late mornings lying together in their bed. Each would tell the other what their families would say when they returned with their sacks of hard-earned gold and their cocky partner in tow. Henry would toss his dark brown hair back from his high cheekbones and affect his father’s long stride pacing across the room. The two lovers would laugh and the laughing would turn to something more physical, though just as pleasant.
* * *
But then that day, that evil day, that Henry woke to find his François really and truly dead. He had been torn away by Death. His dashing Frenchman had died in his sleep from something within his belly. The pain had been getting worse and worse until the night François grabbed his abdomen and screamed. François said that he felt he had been run through with a blade but there was nothing on his skin. He had not been stabbed but by dawn he was dead.
Henry hated remembering that night but he kept wondering was there something he could have done? All he could do was remember the smell of the stale sweat as it poured off François’ pain-wracked body. In the days that followed, Henry made his own vow. He would make Death pay by stealing as many of the living from his grasp as he could.
Henry was brought back to the present in Jena where he sat in the café. The man was calling to him, asking Henry something.
The woman across from him giggled at something her husband had said. Henry looked up, momentarily pulled into the present. He looked up. Into the woman’s brown eyes. He had to return her warm smile.
“Are you new to Jena, young man?” She straightened her blue wool skirt as if she needed to remove unseen wrinkles or crumbs from a tasty pastry. She wrapped her left hand, with a simple wedding band, around a cup of some steaming liquid and nodded toward the balding man.
“Do you mind if my husband and I share the time with you? You seem to be alone and, well, we see each other quite a bit.” She laughed and squeezed her husband’s arm as he threw a mock frown her way. “My husband is Helmut Woltman and I am Eugenia Beckerin,” she said. “We are going to work in Grantville at Leahy Medical Center. We have been taking some courses at the medical school here. Are you here to study at the university?”
Henry smiled. “I’m heading to the medical school, in fact.” Henry blushed and looked out the window. “I had a few years of medical training before becoming a soldier. I plan on joining the next class. Are you both doctors?”
“I am a nurse-midwife,” Eugenia said, “and Helmut is a physician’s assistant. That’s a new term for what used to be called ‘barber surgeon’ but with much more up-time training.” She looked as if she would swell with pride and gave her husband a private smile.
Eugenia continued, looking at Henry, “How did you decide to be a doctor? Please don’t mind me saying so but you look to me more like a soldier than a doctor.”
“I spent some few years at University in England, where I am from,” Henry said. “School did not agree with me, so I left to become a soldier. I am Henry Cooper, at your service.” He doffed his soft, dark green hat to her as he bowed from his seat.
Henry was a well-built, broad shouldered man well past six feet tall. The years in the wars had added a scar over his left eye. With chocolate brown eyes that had turned many ladies’ attention, Henry had made his living by his good right arm for well over a decade.
“So you have left the regiments?”
“Yes, Frau Beckerin. I have spent a few years in the military but I prefer to fight for lives rather than death. I look forward to being a reminder and carrier of health rather than of Death. I have been told that having already received two years of medical training in England I will have a shorter training period here.”
“We wish you well, my friend. My husband and I are on our way to see Grantville. We can’t wait to see all the marvels of the up-timers.” The sweet-faced matron reached over and squeezed her husband’s substantial arm again, giving him a smile.
He smiled back at her. “My wife has been a fan of the Barbie dolls and hopes to come across a spare from one of the up-timers. I told her that is highly unlikely but I am looking forward to studying in the famed library.” The man smiled as he reached up to remove his brown cloth cap to wipe his balding pate.
“Barbie dolls?” Henry asked. “What are they? I have not heard of them.”
“The up-timers have many arts that we do not, including the making of toys,” Helmut said. “One of their toys is a doll that is about so high, perhaps a foot, and is a poppet based on a woman. She has enormous bosoms and a thin waist, and is used for dressing up with expensive clothing made especially for the doll. They are disgustingly expensive, but Eugenia wants one.”
“And perhaps I’ll be able to get one,” she said, smiling.
Henry let the couple talk on as he pushed the memories back and focused on the on busy, sun-washed street outside the cozy café as the drizzle gave way to afternoon sun.
A few minutes later Henry found himself walking out of the tavern and into the Jena streets on his way to the university’s medical school and a new life. As Henry moved through the bustling city he kept wishing he could share it with his best friend, his love, his François. But François lay back in the churchyard in France. Tears rose unbidden again. Henry pulled back towards a building, away from the milling crowds of what seemed to be university students and shoppers.
Before long, Henry’s long strides brought him to the medical school. His new life began when he walked through the high, stone archway.
True to his unspoken vow, Henry dedicated himself to medicine. He never missed a class, never missed a chance to learn something new. He became the perfect scholar. At night when other students were sharing ales at one of the taverns ringing the schools of Jena, Henry cloistered himself in this small, seedy room.
Even his classmates noted his studiousness. Most among them spent their time between their books and the taverns. While they thought Henry to be nice enough, both male and female students noticed his lack of frivolity. The males had heard of his soldierly past and Henry wore his blade regularly, so they dared say nothing to him. The few female students noticed his strong physique, fine brown hair and eyes and wondered what it would take to catch his eye.
Henry was the first to volunteer to see patients with the visiting doctors. He was first to volunteer to help carry supplies or bandage the poor needing help. Henry did not care if the patients were rich or poor; he was there to help when he could. He became known among Jena’s poor as a visiting angel.
He would see the farmers with broken arms and legs as well as the children with scrapes and burns. Some, like the cooper with no way to pay Henry for his help with his wife’s early pregnancy, gave him what they could and blessed his way. As he finished his schooling he reached out and helped even more people, with more dangerous illnesses. He did not limit himself to the wealthy burghers and generals as so many of his classmates did.
Only one among the students became friends with the taciturn young doctor in training who haunted the medical library. She was also a loner, intent on her studies. Frieda was from Austria and as dedicated to becoming a healer as Henry. Occasionally, after class the two would sit in a nearby tavern, drinking tea and discussing the lectures. Other students would watch them, thinking they were more than friends but nothing was further from the truth.
Frieda was young, just twenty when she began her medical studies, but she was very observant. She realized that Henry never eyed the other women, never laughed at the usual crude jokes made by his male fellows. Of course, she said nothing to anyone else.
Henry threw himself into his studies, and later his practice, because it gave him a way to avoid the memories a few minutes longer. When approached by a young woman seeking his attentions, he would politely tell her he did not have the time to become involved and did not want to play her affections for a few nights’ frolic. In this way, Henry remained true to his François and avoided uncomfortable questions. After all, he could not
announce his preferences since they might have caused him to be dismissed from the medical school or if he was very unlucky, be sentenced to death.
Jena, Germany, Late in 1635
Then the time came for Henry and Frieda to graduate, at the top of the class, of course. They had, as the up-timers said, “aced” the medical curriculum. Both had done four years’ work in less than two. Henry had studied medicine in England, before turning to a military career, and he’d kept up his studies as a soldier, always talking to the doctors that served with the regiment. He remembered one in particular, a flamboyant doctor named Gribbleflotz. He’d learned a lot from him.
Henry was going on to study in Grantville, while Frieda was returning to Vienna to teach. Frieda decided she had known Henry several years now and he should trust her. She decided they should talk.
Frieda asked Henry to go with her to a new teashop that had recently opened across town. This way, she felt, they could have a little privacy away from the usual tavern crowd.
How should she start? Why not just jump in? So they sat and sipped their strong tea in silence.
“This is a sad time for me too, Frieda, with leaving and all. You have been my best friend here.” Henry lifted hid cup in salute to his fellow graduate.
“Um, yes, I’ll miss you too but that wasn’t really why I asked you here.” Frieda took a long gulp of the tea.
“Frieda, there you are.” A tall, red-haired woman swept over to the pair and hugged the blond Frieda. Frieda, a bit flustered, hugged her back.
“Henry, this is my friend Magda. Magda is in Jena studying up-timer engineering. We grew up together in a small town near the Turkish border in Austria.”
Magda laughed. “Ja, Frieda was always doctoring small animals like birds and rabbits. Anything hurt in the village ended up in her rudimentary clinic.”
“Not to mention all the times I had to repair you and your brothers after one of your inventions or experiments.” Frieda giggled at the memories and took a bite of the strawberry tart in front of her.
