Ring of Fire IV

by Eric Flint

  He looked away, and for the first time since she’d met the man his good cheer seemed to…not vanish, no. But it certainly diminished.

  “The ones on the inside are a lot worse than anything smallpox can do,” he said. “I’d swap them in a heartbeat. And I might ask you the same question. The scars don’t seem to concern you, either.”

  Eva shrugged. “I’ve lived with them as long as I can remember. I was very young when I came down with the pox. The scars are a fact of my life. There’s nothing I can do about them, so I just ignore them.”

  That was not really true, though—as the feel of the man’s arm under her hand drove home to her. He really was quite attractive, which was simply enhanced by his exotic origin and history. Eva normally ignored such feelings, because she knew they would lead to nothing but disappointment, but she was finding that hard to do with Captain Lefferts.

  Don’t be a silly goose, she told herself firmly. And, within a short time, long habit and well-practiced self-discipline had brought her wayward sentiments to heel.

  They were silent the rest of the way to Government House. Once they reached the entrance and were allowed to pass through by the guards, Lefferts and his Spanish companion took their leave.

  “Duty calls, I’m afraid,” he said to her. The bow he gave her was a lot deeper than the one he’d done in the street—and perfect in every respect. He might be an up-timer, but he’d clearly learned the ways of his new century. He seemed as fluent in that regard as he was in his speech.

  Eva was not surprised. That too was part of the folklore about the captain, and by now she’d come to the conclusion that, for once, folklore wasn’t just prattle.

  After Lefferts and the Spaniard were gone, Litsa was practically jumping with excitement. “Captain Lefferts! Himself! In the flesh! What did you think of him, Eva? Tell me!”

  The young princess of Anhalt-Dessau pondered the matter, for a while.

  “I think he’s a nice man,” she said eventually. “Who would have imagined?”

  Chapter 2

  Missy Stone leaned back in her chair. The expression on her face was one of calm, impassive deliberation with just a slight hint of sarcasm under the surface.

  Her husband Ron wasn’t fooled, though. Missy did sarcasm really well. Really, really, really well. As she immediately went on to demonstrate.

  “So let me summarize the situation,” she said. “Just to make sure I’ve got everything straight in what I might at first glance confuse with a pile of spaghetti. Or a pile of morons trying to make the Guinness Book of Records for the world’s biggest clusterfuck.”

  She gave Rebecca Abrabanel a little smile. “Do I need to translate that last term?”

  Rebecca returned the smile with a serene one of her own. Rebecca did imperturbability really well. Really, really, really well.

  “No need,” she said. “The meaning is clear enough from the context.”

  “Fine, then.” Missy leaned forward a bit. “The landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, Wilhelm V, who just died fighting the Poles near Poznan, spent most of last year and a good chunk of this one trying to grab a piece of the Rhineland for himself.”

  She raised her hand abruptly, forestalling any would-be corrections. “Excuse me, I misspoke. Trying to grab a piece of the Rhineland for the glorious cause of Hessian posterity, I should have said. My confusion was probably due to my haphazard American education. Back in the day—high school, I’m talking about—when we referred to ‘Hessians’ we meant the cruddy bastards who were paid goons for the British crown during the revolution. You know, the ones George Washington—first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen; that guy—thumped in that battle in New Jersey. Trenton, if I remember right.”

  Ed Piazza winced. He’d once been the principal of the high school Missy had attended and was now the president of the State of Thuringia-Franconia. “I’m glad to see you were paying attention in class.”

  “Are you kidding? Ms. Mailey taught American history. You goofed off at grave risk to your self-esteem. That woman did sarcasm really well.”

  “Still does,” Ed muttered. “Something else she passed on.”

  “Unfortunately for the self-esteem of Hessian posterity,” Missy continued, “Wilhelm V’s heroic efforts came to nothing. Leaving aside, of course, the dead people he left scattered up and down the Rhine in the course of his labors. By all accounts I’ve heard, his bombardment of Bonn when he had it under siege was particularly relentless and indiscriminate. Still and all—the dead and maimed were mostly peasants and townsmen anyway, with no posterity worth mentioning—the poor landgrave wound up with nothing to show for it. Thwarted at one end by the stubborn citizenry of Bonn and Cologne; thwarted at the other by the unsympathetic attitudes of the emperor and his Swedish chancellor. How am I doing so far?”

  Rebecca made a little wiggling motion with her fingers. “Allowing for a heavy dash of editorial commentary, quite well. Do go on.”

  “So now we come to the present moment. The landgrave’s widow Amalie Elizabeth is sulking in her tent—well, palace—because she feels unappreciated by the emperor, who is in no position to assuage her melancholy because he’s non compos mentis. That means his brains are now mostly compost, thanks to getting bashed on the head by an uncouth Pole who took exception to being invaded by foreigners.”

  She half-turned in her chair to look at her husband, and then faced forward again to look at Rebecca and Ed Piazza. “And because the USE is on the verge of collapsing into outright civil war and some people—that would be you—want to make sure the landgravine of Hesse-Kassel stays neutral when that clusterfuck gets underway, you think it’d be a great idea if my exactly two months, two weeks and two days old husband pulled up all his stakes—that would be me, among other things—and headed to Hesse-Kassel in order to placate the sullen widow by handing her a freshly minted pharmaceutical industry along with a very hefty bequest to the local college.”

  “I’d hardly call it a ‘local college,’ Missy,” protested Ed. “Marburg University is one of the top schools in the USE.”

  “That’s like calling the short order cook at what used to be McDonald’s—back when it was a hamburger joint rather than a hotbed of insurrection—one of the finest chefs in Grantville. But never mind. I’m nothing if not magnanimous and broad-minded. Which is why there’s no way in hell—”

  “Hold on, Missy,” said Ron. “We’re only talking about a year or so. And I can see some up-sides to getting out of Grantville for a while.”

  Missy gave him a sidelong look that was heavy on slitted eyes and light on newly-wed admiration. “Name one.”

  “I wouldn’t have to deal with Herr Karl Jurgen Edelmann.”

  Missy’s lips tightened. Edelmann was the father-in-law of Ron’s father Tom Stone. He was also the man who managed the Stone family’s immensely profitable chemical and dye works, Lothlorien Farbenwerke.

  Edelmann was a very capable and competent manager. Even an honest one. He was also overbearing, condescending, rigid—and, worst of all, seem to think his authority extended to the pharmaceutical side of the business, a subject about which he knew absolutely nothing and cared even less except in terms of profit.

  “Okay, I’ll give you that one. Name another.”

  “We’d both get away from your grandmothers.”

  Missy now had a frown to match her tight lips. Her grandmother on one side was Eleanor Jenkins; on the other, Vera Hudson. Insofar as a small town in West Virginia had an analog to aristocracy, those two families were at the center—and neither Eleanor nor Vera was prone to forgetting it.

  And…Missy had married one Ron Stone, whose actual father was uncertain and whose “family” consisted of the little all-male band of hippies who’d once been Grantville’s most disreputable assemblage. The fact that since the Ring of Fire the Stones had become the richest American family in the known universe—only Morris and Judith Roth could compete with them in that regard—was neither here
nor there so far as Eleanor Jenkins or Vera Hudson were concerned.

  Leading up to their wedding, Missy had fully intended to keep her own last name. Like many spirited American girls born in the last two decades of the twentieth century, Missy would insist that “I’m no feminist” while simultaneously subscribing to at least ninety percent of the major tenets of feminism—a woman keeping her own name when she got married often being one of them.

  Besides, it was down-time custom anyway. The Americans had been surprised after the Ring of Fire to discover that the tradition of a wife taking her husband’s last name was pretty much restricted in the here-and-now to England. Nobody on the continent of Europe followed the practice.

  But, in the end, she’d changed her mind. One too many snide remarks by one of her grandmothers had done for that. “Missy Stone” she’d be—Melissa Maria Stone, for legal purposes—and if the old bats didn’t like it they could choke to death on their own spite.

  “I’ll give you that one too,” Missy said. “Hell, it probably counts double.”

  Ron shrugged. “Look, I’ll grant you the Hessians—and please name one down-time ruler who isn’t—are obsessed with land-grabbing. But let’s not get too high-up-on-our-horsey about it. Up-time foreign relations usually sucked too, whenever practical necessity reared its ugly head.”

  “Not this bad.”

  “Really?” Ron gave Missy a sidelong look that compared favorably to her own when it came to sarcastic undertones. “Remember how friendly the up-time United States was to the so-called ‘moderate’ regime of Saudi Arabia? Those would be the guys who had the female half of the population under permanent lockdown and executed people for witchcraft. ‘Moderate,’ my ass. But they were squatting on lots of oil and that was all that mattered.”

  He looked back at Rebecca and Piazza. “Fact is, Missy, I don’t want Oxenstierna running the show. Neither do you. And say what you will about Hessians, there’s a reason we learned about them in the history books back up-time. They can field one of the strongest provincial armies in the Germanies, if they choose to do so. And if a civil war’s coming I’d just as soon they didn’t—and you don’t feel any differently about it. What the hell. We spend a year or so in Hesse-Kassel, get a pharmaceutical industry off the ground so maybe the landgravine will stop fretting over the fact her province doesn’t have any traditional heavy industry, and we toss some money at a good university in order to make it a really top-notch one. The two things the Stone family has is lots of money and no big inclination to spend it on ourselves.”

  He raised his fist and coughed into it. “There’ll be some conditions, of course. The top priority has to be creating the best science library in Europe. That goes without saying. We’ll need it both for the business and the university.”

  Missy’s expression abruptly shifted. The look on her face was now that of a raptor intently studying a rodent. The young woman had an interest in everything involving libraries. “Best library,” she said, waving her hand in a gesture that encompassed…

  Pretty much everything. “You can’t qualify it. I mean, where do you draw the line?” she asked. “One man’s science is another man’s art.”

  Piazza raised his hands in a gesture that readily conceded the point. “Best library, period,” he said. “I have no problem with that.”

  Given that he wasn’t proposing to spend any of the SoTF’s money on the library, Ed’s concession was entirely pro forma. Ron Stone would spend his money however he chose, and he was clearly not a man inclined to deny his wife the occasional trinket. Pair of earrings, Europe’s finest library…

  “We think the most immediately critical issue,” said Rebecca, “is to step up the production of chloramphenicol. The plague epidemic that ravaged Lorraine and other areas along the Rhine this past summer and autumn has largely died down. But that may simply be due to seasonal factors, in which case it is likely to flare up again in the spring.”

  “That wasn’t helped any, of course, by the political chaos in the area,” added Piazza. “For which we can mostly thank the king of France’s younger brother, Monsieur Gaston.”

  Plague—any kind of epidemic—was always made much worse if an area was ravaged by fighting. Armies were usually the single biggest vector for disease, not only because the soldiers were carriers but because the destruction they brought with them up-ended whatever medical care might exist in the area. Even after armies left a region, the chaos they created remained.

  Ron frowned. “Are you expecting us to operate in Lorraine? If so, we’ll need credentials that will be accepted by whoever’s now in charge there—and some kind of a reliable security force. By all accounts I’ve heard, Lorraine’s pretty wild and woolly.”

  “The official authorities would be Duchess Nicole and her new husband, General Aldringen,” said Rebecca. “They have the imprimatur of King Fernando in the Netherlands as well as Grand Duke Bernhard of Burgundy. In essence, if not formally, Lorraine is now a semi-independent principality which operates as a joint protectorate of the Netherlands and Burgundy.”

  Ron grunted. “All of which is a fancy way of saying that Nicole and Aldringen don’t have much in the way of an army themselves.”

  “And neither Fernando nor Bernhard is going to station significant forces in Lorraine because they don’t want to risk ticking each other off,” chimed in Missy. “And I’m willing to bet that most of what little Nicole and Aldringen have in the way of military forces are stationed where they can best forestall another French incursion. Which is a fancy way of saying that security in most of Lorraine is going to suck rocks.”

  She gave Rebecca another little smile. “Is that colloquial expression clear in context also?”

  Rebecca chuckled. “Quite.” Again, she made that little wiggling motion of her fingers. “We have already begun negotiations on the subject with the duchess of Lorraine. She is willing to have you bring your own security force into Lorraine, provided it is not too large. And, of course, provided it is reasonably well-behaved.”

  At this point Ed Piazza’s face displayed a bright smile. “And we’ve found what we think are the best people to head up the force.” He pressed a button on an old-fashioned intercom positioned on his desk. “Send in the two captains, please.”

  A few seconds later, the far door to the office opened and two men were ushered in by Piazza’s secretary. The one in the lead had a large flamboyant hat and a grin that was more flamboyant still.

  “You have got to be kidding,” said Missy.

  Chapter 3

  Eva had only been in Government House twice. On both of those previous occasions she’d spent all of her time dealing with the officials who regulated housing development in Magdeburg, so that portion of the huge building was the only part of it she was familiar with.

  Eva’s older sister Eleonore was in the process of completing Wettin House in the capital, and felt that Eva would make a better intermediary with the city’s authorities than she would. Eleonore was firmly convinced that all of Magdeburg’s officials were hard-core members of the Fourth of July Party and would therefore be hostile to the wife of the leader of the Crown Loyalists. Whereas they might be fairly reasonable when dealing with a younger woman who was only related to the prime minister indirectly.

  Eva found the logic flawed, herself. First, because whether or not they were members of the Fourth of July Party, most of the city’s officials were just that, first and foremost—officials. As such, they had a reverence for rules, regulations, and proper procedure that Eva thought bordered on idolatry. As long as they were presented with the right documents, correctly filled out and witnessed in a clear and legible hand, they were not given to excessive disputation. Eva was well organized and efficient, and while her own hand was good but not superb, her family was more than wealthy enough to employ the finest secretaries. The handwriting of some of them took calligraphy to the level of art.

  Secondly and more importantly, she thought her older sister simult
aneously exaggerated the partisanship of the city’s officials and underestimated their intelligence. She hadn’t found the officials she dealt with to be particularly obnoxious. If they held strong political convictions, they seemed to be able to keep them under control when necessary. As for their intelligence, they would have had to be dim-witted indeed not to recognize Eva for who she was.

  Faces marked by smallpox scars were hardly uncommon in the seventeenth century. But there weren’t that many young women resident in Magdeburg who belonged to one of the premier Hochadel families, since most such stayed out of the capital due to its radical plebeian reputation. With all the various tasks falling to the Wettins and their in-laws, Eva had been out and about the city for months now.

  So, between her facial scars and her expensive clothing and frequent appearances in public, Eva was rather well known to the city’s officials. Her identity, at least. And if any of them were hostile to her because she was the new prime minister’s sister-in-law, she had seen very little evidence of it.

  The incident on the street with the CoC patrol had been unusual, and probably due to the recent sharp escalation in political tensions. In any event, those had not been officials of any formal government body.

  All this she had just explained to Litsa. Who was her usual unsympathetic self.

  “In other words, you have no idea where we should go. Lot of good you turned out to be.” Litsa looked around intently, as if she could discern which corridor they should take by sheer force of will.

  “You asked me to come,” Eva pointed out. “I never said I’d make a good guide for you—and you never raised the matter.”

  Litsa ignored her. She pointed down one of the corridor. “That way, I think.”

  “Why?” But Litsa was already ten feet away, striding rapidly.

  Eva hurried to catch up. “Why don’t we ask somebody in one of these offices? I’m sure they would know where we could find Rebecca Abrabanel.”