* * *
Kristina put a slightly grubby hand into the pocket under her skirt. "Papi Christian, I have a letter for you. It's important. About not shooting cannon at the door of the castle church in Wittenberg when the USE attacks Saxony because John George has been so awful to Papa."
Christian IV read it solemnly. "It's good to know that so many people are concerned."
Kristina nodded. "What Martin Luther did was important."
The king of Denmark regarded his future daughter-in-law. Lessons should not be limited to stuffy classrooms. Take advantage of all opportunities. What would the lovely Caroline Platzer with the superb teeth call this? Ah, yes. A "teachable moment."
He shuddered at what he had learned of that other world, in which this child, grown to a woman, never married, converted to Catholicism and abdicated her throne. Abdicated and converted, in reverse order, but that was the gist of it.
In this world, a disaster waited for them all if anything of the sort should happen.
"Yes," he said. "Very important. You were very right to bring this letter straight to me. In the politics of the Union of Kalmar, even more than the USE, it's going to be very important to protect the position of Lutheranism. No matter what we think, personally."
He looked at the pilot in the front seat. "Let the plane circle the city a couple more times."
The plane began to circle again.
Then he looked at his future daughter-in-law. "Now even though, personally, I may think that many of the doctrinal positions of the Calvinists make more sense, I would never be so imprudent as to leave the Lutheran church, the way your uncle, the elector of Brandenburg, has done."
A half-hour later, he was certain she understood why. Her mind was superb.
"And as for the door of the castle church in Wittenberg . . . I will speak to your papa myself. You should come with me. We will speak to him together."
Kristina nodded.
He looked ahead at the pilot again. "Let the plane come to a landing."
Dresden
Hans Georg von Arnim, commander of the forces of John George of Saxony and, in his own mind, the probable upcoming scapegoat in an inevitable, unavoidable, disaster, looked out the window, his hands crossed behind his back.
Holk, again. When everything needed to be focused on the west, he once more would have to send a regiment at least to the southeast to control Holk's depredations among their own people. Which would probably make things worse, since that regiment, too, would need to forage.
He moved back to the table, picked up the latest intelligence report from the USE, and moved back to the window.
At the moment, the best option for the army of Saxony would appear to be to remove the door of the castle church in Wittenberg from its hinges and carry it along with them into battle, as the ancient Israelites had done with the Ark of the Covenant. At a minimum, that tactic should make Gustav's artillery non-functional in Saxony. Maybe he'd send those regiments against Brandenburg.
And as for the elector's safety? The safety of his family in Dresden? In the southeast, where Holk's depredations had brought much of the population to the point of fury?
Arnim smiled, as whimsically as he ever did.
His personal preference at the moment would be to send John George to Zeitz, to move in as roommate with an elderly clergyman named Johann Ernst Luther.
Back to serious options. He returned to the table.
Grantville
"Ronella really does want the wedding march from Lohengrin," Carol said.
Jonas Justinus Muselius opened his mouth to say something about the limited performance capabilities of the limited number of musicians who provided the accompaniment at Saint Martin's services with the limited array of instruments at their disposal.
Carol thought she knew what he was going to say. "Oh, yes. I know. Even up-time, a lot of Lutheran pastors didn't approve its use for weddings. Because it's from Wagner's Ring Cycle."
He opened his mouth again.
"Pagan. Norse gods and all that. Thor, Odin. So if you don't think that Pastor Kastenmayer will let her have it, then we could always go with Beethoven's Ode to Joy. That would probably be the best option, if . . ."
Jonas eventually got a word in edgewise. "Let me investigate a little, please, Carol. Perhaps something can be arranged."
* * *
"Yeah, I've heard it," Errol Mercer said. Now one of Saint Martin's musicians, he was also one of the pack of seven up-time fiancés whom Pastor Kastenmayer would confirm and marry off to their chosen, and Lutheran, brides in April, just before Easter.
"I've heard it, and I expect one of the organists has the music, not that Saint Martin's has an organ yet, but I don't know the words. Or, at least, the only words I ever heard weren't the real ones. A sort of—joke, supposed to be funny."
"A parody." Justus nodded his head. "A well-known literary form."
"If you say so. Whatever you say. But Ronella won't want to march down the aisle to somebody singing
Here comes the bride,
Fair, fat and wide."
"You're going to have to do something about the words," Errol said. "Something different. Not pagan."
Muselius nodded.
Somewhere . . . There was that sermon Martin Luther had given at his niece's wedding, in praise of the sanctity of Christian marriage.
Someone in Jena was bound to have it. He'd go up and see Dean Gerhard. Turn it into verses that fit the meter of this "Wedding March."
As appalling as the music was, from what Errol had hummed to him.
If Ronella wanted it, she should have it. Anything for his bride. The bride he had, so contrary to all rational expectations, attained.
If, in the process, he could Christianize some pagan paean, so much the better. Luther himself said there was no reason that the devil should have all the good tunes. Or, given the musical quality of this wedding march, all people's favorite tunes, at least. He couldn't call it "good."
* * *
Pastor Ludwig Kastenmayer, in a downtown storefront, specifically in the Laughing Laundress, owned by Vesta Rawls and currently with Mitch Hobbs, another of Saint Martin's current up-timer fiancés, confirmands-in-the-making, and would-be grooms, baptized Viana Beasley, daughter of Jarvis Beasley and Hedwig Altschulerin.
In a storefront, because Hedy, the focus of a major jurisdictional controversy between the State of Thuringia-Franconia and Saxony over the validity and status of her marriage, had been strongly advised by Judge Maurice Tito not to leave the boundaries of West Virginia County, formerly known as the Ring of Fire, for the time being.
Saint Martin's in the Fields was just outside the ring, still in the SoTF, but in the County of Schwarzburg Rudolstadt. This part of the County of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt. There was another fragment of it up north of Erfurt.
Just as Count Ludwig Guenther's cousin, who was the head of the County of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, had a piece of it down here, over west of the Schwarzburg castle.
The newspaper published a notice of the baptism.
Pankratz Holz, who was running his own storefront church Lutheran operation in Grantville, published a series of outraged pamphlets.
* * *
"Cappuccino?" Anne Penzey asked on Saturday morning. "I've figured out a way to froth milk."
"Honestly?" Ronella grinned.
"As frothy as the mouth of a rabid dog." Anne stopped. Her mother was a science teacher, after all. "Maybe that's not the best comparison, here in a restaurant. It involves attaching a wire hand whisk to my curling iron. As frothy as the mouth of Pastor Holz when he gets going about something. Not that there's a lot to choose from, between him and a mad dog."
"I'll try one," Dina said. "You?"
"Me, too. Where's the best man? We've got strategy to coordinate."
"Oversleeping, probably. He got back from Jena really late, last night. But he got off the trolley and stopped at the rectory to say that he officially asked Herr Hortled
er for Anna Catharina's hand and was accepted."
"Your dad's going to be presiding over a wedding epidemic."
"Not this one. They'll get married in Jena. That's where she lives. In August, he said. It's too soon to get it in before this summer's war, considering that she's an only child and her mother wants to make a big fuss over it. Wedding banquets and things. The campaign should have quieted down by then." She paused. "Topic change. Jonas is coming, too. He went up to Jena with Gary and he's gotten your music worked out. So that's one thing you can check off the list that your mom doesn't have to worry about any more."
When Jonas came, it was to report that he had achieved acceptable words for the desired wedding march. "That's marvelous," Carol said. "That means we can use Ode to Joy for the recessional, then. You'd better have someone arrange it for the instruments we have, so the musicians can start learning it.
"If I'd known," Ronella said, "If I'd really known what planning a wedding involves, before we got started, I think I'd have gone to city hall and let Mayor Dreeson do it."
"At least it will be in May. You won't need to make artificial flowers."
Carol looked at Dina with dawning horror and pulled out The List. "Flowers!"
"Flowers," Dina said. "And scheduling weddings around the king of Sweden's wars."
* * *
"Another spate of pamphlets." Salome picked them up. "Some are from Holz. I recognize his style by now. But some of them aren't."
"Griep?" Carol asked.
"No. Ludwig has known Oswald Griep for years. They don't agree about anything, which means that I've read a lot of incoming correspondence and annotated it for Ludwig, to make it easier for him to draw up his replies. These are nothing like his writing style, which is pretty pompous. The new ones—" She waved several of them, as if she were fanning herself. "—aren't quite like the ones that showed up on Christmas Eve, either. It's the same typeface and I think the same artist did the woodcuts. But they're more aimed against the up-time Lutherans in Grantville than they are against Ludwig and me. Against you and Ron. And Gary. Especially Gary."
"I know," Carol said. "Poor Gary. Even if he is Missouri Synod and as stubborn as an ox about it, he doesn't deserve this kind of filth."
Grantville, March 1635
Oswald Griep stood looking at the Church of Saint Thomas the Apostle.
A New Testament saint, of course. Those were perfectly all right with Lutherans, unlike the jumped-up modern saints with which the papists indulged themselves.
Some people referred to Martin Luther as a saint, of course. But that was doctrinally incorrect. The need to pursue and extirpate superstition wherever it raised itself among the ignorant was unceasing. Which was one reason that he had his doubts about what might be going on over at Saint Martin's in the Fields. Martin, even the original one, was not a New Testament saint. He had shown up as a bishop somewhere during the media aeva, giving his cloak to a beggar, and become the object of a cult.
Cults were also to be extirpated. That was as much an article of faith with Griep as Carthago delenda est had been for Cato the elder. Not that he had as much practical experience with cults and sects as Tilesius had accumulated. In theory, though, sowing them with salt would be a splendid solution, if only it could be managed in these parlous modern times.
Saint Thomas the Apostle. Otherwise known as Doubting Thomas.
Count Ludwig Guenther, somewhat frivolously, told him that he had chosen the name because, originally, he had harbored some doubts as how to best deal with Grantville and its people when it appeared within his lands.
There was a lot still to be accomplished. Interior finishing. Construction on the school was behind schedule. The war would draw day laborers away, probably. They were generally an unruly lot and prone to become soldiers. The skilled craftsmen would stay, though. Count Ludwig Guenther paid generously for competent work.
But the bricks . . . He wandered across the site to inspect the piles of bricks, neatly laid out on pallets. The bricks were magnificent.
The school before the rectory. Rahel and the children were comfortable enough with her brothers in Jena.
They needed the school by fall. The rectory could wait until next year, if it had to.
Rudolstadt
"We'll postpone the dedication for six months," Count Ludwig Guenther said firmly. "As a matter of respect to Mayor Dreeson and Reverend Wiley. We should not be sponsoring a festivity so soon after their deaths."
"I was hoping to start services much sooner than September," Oswald Griep said. At his most stiff-necked.
Which, the count had learned through trial and error, meant that the man's feelings were hurt. He sat silently for a few minutes. "Go ahead and do that. There's no regulation that requires the dedication to take place first. Just keep it . . . low key."
* * *
Griep knew that the consistory in Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt harbored suspicions over why Saxony had been so active in pushing his appointment, until they had no graceful way to avoid it. But there was more to theological life than worrying about the aberrations of Ludwig Kastenmayer, aberrant though they might be. Aberrant though they certainly were.
Holz had been with Tilesius for several years, now. The consistory in Dresden considered it much more important to keep tabs on an influential ecclesiastical politician such as Tilesius than on Kastenmayer, who was, when one came down to it, just an ordinary parish minister. Even if Tilesius, too, was a Flacian. Especially though Tilesius, too, was a Flacian. The bible itself provided the warning. "For the son dishonoureth the father, the daughter riseth up against her mother, the daughter in law against her mother in law; a man's enemies are the men of his own house." Micah 7:6. Once a town had decided to call a Flacian minister, then—which one would it call. A former student of Jena, or of Leipzig? A former junior minister in Erfurt or in Leipzig? The Philippists were merely opposition. Tilesius, even at his age, was . . . competition. So.
Griep looked at the pamphlet the head of the Saint Thomas board of elders had just brought him. Not one of Holz's, as unpleasant as Holz was. Not "low-key," either. He paged through it again.
He knew what Count Ludwig Guenther wanted. No more "stress" in Grantville in the wake of the demonstrations, the deaths.
Not one of Holz's, but still—stressful.
The count had, no matter how reluctantly, consented to his appointment at Saint Thomas.
He went downtown to the law offices of Hardegg, Selfisch, and Krapp.
Johann Georg Hardegg sent the pamphlet, with Griep's comments, to his sister Christiana in Leipzig. Who gave them to her husband Georg Friedrich Krapp—the printer, not one of the multitude of Krapp jurists. Who, as requested produced an analysis of what firm had most probably done the printing and sent it all, as he had been asked to do, to Georg von Werthern in Dresden.
Who was the patron of the parish Oswald Griep left when he accepted the call to Saint Thomas the Apostle in Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt. The same parish Werthern had thrown Pankratz Holz out of some years previously, immediately before appointing Griep.
Dresden
The people in the room grouped themselves by age. Without anyone organizing it. By the book cupboard, Zacharias Prüschenk von Lindenhofen. He was about twenty-five, von Arnim thought. Next to him, Georg von Werthern's two boys, Dietrich and Wolfgang. Both in their early twenties, only a year apart. The elector's two oldest sons, Hans Georg and Augie, who matched Dietrich and Wolfgang precisely in age, year for year. They had all been educated together.
On the other side of the room, Saxony's most prominent theologian, Matthias Hoë von Hoënegg, who was forty-five now, and Georg von Werthern, much the same age and Saxony's chief minister of state for the past two years. Werthern, with the assent of the two young dukes, was effectively setting policy, now. The elector was . . . incapable most of the time.
In the middle, Nikolaus Gebhard von Miltitz and Johann Georg von Oppel, both in their mid-thirties and well aware that when catastrop
he hit, the two of them, as working diplomats, under Werthern, would get the task of negotiating to save whatever might be saved out of Saxony's shattered ruins.
Presuming that any of them were still alive when the time came, of course, von Arnim thought. If not—then someone else. That fell within the providence of God.
Benedikt Carpzov, next to them. Same age. The best lawyer they had available.
By the door, looking like they were not entirely sure they should be present, Carpzov's younger half-brothers, both in their late twenties. One a lawyer, the other a theologian.
And himself, of course.
By age, he belonged with Hoënegg and Werthern.
By temperament, too. He had worked with both men for years. One theologian. One civilian councilor. One military man.
In agreement.
Von Arnim glanced across at the young dukes, who with Werthern's sons were flanking Prüschenk. Then at the diplomats. "Saxony can't afford the hatred he is stirring up," he said.
Carpzov started to say something.
Von Arnim looked at Hoënegg.
"The pamphlets are not about serious doctrinal issues. The rest of you don't need to worry about Holz—the church will take care of him, in time. These, though, have become Zacharias' own personal vendetta against the up-timer. Because the daughter of Chancellor Hortleder chose the other man. Thus standing in the way of his ambitions."
The youngest Carpzov, the theologian, started to say something.
Von Arnim nodded at him.
"Zacharias hadn't actually made an offer to Anna Catharina's father, yet," he said. "He was still weighing whether it should be Friedrich Hortleder's daughter or the daughter of the mayor of Naumburg, Dr. Romanus. Which of the two matches would bring him more advantages. He almost offered for Gertrud Romanus more than two years ago, but then he made the acquaintance of the Hortleder family and held off."
Grantville Gazette Volume 27 Page 5
