Grantville Gazette, Volume 69

by Bjorn Hasseler

  He turned to Heinrich. "Pipe production?"

  "As of today," the youngest Bach said, "one hundred and forty-seven pipes completed, thirty-six more ready for tuning, and nineteen roughed in."

  "And Master Luder is still working the lowest register pipes?"

  Heinrich nodded. "He understands that getting them done first will speed things up later as he moves to the midrange and treble pipes. He will be able to get more pipes out of a single sheet of tin, and he's gotten very good at bending the tin and sealing the edges. To the point where he is about to let the other whitesmith, Müller, out of their agreement. He says that he spends so much time going over Müller's work and either fixing it or arguing with him about it that he can pretty much do the work himself as fast or faster. He also muttered something about it was obvious why Compenius hadn't hired Müller for his work."

  "Any word on how the Compenius project is going?" Johann asked.

  "I have not heard anything," Christoph replied.

  "Someone told Master Luder that they have finished clearing out and rebuilding the pipe loft, and the whitesmiths have started making pipes, but nothing more than that."

  "We still have not had that much conflict with him," Johann mused. "I am glad about that, but also nervous." He thought about it for a few moments longer, then shrugged. "Nothing says we have to get in each other's way. We will see."

  He placed his pencil in its loop in his notebook and closed it. "You two are on your own tonight. There will be a small performance at the Duchess Elisabeth Sofie Secondary School for Girls tonight, involving Frau Marla and a few of her friends in something for the Arts League and the school. I suspect they are trying to raise money and using Frau Marla's cachet to do it."

  "And we poor humble Bachs are not on the invitation list," Christoph said with a mock frown. "Imagine that."

  "So how are you getting in?" Heinrich asked his oldest brother.

  "Staci is part of the performance group and asked me to come along."

  "It is always who you know," Christoph said with a smirk.

  Johann looked at the two of them. "So stay out of trouble, all right?"

  His brothers looked at each other, grinned, and looked back at him. He shook his head.

  ****

  There was light applause as Marla led her group of performers into the great room of the townhouse. Of course, as great rooms go, it wasn't huge, but there were easily twenty Adel and patricians seated in a crescent around a piano, leaving some space.

  There were more people than that in the room, of course. There was one steward at a table with several bottles of wine and other comestibles, and there was a table laden with food in what the up-timers called "buffet-style," with servants to serve the food and even deliver full plates as needed.

  Marla and her friends were obviously experienced at this kind of affair, Johann noted. They gathered around the piano, Marla standing at the fore. She had her hands clasped before her.

  "Good evening," Marla began. "Thank you for coming tonight. We will be presenting a short program of up-timer music of the sorts that were called 'popular' prior to the Ring of Fire. We hope that you will find it enjoyable. For some of these songs, this will be the first time we have done them in Magdeburg."

  And with that, she settled on the seat at the piano, placed her hands on the keys, and the music began.

  Johann didn't recall a lot about the evening after it was done, other than the sheer mastery of the music as the musicians moved from song to song. A few of them stuck with him: Staci singing “Norwegian Wood," Marla singing “Big Yellow Taxi,” Isaac and Rudolf doing a duet on “Mommas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys,” and others.

  In the middle of the evening, Marla stood up and moved around before the piano, where she was joined by Staci, Isaac, and Rudolf.

  "And as a real change of pace, just so you'll know that there were some really weird guys out there, here's a bit of musical humor." She looked directly at Johann where he stood in the back of the room and gave a quick grin. For a moment he was apprehensive, uncertain as to what was going to happen. Marla hummed a pitch, gathered the eyes of the other three, and gave a nod.

  They broke into a rendition of “My Bonnie Lass, She Smelleth.” Johann had to bite the knuckle of his forefinger to keep from bursting out in wild laughter as they progressed through the verses detailing both the beauties and the shortcomings of the lass. When they hit the line about her sounding like a crow, he nearly drew blood trying to suppress his guffaws. As it was, at least one or two moans escaped him, which drew some sidelong looks from some of the servants.

  The song was finished in a few minutes, and he sagged in relief. Marla returned to the piano keyboard, and the next couple of songs passed in a blur while he regained his composure. He straightened up and paid attention, though, when Marla said, "This is the next to the last song of the evening. It's a superb song, with a rich reputation in the up-time. ”Hotel California,” two three four."

  What followed was a tour-de-force of syncopated rhythmic piano work, impassioned violin playing, especially in the long extended coda, and Marla's surgically tuned voice bending tones and placing lyrics as if they were gemstones in a matrix. Despite himself, Johann was caught up in it, hunching forward and rocking back and forth as the currents of the song ebbed and flowed. When the coda died away, he was almost limp.

  Marla stood again. "For the final piece, we are going to do something a bit different, perhaps more than you expected. Since one of the program events coming up in the next few days will be the ballet Swan Lake, we thought we would present one of the dancers doing something for you tonight. It won't be ballet, and it will be rather different. Please give us a moment to prepare." She looked toward the side door and nodded. A veritable procession responded to her nod.

  First came a couple of male servants carrying a rolled-up carpet, which they took to the far side of the piano, set down, and unrolled. It extended far enough that Johann gained an insight as to why there weren't more chairs in the room.

  Those two men were followed by four very brawny men who were lugging in what appeared to be…a slab of metal? It was perhaps four feet wide by six or eight feet long, and from the way they were straining with it had to be very heavy, which meant it was thicker than he had at first assumed it would be. They carried it very carefully over to the carpet, lowered one edge down with great care to rest on the carpet just inside the front edge of the carpet itself, then lowered the back edge of the metal plate to rest on the carpet. There was a final soft thump as it settled into place.

  The men exited, and Staci re-entered the room. Johann hadn't even noticed she'd left. Her steps were very loud—much louder than normal, and she was followed by a musician Johann hadn't seen before, carrying a viola da gamba. Two of the others stepped forward, holding flutes, to cluster behind Marla while Staci moved to stand behind the metal plate.

  "This is a style of dancing you've not seen before," Marla said. "It's called tap dancing, for reasons that will be very evident in just a few moments. The song is “Take Five,” and I give you premier dancer Anastasia Matowski."

  Marla sat down and without further ado began playing a very unsettling rhythm, very syncopated; a pattern that repeated over and over. As she did so, Johann's attention was drawn to Staci reaching to the left side of her waist, unfastening something, and swirling her skirt off to reveal her legs clothed in black hose that progressed to where they disappeared under an extremely brief garment which clad the bottom of her torso. It was as if her legs were nude, but painted black. He could hardly grasp what he was seeing.

  By now the viola da gamba player had joined in, and was providing a ground of plucked notes over which Marla was now elaborating a bit. Johann finally pinned down what was unsettling him about the music: the meter was not 2, or 3, or 4—it was 5! No one wrote in 5, but this song had been.

  That conundrum solved, his mind immediately fixated on the other thing that was unsettling him—S
taci—just as the flutes joined the performance, which was apparently Staci's cue to move.

  Her petite figure erupted into an outpouring of rhythmic clicking from the shoes she was wearing on the metal plate. The sound was almost overpowering. In the back of his mind, Johann was astonished to hear that she was tapping her feet in very complex patterns that still fit into and flowed with the 5 meter, adding to the complexity of the music and making a true multi-sensory experience, one that he had never even considered was possible.

  That astonishment lasted but a moment, though, for in the next moment Johann saw every man in his field of view tense up. The seated guests all twitched, heads turned toward Staci, and to a man they leaned forward at least a little bit. He glanced quickly at the servants who stood to one side of him by the tables, and saw the same tension in them, the same slight shift in posture. And there was no evading what they were all focused on, to a man.

  Fräulein Staci Matowski dancing—but such dance—legs flashing, moving, kicking, swinging out from side to side, from front to back—legs so nearly nude that one could see the cords of muscle in them as she moved. There was no question what the others were fixated on.

  For all that the back of Johann's mind was growing increasingly uncomfortable with what he saw, the front of it was so wrapped up in visual presentation of the dance, in the movement of Staci's body—in the sensuality of it—that his mind was overloaded. He felt as if his skull should be bulging, like a wineskin that had been overfilled.

  The song finally came to an end. Johann knew that it couldn't have lasted more than a few minutes, but it had felt to him as if it had lasted forever, with Staci up before the audience capering around and displaying herself. When Marla stood, the audience applauded, some louder than others. Johann, head spinning, slipped out the door of the great room.

  Johann didn't know what to think. He didn't know how to feel. He wasn't numb, but he felt as if he couldn't move, respond, act. After a long moment, he wandered down the hall toward to front door to the school, wavering as he did so, bumping into first one wall and then the other until he finally walked through the doorway and down the steps to the street.

  Outside, in the night air, the coolness seemed to help slow down the currents of his mind, reduce the churning of his thought. Johann stared straight up to see the spangling of stars on the black velvet of the sky. No moon was visible yet. But as his thoughts slowed down and returned to some sort of order under the starlight, something darker began to form, to grow in him.

  "Johann! There you are!"

  Staci's voice sounded behind him as the door to the school opened, and the musicians all exited in a throng. Staci skipped down the steps ahead of them and almost bounced over to Johann and placed a hand on his arm. "Did you see me dance? What did you think?"

  Johann shook her hand off and took a step back. Her smile disappeared into shock as her mouth dropped open. Before she could say anything, the darkness found its outlet.

  "How could you?" Johann demanded in a hard tone that nonetheless shook. "How could you put yourself on display like that? You were practically naked, dancing like Salome in front of all those people, those men." He heard his voice become vicious, and at just that moment he didn't really care. "I thought you were an artist. I thought you danced for joy, for beauty, not for tawdry lascivious lust. You…you little hypocrite."

  Johann was surprised to find that his hands were fisted, clenched at his sides, as his breath poured in and out of him in torrents. At least the pressure inside was gone. But then he saw Staci's face. Tears flowed in slow procession down her cheeks, her eyes looked bruised in the lamplight from the lamps by the door, and her cheeks looked sunken. She looked like a starveling, someone famine-struck, and it dawned on him that he had just taken from her the nourishment of her soul.

  The tableau was still. Johann, Staci, and the musicians behind her all stood motionless for a long moment. Then Staci sighed.

  "I'm…sorry you feel that way," she said in a very quiet, almost dead tone. "You need to find your girlfriend somewhere else, I guess. Don't bother calling." She turned, took two steps, then turned back. "Oh, and I wouldn't shave my legs for you if you were the last man on earth."

  She turned again, head high, and walked down the street. The musicians all flowed around Johann, avoiding contact with him, although Marla's fulminating glance should have left him as a pile of charred bones in the street.

  Johann stood in the dark, alone, empty.

  ****

  The Long Road Home, Part 2 by Nick Lorance

  Hartmann escorted the shaken Kirsten to the MP tents, telling her to wait while he went inside. However, things looked to be getting worse.

  “Murder?” Hartmann asked in a chilly voice.

  “Yes.” Captain Hess from the MP Company told him from his seat at his desk. “You know the way things go in a situation like this. What happened at first glance is one of our camp followers murdered her accomplice, one of the French sutlers now working for the army, in the act of robbing you.”

  “Accomplice?” Hartmann demanded.

  “Thieves falling out, sergeant. You have seen it before” Hess commented without looking up from the papers on his desk.

  Hartmann ground his teeth. “With all due respect, Sir, the girl has been in my tent for almost a week now. If she had wanted to steal from me, she would have done it before.”

  "Perhaps you haven't satisfied her," Hess said, taken aback at the fury in the sergeant's eyes.

  Hartmann took a deep breath, reining in his fury. “Sir, she is a child stolen from her father. Tortured into compliance, raped and impregnated. The only 'satisfaction' she would wish from me was my support, and I gave her that. Anything more would have been adding further insult to her injury.”

  Hess stood motioning to the guard behind the sergeant. “We will continue to investigate, sergeant. My men will take her for questioning—” There was a scream from outside, and Hartmann plunged from the tent with the officer running to keep up.

  Two of the MPs held Kirsten by her arms. She was pulling against them and screaming as she tried to fight free. The one on her left snarled as one of her feet kicked him in the shin and would have slapped her if Hartmann hadn't caught his hand.

  "Strike her and by God, I will take your arm off at the shoulder!" Then he caught Kirsten's head between his hands, talking soothingly even as she kicked him several times. Finally, she calmed down, looking at him in terror as she whimpered.

  Hess looked at the girl, then at Hartmann. “I am sorry, Sergeant, but she must be placed in our custody until the investigation is complete. We will not harm her.”

  "I understand, sir." Hartmann held the sobbing girl to his chest. "I do not think she does. But I will try to explain."

  Kirsten gasped, then her eyes widened, and she gave a whispered “Oh” as water suddenly fell on the ground between her feet. Hartmann took one look. He had been there when both his sister and younger brother had been born, so he knew what that meant.

  “The bitch pissed herself!” One of the MPs commented sarcastically, then landed on his back as Hartmann spun and punched him.

  He caught the girl as she started to fall, lifting her in his arms. The other was cocking his rifle but met Hartmann's cold eyes. "She is giving birth! By God, if you shoot you had best kill me!"

  Hartmann ran, the guard running after him as he shouted to clear the way. The medic in the hospital had time to see him coming, “We need the midwife here now!”

  ****

  Frakes watched the sergeant run to the hospital the girl in his arms. No one in Hartmann's company would be surprised by his actions. "Right, back to it." He soaked the barrel brush in the smelly fluid the up-timers said was not the same, but was still called Windex, then took the rifle from Kraus. "You are finished when the brush and cleaning patch come from the barrel clean." He looked up idly at the cart parked on the edge of the camp. Wasn't that the one the dead man had parked? "Keep at it."

 
; The NCO reached the cart just as a sutler came from the other side to climb in. “What do you think you are doing?” The man yelped and ran away. Frakes looked at the load. Odd, it looked like the man had packed to leave camp. No crime in that, though it was standard procedure to escort sutlers who were leaving the army camp permanently. At the rear of the cart was a trunk that had been left unlocked, looking as if it had recently been dug up and he flipped up the lid.

  For a long moment, he merely stared at the glass jars before him; then he lifted one from the padding. "Mein Gott …Kraus!"

  “Wachtmeister?” The soldier was turning the brush as he pulled it from the barrel.

  “Run over to the MP compound. Tell them I need an officer and some witnesses.”

  “What?”

  “Back when I lived in Frankfurt, I used to work as a scribe and later investigator for the Watch. When a crime scene was very confused, I would draw the scene and record the evidence.” At the man's blank look, he sighed. “Just tell them I have found evidence of a crime.”

  ****

  Kirsten was gasping in pain as the midwife worked. Richard had tried to leave, but her hand had locked down like a clamp on his. The medic had taken one look and decided this was not in his job description, so had made himself useful by making sure the midwife had plenty of hot water and clean cloth.

  Frau Stein was all business. "You are having the baby early, girl. But a lot of first-time mothers do. Just be calm and we will see it through." She looked at Hartmann, who looked back at her with an edge of panic in his eyes. "And you, Sergeant, do not just stand there like a statue. Talk to her."

  Hartmann nodded jerkily, then looked back at Kirsten. “It will be all right,” he said, immediately feeling like an idiot.