1635-The Tangled Web

by Virginia DeMarce

  "Why so angry?"

  "It showed one of his staff in a scandalous position with the abbot of Fulda. And named her."

  "Ah," Wackernagel said. "Yes, I can see that. Was a military escort really warranted, though?"

  "Maybe not. Even probably not. Most of the time, the roads here are fairly safe now. Although, just yesterday, Helmuth's daughter Gertrud went into Fulda itself and was accosted by the older son of Ritter von Schlitz."

  Wackernagel frowned. He had seen that man just this morning, up at Bodamer's. "Were his father and brother with him?"

  "In Fulda? I do not know. Not, certainly, at the time when he called Gertrud a slut and soldier's whore and pointed to the placards saying that the same fate waited for her. Other people in Fulda started pointing at her and calling her the 'up-timer's whore' too."

  "Then?"

  "Then Captain Wiegand came along with some of the Fulda militia and took her into the Ratshaus," Jeffie Garand said. He had his arm around Gertrud's shoulders. "She stayed there until the day was over and came back home with her father. According to Wiegand, von Schlitz was angry—tried to draw his sword on the captain. But the militia had other more urgent assignments, so they couldn't stop to deal with him the way he really deserved."

  "Exactly what," Wackernagel asked, "was this placard about?"

  Dagmar produced one. She had several. The soldiers had obeyed the orders to tear them down, which did not mean that they had destroyed such entertaining reading matter. And, in any case, they could be used to paper the walls of the cottages. The more layers of paper a woman pasted up on the wall, the fewer drafts would come through in the winter.

  She had several copies of the pamphlet, too. She gave Martin a couple. He tucked them into his saddlebags.

  They were about to start eating. Whether Sergeant Hartke was home yet or not, a meal could be kept warm only so long. A minor riot appeared to break out by the entrance to the compound. Jeffie jumped up and ran out; then came back with Hartke.

  "I finally threw that sutler out," the older man was saying. "He's been trying for weeks to overcharge really drastically on the thread and notions for making the rest of the new uniforms and I've already warned him three times. Tell everyone tomorrow, Dagmar. He's not to be allowed back. Have some of the women take everything out of his cottage and throw it on the ground just outside the entrance. If he wants it, he can come and haul it away. If he doesn't bother, then it's free pickings."

  The conversation meandered back to the scandalous pamphlet and stayed there all through the rest of the meal.

  Wackernagel headed back down the road. There would still be a couple of hours of daylight and he didn't want to waste it.

  Gertrud Hartke and Jeffie Garand wandered out of the compound, up in the direction of Menig's paper mill. They had discovered a rather nice stand of bushes there a couple of weeks before.

  "Jeffie," Gertrud asked. "Can men really do all the things that those woodcuts in the pamphlet showed?"

  "Not, um, precisely. No."

  She didn't say anything.

  "If you would really like to know what we can do, I'd be glad to demonstrate the whole procedure, so to speak. Think of it as a lesson in up-time scientific method. The hands-on experimental approach to finding out."

  Gertrud thought about it. Up till now, she had really sort of been teasing Jeffie. He had made it so plain what he wanted from her, but at the same time he had been so unbelievably well-mannered about it, that she couldn't resist teasing a little. But . . . If all those people in Fulda already thought that she was a soldier's whore, why shouldn't she be one? Especially his?

  "Okay," she said.

  "Gertrud," Jeffie said. "You know what?"

  She shook her head no. It was too dark to see, but he felt her hair move against his chin.

  "Last winter, Derek—Major Utt, that is—said something. He said that if I got you pregnant, I was a married man."

  "Oh."

  "I'm not as forgetful as people sometimes think I am."

  Gertrud snuggled in. She wouldn't have minded being a soldier's whore. Not really a lot, at least if Jeffie was the soldier. There were plenty of them in Barracktown. But a soldier's wife would be better. She wondered how long it would take for her to become a married woman.

  Gelnhausen

  Martin Wackernagel found it odd to pull into the post station in Gelnhausen and not see David Kronberg waiting. He finished his business and prepared to start out.

  There was a young woman standing outside.

  "You are Wackernagel?"

  "Yes, that's me."

  "Have you seen David Kronberg?"

  "I passed him at Neuhof. He was heading for Fulda, just as he planned."

  She smiled. "Do you know where he will be staying, in case my father might wish to find him?"

  "I told him to stop at Barracktown. Sergeant Hartke just threw out one of the sutlers, so there's a cottage standing empty. I expect he can stay there a few days until he finds a job. If David's already gone when your father gets there, tell him to ask for Dagmar. That's the sergeant's wife. She'll know where he is."

  Riffa went home and talked to her mother. A sutler thrown out. A cottage. Zivka went to bed thinking. Could she afford to wait for her husband to come home? A sutlery. A permanent business for an honest man. A home, perhaps.

  Hanau

  "Ask him in person," Meier zum Schwan had requested. "I've written a letter for you to take, explaining the details. But please deliver it in person and tell him how urgent it is for me."

  So here he was, talking to a rabbi. Martin Wackernagel smiled to himself. At least he knew the history. Jews had settled in the county of Hanau long ago. About four hundred years ago, probably. They had been expelled not long ago, in 1592. Then Count Philipp Ludwig II came into power in 1603 and he changed it again. He invited Jews back to his capital city—only wealthy Jews, to be sure, but Jews. He let them build a synagogue; he issued a charter defining their legal status and protecting them. The community had grown steadily. From ten persons in 1603 to almost fifty families now.

  Including the rabbi. Der dicke Meier wanted him to come to Gelnhausen to arbitrate the dispute within the Kronberg family.

  "Isn't it a bit late?" Martin had asked.

  "No. That's why David left when he did. Before it became too late; before someone said something that could not be retracted. Though Jachant Wohl came perilously close with her words about vagrants."

  "Yes," Menahem ben Elnathan said. "Yes, I will go to Gelnhausen."

  Wackernagel looked at the man. He wasn't young. He did not look particularly strong, either. "If it can wait for a week," he offered, "I will stop here on my next trip outbound and go with you to Gelnhausen. David Kronberg isn't there in any case. He has gone to Fulda."

  "I would not refuse your offer," the rabbi answered. "It will still be necessary to deal with all the others involved in the debacle."

  "I brought your newspaper, too," Wackernagel said.

  The rabbi picked it up and shook his head. "Useful, but so predictable. It's been the same pattern for years. Almost everything concerning the Ottoman Empire comes through Venice. Vienna sends news about Hungary, the Balkans, and the Turkish wars. Nearly all the articles with information about the Spanish possessions in southern Italy, Spain itself, Africa, Latin America, and the Philippines come through the imperial post office in Rome. If it pertains to England or France, it probably came through Antwerp although, possibly, now that the Swedes have a post office there, through Hamburg. Cologne gathers the news from the northern Netherlands and from the Germanies themselves, although that is now somewhat counterbalanced by the efforts of the postmaster in Frankfurt itself. A person has to read every story with an eye to who provided the information and how it is slanted."

  He looked up hopefully. "Do you have unofficial gossip?"

  Wackernagel offered a summary of the scurrilous pamphlet that had recently been circulated in Fulda.

  "That is
an unusually specific attack. Much of the material that has been sent to me recently is more generic in nature." Menahem ben Elnathan showed Wackernagel some examples of the anti-Semitic pamphlets that had been circulating in the CPE.

  "Look," Wackernagel said. "Most of the pamphlets that you have bear no resemblance to the one in Fulda. But these two have a similar typeface and illustration style. I don't think that I have ever seen this typeface before."

  "They are similar in another way," ben Elnathan observed. "Most of the pamphlets are general attacks. But you say that the two women mentioned in the Fulda exemplar are real." He picked up one of the other pamphlets. "As Rebecca Abrabanel, the wife of Michael Stearns, is quite real."

  "I've never seen her," Wackernagel said, "Rebecca Abrabanel, that is. Or either of the Fulda women, but the up-timers in Fulda say that the face on the image of Clara Bachmeierin was a quite good likeness."

  "Nor have I seen Rebecca Abrabanel. But something concerns me. The typology of Rebecca as the deceiver, deceiving Isaac into extending the blessing to Jacob rather than Esau, would not, I think, be the first thing that would spring into a Gentile's mind."

  "If I could borrow that," Martin said, "I could show it to my brother-in-law. He's a printer; he might see something in it that we don't."

  "You can borrow several. I'm not likely to run out."

  Once More, with Feeling

  Frankfurt am Main, June 1633

  "What do you think of them, Crispin?" Martin asked.

  His brother-in-law looked down at the pamphlets.

  "You want to know if I think they're nasty? Loathsome? Fetid?"

  "I want to know if you recognize anything about them. There's no printer's logo of any kind; not even an imaginary location and forged name of a printing house. No date of publication. I can tell that much for myself, but I'm not a specialist. You are."

  "Let me look at them in the morning. In the daylight."

  "I don't think they were printed."

  "Crispin, they're lying on the table right in front of you. Of course they were printed."

  "Umm, um. Look at this. It's printed. I printed it right here."

  It was a neat pamphlet, full of illustrations, advising an expectant father how to build nursery furniture in his spare time. Self-improvement was the bread and butter of the small printer.

  "Now, this one. Escher put it out last week. How to Make Beer at Home."

  Martin picked it up.

  "And this one. It's from Freytag. Sample Letters to Government Officials. Both of these have the place and printer identified. They're trying to make money, after all. But just compare the pages."

  Martin did not have much luck. Crispin patiently showed him the difference, point by point.

  "I think these pamphlets you brought, both the Abrabanel one, which you say that according to ben Elnathan came from Magdeburg, and the one that showed up in Fulda, were produced on these new 'duplicating machines.' "

  "That means?"

  "I tell you, Martin, these new stencil systems will be running small printers out of business. If I don't manage to get hold of one of these 'duplicating machines' pretty soon, my own business is going to fold. It's not as if I make my money printing large editions of thick academic books. And Escher so far hasn't even let slip the name of the man he bought it from."

  "Put an ad in the paper," Martin suggested.

  "For what?" Merga asked. "Crispin isn't trying to sell something."

  "Say you want to buy one. Escher and Freytag may not want to tell the rest of you where they bought them, but I'd say it's pretty likely that the maker would like to sell more."

  The expression of Merga's face became quite predatory. "I'm going down to the post office right now." Which she did.

  "While she's gone . . ." Crispin said.

  Martin looked up. It wasn't like Crispin to sound so hesitant.

  "This pamphlet that the Gelnhausen rabbi loaned to you . . . the one naming Rebecca Abrabanel . . ."

  "Yes."

  "I don't even like to suggest it. Jews get enough trouble in this world without my adding to it. But the way that it is written. I can't help but wonder about the possibility of an apostate—a convert—writing it. First generation—one born and educated in Judaism. That pamphlet, and some of the others the rabbi had collected. They rely quite a lot upon Talmudic tropes. If not an apostate, then perhaps a university-educated Hebraist."

  "Either possibility is less desirable than the other."

  "You might just mention them to the rabbi, though. Rabbis are trained to think their way through unpleasant possibilities. That's part of what they do."

  He couldn't leave without going upstairs and saying goodbye to his mother. Or he could, but he would regret it later.

  "About settling down," she was saying.

  "Look, Mutti," he said patiently. At least he made the effort to sound as if he were saying it patiently.

  "It isn't just that I like being on the road, though I do like being on the road. I like it a lot. But working as a private messenger is a lot less subject to political vicissitudes than working for the imperial postal system used to be. Or, for that matter, than working for the Swedish postal system is now."

  She looked skeptical.

  "I wasn't dependent upon Johann van den Birghden's favor to get my job, which is just as well. I sort of doubt that van den Birghden would have hired the son of a man who worked for his main rival."

  That was true enough—something that his mother couldn't argue with. Van den Birghden was not only the postmaster but also the newspaper publisher. It was the Frankfurter Post-Avisen. The only one, now. Martin's late father had worked as an itinerant salesman for Egenolph Emmel, a bookseller and van den Birghden's rival newspaperman. He had started the Frankfurter Journal in 1615.

  Then van den Birghden had come to Frankfurt to run its newly established central post office for the Thurn und Taxis in Brussels. In 1617 he had founded the other paper. Emmel sued. In the course of the litigation, Birghden asserted that postmasters had a legal right to a monopoly on publishing newspapers.

  "I've stayed out of the postmaster's way," Martin continued. "Van den Birghden is a busy man. Reminding him that my father ever worked for Emmel would not be a clever move. Even as a private courier, I have to work with the post offices, but it's not hard for me to avoid him. An ordinary person hardly ever has any reason to encounter the head of the postal system, especially not now that he is so busy establishing new routes. He's speeding up the field post system for the Swedish army. He's setting up alliances with the other postmasters working for the Swedes such as Wecheln in Leipzig and Stenglin in Augsburg. He's trying to speed up the links from Mainz to Hamburg and from there to Stockholm."

  "Every one of those," his mother answered, "offers an opportunity for a man who is ready to settle down."

  She looked at him.

  "But," she said, "if you will not, perhaps you will not. Nonetheless, you could get married even if you continued to ride the Imperial Road. It is not likely, now, that Crispin and Merga will ever have children. I want to be a grandmother before I die."

  He fled down the stairs. Mutti's new thought could be dangerous. Never, never before, had she separated the ideas of "getting married" and "settling down." Always before, one had gone with the other.

  The Wheels of the Gods

  Gelnhausen, July 1633

  It wasn't pleasant, Zorline Neumark thought. The community had not just split since David Kronberg left. It had shattered into a dozen pieces. It wasn't clear that it could ever be put back together. The only people who didn't seem to be involved, one way or another, were Zivka zur Sichel and her daughter, who had kept completely out of it.

  Though they would probably be drawn in once Zivka's husband Simon came back from his current trip. Whenever he was in Gelnhausen, he made up part of the minyan.

  Now, though, the Wohls were not speaking to her husband. Salman and Daertze were trying to keep the peace between M
eier and Abelin. Some of the Zons' in-laws weren't speaking to any of them. The parents of Feyel Wohl's betrothed were said to be having second thoughts after Jachant's very unsuitable statements. Feyel and her betrothed, who really did want to marry one another, now blamed Jachant. Hindle was shrewish.

  Zorline was very glad to see the arrival of Menahem ben Elnathan. In a way, she was glad to see him riding with the Gentile courier. It sent a signal that Samuel Wohl, parnas or not, would not have things all his way. The president of a Jewish community was not a dictator.

  "He's back," Riffa reported to her mother. "The courier. He brought the Hanauer rabbi, then went to the post office again."

  "Get your basket, then. I have hired the teamster to come for the rest of it the day after we have left. He has the key to the lock. The current rent we have paid for the cottage with the sickle expires the day after that. We will follow the rider to Fulda."

  Barracktown bei Fulda

  "Can you believe it?" David Kronberg asked earnestly. "It was a competition, but still . . . Only forty-two hours from Berlin to Hamburg. They say that the Brandenburg messengers are regularly covering Königsberg-Berlin in four days, now; Berlin-Cleves in six days when there aren't any armies in the way."

  Three or four other post riders were gathered at the table, talking shop.

  Not that David was a post rider, exactly, although he did have a job. He had happened to arrive in Fulda in the middle of a dispute between the NUS administration, the Swedes, and the city fathers over whether the city gates would be opened to allow passage of post riders in the night, since the main road led right through the city and the post office and change station with the remounts were inside the walls.

  Since the city fathers would not budge from their stance that any proper set of gates remained closed from sunset to sunrise, the Swedes and the NUS moved the post office to Barracktown and surfaced a riding path around the city walls. David had ended up as a postal clerk, accepting, sorting, bagging, and routing the mail.