by Eric Flint
He set down the paper. "No, I think our initial plan is still the right one. Wait for a while, and let things develop further." Another up-time expression came to him. "Give Oxenstierna some more rope with which to hang himself." Kassel, capital of the province of Hesse-Kassel "Poor Wilhelm," Amalie Elisabeth murmured to herself, as she gazed through the window on the snow-covered ground. That ground would turn into a very cheery and pleasant garden, come the spring. But for now, it just looked cold and bleak.
Her own mood had been cold and bleak, ever since her husband was killed in that stupid, pointless war in Poland. Mike Stearns had been right about that war, as he was right about so many things. The fact just made the landgravine's mood bleaker, of course. Her differences with Stearns and his party still remained; extraordinarily wide in most places, if nowhere quite as deep as a chasm. Why could her own side in this great political dispute not produce a man to match him?
She'd hoped that Wilhelm Wettin would be that man, once. But for all his undoubted intelligence he'd proven too prone to short-sightedness. And now that short-sightedness had led him into a prison cell. It might yet lead him to the executioner's block.
In an odd sort of way, though, the news of Wilhelm's arrest had improved her spirits. Not cheered her up, certainly. But there was a greater ease about her now, a certain lightening of dark airs. Whatever else, Wilhelm had been a good friend for many years. It had pained her greatly-her husband, too-to watch him sink deeper and deeper into the mire.
He was out of it now. Whatever happened, no more blame or fault could be placed upon him. She was glad for that, if nothing else.
But there was something else to be glad about, as it happened. In fact, two things.
First, that foul Swedish chancellor had finally exposed himself as a tyrant as well as an unprincipled schemer. Imprisoning the former duke of Saxe-Weimar on such vague and patently absurd charges had infuriated her-and she knew full well it would infuriate many others in her class. In the Niederadel, as well.
There was an irony there, and she was not blind to it. For all that Stearns had so often bruised-badly bruised-the sentiments and sensibilities of the German aristocracy, not once had he broken his own laws when he'd been in power. Not once had he thrown a nobleman into prison on vague and obviously trumped-up charges. The fact was, whether they liked the man or not, that German noblemen could move about the USE in greater safety and security during the time of the Stearns' regime than they could now. Amalie Elizabeth herself would be nervous, if she left Hesse-Kassel.
Well…unless it was to visit Brunswick. Duke George was another old friend.
A pity he was off in Poland, commanding one of the army's divisions. But the man he'd left behind to run Brunswick's affairs, Loring Schultz, was both competent and pleasant to deal with. Later today, she'd write him a letter, urging that Brunswick should join Hesse-Kassel in declaring strict neutrality in the current political conflict.
But there was another letter she needed to reply to before then. And there lay the second thing to be glad about.
She left the window, moved back to her writing desk, and picked up the letter she'd received the evening before from Rebecca Abrabanel.
Shrewd, shrewd, shrewd. Who would have thought to find such subtlety-such delicacy, even-in a young Sephardic Jewess most of whose life had been cloistered and tightly circumscribed? The sheer naked intelligence involved was almost frightening.
In no other respect were the ways of God quite so mysterious as the way He sometimes divided his favors. To think that He'd provided such a wife for such a man. It seemed grossly unfair, but no doubt He had His reasons. Tetschen "I wasn't expecting you, sir, to put it mildly." Jeff Higgins motioned to one of the chairs in his headquarters. "Have a seat, please."
"As long as it's not an airplane seat." Mike Stearns eased himself into the offered chair. "The truth is, Jeff-I'll admit it like a man-flying makes me nervous. Always did, even the fancy airliners we had back home, much less these ramshackle gadgets Jesse has at his disposal and I never said that, you understand. Air force guys have thin skins and tender egos, it's some kind of law of nature."
Jeff sat down in another chair and nodded solemnly. "Not a word, sir, I promise. He'll be at the field for another two hours anyway, fussing over the ramshackle gadget."
Mike smiled. "For today, let's keep it to 'Jeff' and 'Mike.' "
Jeff pursed his lips. "Why does that make me nervous?"
"Most times, it probably should. But not today. The reason I twisted Jesse's arm into flying me up here-and twisted it a lot harder to get him to agree to fly me back tomorrow-is because I figured I'd better come talk to you in person." He paused for a moment, as if he were studying Jeff. "Before you got too twitchy."
"Twitchy about what, sir? Ah, Mike."
"Twitchy about the fact that there's a whole army at your wife's throat and I'm just keeping you here twiddling your thumbs and keeping myself even further away. Twiddling my thumbs."
"Oh. That." Jeff got up and went over to a small stove in a corner. "I've got some coffee, if you'd like some. Tea, also."
"You've got coffee? Is it…?"
"The real stuff? Sure is."
Jeff stirred up the fire, looking over his shoulder with a little grin on his face. "Fact is, Mike, the becky's become the strongest currency in the whole area. The exchange rate's terrific. So, yeah, I can afford real coffee. Not often, of course. But I figure this counts as a special occasion."
He placed a kettle on the stove and went back to his chair. "As for what you're worried about, relax. I wasn't actually getting twitchy. Well…a little, I guess, but I've applied it to a useful task."
"Which is?"
The young colonel's tone got noticeably harder. "Which is the moment you tell me to take the fortress at Konigstein, it's toast."
"Ah. Good." Mike cocked his head a little. "But I'm a little curious. Why aren't you twitchy?"
"Hey, I can read." Jeff motioned toward a table against one of the walls. The table wasn't exactly piled high with newspapers, but there were a fair number of them. "Between what's happening in Berlin and what's not happening in Magdeburg and what I'm damn sure is happening in Dresden-not much news coming out of there, of course-I figure I know what we're up to."
"Keep going. I'm fascinated, watching a great detective at work."
Jeff smiled. "This ain't hardly Sherlock Holmes territory, Mike. What we're up to is that we're just biding our time, on account of we're frugal. Or maybe just lazy. You've got the smartest wife in the world and I've got the toughest one, so we're letting them soften up the opposition for a while."
Chapter 22
Mecklenburg The first major clash outside of Saxony-and the only one, as it turned out-occurred in Mecklenburg. The nobility of that province had been chafing ever since most of them were driven out during Operation Kristallnacht. Now, emboldened by the convention in Berlin and what they saw as the new dispensation enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Duties, they formed themselves into a small army of sorts-entirely an army of officers, so far-and sallied from Berlin, calling on their retainers and supporters to join them.
A fair number did so, in fact, before they reached the Mecklenburg border. But more than half a year had passed since the change of regime in Mecklenburg. The province's Committee of Correspondence had not spent those months idly, and neither had the Fourth of July Party. The Mecklenburg CoC's initial armed contingents that they'd fielded during Operation Kristallnacht-ragged bands, more like-had been transformed into a fairly well-trained and a very well-armed militia in the intervening period.
And they sallied forth just as enthusiastically as did their betters. Class relations in Mecklenburg were more savage than in any other province in the USE. The poor soil of the region supported a poor agriculture and industrial development was still nascent and confined almost entirely to a few major towns. So, outright poverty clashed against its close cousin in the form of a hardscrabble aristocracy.
> The initial skirmishes were fought in a range of sandy hills just south of Wittstock. None of the contestants realized it, then or ever, but in the universe the Americans had come from a much greater battle would be fought on that same terrain less than a year later, in October of 1636. In that battle, the Swedish army led by General Baner-the same man who was besieging Dresden in this universe-would defeat an army of Austrian Catholic imperialists and their Saxon Protestant allies. The Swedes were financed by Catholic France, proving once again that the supposed "wars of religion" were just a veneer over dynastic rivalries.
The terrain favored the reactionary forces, because of their greater strength in cavalry, but not by much. Truth be told, it was terrain that suited nobody very well-just as it hadn't (wouldn't-didn't-mightn't? the Ring of Fire played havoc with grammar) in the battle of Wittstock.
After two days of intermittent fighting, the noblemen's forces managed to push their way to the town's outskirts, but there they were stopped. As was usually true with German militias, the CoC contingents fought best on the defensive, especially when they could fight behind shelter-and by then, they'd done a fair job of fortifying Wittstock.
Another day passed during which the leadership of the reactionary army squabbled and bickered. They'd had no clearly defined leadership structure when they left Berlin, and the situation hadn't improved any since. Finally, more because a few of the leaders decided to do it and the rest just tagged along, rather than because they'd persuaded anyone, the noblemen's army headed north.
The plan, if such it could be called, was to circle around Wittstock and then strike across country toward the provincial capital of Schwerin. The logic involved was flimsy, at best. Why, after being stymied by the jury-rigged defenses of Wittstock, these leading noblemen thought they could take the larger and much better fortified city of Schwerin, was something that none of them even tried to answer. They were satisfied, it seemed, simply by the act of doing something. Berlin Back in Berlin, Oxenstierna was of two minds on the matter of Mecklenburg. On the one hand, he was skeptical that the aristocratic expedition had any real chance of success. On the other hand, he was glad to see someone doing something. Doing anything. Like the leaders of that little army, the chancellor of Sweden was getting increasingly frustrated by the defensive tactics of his opponents.
He hadn't expected that. Axel Oxenstierna was a very intelligent man, but even intelligent people are prone to being blinded by their own biases and preconceptions. The chancellor's favorite word to describe the political state of affairs brought into existence in the Germanies by Mike Stearns, the Fourth of July Party-to say nothing of Gretchen Richter and her Committees of Correspondence-was "anarchy."
He repeated the term so often that he came to believe it himself. Indeed, came to take it as a given, an axiom of political theory, the foundation of right thinking and the keystone of statesmanship.
He'd have done better to ask the Archduchess Isabella her opinion of Gretchen Richter. She'd have told him the same thing she once told her nephew Fernando, now the king in the Netherlands: "I hate to admit it, but that infuriating young woman would make a splendid queen-and if we were ever so unlucky as to live in a universe where she was an empress, we'd be calling her either 'the Great' or 'the Terrible,' depending on which side of her favor we lay."
The new king hadn't disputed the matter. He was pretty sure the canny old woman was right.
Of Mike Stearns, the chancellor would have done better to listen to the Dutch painter and diplomat Peter Paul Rubens than to listen to himself. Rubens would have told him that he was quite sure future historians would refer to their period as the Stearns Era, or something similar, and that he could think of no more foolish error for a statesman than to underestimate Stearns.
But of all Oxenstierna's mistaken assessments of his enemies, the worst was his assessment of Rebecca Abrabanel.
He had none at all. At least, none beyond the common judgment of all heterosexually-inclined males between the ages of twelve and dead that the woman was extraordinarily attractive.
He'd met her during the course of the Congress of Copenhagen, which she'd attended. Several times, in fact. Once, he'd even been seated next to her at a formal banquet and had discovered, a bit to his surprise, that she was a charming conversationalist as well as a great beauty.
But he'd never thought much about her in any other terms, and certainly not in terms of her qualities as a political leader. Without even really thinking about the matter, he took it for granted that she was a cipher. A wife-hardly the first in history-who was able to attend affairs of state and pose as an important figure solely and simply because of the status of her husband.
Strigel, Spartacus, Achterhof-those were his enemies, now that Stearns himself had been shipped off to Bohemia. And Piazza, of course, but Piazza was tied down in Thuringia-Franconia thanks to the shrewd maneuver with the Bavarians.
Strigel was an administrator, Spartacus was a propagandist, and Achterhof was a thug. A very capable administrator, an often dazzling essayist, and a dangerous thug, to be sure-none of them were men you wanted to take lightly. Still, they moved within certain limits.
Those being, of course, the inherent limits of their anarchic rule.
So, the chancellor of Sweden was frustrated. How was it that chaos had not already spread across the Germanies, as the wild men of the CoCs erupted in fury? Chaos which would require a strong hand to suppress. How was it that entire provinces seemed to have remained perfectly calm and orderly?
Even under the pressure of the Bavarian assault, the SoTF was apparently quite stable. Hesse-Kassel had already announced it was maintaining neutrality in what the landgravine-a most aggravating woman, despite her high birth-chose to call "the current turbulence." As if the situation was the product of the weather instead of anarchy!
She was influencing Brunswick in that direction, too. That was not particularly surprising, any more than it was surprising that Prince Frederik of Denmark was keeping his province of Westphalia on the sidelines. What Oxenstierna hadn't expected, though, was to see her attitudes beginning to spread further south. It was as if the Rhine was an infected vein carrying a female disease. Now the acting administrator of the Upper Rhine, Johann Moritz of Nassau-Siegen, was starting to coo like a dove!
Nils Brahe, the Swedish general who doubled as the administrator for the Province of the Main, was insisting that he needed to keep all his troops rather than sending some of them to Baner on the grounds that the French were behaving "suspiciously." While, at the same time, reporting that his province was orderly and undisturbed by CoC agitators.
Oxenstierna was doubtful that Brahe was telling him the truth. But what was worse was that he didn't know whether he preferred the truth in the first place. The thought that Brahe might be reporting accurately when he said the CoC was quiescent in the Main was in some ways more disturbing than if they'd been running amok.
Finally, there was the ongoing aggravation produced by General Horn in Swabia. What in the world had possessed Oxenstierna, that he'd ever agreed to let his daughter marry that wretched man? Christina's death four years earlier had had one beneficial effect: at least her father no longer had to associate socially with his ex-son-in-law. But that wasn't any help under these circumstances, when the association was necessitated by political and-above all-military realities. Except for Baner's army at the gates of Dresden and the army Oxenstierna was keeping in reserve here in Berlin, Gustav Horn commanded the most powerful Swedish force in the USE. Being fair, Horn's claims that he needed them to counter the ever-ambitious Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar had a great deal more substance than the similar claims made by Brahe about the French. Oxenstierna was dubious that the French were behaving "suspiciously," but he didn't doubt for a moment that Bernhard was.
Horn, moreover, could also argue that he needed some of his troops to maintain order in Wurttemberg, which had been restive ever since the dying Duke Eberhard had bequeathed his territory to its people.
Oxenstierna took a moment, again, to curse the young man's shade. Eberhard had been filled with a treasonous spirit, obviously. It was reliably reported that the duke's former concubine was now one of the leading figures among the Dresden rebels. The chancellor wondered from time to time which of them had infected the other with sedition.
Then there was the Tyrol, about which the less said, the better. Darmstadt, Province of the Main Upon the conclusion of the meeting, the delegation from Darmstadt's Committee of Correspondence was politely ushered to the door by the mayor, the head of the city's militia and three members of the city council. When they'd left the Rathaus, the militia's commander finally exploded.
"I hate dealing with those radical swine!"
One of the council members made a face, indicating his full agreement with the sentiment. But the expressions on the faces of the other two councilmen indicated a much more skeptical attitude.
The mayor agreed with them, too. He put a friendly hand on the commander's shoulder-no feigning involved; the two men were good friends, and cousins to boot-and said: "Look, Gerlach, no one likes having to deal with them. But it's better than the alternative."
"I could drive them out of the city-entirely out-inside of a day." He worked his jaw for a moment. "All right, two days. Maybe three."
"And then what?" asked one of the councilmen. "Before you know it they'd be back with reinforcements from Frankfurt and we'd have an all-out war on our hands. Remember the mess after the Dreeson Incident?"
"And at what cost?" asked the other councilmen who'd been dubious. "Two or three days of fighting inside the city will leave a third of it in ruins. It's not worth it. It's not even close to being worth it."
The militia commander went back to working his jaw. It was a mannerism he had when he was angry but had no satisfactory way to act upon it.
"We won the election!" he exclaimed.
The mayor shook his head. "Not the way it turned out. I figured-so did you-that the duke of Saxe-Weimar would be the prime minister. Instead, he's in prison and we've got Oxenstierna in the saddle."
