Grantville Gazette V

by Eric Flint

  "I see . . ." was all Martin could manage.

  "It is masters' business, still, I think you deserve to know about it. Bruno and Joseph are not alone among masters in disliking Hubner's behavior. They are coming as an official delegation. Hubner will have to answer questions before masters of his craft. Unless the man is a total idiot he'll manage to wriggle out of anything beyond a fine or two. Do you think Hubner a total idiot?"

  "Ah, well, ah . . . sometimes. If his temper is up. Later he often seemed to,

  ah . . . regret what he'd said."

  "And his temper flares up quickly and hotly, especially if his actions and meanings are called into question. Am I correct in my assessment? I have met the man several times, you know. From what I've seen he takes any questions about his work as a personal attack on himself."

  "Ah, yes. Quick and hot." Martin squirmed a bit, uncomfortable about discussing a master of his craft in such a disrespectful manner. What the devil could Herr Hubner's temper have to do with anything?

  "I think I will take Bruno's offer up and sit in. Herr Hubner may provide quite a show." Glauber grinned again and passed his mug back for more beer. "Bruno sent his greetings to you. He is full of praise for your work and states he is anxious to see this shop. Joseph has expressed similar thoughts. I think you will enjoy showing them what you have done with Kudzu Werke. I see no problems for Rudy if his work is up to your standards. Little side matters such as advancing a deserving young man to journeyman—well, I don't think they would have a problem with such."

  "Oh, sir! It will be great if Masters Eisenbach and Ritterhof could confirm Rudy as a journeyman! Rolf and Jakob would still be without proper apprenticeships but maybe . . ." Martin took a large gulp from his own mug. The sour, sick feeling in his stomach eased.

  "Oh that! As for the boys' apprenticeships, you will be able to deal with those yourself, Martin."

  "But, sir! I'm only an journeyman . . ." A thought struggled out from the back recesses of Martin's mind. A thought, a hope, a wish. "Sir?"

  "Is your mug full, Martin? Right then. A toast to the newest Master Blacksmith—Martin Reinhard Schmidt." His grin splitting his face, Glauber saluted Martin with his mug full of beer and drained it in one gulp. "Here, son, I've letters and documents from Bruno and Joseph for you."

  Stunned, Martin reached out his hand, letting the remains of his sandwich fall to the floor. Purring loudly at the largess, the shop's cat pounced and dragged the gift under Martin's desk.

  Murphy's Law

  By Virginia DeMarce

  Part I: Grand Scam

  Spring, 1634

  "I have to decide within the week," Leopold Cavriani said. "I have no hesitation, of course, about leaving my daughter Idelette here with the Reverend and Mrs. Wiley. She will learn practical business from Count August von Sommersburg's factor, the count being one of the clients I am serving as a consultant. However, the question of her preparation in the theory of mathematics and accounting as applied to business still remains. The thought of apprenticing her to another woman is one that appeals to me. Your up-time concept of 'role model.' However . . ."

  "I can't tell you whether Aura Lee would be a good person to apprentice your daughter to, Mr. Cavriani. I've only got an eighth grade education. She's got a degree from WVU and she worked for the state government for years before she married Joe. Then she worked for the county right up until the Ring of Fire. I can't judge how good she is at her work, but they kept her on at those two jobs. They were the only ones she had during twenty years. She wasn't what they call a job-hopper." Juliann Stull looked across the table at Inez Wiley and Leopold Cavriani. Cavriani noted that the woman did not have the near-perfect teeth of so many up-timers. Hers were crooked and discolored, one of them visibly missing.

  "I can talk to other people in regard to your daughter-in-law's professional qualifications," Leopold Cavriani answered. "But in regard to Idelette's training here in Grantville, I am concerned with more than that. Mrs. Wiley does not personally know the younger Mrs. Stull well." He smiled. "She did, however, suggest that no one is likely to have a more realistic appraisal of a woman's character than her husband's mother. Perhaps, even, a critical appraisal. I have learned a great deal about Mrs. Aura Lee Stull—that, for example, she is one of the daughters of Willie Ray Hudson of the Grange and thus stems from a family of political influence in Grantville. I am concerned now with her . . ."

  "Morals." Inez said flatly. "Ethics. 'Role model' in that sense, as well as her education and social status. Mr. Cavriani is concerned about his daughter's well-being in all ways."

  "If you're thinking about that story that went around, about what happened at the restaurant in Fairmont," Juliann answered, "it's true. That's exactly what they did, her and Joe."

  "If you might pardon my ignorance," Cavriani said, "what story?"

  Juliann leaned forward a little, her arm resting on the back of her chair. "It was in September. That would have been 1987. Joe called and wanted us—me, Dennis, Tom and his wife and Harlan—to come over to dinner at a fancy restaurant in Fairmont. When we got there, it was all set up. Not one of those banquet rooms but a big table set up in the regular dining room. Flowers and candles on it and stuff. With Willie Ray and Vera, Debbie and Chad, Ray and Marty and their kids arriving at the same time and the waitress taking them to the same table. And I thought, 'Oh, hell and damnation.' Pardon my French, if you will, since Methodists aren't supposed to cuss. Not even to themselves."

  The heavyset old woman paused and took a drink from her root beer. For her, Cavriani thought, "old" was the right word rather than "elderly." The mother of Chief Justice Riddle, the formidable head of the Grantville League of Women Voters, was "elderly." Eleanor Jenkins, the president of the Red Cross, was "elderly." Juliann Stull was just old. Old and worn, in the way old people were worn in his own seventeenth century. She was over eighty, Mrs. Wiley had told him. Tough, but old.

  "So we sat there," she continued. "The waitresses brought salads and everybody sat there being real polite about what they said. Then the waitresses brought roast beef and baked potatoes with broccoli and everybody sat there being real polite some more. It's not as if the family of the state representative had a lot in common with the family of a miner who got crippled up with black lung, started drinking too much, ran out on his family, and died in a flophouse in Florida fifteen years later. I was a cleaning lady when Joe was growing up, working two jobs to keep food on the table. The only reason I ever knew that Garland had died was that the black lung people in the regional office in Parkersburg tracked me down and told me I was entitled to widow's benefits. But everybody was real polite. Especially because the restaurant had a lot of perfect strangers in it who were eating their dinners, too. Which might be why Joe and Aura Lee had the table set up out there instead of in a banquet room."

  "I think I can visualize the scene," Cavriani said. He was also keeping in mind that this woman's son Joe was currently serving as secretary of transportation for the State of Thuringia-Franconia and had become, since the Ring of Fire, a man of considerable political importance and influence in his own right, given the importance of roads and railroads in the new world that was developing. Owing little or nothing to his father-in-law's influence. From the origins his mother was now describing. With Marcus von Drachhausen, the noble son-in-law of Count August von Sommersburg, who was in turn one of Cavriani's own employers, serving as deputy secretary under him. Wheels within wheels . . .

  Juliann heaved herself to her feet. "I don't mean to be rude by standing up, but I've got to straighten this bad leg out every now and then. Then, the waitresses brought the pie and coffee. Before people could go on being real polite, Joe got up and said that he and Aura Lee had gotten married at the courthouse in Charleston the week before. That the state transportation department had transferred him from Clarksburg to Morgantown, that Aura Lee had quit her job with the state and gotten on as a budget officer for Marion County, and that they'd bought a hou
se and would be living in Fairmont."

  Inez Wiley smiled.

  "That just sort of laid there for a while," Juliann continued. "Then Dennis called for the waitresses to bring champagne for a toast, which sort of distracted all the other Methodists into wondering whether they really ought to drink it or not, even though there wasn't any minister at the table. That brought a little relief. And the waitresses brought fancy glasses with stems and poured the champagne and Dennis toasted the bride and groom. Then Joe said, 'Plus, we're going to have a baby in March.' And Aura Lee said, 'We didn't see any point in prolonging the agony by putting off telling you that.'"

  "That's what I thought, perhaps, that you needed to hear, Mr. Cavriani, before you made your decision," Inez Wiley said. "Something else to take into consideration, perhaps, is that the only other woman in Grantville who really has the academic preparation to provide Idelette with the level of training you want for her is Carol Koch. Her mother-in-law was left up-time. But, uh, Ron and Carol got married in December 1979 and Ronella was born in June 1980. So in a way, it's six of one and a half-dozen of the other. Not to mention that neither of them is Calvinist."

  "Do you have any Calvinist female mathematicians or accountants in Grantville?" Cavriani asked.

  "Not as far as I know. Not up-time trained ones. Ashley Jennings was brought up PCUSA-Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, which is real liberal—and joined the Church of Christ when she married Terence Sterling, which is probably worse than not ever being a Calvinist at all. Enoch would think so, at any rate." The wife of Grantville's Free Independent Presbyterian minister and by default universal Calvinist minister smiled.

  "You observed Carol in action at the Rudolstadt Colloquy, of course," Inez continued. "Shortly after that, when Leahy Medical Center in Grantville began cooperative efforts with the medical school at Jena, the faculty there asked for someone to teach statistics. So Grantville sent them almost the only person we had available to teach statistics for a year. Someone told me that when the dean looked up and saw who their new adjunct faculty member was, he came close enough to dying of apoplexy that the cooperating medical team had to be called in."

  "If Mrs. Koch is in Jena, then she would not be available as—what was the word—Idelette's mentor, would she?" Cavriani asked.

  "After the end of the current semester, Carol will be working for the state government. Tony Adducci has asked her to take a job at the Department of Economic Resources. Aura Lee works for the Grantville/Ring of Fire local government, so you might want to think, too, which level of government you'd rather have Idelette studying while she is with us."

  Juliann, who was still standing, looked down and interrupted Inez. "I've never had a thing against Aura Lee, mind you, since that's the question Mr. Cavriani came to get answered. I don't have a thing in common with her, but nothing against her. She must have had a dozen chances, in all those years between when Joe started going out with her and she finally married him, when she could have done something that would have broke his heart and spirit. But she never did. So I'm not going to hear anyone say a word against her."

  "All those years?" Cavriani asked.

  Juliann switched her gaze to him. "They were already eyeing each other before Joe went into the army after he finished his junior year. Back before Grantville had this big consolidated high school. That was 1973 and she was sixteen, then. They saw each other whenever he came back and they wrote back and forth. I know that because when he got out of the army, he had a box with five years' worth of letters from Aura Lee saved up in it. Which makes me sort of think that it would have been when he was home on leave the summer of '74 that they got to the point of 'gone fishin',' instead of just 'a wishin'.' If you take my meaning. He even managed to get leave and come back to take her to her senior prom. That was '76; they cut it so close that Dennis picked him up at midnight after the prom itself was over to take him to Fairmont to catch the bus back and her father came later and picked her up from the after-prom party."

  "Knowing that she had attended with Joe?" Inez asked.

  "There ain't no flies on Willie Ray Hudson, Inez." Juliann picked up her root beer. "There wasn't nothing sneaky about it. I know they saw each other as regular as possible all the time she was at WVU. He got out of the army in '79. The army was the best deal anyone could have imagined for Joe. He came out with his high school diploma plus all sorts of certifications, including fire fighting. He was in transportation the whole time. Then he got the GI bill to take a technical course. She graduated in '80, right in time to land in the middle of the storm about her sister Debbie seeing Chad Jenkins and then getting married to Chad Jenkins. Which she ducked out on by getting a job in Charleston and not coming back to Grantville."

  Juliann took another sip. "I guess you could put it this way. I don't think they got married because they were having a kid. Not a case of, 'you can't fool Mother Nature.' I think they decided that the time had come to have kids if they wanted them at all, so they got married once Mother Nature decided to pick up the option they gave her, so to speak."

  It didn't take Leopold Cavriani long to sort through the implications of that rather convoluted statement. He still found the marriage customs of the up-timers somewhat confusing, as in this apparent case of fidelity precedent to matrimony for a period of nearly a decade and a half—not unique by any means, he knew—whereas others entered into formal matrimony and then dissolved it with quite dizzying speed. Not to mention the concept that in the up-time world, children had been regarded as an . . . optional . . . aspect of marital relations rather than their essential purpose.

  "I've never had a thing against Aura Lee," Juliann repeated. "Especially not since they named their girl for me instead of for Vera Hudson."

  Even though Juliann's voice was raspy from years of chain-smoking, the cream in it could have been skimmed, whipped, and spread on top of strawberry shortcake, Inez Wiley thought.

  * * *

  "You do not know of Barbarossa?" Count August von Sommersburg looked at the secretary of the treasury of the State of Thuringia-Franconia and blinked. The story of Barbarossa was well known. "Even the encyclopedias of the up-timers recall the emperor who is said to be sleeping beneath the Kyffhäuser mountain in northern Thuringia, not far from my own lands."

  "I don't doubt that they do," Tony Adducci said. "I've just never happened to come across him myself. My wife Denise might have, or my sister Bernadette. They have more education than I do."

  Leopold Cavriani looked at him, thinking that the man was extremely intelligent, although he had little formal education compared to several other of the SoTF officials, with only two years of what the up-timers called "college." This did not bother Leopold, since he had no university training at all, himself. The Cavrianis sent only those family members who appeared to be in need of a somewhat more sheltered life into the academic world.

  Adducci, an UMWA man, had become widely respected since the Ring of Fire for his reading into economic issues—partly, as he said himself, courtesy of his librarian wife's research skills. He had run for election under the Fourth of July Party right away in 1631 and was surprised when Mike Stearns picked him for secretary of the treasury of the NUS, now the SoTF. One son in the army, two sons still dependent upon him, and—Cavriani smiled—a daughter whose arrival two months before had bemused her parents more than a little. Baby Rosemary was twenty-one years younger than Tony, Jr.

  Since the Ring of Fire, Adducci had been diligently reading up on the financial material that his wife and sister loaded on him and complaining with some humor that the Chinese word for strife was two women in the household. For three of those years, his statement that if a daughter was added, he might as well resign like the original secretary of treasury had been considered a joke by his colleagues.

  "By those writers and dreamers who have had a vision of a Germania greater than the thousand squabbling principalities of the Holy Roman Empire," Cavriani said, "Emperor Frederick Barbaro
ssa has been considered greater than Charlemagne in some ways. If he had not been betrayed by Henry the Lion, he might have been greater in all ways. Historians say that he died as an old man during the Third Crusade, drowned while crossing a river in Asia Minor. His body was never found."

  "Then what's he doing in Thuringia?" Adducci asked.

  "German folklore says that he never died at all," Cavriani answered. "That he, with his heroes, is there in the bowels of the Kyffhäuser, under the ruins of the Hohenstaufen castle. That in the hour of Germany's direst need, he will reappear in all his one-time power and glory."

  "Sort of like King Arthur." Tony got up to refill their coffee cups.

  "Supposedly," Count August said rather ruefully, "all of this is no idle fancy. It is said that once upon a time a peasant entered into the great cavern on the south side of the mountain and saw the emperor sleeping there in a magnificent room. He was sitting in an ivory chair at a marble table. His red beard had grown right through the table. There is another story of a piper who played for him, to entertain him during his centuries of sleep, and received a hat full of gold as a reward. Or other musicians who were rewarded with poplar branches that turned into solid gold as they walked home. About every century, it is said, a living person has been admitted into the presence of the sleeping emperor."