by Eric Flint
"It's what I'd have done, Larry."
"This I thought also," said Heinzerling. "The monsignor was known in the future history as a cardinal of France, no? So the Vatican seeks to prevent this?"
Jones sucked at his lip, began to pace. "Maybe. But would they? By now, you can be sure the Vatican has gotten its hands on all the histories available, just like Richelieu did. Remember that Mazarini—Mazarin, as he would be by then—sponsored the Peace of Westphalia. And sheltered the Barberini when it all hit the fan after Urban VIII's death. Surely they'd leave him in post to take root?"
Mazzare sat up. "On the other hand, is this place getting to us so soon? Blasted intrigue and double-dealing! Perhaps the pope and his advisers just wanted their best troubleshooter here—especially since he's more familiar with Americans than anyone else they have. Someone good enough to do the job, junior enough to shunt aside if he stalls. Whatever. We're here to do a deal with the Venetians. If Giulio wants to talk, he'll talk. Gus, who else is in town?"
"Moment, bitte." Heinzerling crossed to where a pitcher of wine had been left out, took a goblet and drank. He made a face, perfectly reflected in the polished silver of the cup from where Mazzare sat. "Ach, nasty cheap wine. Essig. So, the ambassadors. The Spanish one, the count de Rocca, is a pompous ass. He's the regular ambassador sent directly from Madrid. But Cardinal Bedmar is also here for Spain—indirectly, at least; officially, he's 'special ambassador from the Spanish Netherlands'—and that is causing trouble, of course. D'Avaux for France, and he is Richelieu's creature and bag-man. The representative for the empire is another nonentity—I've already forgotten the name—since the empire and Venice are usually so far"—he held up thumb and forefinger—"from war that any ambassador is wasting his time here. There is not a Dutchman to be found for love nor money and the English ambassador does little and says less."
"Dutch are out of it. The English ambassador, though. Why's he so quiet?"
"He is too busy making money, from what I am hearing."
"Hmm." Mazzare scratched a chin that, twentieth-century razors having become largely a memory, was developing a fine beard. Local fashion was for a properly trimmed goatee for a reason: it kept the blade away from all the hard bits to shave. "No surprise that the Dutch aren't about. Why is Bedmar trouble?"
Jones groaned. "Come on, Larry! Didn't you pay attention in Causes of the Thirty Years' War, 101? Bedmar! The Venetian Conspiracy! Osuna's Fleet!"
"Assume I didn't, Simon," Mazzare said patiently. "And wasn't the Defenestration of Prague the cause of the Thirty Years' War?"
"Sort of. In the same sense that Archduke Ferdinand's assassination was the cause of the First World War. It was just a trigger, that's all—one of many possible ones. In fact, the other major candidate for the trigger event happened right here, just a few days before."
"It would be better to say it did not happen, ja?" Heinzerling was now leaning against the buffet table where the wine-jug was, using his goblet to gesture. "Bedmar had paid a fifth column to open the city to Osuna's fleet, it was said, and the state inquisitors hanged the principal conspirators shortly before the fleet sailed—after breaking their legs, in time-honored Venetian custom. The conspiracy ended, and Venice remains independent. There was trouble; I recall it even from the seminary. But a week later, there was the worse trouble in Prague and war began in Bohemia instead of in Italy."
"And Bedmar's back? I see the concern that might raise." Mazzare was pointedly not looking at Heinzerling. A drink or two was fine, but he had promised Hannelore that he would not let his curate hit the sauce too hard.
"Ja, he is back." Mazzare heard Heinzerling put the goblet down. "And I hear that he is bribing anything with hands to hold scudi. I hear only rumors, you understand."
Mazzare sighed, and looked up at the ceiling a moment, noting the cracks in the plaster. "It all sounded so simple when Mike and Francisco set it out for me. A trade deal, they said. Stand there and look solemn and sign things, so the Venetians can pretend they're not dealing with Jews, they said. D'Avaux is your only problem, they said. Bah!" He swept a hand across an imaginary chess-board, scattering the pieces of a game grown tiresome.
"Come on, Larry." Jones' grin looked as forced as his tone. "If it wasn't hard, they wouldn't need us."
"Well, the women are going to be upset," said Mazzare.
Heinzerling nodded. "Ja. If Hanni saw the filth in here, she would be ganz verruckt."
That set Mazzare to chuckling. The formidable Frau Heinzerling governed domestic arrangements at the rectory with an iron will. Preconceptions about early-modern attitudes to cleanliness were crushed under her regular blitzkriegs with duster and beeswax. The place gleamed; not a surface in it couldn't have been used for surgery.
"Speaking of domestic arrangements," he said, "how are the troops and the various technical missions settling in?"
"Ganz gut," said Heinzerling. "Captain Lennox and his troops are comfortable and probably looking for a drink."
Heinzerling made a face as he mentioned the Scotsman. He and Lennox, in many ways, were two of a kind. One of the more famous brawls in the Thuringen Gardens had transpired when the two of them had debated their competing doctrines of justification one night. The Jesuit had won the debate and—narrowly, he insisted!—lost the ensuing fistfight. Lennox had paid the price in a broken tooth, two broken ribs and the finger he had dislocated on Heinzerling's jaw. Carried back to the rectory, Heinzerling had had a black eye added to his injuries by a furious Hannelore keen to enforce her ambition of getting her man to settle down to parochial respectability. Gus had behaved himself, more or less, ever since.
"And the technical folks?" Mazzare dragged himself back from memories of happier, if harder-working, times.
"Also settled. The Stone boys are suggesting a few drinks with the local Committee, and I mean to go with them."
Mazzare nodded, then frowned. "Is that wise? Should we be seen to have links of any kind with the Committee?"
"He has a point, Gus," said Jones. "If we're talking to the grandees, surely they'll take fright if we're also hobnobbing with revolutionaries and the like?"
Mazzare sat up straighter. "For the moment, let's not take risks. Gus, have the Committee here been in touch yet?"
"Not so far as I know. Frank is a member of the CoC in Grantville, as I'm sure you are aware—all three of the rascals, probably—and he will be looking to make contact." Heinzerling stroked his chin a moment. "In fact, I think it cannot be that the local Committee has been in touch, since it is all staff of the palazzo or the embassy in here so far. They will of course place someone with the servants."
"Right." Mazzare nodded. "What teenage boys do is one thing. You, Gus . . . another. So keep them out of trouble, if you can. And ask Sharon to help."
Jones grinned. "For a man with no children you've got a surprising grasp of teenage psychology, Larry."
Mazzare grinned back. "I have memories of being a teenaged male myself, Simon, before I turned my thoughts to Heaven."
Heinzerling was looking puzzled, so Mazzare took pity on him. "Sharon'll be the key to keeping the Stone boys under control, Gus. Even more than their father and mother. She's the most glamorous woman they know—well, leaving aside Becky Stearns—and close enough to their own age to leave room for fantasies."
Now Heinzerling was frowning. "She is grieving for her dead betrothed, Hans Richter."
Jones smiled. "Yup. Like Larry says: glamorous. For Pete's sake, Gus, weren't you ever a youngster?"
Heinzerling shook his head. "Americans are all insane. What has 'glamor' to do with anything? Much less fantastical delusions? Fraulein Nichols is a respectable young woman grieving for her betrothed, and those boys are much too young to be entertaining notions of marriage anyway.
"However," he said, shrugging heavily, "I will do as you ask."
* * *
After Heinzerling left, Jones cocked an eye at Mazzare. "It might be good for Sharon, too, having to concentr
ate on keeping those juvenile delinquents out of trouble. Give her something to think about other than . . ." He groped in the air, a bit feebly.
"That's what I was thinking." Mazzare sighed heavily. He was worried about Sharon.
Sharon Nichols had been added to the diplomatic delegation at the very end, just two days before it left Grantville. That at been at her father's urging.
"Anything to get her mind off Hans," he'd told Mazzare. Seeing the question lurking in the priest's mind, James Nichols had chuckled harshly. "Oh, I'm not worried about that, Father. My daughter is about as suicidally inclined as a brick. But . . ."
He'd groped in the air too, then, and just as feebly as Jones was doing now. Mazzare understood both gestures. Sharon's romance with Hans Richter had been a storybook one, ended when her fiancé died in true storybook fashion at the Battle of Wismar less than six months earlier. The woman was in her early twenties, to make things worse—that treacherous age when deep grief could insidiously slide into a quasi-romantic melancholy that lasted for years and years. A lifetime, in some cases. The priest had seen it happen, from time to time.
And what a waste that would be! Not just the waste of a life, but the waste of a person whose intelligence and skills—not to mention sheer energy, when Sharon was her normal self—would be an asset to many other people. Including—Mazzare admitted to some selfish motives here—the delegation from the USE to Venice. Sharon's hands-on medical skills would be a valuable addition to Tom Stone's more theoretical knowledge.
He rose from his chair and went over to a window, looking out over the city. "God knows Venice could use her," he murmured.
Loud enough, apparently, for Jones to hear him. The Protestant reverend snorted sarcastically. "And that's another thing the guide books didn't mention! The glamorous pestilence."
Jones wasn't really being fair to Venice, Mazzare thought. Or Italy as a whole, for that matter. Yes, Venice had lost about a third of its population in the recent plague. But that wasn't an unusual percentage, in this day and age, for a city struck by bubonic plague. Many cities suffered worse. The truth was that medicine and public sanitation were more advanced in Italy in the seventeenth century than probably anywhere else in Europe.
Which . . . wasn't saying much.
Mazzare was a conservatively inclined man, by temperament, and found the constant changes in his life more than a little taxing. In three short years he'd gone from a small town in up-time America where disease didn't include bubonic plague and typhus, through a jury-rigged little "United States" restricted to the southern half of Thuringia, through an equally jury-rigged "Confederated Principalities of Europe," to yet a fourth nation—the only- months-old "United States of Europe" which Mike Stearns was busily jury-rigging right now.
And—it needed only this!—one Father Larry Mazzare was the ambassador from that country to Venice. It was almost funny, in a way. He'd been appointed as ambassador from one country—the CPE—but by the time he'd finally been able to take up his post, his country had changed underneath his feet.Oh, well. He tried to brace his spirit with lines of poetry, which he murmured aloud.
"How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!"
Again, he'd spoke louder than he thought. Reverend Jones frowned. "Sounds like something from the King, although I don't recognize it. Since when did you become an Elvis Presley fan, Larry?"
Mazzare sighed again.
Chapter 10
"Cool." Gerry put the enthusiasm into the word that only someone sixteen could manage.
"Yeah, it'll do," Ron drawled, looking around.
Frank couldn't quite figure out if he was looking at the decor or the help—who clearly thought the Stone brothers' various attempts on the Italian language were funny, but were being polite about it. At least, he hoped that was what they were finding funny. They had also insisted on doing, more or less, everything for him and his brothers when they had lugged their bags up to their rooms, short of—
He let that thought die a natural death. True enough, the help was worth looking at. All four of the servants assigned to them were girls about their own age. If only two of them could properly be called "pretty," all of them could certainly bear the label of "healthy" with great ease.
But if there was one thing that Frank's not-so-great weight of experience with the female of the species had taught him it was that not pushing too hard on the first date—don't hump her leg, as his dad had once put it in a jocular mood—did wonders for the success rate in the long run. Things had been decidedly fluid on that front these past two years, though, and he was a free agent for the moment. Part of that was the way in which German attitudes were rubbing off on everyone he knew—including himself, truth be told. Everyone seemed to want to get themselves set up and steady before they got romantic. Which was odd, but then again most of the things everyone had taken for granted as opportunities for dating had gone away. And then the rubbers had run out, and things had gotten decidedly chilly on that front, damn it.
So, he looked around. "It isn't quite how I imagined it."
"Oh?" Ron sounded interested.
"Sure. I looked it all up. You wouldn't believe how many books of photographs of Venice there are. Well, you would now you've seen it, and this town's famous for looking pretty. But all the photos have captions about how such-and-such a palazzo or the Casa-de-that was refurbished in the eighteenth century. So I figured it'd all look more—different—than it did in the pictures, and all."
"Oh," said Ron. Frank's younger brother was trying very hard not to stare at the rump of the chambermaid who was bending down to sort their linen into drawers. Frank sympathized with his struggle. She was the only maid left in the room, since the others had left in a swirl of giggles—and easily the best-looking.
"Whoah!" Gerry called out, "Not that one!" He stepped smartly across the room to where the maid was about to try to lift his bag of tricks. The one that clanked when he moved it.
Frank didn't doubt that someone would take a peek later anyway, but by then the Stone boys would have taken the more outré stuff out of it and hidden it somewhere safer. Gerry was the youngest of the brothers and he'd packed the thing—which meant that "outré" would be outré indeed.
The maid gave Gerry an odd look. Not puzzled so much as . . .
Calculating.
A thought came to Frank, and he decided to take a chance. "Committee?" he asked, making sure to use the English term.
"Yes," the maid hissed softly. "You are the Committee with the Grantville embassy?" Her English was surprisingly good, aside from a heavy accent. But Frank thought the accent was a charming as the rest of her.
"Yup," he said, extending a hand. "All three of us, actually. You learned English for us?"
"No." She took his hand a bit shyly, not shaking it so much as just holding it. "My father make us learn, so we can work with Sir Henry Hider. And then he made us study even harder, when we learned you were coming to Venice."
"Who's Hider?" Frank asked, feeling a sudden twinge of anxiety. Well. Jealousy, to be precise. Did some lousy Brit already have the inside track with the girl?
"Steady on there, podnuh," Gerry said. "Ma'am," he said, sweeping off the silly cavalier hat he'd taken to wearing, "might we have the privilege of your name?"
Frank nodded. The courtly manners thing might be a good idea after all. It had seemed excruciating stuff when a small assortment of Nasis and other gentry had been giving them crash-courses in current manners—Dad's attempts had been hilarious at first until he seemed to just accelerate ahead of everyone—but the effects could be impressive. Frank swept his baseball cap off with the hand that the maid wasn't holding—score one, he realized, she hadn't let go yet. "Lady," he said, in his best shot at the Italian language, "permit me the honor of naming my brothers Gerry and Ron Stone, and I am Frank, very much at your service. And you are?"
The giggles suggested he'd got it wrong, but at least in an a
musing way.
"Giovanna Marcoli. My father Antonio is the—what is the word for capo?—of the Committee of Correspondence in Venice." The girl straightened proudly. "All of north Italy—even Milan! Even though he is only a metalworker."
She giggled again, and Frank realized her amusement had been at the notion of herself as a Lady. Craftsmen were respected enough, in Venice, but very far removed in social terms from the Venetian noble merchant families. The Case Vecchie, Frank thought they called themselves—the "Old Houses."
Giggling or not, Giovanna still hadn't relinquished his hand. Frank was in no hurry for her to do so. The hand was of a piece with the girl herself—small, warm, and very well shaped. "Sir Henry is a merchant and a man of some note in Venice," she continued, "if you like I will tell you more of him later?"
"Sure," said Ron. The middle of the three Stone brothers had just turned eighteen, and had a slightly-too-eager tone in his voice. No, make that much-too-eager. He took off his hat, an English foghat he'd gotten somewhere, just to make sure Frank was outdone in the dumbass headgear stakes. "Thanks."
Great, thought Frank, he's going to hump her leg any minute. Actually, he could feel that urge himself. Please, please, please, he thought, let Giovanna not turn out to be attached or something. Short, brunette, dark-eyed, and—and—
Perfect.
Damn. Frank was sure he'd blow it.
As if foretelling his doom, Giovanna finally let go of his hand and frowned. Suddenly, she seemed all business.
"Messer . . . Gerry, it is?" Giovanna asked. "Why must I not touch that bag?"
"This bag?" Gerry said, hoisting it up with a grunt of effort.
"Yes. Is it secret to you or to the Committee?"
"Both, in a manner of speaking." Gerry crossed the room to a table to unpack it.
Frank went over to watch. He'd been kind of curious himself.
"Now," said Gerry, "I expect y'all got a thing or two on sale hereabouts in Venice for the man of action, but I figured on being prepared, one way or another." He looked around to his audience, which was now everyone in the room.
