1635:The Dreeson Incident (assiti shards)

by Eric Flint

  "That's what I managed to overhear," Isaac de Ron finished. He glanced out the window. "I had best be going, my lord. I have been here, supposedly in your cellars talking to the butler, for much longer than I would need to stay for even the most complex delivery of fine wines. Someone might notice."

  "I suppose you would not want me to ruin your reputation by having the butler complain in public that you delivered inferior goods and he was rebuking you?"

  Benjamin de Rohan, duke of Soubise, was trying to be jocular, but de Ron jerked his head up. "Never!"

  "Very well then. I will let my brother know of your fears that Ducos is planning additional assassinations." Soubise stood up.

  De Ron withdrew. He recognized permission to depart when he saw it.

  On the Main River

  Ancelin and Deneau sat quietly in the back of the barge.

  Locquifier's assumptions had been wrong. The old woman had no maid or steward or driver. None of the ordinary attendants of a traveling gentlewoman.

  She did have a bodyguard, which was unexpected. When she left the Rhine packet at Mainz, the commander of a detachment of guards wearing Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar's livery-guards who were accompanying a young girl-detached four of them to go with "Mrs. Dreeson."

  That was presumably because she was the grandmother of Hans Richter. She had no real distinction of her own, but even Frankfurt by now had renamed a square in honor of the "hero of Wismar."

  The girl had hugged her. Hard.

  Why, they could not imagine.

  Nils Brahe, Gustav Adolf's commander in Mainz, had met her in person. She had immediately addressed several complaints to him. She had no information she had not gotten from newspapers. Nobody had sent her any information about her schools. Was Annalise all right? What about the other children? If one of them had died during the summer, she was sure no one had thought to tell her. She had not had a word from Amberg. Had those young idiots Thea and Nicol starved to death when they went off without a bank draft? Where was Elias Brechbuhl? Had Hieronymus Rastetter been in touch? She had no expectations that those Jesuits were any more cooperative now than they had been last spring. Had Cavriani arrived in Geneva safely with his son? Well, of course not-they had probably been set upon by bandits along the way. What about Mary Ward and the English Ladies? Had they all been raped by mercenaries between Neuburg and Grantville? Why was everybody else in the world too busy to tell her anything?

  She had continued to make similar comments ever since they got on the barge. Directed, now, not to Brahe, but rather to a young German officer, the head of her bodyguard. She spoke quite clearly. Of course, her false teeth were famous, now. Almost as famous as Wallenstein's jaw. Several newspaper reports covering her escape from Bavaria in company with the "wheelbarrow queen" and the admiral's wife had mentioned the effective way she used them.

  Ancelin almost felt sorry for the Archduchess Maria Anna, if she had to put up with this for what must have seemed like two very long months.

  The conversation of Veronica Schusterin, verw. Richter, verh. Dreeson, was an apparently unending paean to the concept "cranky." That was all they had learned from their observations.

  "I wonder what Guillaume expected us to learn?" Deneau whispered. "Or did he just want to get us out of the way? Do you suppose the others have planning something while we've been gone? Are they going to exclude us from some new project?"

  Ancelin shook his head. "It was exactly what he said, probably. A concession to our desire to actually do something. Not just sit in de Ron's back room and talk. Now be quiet. I'm trying to listen."

  "Why? Nothing important is going to happen on this stupid boat. I don't think I've ever come across such a pessimistic old lady."

  In addition to the two of them, the bodyguards, and old woman, there were several other passengers. One man, dressed in black riding clothes, sitting by himself at the far front, had been escorted to the pier by a couple of Nils Brahe's Swedes.

  A courier, probably, Ancelin thought.

  Frankfurt am Main

  As soon as the barge tied up, the man in black got off. He walked up to the lanky, freckled redhead who was commanding a group of sickly-shade-of-salmon-pinkish-orange-uniformed soldiers. That had to be Utt, the commander of the Fulda Barracks Regiment. Ancelin could figure out that much from the newspaper reports he had read in Mainz. And doesn't that color clash with the man's hair? he thought. Terrible. No sense of style at all. If he had chosen a rich brown, or even a deep shade of rust…

  Before he became a conspirator, Gui Ancelin had been a tailor.

  But that had been another world. Before Richelieu's siege of La Rochelle, he had also been a man with a wife and three children. A father and two sisters. Before the starvation and the plague brought by the siege. Louis XIII's siege. Richelieu's siege.

  The newcomer was waving a sheaf of papers. Utt turned and told off a half-dozen mounted soldiers. They moved away, one of them calling for a water boy to bring up one of the remounts.

  A courier, then. Nothing to get excited about. Couriers came and went all the time.

  Then the bodyguards debarked. Followed by Frau Dreeson in full spate.

  An elderly man limped down the quay to meet her.

  "Henry, what were they thinking of, sending you on such a strenuous trip? What if you had fallen? Remember what Doctor Nichols told you. Hip replacements are a thing of the past. Or of the far future, depending upon how a person looks at it. Or the ATV had an accident and you were thrown out? You could have been killed. What good would a hip replacement have done you then, even if you could have one?

  "What were you thinking, for that matter, going off and leaving Annalise alone with the children.

  "No, it does not matter that Thea and Nicol are there. It is just as well they didn't die, I suppose, but being alive is no remedy for being fools. They were alive when I met them in Grafenwohr and fools there, already. Just one more expense for you, I suppose. It would be too much to hope that they are paying their own way."

  By this time, she was halfway up the pier, the bodyguards closed in behind her. Ancelin and Deneau stayed at the rear of the other debarking passengers, but they could still hear her voice, ranting away.

  Then she reached the head of the pier, where the formal reception party was waiting. Stopped. Lifted her head and smoothed her face.

  "I am honored to make the acquaintance of the Burgermeister and councilmen of Frankfurt and their gracious wives."

  The Burgermeister turned to another man. "Permit me to present you to Monsieur le duc de Soubise, a guest in our city."

  The wrinkled old harridan curtsied quite properly.

  Ancelin couldn't quite believe it.

  Of course, he had never encountered the Abbess of Quedlinburg.

  The Burgermeister had turned to his prominent guest again. " Monsieur le duc, may I present Mayor Henry Dreeson of Grantville. Herr Wesley Jenkins, the State of Thuringia-Franconia's administrator in Fulda. His wife. Major Derek Utt." He proceeded through the litany, having carefully memorized the list that his secretary had given him the evening before.

  Soubise inclined his head. "It is my pleasure. My brother, the duke of Rohan, has already met one of your fellow-countrymen, Monsieur Thomas Stone. In Padua, where he presented him with an autographed copy of his translation of the life of Duchess Renee of Ferrara. He was very favorably impressed with Monsieur Stone's lectures and delighted to extend hospitality to his son Elrond at his current headquarters in Switzerland. He finds him to be a very promising young man."

  The Grantville contingent blinked but, all things considered, bore up well under this rather startling information.

  Occasionally, the newspapers did miss something.

  Chapter 16

  Frankfurt am Main

  "Angry people are, mostly, just angry people," said Henry Dreeson. "It's their nature. Solve one of their problems and they'll find something else to be angry about. Maybe because you solved it and took away the
ir gripe."

  Henry figured that this ceremonial banquet with the Frankfurt bigwigs was going fine. Shop talk was shop talk, wherever you found it. Names kept floating past his ears. Gunderrode. Zum Jungen. Both of them named Hector, which was sort of peculiar. He hadn't met any Germans in Grantville named Hector. Maybe they were relatives.. Stalburger. A couple of men with a "von" in front of their names, though he didn't understand why nobles would be city councillors. But "Baur von Somewhere" didn't actually sound very much like he descended from some medieval knight in shining armor, and neither did "Wei? von Somewhere Else." Recent promotions, maybe-guys who had bought the farm, or at least the estate, in the most literal sense of the word.

  Down the table, past the Burgermeister, one of the councilmen was starting to rant about the dangers of popular revolution. Sounded like Tino Nobili going full tilt. He turned his head a little to direct his good ear toward the man. "Popular election to choose the council is the worst idea I've ever heard. And I've heard it before. If you let these CoC rabble into the city government… Why, the last time, twenty years ago, it took us two years to get the movement under control."

  As usual. The municipal equivalent of generals fighting the last war.

  "The gates of the ghetto are barricaded. The main difference from twenty years ago is that this time the defenders are armed, as well." The printer Crispin Neumann finished his report. He was known to have connections in Frankfurt's Jewish ghetto, although most people were too polite to specify what they were-namely, that his grandfather had been a convert to Lutheranism; he still had relatives who lived there.

  The members of the Frankfurt city council looked at one another.

  "Isn't there any way you can head it off?" Henry figured that maybe he wasn't expected to talk, him not being a citizen of Frankfurt; but, what the hell, the Burgermeister had invited him to come to the meeting. He looked at the militia captain. "I mean, this town can't be that different from Grantville. Our police know to keep an eye on the 250 Club when certain sorts of things come up. Don't your watchmen do the same thing? Have a sort of list of trouble spots, that is? Even if it's in their own heads and not written down anywhere?

  The captain nodded; started to say something.

  In the back of the room, someone stood up. Henry peered through his glasses. Sergeant Hartke's wife? The Danish woman, Dagmar?

  "It is work righteousness to attack the Jews!"

  Everyone in the room blinked.

  "These men in the taverns are not good Lutherans! Think, only think!"

  Her German was beginning to fray a little at the edges, but she clearly had something to say. Cunz Kastenmayer slid, as inconspicuously as possible, away from his post. He had been standing behind Mayor Dreeson's left shoulder, translating whenever a conversation between the Grantvillers and the leading lights of Frankfurt politics became too complex for either the councilmen's limited English or Dreeson's less limited, but still far from fluent, German.

  "Think of the words of Paul Speratus!"

  Every Lutheran in the room, obediently, thought of the words of Paul Speratus. They could do that effortlessly, of course. The hymn "Salvation Unto Us Has Come" had been a staple of the Lutheran liturgy for a century. They all knew it by heart.

  "Think!" Dagmar boomed again. She started reciting in Danish, but Cunz repeated the German after her.

  "It is a false, misleading dream

  That God his law has given

  That sinners can themselves redeem

  And by their works gain heaven.

  The law is but a mirror bright

  To bring the inbred sin to light

  That lurks within our nature.

  "See!" Dagmar proclaimed. "These men who attack the poor Jews. Like little Riffa's parents, who are the sutlers at Barracktown now. Or her husband, David Kronberg, at the post office. Who has an aunt and uncle who have adopted him…" She paused for effect. "… and who live right here in Frankfurt! " Her voice, deep and stentorian at most times, rose to a shrill dramatic screech. "They are trying to earn heaven by their works, these anti-Semites, as you call them. But, remember-

  "Christ came and has God's anger stilled,

  Our human nature sharing.

  He has for us the law obeyed

  And thus the Father's vengeance stayed

  Which over us impended.

  "It is Christ's atonement that saves us. Not actions such as killing usurers. Which means," she concluded triumphantly, "that these men, these mutterers against the Jews, are doctrinally unsound! "

  Cunz would have been struck dumb with admiration if it hadn't been his duty to keep translating. No one could possibly have come up with a condemnation of attacking the ghetto that would have a deeper resonance in a Lutheran city. Anti-Semitism as "doctrinally unsound" work righteousness. How…

  Inspired.

  Dagmar sat down. He returned to his assigned place at Mayor Dreeson's shoulder.

  ***

  "What are you planning to do then?" the militia captain asked. "Create what Nathan Prickett would call a 'thin blue line' around the ghetto?"

  He hadn't been in the planning meeting. He had been off getting his lieutenants to agree to go along with the program. Whatever the program might prove to be.

  " Ach, nein." The Burgermeister gestured expansively. "There are not enough of us in the city government to surround it if there is a coordinated attack. Besides, since the ghetto is armed this time, not to mention reinforced…"

  The militia captain nodded. A fair number of Frankfurt's CoC members had somehow managed to be inside the ghetto when the elders of the Jewish community barricaded the gates.

  "… we might be caught in crossfire. Which would be stupid of us. Dreeson, the Grantviller, mentioned that his daughter had many favorite words. One of them was proactive. This means that we do not wait for the mutterers to finish getting organized. We will not wait for an attack on the ghetto."

  The captain was pretty sure that he would not like what came next. "So, then…"

  "We shall be proactive. We march on the taverns where the mutterers gather. Tonight."

  "Your cane will slip on a cobblestone wet with this mist. You will break your hip."

  Henry Dreeson shook his head. "Nonsense, Ronnie. Anyway, if the hip has to go one of these days, at least it'll be going in a good cause. And 'march' doesn't mean 'be carried along in a litter.' Anyway, there'd be just as much chance that one of the litter bearers would slip on a wet cobblestone, fall, and throw me out. That would be a longer way down and a harder landing than if I trip myself."

  Veronica glared at him. "Then," she said, "I am marching with you. Only to hold your other arm, mind you. Only to steady you if your cane should not be enough. Not for some stupid heroic cause such as the one that led Hans to his death."

  Frankfurt's militia officers were, by order of the council, in full ceremonial uniform. The type of uniform that they normally wore only to awards banquets. With sashes, satin trousers, lace collars, and polished boots. Items that were both difficult and expensive to clean.

  The militia captain gave his instructions. He had a loud and booming voice that carried well, too. Not in the Ableidinger league, but plenty loud enough. "One company surrounds each of the target taverns right after the bells toll. Ensure that no one leaves. Those who resist will be shot. Those who surrender will be arrested."

  As usual, Nathan Prickett noted a bit cynically, seventeenth century notions of legitimate police work diverged sharply from twentieth. Granted that they were a bunch of loudmouthed anti-Semites, the men in the taverns who were about to be set upon by the city militia hadn't actually done anything illegal. They weren't even drunk and disorderly yet.

  Fat lot of good it would do them.

  The militia lieutenants nodded firmly at their captain's instructions.

  "Ensure it. You have the best of the guns from Blumroder. Your men know how to use them. No one leaves."

  The captain looked around. On the average, t
he militiamen looked more enthusiastic about the evening's proposed project than the lieutenants did. That was Nathan's assessment, anyway, and it seemed the captain shared it.

  "If anyone tries to leave a tavern," he bellowed, "the man who shoots him will succeed to the lieutenancy of the company. If more than one man tries to leave at the same time, every man in the company who shoots will receive a substantial reward."

  That ought to stiffen everyone's back a bit. Not to mention encouraging the lieutenants to do a little shooting themselves. It wasn't an empty threat. Judging from their own vigorous nodding, the council had already agreed to the provision.

  "In the front row with the Burgermeister." The city council secretary had a list, by which he was lining up the order of march.

  "I have never entered some of these neighborhoods in my life," one of the councilmen muttered.

  "Maybe it will do you some good. You can learn how the other half lives."

  He started to sputter; then decided that sputtering at the grandmother of the "hero of Wismar," right at this moment, was not the best idea.

  The Grantville mayor was on the left hand of the Burgermeister. On his right hand-the unhappy councilman grimaced-was the Danish woman who had disrupted the council hearing. And, behind the civic officials, the orange uniforms of the Fulda Barracks Regiment.

  Henry looked around and yelled, "Jeffie?"

  Jeffrey Garand looked rather anxiously at Derek Utt. "Derek? Uh? I mean, Major Utt?"

  "Go on."

  Jeffie ran to the front line.

  "Is that your flute, you've got there in your hand?"

  "Ah, yeah, Mr. Dreeson. It's not standard, I know, for one of the sergeants to double as a piper, but, well, I've got it, and we're not quite fully staffed, so…"

  "You were in the marching band, weren't you? In high school?"

  'Um-hmmn."

  "Can you still play 'Hey, Look Me Over'?"

  Jeffie sighed. "In my sleep."