by Eric Flint
While they waited at the Ussel, Mary got down to walk for a short distance. She was trying to toughen her feet again. Maria Anna stood, holding the horse, watching her.
* * * *
A man standing near the ford looked up, glanced at her casually. Looked again. Surely not. But so like, so very like the missing archduchess.
Captain Raudegen was not especially happy to be holding water buckets for horses. A captain of cavalry should have risen well above such a duty. Colonel von Werth had sent him, with five men, to scout north of the river to find out whatever he could. But he was not to do it by riding rapidly through the countryside. If such a raid was to come, it would come later. Instead, Raudegen had been instructed to stand at fords, counting the men and animals going past them. Among other things. Colonel von Werth had not mentioned his intentions, but the possibility of a raid in strength north of the river, against Banér's camp outside Ingolstadt, was certainly a good one.
Raudegen did not like Colonel Johann von Werth. He respected his abilities, but he did not like him at all. "Von" Werth, to start with. Everyone knew that he had been born a plain "Jan van Wierdt" in a village up around Cologne, about 1591. The Low German of the region, like Dutch, did not use "van" as a designator of nobility, but just to say that a person was "from" here or there.
The colonel spread the story of a family tradition that once upon a time, in Friesland, the family had been knights, driven out after the Reformation for its unshakable Catholic faith, But he admitted that he and his eight brothers and sisters had worked in the fields, that he himself as a boy had herded swine, and that after his father's death he had worked as a hired man on farms owned by others.
So Jan van Wierdt joined the army when he was nineteen—yes, it was said, starting as a water boy for horses, performing the same service that Raudegen was performing now. As he rose from the ranks under General Spinola, he modified his name into the High German form. With all of the associated implications. "Von Werth" or, depending upon the document, von Wörth, Werd, Weert, or even, in the French form, de Weerth. Within ten years, he had made captain; in another ten, colonel in the Bavarian Eynatten regiment.
A water boy from a village on the lower Rhine. Raudegen was ambivalent. The son of farmers. What did it say about the hierarchy of society? After Pappenheim, von Werth had been the second most effective cavalry commander in the service of the imperial forces—certainly the most effective in the service of the Bavarian forces. It was a matter of judgment, at any given time, just how closely the Bavarians and the emperor were allied with one another. At the moment, Werth was in command of Duke Maximilian's cavalry south of Ingolstadt.
What did it say about Raudegen's own prospects? There was no noble predicate preceding his name, either. It was, in fact, a military alias. So who knew how high the son of a village farrier might rise? That Raudegen was the son of a village farrier was the reason von Werth had assigned him to this scouting mission. He, too, knew how to stand at a ford and water horses, with none of the danger that a noble captain might run of breaking out of character.
There were all sorts of stories going around in the army, coming from the books of Grantville. That in another world than this, in May of this very year, von Werth had played a significant part in a great Catholic victory at Nördlingen; that as a reward, Ferdinand II really had made him a Freiherr, whatever ambiguities his social status may have had before. That Maximilian had promoted him. Feldmarschalleutnant und Generalwachtmeister. Lieutenant Field Marshall and Major General.
In this far less favorable world, von Werth was in a stinking camp south of Ingolstadt. Champing at the bit, wanting to do something, anything, to move against Banér.
Raudegen finished his task and walked downstream to where five other Bavarian cavalrymen in plain clothes were waiting for him. They had expected nothing more exciting from this day's work than a count of sheep and oxen being driven toward Neuburg and Ingolstadt. Only one went back across the Danube, carrying a message to von Werth and his commander, General Franz von Mercy, whom Duke Maximilian had borrowed from the Lorrainers. Raudegen himself took the others and headed back to Rennertshofen, profoundly wishing that they had horses. They had left their horses on the south bank. If he was wrong, he was making a laughing stock of himself. If he was right....
* * * *
They were across the ford. Walking again, next to Mary's horse, Maria Anna thought that she might as well start now. She would begin a novena, for the salvation of Mary Simpson's Socinian soul.
She told her so, as they ate their supper. There were no rooms to be had in Marxheim. Cavriani had bought a salad of peas from a vendor and fresh bread; they had a place to camp and tether the two horses in the fenced courtyard behind the bakery.
"Oh, into guilt tripping, are you?"
Some explanation followed. What a lovely concept, Maria Anna thought. She rested her chin upon her knee, meditatively.
"To think," she said, "that I have been 'guilt tripped' all my life and no one ever told me. I am not embarrassed to 'guilt trip' you. People do it all the time." She gestured at Veronica, who was pulling a bucket of water for the horses from the cistern on the other side of the yard. "Just as Mother Superior Ward's making the rosary of twigs was to give Frau Dreeson one. Which it did."
They had a rather nice discussion of tactics and techniques. Not, Mary pointed out, manipulation. It was nicer to consider it under, well, some other word. But it had to be done. Otherwise, if one did not bring people to some common focus of purposes, there would be no schools, no operas.
"Opera? You like opera?" Opera had not entered the conversation as long as they were traveling with the English Ladies. "Have you ever heard this?" Maria Anna started humming; Mary laughed and started singing along.
"I saw the original production of The Sound of Music."
In the back courtyard of a bakery in Marxheim, plans for the expansion of Europe's commitment to opera, generously defined, began to arise; then spread to ballet. In the course of it, Maria Anna and Mary each discovered that the other would really rather converse on these matters in excellent literary Italian, or in French, rather than in somewhat fractured German. Their conversation rapidly became more voluble. The discussion moved to contemporary artists of the Netherlands, and to the interior decoration of state buildings in national capitals.
Veronica, who did not know a word of either Italian or French and had no desire to learn, looked at them sardonically, curled up, and went to sleep.
Leopold Cavriani smiled into the dark. "Culture vultures," Annabelle Piazza had called such people. Idly, he wondered for a while about the best way to put the phrase into Latin. When he had a chance, he would have to ask Marc's friend Böcler back in the Upper Palatinate. Then he went to sleep as well.
* * * *
Raudegen was uncertain. The younger woman certainly had an uncanny resemblance to the archduchess. But he could scarcely believe that an archduchess of Austria would walk while permitting another woman to ride. There could be no other woman in this part of the Germanies who outranked her. But now that he had seen the other two women with her, he was nearly sure. He had been there, that day in Freising, when the "witches" were dumped out of the barrels. Possibly, just possibly, an archduchess might walk and permit the wife of the up-time admiral to ride, given the way that the war between the Swede and the League of Ostend was going.
He would risk following them for another day, at least. He had come up through the ranks; he had not gained his commission through mental timidity any more than he had gained it through physical cowardice.
* * * *
From Donauwörth to Ulm
Egli had been right in both of his predictions. The two horses he had bought at Neuburg reached retirement age by the time they got to Donauwörth. But there, more horses were to be found, not to mention another factor employed by Cavriani Frères de Genève and, thereby, access to more money. Cavriani bought four decent horses, whether Veronica wanted to ride o
r not. He obtained clean clothing, not new, but of good enough quality to justify the horses, from a second-hand dealer. They kept Egli's broad-brimmed hats.
* * * *
Four horses. That meant that the group had the money, obviously, to purchase them. Plus different clothing. The younger woman's stance on horseback was very like that of Archduchess Maria Anna.
Raudegen sent a second man back to Ingolstadt with another, more urgent, message.
* * * *
The next day they made Höchstädt by noon. The town had plenty of amenities, naturally, since the counts of Pfalz-Neuburg had a residence there and the customary service businesses had grown up around the palace. They had a pleasant lunch.
Cavriani bypassed Dillingen altogether. No sane and reasonable Calvinist wanted to go near the seat of Heinrich von Knoeringen, prince-bishop of Augsburg.
Lauingen was Pfalz-Neuburg again, another residence of the counts; a short day, but a safe place to spend the night. The southerly road that forked off before Lauingen would have been easier, but Gundremmingen and Offingen were subject to the prince-bishop of Augsburg. Cavriani preferred to avoid them, just as he had avoided Dillingen.
* * * *
Captain Raudegen was seriously disappointed. He sent the third of his five men back, this time to Dillingen and then to continue to Ingolstadt. He told the man to get a horse from the lieutenant and come back, with information on what Werth said. He was becoming concerned; he should have received some response from Werth before this.
* * * *
They could have made Gundelfingen today easily enough, just another mile and a half. But that was over the border into another jurisdiction. Better, Cavriani thought, to stay where they were. Going through Gundelfingen and its check points in the morning would suffice. After that, Günzburg and an unavoidable crossing to the south bank; there were no more passable roads on the north shore of the Danube along here. Günzburg. Voerderoesterreich. Austrian. One of the widely strewn Habsburg possessions in Swabia. Günzburg; one of the archdukes—Karl, Cavriani thought—had actually resided there twenty or so years ago, for quite a while. He checked with Maria Anna.
"Yes," she said. "It was Archduke Karl. The son of the one who obstinately married the Augsburg girl, Philippine Welser. She was rich and beautiful, but not noble. Her two sons, therefore, were not eligible to inherit any hereditary Habsburg titles." She smiled. "We are, though, sufficiently proud of ourselves that we did not leave them commoners, but gave them others. This Karl first married an Italian commoner who bore him children; he had none by his second wife, a Cleves duchess who was of equal birth. He died in 1618. His sons are called von Hohenberg."
The vagaries of Habsburg genealogy were not Cavriani's concern. Before they started out the next morning, he asked, "Is there anyone in Günzburg who would be likely to recognize you?"
Maria Anna pursed her lips. "I don't think so. It is a long way away from Vienna or Prague, and Günzburg has been administered from Tyrol since Archduke Karl died. If any official stationed here has ever seen me, it would have been when I was a child or young girl, probably." She frowned. "Unless, of course, it might be one of the military officers. Or even an ordinary soldier. They come and go."
Leipheim; good enough. Nersingen and a thorough examination of their travel papers by officials of the prince-abbey of Elchingen. They were passed through. So were Raudegen and the two men he still had with him.
* * * *
Ulm
Ulm. Beautiful, beautiful, Ulm. Cavriani had never been so happy to see an imperial city in his life. This had been their longest day since leaving Neuburg, and an uneasy one.
Never so happy until the next morning. Leaving the women at the inn where they had slept, he went to look up some businessmen of his acquaintance, bought a newspaper, and checked with the money changer who served as the firm's banker here.
All of them were unanimously in agreement. Going farther into Swabia now would be the act of an insane man. Even if Cavriani had urgent business at home in Geneva, he should plan to stay in Ulm for quite some time. No one in Ulm knew precisely what Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar planned to do next, nor, above all, why he was carrying out his current course of action, but the rumors were running wild.
Half of Bernhard's army was still in the Franche-Comté, the Sundgau, and Alsace. It could be arrayed against the French, but the French were not moving. Given the crushing defeat they had suffered at Ahrenbök, how could they? The other half—at least half, maybe more— was marching into southern Swabia. No one knew why. Certainly, however, he had cut the Spanish Road.
Horn had thrown a strong garrison into Ehingen, a dozen miles or so up the Danube; the roads were secure that far, at least, although there were foraging parties throughout the countryside collecting "contributions" from the villages.
Past Ehingen, tomorrow? Or the next day? Who knew? No one had heard from Munderkingen for three days; the great monastery at Obermarchtal had burned already in the spring of 1633; each side, Bernhard's troops and Horn's troops, accusing the other of having done it. Either seemed equally probable, the way the war in Swabia had been conducted. The magnificent organ had been a great loss; even a Lutheran city councilor in Ulm would admit that. In any case, he would be well-advised not to try the south route. The northern road, however, past Lauterach and Reichenstein, was in very poor repair for at least five miles before it intersected the main road again, and there were reports of attacks on travelers.
In any case, Horn had occupied Riedlingen, one of the five Austrian cities along the Danube. That was five days ago. Anywhere Cavriani went, past Ulm, he would be in the presence of troop movements. Which meant that, almost certainly, some of those troops would confiscate his horse.
Nobody had reliable information on the current situation beyond Riedlingen. The monastery at Inzigkofen, too, had been burned, the previous fall. That, it was fairly certain, had been done by Bernhard. After all, he and his troops, although in the service of France, were mainly Protestants. In many villages that before the war had sixty or seventy households, there were perhaps six or seven remaining. The other farmers had fled, some into the walled cities with which they had sanctuary contracts, some into Switzerland. At one point, Horn had invested the Austrian towns of Mengen and Sigmaringen, which he would have to pass, but he might have pulled those troops away to face the new threat from Bernhard. There was no way to tell. The monastery at Beuron had also gone up in flames last fall; the abbot and monks had fled into Switzerland.
The valley of the upper Danube had suffered greatly since the autumn of 1632, everyone said. Mühlheim had been repeatedly occupied by the opposing forces, first Bernhard's and then the Swedes. In one attack there in 1632, two hundred Swedes had been killed; he would see the mass grave as he passed by. The little town was no longer really significant since the moving of the road from Lake Constance to Rottweil to run through Tuttlingen, but still, before the war, it had nearly a hundred households. The last Cavriani's informant had heard, there were less than thirty. The rest had fled, starved, or fallen victim to the plague. All of which meant that if he insisted on leaving Ulm, he would find no safe stopping point before Tuttlingen, at the earliest.
Cavriani came back to the inn in full sympathy with Duke Ernst. He sincerely wished that General Banér were available to say what he was thinking. They had been lucky, thus far. Now he was facing ninety miles between Ulm and Donaueschingen—more if they had to detour around scenes of military action—through nearly two dozen different official political jurisdictions, none of which had any authorities effectively in charge because of the war, on insecure roads in the midst of major troop movements. In the company of three women who would make extremely valuable hostages for Bernhard or, in the case of the archduchess, possibly for Horn also.
If, of course, anybody bothered to identify them and did not simply kill them first.
Chapter 56
Vita Brevis
Bavaria, south of Ingolstadt
/> "This," Marc Cavriani proclaimed, "is completely insane."
For the past three days, he and Susanna had spent more time in the fields, sitting or lying concealed behind or under bushes, than they had spent walking. They had spent one entire afternoon in a pear orchard, up in one of the trees, avoiding soldiers. At the moment, they were lying in a drainage ditch, about a half mile outside Hohenkammer. There were three or four inches of water at the very bottom from the recent rains. In the spring, it probably ran full, eighteen inches or two feet before the water would spill over into the low-lying portion of the planted fields and drown the young crops.
Marc's impression was that every soldier in Bavaria must be moving in the direction of Ingolstadt. That had to be wrong, of course. Duke Maximilian might be pulling men from the eastern border, against Austria. Out of the garrisons, even though that would be risky, considering how strongly the local administrative districts had been objecting to quartering and contributions during the past year. Bavaria was poised on the edge of a peasant revolt; the demands of the military were more than its people could meet. Surely, however, the duke was not pulling away the ones who were looking west, toward Swabia?
In any case, wherever they came from, Marc certainly did not wish to join them. The last thing that he wanted to be was a Bavarian soldier—which he was likely to become, being a young man and able-bodied, if any of these units saw him. He did not have much confidence that an Italian passport would save him. That was the last thing he wanted, not just because of personal distaste, but because he was responsible for Susanna.
Susanna. If they were taken by a military company, there was no possibility that she could disguise the fact that she was a girl for long. When that happened....
