Ring of Fire(186)
Then, he looked faintly alarmed. Morris chuckled harshly. "Yeah, I know. You can't cook worth a damn, kosher or not. Neither can I."
Morris looked toward the bank of windows on a far wall. Somewhere beyond, over one hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies, lay Grantville—where his wife was getting ready to join him with the rest of the workforce that was moving to Prague.
"Judith is gonna kill me," he predicted gloomily.
"Nonsense," pronounced Uriel. "Hire cooks from the ghetto. You have no choice anyway, under existing law. It is illegal for a Jew to hire Christian servants—and you'll need servants also, living in this almost-a-palace. Or Judith will surely murder you."
"That's a good idea," Jason chimed in eagerly. "It'll help dispel suspicions of us, too, if people from the ghetto get to know us better. If you have cooks and servants coming in and out of the house every day, as well as jewelers and gemcutters coming to the workplace . . ."
That just made Morris feel gloomier. "Great. So now I've got to be an exhibit in a zoo, too?"
"Yes," said Uriel firmly.
Chapter III: Fianchetto
June, 1633
1
"Please come in, Bishop Comenius, all of you." Morris waved his hand toward the many armchairs in the very large living room.
Morris still thought of it as a "living room," even though he suspected that "salon" was a more appropriate term. Despite having now lived in this mansion in Prague for a number of weeks, Morris was still adjusting mentally to the reality of his new situation. Three months ago, by the standards of the seventeenth century, he had been a well-off man. Today, after the results reported by his partners Antonio Nasi and Gerhard Rueckert in the letter Morris had received two days earlier, he was a wealthy man—by the standards of any century.
Seeing the entourage Comenius had brought with him and who were now filing into the room—a room that was already occupied by a large number of people—Morris was glad that the room was so enormous. It was a very proper-looking room, too, since he and Judith never used it as a "living room"—for that, they maintained a much smaller and more comfortable room on the second floor of the mansion—and the small army of servants they had recently acquired kept it spotlessly clean.
That was another thing Morris was still trying to get accustomed to. Servants. And not just a cleaning lady who came in once a week, either, but a dozen people who came and went every day. In fact, they would have lived in the mansion except that, following Uriel and Jason's advice—which was the law, anyway—Morris had hired exclusively Jewish cooks and servants. By the laws still in force in Prague, they were required to return to the ghetto every night, just as they were required to wear distinctive insignia identifying themselves as Jews whenever they left the ghetto.
Morris did not share the ferocious egalitarianism of such people as Gretchen Richter and her Committees of Correspondence, although he was, quietly, one of her chief financial backers. He wasn't even as egalitarian as some of the more diehard members of the United Mine Workers and their growing number of spin-off union s. Still, he found the situation somewhat embarrassing—and was growing angrier all the time at the restrictions placed on Jews in his new day and age. The restrictions were being ignored in his case, true, since Morris fell into the informal category of a "court Jew." But they still left a smoldering resentment.
Seeing the last man filing into the salon after Bishop Comenius, Morris felt the resentment vanish.
"Hey, Red! Long time. I was wondering if you were still alive."
Red Sybolt squinted at him. "Hi, Morris. Oh, yeah, I'm still around. Still kicking, too." He jerked a thumb at the very large man by his side. "Hell, even Jan here is still alive, which is a real miracle given how crazy he is. Things got hairy now and then, especially in Saxony, but the worst that happened is my glasses got busted. I still haven't managed to scrounge up a new pair."
Morris had always liked Bobby Gene "Red" Sybolt. He wasn't sure why, exactly, since on the face of it Red and he shouldn't have gotten along all that well. Just for starters, Red was one of those union activists who, though not really a socialist himself, had been influenced by socialists he'd run across in the course of his activities before the Ring of Fire. In his case, by the Socialist Workers Party, which had, off and on, had a certain presence in northern West Virginia going back to the late 1940s. One of the things Red had picked up from the SWP was a hostility toward Zionism. And while Morris had been uneasy about some of the policies of the state of Israel toward Palestinians, both he and his wife Judith had always been supporters of Israel.