"A lot worse. Especially if Richelieu gets Spain mired in Germany and makes mischief elsewhere." Mazarini scowled at the map, as if willing Gustavus Adolphus away from the Spanish Road. That road had been instituted in days when the English were resolute in their heresy, rather than kissing Spanish diplomatic ass and leaving their shipping alone, inasmuch as a nation of inveterate pirates could bring themselves to do that.
The road was the land route from Spanish-held Genoa to Flanders, a hard road and an expensive one. Poner un pica en Flandes, they said, for anything difficult and expensive to just short of impossible.
"Don't know why Spain doesn't just abandon the Road. They haven't used it in ten years," said Heinzerling.
"That hasn't stopped them fighting for it. You forget, I was in the Valtelline for the last bloodletting. And the Mantuan business, for which that fathead de Nevers and his alleged inheritance was no more than a pretext. We kept that from a worse fight only by the Grace of God." Mazarini made a face. "Worse fight. Hah! Plague and fever and nearly three years of butchery." He trailed off, remembering some of the things he had had to ride past in cavalier finery. He had stuck resolutely to his clerical dress after that.
Heinzerling prodded, seeing his boss about to grow maudlin. "So what do we do?"
"Try to stop my good work being undone by Spaniard hotheads, that's what we do." Mazarini scratched his chin, although he had already thought it through. "We have to get into this before worse happens. Go, start packing, my German friend, you're going to be taking a trip home soon."
Heinzerling left and Mazarini turned his mind's eye to Thuringia and the problem of making contacts in this Grantville. Anywhere else, and the notables would be known to someone. A discreet question or two and the Church's formidable network of gossips would see that the information got to him.
So, instead, to first principles: if you want to know something about a parish, ask the priest. He began to rummage through the reports. The one that named the church in Grantville was among the earliest—the doctrinal lay of the land had been the first priority of the spies, given what it usually told about a local ruler in the Holy Roman Empire.
When Mazarini saw the name that church had borne when the town first appeared, he gaped for a moment. When he saw the spies' comment that it was clearly a heretic establishment as there was no such saint, he positively bellowed with laughter, slapping the desk in his mirth.
Heinzerling put his head back around the door as Mazarini was recovering, some minutes later. "Ein problem?" he asked.
"No, quite the reverse. I think there is more to the story about Thuringia than I was prepared to credit. You remember who we had in here last week? Who you had to 'escort' out of the Palais?"
"That arschloch down from Paris?"
"The very same." Mazarini turned the report around on his desk. "Here, look here."
Heinzerling looked down at the paper, his lips moving a moment. When he looked up, he was grinning. "Ja. Definitely from a far and strange time. Of course there is no such saint, he isn't dead. Yet. More is the pity."
"Oh, it makes too much sense not to be true." Mazarini choked while his belly shook again with laughter. "Saint Vincent de Paul. Oh, he should be, he should be. What do the French say of their priests? The shortest way to hell?"
"Is to be ordained a priest, ja."
"Quite so, and de Paul is trying to teach them their letters and to stay out of the whorehouses. The patience of a saint!"
Heinzerling's grin widened. "Would you mind that I tell him?" He was fighting to control his face, trying to reconcile the expostulating little man he had marched out of the Palais by the scruff of his soutane with the image of a plaster saint. With his name on the front of a church, yet.
Mazarini choked again, and then roared with another burst of laughter. "No," he said when he recovered, "In the name of God and all his Angels and Saints, including Saint Fucking Vincent, no. The wretched mendicant will simply increase his demands to match his new status. No, Heinzerling, you're going to Thuringia. And I want reports on everything, you hear me? Everything."
2
Six months before, two newlyweds had walked out of Saint Vincent's, Grantville, after the novelty of a Methodist wedding service conducted in a Catholic church.
"Just got to change, then I'm ready when you are, Larry." The Reverend Simon Jones came back into the church from waving off the happy couple. "I intend to scandalize my flock by buying a beer for a romish idolater."