"Please," Pat said. "Don't ask." If anything, she turned redder. Her skin was very fair.
So Noelle didn't ask. But she did look the name up later. And blushed as red as Pat by the time she was done with the biographical sketch. Being named, even second-hand, for someone whose life history was summed up under the keywords "erotic French sex kitten" just didn't seem to be the proper image for a would-be nun.
"Um, Bernadette," she asked a couple of days later. "Did you ever hear of Brigitte Bardot?"
"Yep," Bernadette answered tersely.
"When we went in to do the name change. Ah, Dennis says that's what he called Mom when she was a teenager. Brigitte. She gave the name to me when I was baptized. For her. Because Patty was already named Patricia, I guess."
Bernadette looked at her. "Well, keep it in mind when you're thinking about whether or not you want to join a religious order."
"What do you mean?"
"You are Pat's daughter and he probably wasn't calling her that for no reason at all."
"Uh?"
"Look, Noelle." Bernadette tried to keep her voice kind rather than brusque. "Nowhere in all that testimony before Judge Tito and Tom Riddle or at the hearing over at St. Mary's did anybody so much as hint that Dennis and Pat waited until they were out in Leavenworth with his dime-store rings on her finger to start sleeping together."
"Oh." Noelle paused a moment. "Well, I guess that wouldn't have been likely. From what I've learned about Dennis' family so far. Actually, Dennis told me that they didn't wait that long. When I asked him about it. It would have embarrassed Mom if I asked her."
"I'm sure it would," Bernadette agreed. "And if you're even thinking about becoming a nun, Noelle, you might give some consideration to what she was doing then that would embarrass her so much if you asked her about it now."
And after that, Bernadette said to herself, you'd better think again.
The Austro-Hungarian Connection
Eric Flint
Chapter 1. The Track
Vienna, Austria
October 1634
Fortunately, that part of Janos Drugeth's mind that always remained calm and controlled, even in the fury of a battlefield, was still there to restrain his panic. Indeed, it found the panic itself unseemly.
You are a Hungarian cavalry officer in the service of the Austrian emperor, that part of his mind informed Janos sternly. A breed noted for its valor.
It was all Janos could do not to snarl "so what?" aloud. He was not facing the familiar terrors of war.
You are not even unaccustomed to this, the stern inner voice continued. You have ridden in automobiles before. In Grantville. Several times. Just a few months ago.
Janos' grip on the handrest of his door to the vehicle grew tighter still. He was sitting on what Americans called the "passenger side" of the automobile. They also sometimes referred to it as "riding shotgun," he'd been told, a phrase that didn't seem to make any more sense than many of the up-timers' expressions.
True. He had. Four times, in fact, with three different operators.
But, first, those vehicles had been driven by Americans very familiar with their operation. All three of them filled with the sobriety of age, to boot. Not a young Austrian emperor whose personal acquaintance with automobiles was this one, and no other. The cursed thing had just arrived in Vienna the month before, not long before Janos himself returned from his inspection of the frontier forts facing the Turks.
Second, two of the vehicles had been large and stately things, moving not much faster than a horse and stopping frequently. What the up-timers called "buses." The third had been a "pickup" filled with people in the open area in the back, which moved not much faster than the buses. And the fourth had been large and roomy, almost the size of a proper coach if much lower-built, whose operator had been an elderly woman.
None of them had been a so-called "sports car" driven by a maniacal down-time monarch. Nor had any of them been driven on a ridiculous oval-shaped course freshly prepared for the purpose at the command of the crazed king in question. Ferdinand called it a "race track." The term was English, and unfamiliar to Janos. But his command of the language was almost fluent now, and he could easily determine its inner logic. Its frightening inner logic.
The automobile skidded around another curve in the race track. The rear wheels lost their grip on the surface, just as Janos had known carts to do on slippery cobblestones during a rain or in mud. But the carts had been moving slowly, not at—his eyes locked on the "speedometer" and froze at the sight—sixty miles an hour. The phrase didn't have a precise meaning to Janos, but he knew that was far faster than he'd ever seen an American drive such a contraption. And even at slow speeds, such a mishap could easily cause a sturdy down-time cart to break a wheel or axle.