Ring of Fire II(47)

They waxed the fabric on the stretchers that the attendants used to carry patients to the Pesthaus, too.



That brought his mind back to the current state of the Pesthaus. Bursting at the seams. Grandma Geraldine had another saying. "The hotter the battle, the shorter the war." She'd gotten that from her own mother. With the help of a set of twins, Great-Grandma Anna had managed to have seven children in eight years before she stopped cold at age thirty.



He hoped his great-grandmother was right.



So he opened the door and went in. It always took him a pause and some thought before he managed to walk up and open that door.





De Melon had become accustomed to the smoke. Something was always burning. When the Health Board had sent members of the council and the lay sodalities out to make a survey of the city, they had found many uninfected families sleeping on straw pallets that were filthy and fetid. That was scarcely surprising. That the poor had pallets at all was a sign of the comparative prosperity of the Germanies as compared to Spain.



The Health Board had ordered them all confiscated and burned. Ordinarily, that would have left the poor sleeping on the ground. Not that this was a terrible hardship in the summer. De Melon had slept on the ground more than once.



The order for a couple thousand clean, uninfected replacement pallets to be delivered to the drop-off point had put a big dent in his budget. Luckily, he hadn't had to pay cash. He had used bank drafts, duly countersigned by two members of the Magistracy for Health and payable in Würzburg. If fortune smiled, he would be reimbursed. By someone. Given the events of the summer, it no longer seemed probable that Duke Maximilian of Bavaria would reimburse him. He was far from sure that the duke was still his employer.



Maybe the bishop of Bamberg? Then, again, probably not, with Dornheim dead in Carinthia and the cathedral chapter not yet having elected a successor. It would be Hatzfeld, probably, but no telling how long it would take the pope to confirm him. It wasn't likely that a suffragan would be willing to authorize large, unexpected, expenditures.



The Health Board had given the fresh pallets to households that had already been cleaned and whitewashed, in return for a promise by the housewife that she would continue to use DDT.



It cost a lot. Probably less than burning corpses, though. Because of the siege, it was not feasible to establish a plague cemetery without continuing to reinfect the city. No way to make burials outside the walls. The church frowned on cremation except in the direst emergency. However . . . Surely the up-time understanding of atoms would lead to a change in policy. Logically, it should not be any more difficult for God to reassemble atoms dispersed in the air than those dispersed in the earth. So . . . Corpses were remarkably hard to burn, even if one saved on fuel by using old pallets and the rags and furnishings taken from infected houses as much as possible. One could regard the new pallets as a good use of limited funds. One would certainly interpret the new pallets as such a good use when reporting the condition of one's budget to one's employer.



There were other savings to be attributed to the siege, also. He did not have to deal with preventive quarantine of possibly infected individuals coming into the town from elsewhere. That tended to be expensive because of the need for posting guards outside the quarantine barracks. Merchants and other travelers often resented having their journeys interrupted, not to mention taking exception to being charged a reasonable amount for board and room during their period of isolation.



Of course, the siege also meant that the Health Board had not been able, thus far, to expel all transients, vagrants, mountebanks, and other undesirable elements who had been in the city when the plague broke out. So the authorities were having to feed them.



He would have to talk to Herr Trelli about that. Expulsion was pretty standard procedure. It was Herr Trelli who had forbidden the council to follow that procedure, on the grounds that they would starve to death between the city walls and the siege lines, or attempt to escape through the siege lines and possibly spread the plague into the countryside.



If Kronach offered to surrender in return for the SoTF's absorbing all the costs of coping with the plague as a starting point for negotiations . . . At the very least, by the time the negotiations ended, Herr Marcantonio in Bamberg should certainly reimburse de Melon for feeding those noncitizens all summer. That was only reasonable. This epidemic was eating up about forty percent of his budget and he wasn't really in the best position to float loans at the moment. No banker worth his salt was going to finance a military entrepreneur who was probably unemployed. Or if employed, employed by the wrong side.