The Baltic War(176)

"That went quite well, I thought," he said to Torstensson a bit later, after summarizing the settlement.



The Swedish general extended his forearm and looked at his watch.



Mike frowned. "Is there some deadline I don't know about?"



"Oh, it's not that. I just wanted to make sure you hadn't somehow swindled me out of my timepiece while we were talking."





Chapter 40


"What's wrong, Caroline?" asked the young countess of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, after she came into the door of Caroline Platzer's office in the settlement house.



There being no answer from that quarter, Emelie turned to the third occupant of the room. That was Princess Kristina, perched on a chair next to Caroline's desk. "Why is Caroline gripping that sheet of paper as if it were the devil's work, and glaring at it so?"



"It's a letter from Count Thorsten," Kristina piped. The princess having decreed Thorsten Engler a count, she was not about to relinquish the claim. Here as in so many instances, the daughter could teach the royal father lessons in stubbornness.



Kristina pointed to the offending letter in question. "The censors blocked out so much of what he said that she can't make much sense of it."



The seven-year-old's ensuing shrug was a gesture far beyond her years. "I don't really see what she's so upset about, myself. Practically everything they left is an endearment of one sort or another. So it's not as if she's wondering if he still wants to be betrothed."



As she'd been talking, the older dowager countess of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt had come into the room also. Anna Sophia took a chair; then, with a loud and disdainful sniff:



"As if he could anyway! The offer of betrothal was made in front of witnesses. Well, more or less. But her acceptance of the offer certainly was. Scandalous, that business. The whole town's still talking about it."



Taking her own seat, Emelie almost laughed. There were times she found her middle-aged sister-in-law's definition of "the whole town" quite amusing. What Anna Sophia really meant was proper society—and solely the Lutheran portion of it, at that.



Emelie didn't doubt at all that the regiments of the army had been talking about the betrothal, also. But the dowager countess wouldn't know about that, and wouldn't care if she did. Her concern, and that of her intimate circles, was that Caroline Platzer had made a most unsuitable match for a husband—and, alas, there was now very little that could be done about it. Seeing as how the impetuous and foolish young woman had made such an incredible public display of the business.



"I have no idea what's happening to him!" Caroline wailed, slamming the letter onto the desk under her hands.



Thankfully, Anna Sophia said nothing—and Caroline wasn't looking at her. Thankfully, because it was clear from the expression on the dowager countess' face that her thoughts were running along the lines of: Well, you know he's still alive. More's the pity.



The problem wasn't even so much a clash of cultural attitudes as it was a clash of expectations that were shaped and colored by those very different attitudes. Perhaps because of her youth, or perhaps simply because she'd spent so much time with Caroline and Maureen Grady and other Americans, Emelie could see both sides of the issue where neither Caroline nor Anna Sophia could see any but theirs.



For Caroline, as for all the up-timers, the issue was simply and solely one of a prospective marriage. And since issues of class didn't matter to them, Thorsten Engler made a perfectly suitable match for Caroline. End of discussion.



There were subtleties there, of course. As she'd gotten to know them better, Emelie had come to realize that the American indifference to class was not so much indifference as it was a very different assessment of how class was defined in the first place. Unless issues of race complicated the matter—and she'd found up-timer attitudes on that subject both varied and often contradictory—then the "blood" of the prospective marital partners was simply irrelevant, especially in this instance. The Americans were a hybrid stock, whose second-largest national component after the Anglo-Saxons was German to begin with. That was certainly true of Caroline Platzer, as her surname alone indicated.



What did matter was, first, a person's economic status; and second and still more important, a person's prospects for economic advancement.



And there was an enormous cultural weight thrown onto the latter, reinforced over and over again in every aspect of American society. It was one of the standard themes of their popular literature, whether in the form of books or those moving visual depictions that Emelie found so fascinating. Show any American a story where a lively young woman's "hand in marriage," as they put it, was being sought by two rivals, one poor but industrious and the other wealthy and indolent, and the audience automatically knew which rival they favored.