Chapter 1
Magdeburg, central Germany
Capital of the United States of Europe
After they'd completed the grand tour—Michael's phrase; and a disturbingly appropriate one—of their new home, and had returned to the entrance foyer, Rebecca looked around. Her gaze was simultaneously uncertain, dubious, apprehensive, wary, skittish . . .
She tried to avoid the term "covetous." Not . . . entirely successfully. Compared to the modest working-class house owned by the Stearns family in Grantville, much less the cramped apartments Rebecca and Michael had been occupying since they moved to Magdeburg, this house was both immense and luxurious. In truth, it was more in the way of a mansion than a house, if not a manor as such. The building was immediately adjacent to its neighbors and had almost no yard; what the up-timers called a townhouse. But by the inner city standards of Magdeburg it was as close to a mansion as you could get, short of an outright palace.
The very foyer she was standing in exemplified her mixed feelings. The "foyer" in Mike's house in Grantville had been a simple entry vestibule, just large enough to provide the house with a heat trap in winter and space to hang some coats. The foyer in this house bore a closer resemblance to the hall of an auditorium. You could hold a fairly large party in this space.
Andrew Short came into the foyer from a side door that led to the rooms in the back of the house. "Splendid field of fire," he announced, giving the area a sweeping gaze that had none of Rebecca's doubts and anxieties. He was actually rubbing his hands!
"There's no way in except through that door"—he jabbed a forefinger at the main entrance—"and the service entrance in the rear. And anyone who tries to come through here, we'll slaughter the bastards. Assuming they get in at all."
Rebecca studied the entrance in question. For all its ornate decorations, the "door" looked like it belonged in a castle. It was a double door, huge, made of solid oak further braced with iron, and seemed to have enough in the way of locks and latches to sink a rowboat—not to mention the heavy crossbar resting nearby that could be added in a pinch. The "service entrance" in the back was similar in design and construction, if smaller and completely utilitarian.
There were no other entrances on the ground floor of the mansion. Rebecca had been struck by that: not so much as a single window. Not even a barred one, or an old-style arrow slit. Anyone attempting to assault the house would either have to smash down the heavy doors, blow a hole in the thick stonework of the walls, or scale the second floor using ladders. And those windows were barred. True, the bars were tastefully designed. They were also thick and too closely spaced for a human body to pass through.
For all practical purposes, their new home was an urban fortress. That was hardly surprising, since it had been planned and built with that purpose in mind. Michael Stearns had known for more than a year that he'd eventually be leaving Magdeburg for long stretches of time, and he was bound and determined to keep his wife and children as well protected as possible in his absence. By now, more than four years after the Ring of Fire, he had lots of enemies. Many of them were bitter and some of them were prone to violence.
Rebecca had plenty of enemies herself, for that matter. If she wasn't as prominent as her husband in the political affairs of the new United States of Europe, she wasn't that far behind him, either—and had the added distinction of being a Jewess.
Andrew spoke again, now jabbing his finger at the ceiling. "And look there! Murder holes! Ha! They'll be surprised to run into that, should the bastards made the attempt."
He didn't specify the names or even the nature of "the bastards." For someone like Andrew Short, it hardly mattered. He and his small clan had transferred their allegiance from the king of England to the person many people called the prince of Germany. Princes had enemies, it was a given; and such enemies were bastards. Also a given.
Rebecca stared up at the ceiling. Murder holes. She knew what they were, abstractly, but such devices were something she associated with medieval castles. Here, in a modern town house built as much as possible along up-time lines . . .
Finally, she spotted them. They were cleverly disguised as further decorations in a heavily decorated ceiling. Wood inlays, to a casual observer. But she had no doubt the wood inlays were slats that could be easily slid aside, exposing any attackers below to fire from above.
She shook her head and looked away. The headshake was simply rueful, not a gesture of denial or criticism. She knew all too well the risks she and her husband—and their children—were taking and had been taking for years. If any reminder were needed, the mayor of Grantville and one of the town's ministers had been assassinated just three months earlier. By fanatic reactionary anti-Semites, it was presumed—exactly the sort of people who hated Rebecca with a passion and had been writing and spreading vicious propaganda about her for at least two years now.