"Sit down," he urged Gretchen. "Have some more tea."
But Gretchen was far too frustrated to follow that advice. She was the sort of person who, once she'd made up her mind to do something, wanted to do it. Now. Not tomorrow. Not the day after.
Now.
All the more so, since Tata's daily radio reports indicated that Dresden was coming to a boil. With the elector dead and the USE's emperor completely absorbed by his campaign in Poland, there was a power vacuum in Saxony. Then word came that Kresse and his little army of irregulars—the same people who had killed John George—had left the Upper Vogtland and were marching on Dresden. That army wasn't even so little anymore. The militias of many of the villages and towns that Kresse passed through or nearby were joining him.
That news—which Tata and Joachim Kappel had seen got spread widely—had panicked many of Dresden's patricians, prosperous burghers and officials. They'd fled the city, just as the same class of people had fled Amsterdam before the cardinal-infante could begin his siege.
The whole situation sounded much like Amsterdam. There might even be a rough equivalent to Fredrik Hendrik, the prince of Orange with whom Gretchen had been able to negotiate and maintain something of a tacit alliance. Or truce, at least. Gustav Adolf's appointed administrator, Ernst Wettin, had arrived in the city already. Tata's first reports indicated that despite being the prime minister's younger brother, Wettin didn't seem at all inclined toward confrontation.
But that was probably going to be a moot point, soon enough. The Swedish general Báner was also coming to Dresden. More slowly, because he was bringing an army with him.
There'd been a powerful army at Amsterdam, too. But the commander of that army had been Don Fernando, a man with imagination and great ambitions and, somewhere in his core, a very real streak of decency.
None of which was true of Báner, by all accounts Gretchen had heard. He was coarse, pigheaded, narrow-minded, and seemed to have no ambitions beyond being feared by those he wished to fear him.
He was also on record as saying that the most suitable use for a CoC agitator's head was to serve as an adornment for a pike head. And he was bringing a lot of pikes to Saxony.
"I have to get to Dresden!" she said. For perhaps the twentieth times in two days. If this kept up, she'd have to use a horse, even if she wasn't much of a horsewoman. Or a boat, maybe, except the Elbe was flooding.
Dresden
Tata and Joachim Kappel had taken over the Residenzschloss a week earlier, once it became clear the CoC was now the most powerful force in the city. Dresden's official militia had shattered into pieces after a big portion of its officers fled the city. Many of the rank-and-file militiamen had joined the CoC outright. Many others had simply retired into their private affairs. Yet another portion of the militia—perhaps a quarter of its original number—had reorganized themselves into something they called the Dresden Defense Corps. They were maintaining a studied neutrality concerning the city's political affairs, insisting that they were simply and solely a body to defend Dresden from any attackers.
Whether the definition of "attackers" included Kresse's forces from the Vogtland, now just two days from the city's walls, remained to be seen. But for the moment, Tata and Joachim were willing to keep the peace with the DDC.
Tata and Joachim had developed a very good working relationship. Kappel was the organizer, the "inside man." Tata had much better skills than he did at dealing with people outside the ranks of the CoC. She had become the public face of their movement in the city, far more widely known than he was.
Partly, of course, that was simply due to their very different appearance. Tata was a pleasant-looking young woman, not threatening in any way. Kappel . . .
Eric Krenz had put it this way, in front of both of them, "If the forces of reaction ever need a poster boy for the wicked and vicious instigators of bloody-handed riot and revolution, Joachim, you're their man."
The jest had been close enough to the truth to make even Kappel laugh. He was a man in his early forties who was not simply ugly but frighteningly ugly.
Their enemies in Dresden had taken to calling him "the troll."
So did children on the streets.
So did his own CoC cadre, for that matter.
It had been Kappel who first broached the idea of seizing the elector's palace, but it had been Tata who came up with the formal rationale.
She understood, as Kappel often did not, that you had to be careful not to give people the impression that you were simply high-handed. Even when you were being high-handed. In fact, especially when you were being high-handed.
So, the official explanation for the seizure of the palace: They needed its vast expanse, its many rooms and resources, in order to take care of the troops, wounded in brave battle with the enemy.