The Eastern Front(23)

Part Two



July 1635



The round ocean and the living air





Chapter 8


Magdeburg

Had Gretchen seen the expression on Rebecca's face a month earlier, when Rebecca first inspected her new home in the capital, she would have recognized it. She was wearing much the same expression, after having completed an inspection of her own new home in the city.

Not quite, though. Gretchen had the same uncertain, dubious, apprehensive, wary, and skittish attitude. But, unlike Rebecca, she was making no attempt to avoid covetousness. The last few weeks of having to take care of a small horde of children again—she'd forgotten what it was like, during her long absence in France and Holland—made the prospect of settling them into a large apartment building very attractive.

In her days as a camp follower in a mercenary army, she wouldn't have thought of such things. Lack of privacy had been the least of her worries. But she was not immune to the common tendency of people to have their expectations and aspirations expand along with their blessings. The more you had, it sometimes seemed, the more you wanted. If you weren't careful, that could lead into a bottomless pit.

"And down you'll plunge," she muttered.

* * *

Jeff had lagged behind his wife, more interested than she was in the interior design of the building. He came into the vestibule just in time to hear her last remark.

"What was that, hon?" he asked.

Gretchen shook her head. "I was just contemplating the dangers of excessive greed."

Jeff looked around, smiling nostalgically. The structure had been designed by a down-time architect. Where an up-time apartment building was essentially a collection of individual homes all squished together, this "apartment building" reminded Jeff of a hotel more than anything else. Not a newfangled motel, either, but the sort of oldstyle hotels you often found in the downtown areas of small cities.

He'd had a great-aunt in Winchester who'd owned such a hotel. He'd spent a week there, once, when he was eight years old. His great-aunt's hotel had only a few transient customers. Most of the inhabitants of its many rooms had been elderly residents of the town, usually but not always male. There was a common kitchen, and his great-aunt always provided three meals a day in the hotel's dining room.

That was what this apartment building in Magdeburg reminded him of—except this building even came with a resident cook. Two of them, in fact. A middle-aged man and his wife; both, of course, members of the city's Committee of Correspondence.

"So much for those piker Joneses!" He said that with a melodramatic sneer, twirling a mustachio in the bargain. The seventeenth century had its drawbacks, but it also had its advantages. One of the greatest of those, in Jeff's opinion, was the ubiquitous facial hair sported by men. Jeff ran toward fat, and had been sensitive about it since childhood. He still was, even though he'd replaced of lot of fat with muscle since the Ring of Fire, and even though Gretchen insisted she didn't care. Nothing, in Jeff's opinion, improved a plump lip and jowls like a beard and mustache.

"Who are the Jones?" asked Gretchen.

"They're the next door neighbors that people are always trying to surpass in wealth and ostentatious displays."

"Ah." She nodded wisely. "Bait, dangled by the devil."

This was one of the seventeenth century's drawbacks, on the other hand—the tendency of its inhabitants to inflate all manner of human frailties. There was no peccadillo that someone wouldn't call a sin; no venal sin that couldn't be made into a mortal one; and no mortal sin where a dozen could be described in detail. Even a person as normally levelheaded as Gretchen was prone to the habit.

"Fortunately, we are not guilty," she continued. "I have decided that Gunther is right. We can use this otherwise-far-too-large building for good purposes. The basement, for instance, is perfect for an armory."

And another drawback. This one, the tendency of down-timers to look at everything bloody-mindedly. As his friend Eddie Cantrell had once put it: "These guys make the Hatfields and McCoys look like Phil Donahue and Oprah."

Of course, given the nature of the seventeenth century, it was hard to blame them. The Hatfields and McCoys would have been right at home here.



Veronica and Annalise came into the vestibule. "It will suit you, I think," said Gretchen's grandmother.

Jeff figured the "I think" part of the sentence was what the British philosopher Bertrand Russell had called a meaningless noise in a collection of essays he'd read once. Gretchen was devoted to her grandmother. Jeff would allow that the old biddy was tough as nails, and some of the time he even liked her. But he often found her view of the universe annoying. Veronica, so far as Jeff could tell, recognized no distinction between an hypothesis, a theorem, and a fact—not, at least, if she was the one expounding the certainty.