The Ram Rebellion(126)

As political appointees went, Jackson wasn't a bad guy, Matt figured. "Me either," he admitted.





Bamberg, July, 1633




By July, five-year-old Amanda O'Brien seemed likely to become the most spoiled kid in Bamberg. Honorary grandparents and uncles were in competition. Until Stacey, taking a hard look at what was happening, brought home Gerhard and Emilia Kirchhof; orphans aged five and three, and gave Tom this melting look. She told him that she was pregnant again after the adoption went through.





John and Janie Kacere had acquired a couple of boys as foster children, but they were basically too old to be spoiled, both in their early teens. Both had been recommended by a Jesuit at the church the Kaceres attended as brilliant but poor and without known relatives. Farmers' sons, from rural villages that had been burned out. One from Weissenbrunn; one from Hummendorf. One burned by the Catholics from Kronach; one burned by the Protestants in revenge. Equal opportunity mayhem. Both villages had been confessionally mixed; neither set of raiders had bothered to stop and ascertain the confessional affiliation of their victims.





For the time being, they were attending the Latin school in Bamberg, with tutors to help them catch up, while John and Janie taught them English. In a couple of years, the Kaceres thought, they would be able to take them back to Grantville, to go to the high school there.





* * *



Reece Ellis, from the Special Commission on the Establishment of Religious Freedom, came up from Würzburg to see what Walt Miller and Matt Trelli had been doing. When he found out that Walt was down by Forchheim building a road and Matt was up by Kronach trying to figure out what, if anything, Vince Marcantonio and Cliff Priest could do next about the stalemate there, he was less than happy.





A lot of the things that Reece said made Matt feel awfully guilty. He knew that he should have been working on the commission stuff. It was assigned to him. But . . . he just didn't have time.





Vince Marcantonio handed Matt a handful of pamphlets. From Jenny Hinshaw, back in Grantville, he said.





The letter in the package explained things. Her husband, Guy, had just been sent off on some kind of special detached duty. She knew that he had written a briefing paper for the Bamberg team earlier, since he had been stationed in Bamberg uptime and had explored a lot of Franconia while he was there. Picking up tourist brochures, which he had squirreled away. She had stumbled across them the week before while she was looking through some boxes in the closet. There might be something useful; maybe not. In any case, they were welcome to use them, but she would like them back, please, when they were done. They were, after all, Guy's souvenirs. But she thought she would send the originals. Who knew? Maybe even the photos might be of some help.





One term caught Matt's eye. And one name. War of religion. You would think that even when people changed jobs, they would at least stay on the side of the same religion. Sometimes, it seemed, it was just a matter of personal advantage. Or ambition. One guy, an artillery general, Count Johann Philipp Cratz von Scharffenstein, had been in and out of Kronach in 1632 in his capacity as Emperor Ferdinand II's artillery general.





Back then, uptime, in 1633, he had been commander at Ingolstadt, took offense at something Duke Maximilian of Bavaria did or didn't do—the pamphlet wasn't very clear on that—and conspired to turn the Bavarian fortress over to Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. Who, uptime, had still been fighting for the Swedes. The whole thing got extremely confusing. Scharffenstein's plot didn't succeed, but he managed to get away. The upshot had been that in 1634, Scharffenstein, who had helped set up Kronach's defenses when he was on the "Catholic" side had switched sides and turned up as a commander in the "Protestant" army that put the city under siege.





More and more, these days, Matt had a bad taste in his mouth.





Kronach, August, 1633




Carl Neustetter did not know where the plague had come from. It had started the month before. Plague, certainly. Over a hundred people had died, already. If the observers outside the walls were keeping track, they should be counting the funerals.





It certainly did not help that there was no place to bury the dead except inside the walls.





Unless, of course, they wanted to open the gates.





The besiegers had offered a parley. They had not, naturally enough, offered to allow the city to send out its dead for burial. Or to allow the living to leave. The standard way to handle plague was to quarantine it as far as possible.





Neustetter wanted to open the gates. Wolf Philip von Dornheim did not. But, then, he was no longer the bishop's relative. The bishop was dead in his exile. Neustetter had not received any news by way of a human being for nearly three months, but he had always kept a loft of carrier pigeons, as did one of his old friends in Bamberg.