"Hey, wait. Those three security guys have decent MP training. Them we can use." Scott's mood had actually brightened a little. "If only they would send us some staff . . ."
"Yeah," Steve said. "Really, I could use all four of the guys that they're sending to be this commission. If, of course, Congress had been so kind as to appropriate enough money into our budget that Mike could have sent them to work for me. But, at least, they're sending them. For Bamberg, they're just piling the commission function on top of what Walt Miller and Matt Trelli are already doing. In Fulda, Mark Early gets the job and they're sending Joel Matowski out from Grantville to help him, as soon as they can get him detached from what he's doing now."
"Joel Matowski is what? Twenty-four years old?"
"Can it, David," Anita said. "All of us were twenty-four, once upon a time. People can't help it. But—why Reece Ellis?"
They all looked at one another.
It was a good question. The sections of Franconia that Gustavus Adolphus had assigned to Grantville for administrative purposes were almost entirely Catholic. Somehow, most of the administrators sent there by Grantville had turned out to be Catholic, with just a large enough salting of Protestants to indicate that these assignments were not entirely based on religion.
There had been a vague hope that sending Catholics would be a conciliatory gesture, perhaps. Or that it would make more of an impression upon the residents of Franconia if the news about changes in the wind was brought to them by their fellow religionists. Or . . . who knew? In any case, Anita thought, most of the people sitting around the table had known one another for a long time at St. Mary's. The people in the commission seem to follow pretty much the same pattern. Except for Reece.
Scott Blackwell wasn't Catholic, true, but he had recently gotten engaged to a down-time woman who was. Steve's deputy, Saunders Wendell, was Presbyterian—but his wife Jessica was Catholic. Saunders was not in the meeting because he was out arbitrating a dispute between two claimants to a mill pond. The stream of water in question formed the boundary between two Aemter. The Amtmann, the local administrator, in each of them had issued a decision that favored the man from his own district; the dispute had been appealed to higher authority. Saunders, armed with a sheaf of paper from Anita's down-time clerks that laid out the course of the claims for the past three generations, had set out in the sure knowledge that no matter what he decided, at least half of the people involved would be unhappy and resentful at the end of it.
Reece Ellis. Well, aaah. He'd married Anne Marie Robinson, who was a member of the parish. No one knew quite why, except for the obvious, of course. For Anne Marie, the Rite of Holy Matrimony was also the Only Path to Sex. Anita sometimes wondered whether Anne Marie ever regretted having walked down that path with Reece, but if so, she had never admitted it.
Reece hadn't converted. He took outspoken pride in not having converted. He seemed to mention at every opportunity that he hadn't converted.
Why Reece? Why to Franconia?
"Maybe," Scott suggested, "they've run out of baby lawyers."
It seemed as good an explanation as any. The morning staff meeting moved on to the next agenda item.
* * *
"You what?" Reece Ellis asked Johnnie F. "You fucking what?"
Johnnie F., more formally named John Frederic Haun, had come down to Würzburg the previous fall with the first set of military administrators that Grantville sent. It had rapidly dawned upon Steve Salatto and Scott Blackwell that all was not rosy in Franconia. A significant proportion of its inhabitants loathed the king of Sweden, did not appreciate that he had assigned them to be governed by a batch of foreigners and Thuringians (which amounted to the same thing, in their eyes) who were almost all heretics to boot, and considered that, in general, they had been perfectly happy in their "loved Egyptian night." So Johnnie F. had been appointed to head a "hearts and minds" program. At which point, he had brought his wife Tania and their adopted Korean son, Dakota, to Würzburg. They had moved into a comfortable down-time house, with no more in the way of twentieth-century amenities than that of any other master craftsman or minor bureaucrat in the city of Würzburg.
"I joined the Catholic church," Johnnie F. repeated.
"We are damn well supposed to be here establishing religious freedom. Not caving in to what these guys believe."
"Religious freedom includes joining the Catholic Church," Johnnie F. pointed out cheerfully. "Now, I admit we mainly did it at first to make it easier to adopt those kids. Tania just fell in love with all four of them at the orphanage where she was volunteering, and it's run by nuns. But it's done more for getting the people down here with the program than anything else I could have done. I didn't expect that, really. But here I am. Trophy convert in person. Hauled out of a variety of heresy that hadn't even been invented in this day and age into the light of True Faith. Nobody around here is impressed by the fact that Steve or David is Catholic. For heavens sake, they all expect Italians to be Catholic. There's nothing exciting about it; dog bites man rather than man bites dog and all that; it would only be interesting if one of them wasn't. But me, I'm on show at all public occasions. Which almost always gives me a chance to say how well it worked the American way. Don't knock it till you've tried it, I always say."