Added at the bottom, in Steve's handwriting, were a few more sentences. "One of Arnold Bellamy's letters must have gone astray in the mail. Check whether they are here as NUS employees or contractors. Don't have the vaguest idea who the down-timers are. Find out tactfully."
Meyfarth read through it hurriedly on his way back to the reception room. What was a "corker"? The essence was clear, however.
"Not the Three Graces," he murmured to himself. Probably the Three Furies. He shoved the note into the side pocket he had had a tailor add to his robe and returned to the outer office wearing a professional smile. "Ah, Mrs. Utt, Mrs. Fodor, Mrs. McIntire. We are so pleased that you have made the trip successfully. Would you be so kind as to present me to your associates?"
The obvious treasury official was one Johann Friedrich Krausold. He was indeed a former Saxe-Weimar and now New United States Kammerverwalter assigned to Jena. The four young men were the next generation of trainees. Johannes Elias Fischer, from Arnstadt; Michael Heubel, from Stadtilm; Samuel Ebert, from Saalfeld; Ambrosius Wachler, from Weimar.
Meyfarth smiled at the young men quite genuinely. Not so much in greeting as because he recognized the eternal verities. Having brought astonishingly few bureaucrats from the future, the uptimers were now growing a supply. Government would go on. He led them into Steve's office.
"The books and encyclopedias in Grantville that told those of us in the administrative teams that got sent to Franconia about such general concepts as cuius regio as deciding a principality's religious allegiance and the requirement that subjects accept the religion of the ruler . . ."
Steve Salatto placed his hands on the desk, leaned forward, and gave the three lady auditors sitting in front of him a smile. "I won't go so far as to say they were junk. But they were at least as misleading as they were useful. Or maybe the problem's been with us, and our assumptions, coming to it out of an American background. We thought there would be one piece of ground here and all of its residents would be Catholic; then there would be a border; then another piece of ground over here and all of its residents would be Protestant."
He shook his head ruefully. "When it came to Franconia—dream on!"
He gestured toward the window. "For instance, the Steigerwald—or Steiger Forest, we'd say—takes up a space roughly twenty-five miles or so from Volkach to Bamberg, west to east, and a little under fifty miles from Knetzgau down to Windsheim, north to south. Or, maybe, five miles or so more in each direction, depending on how you count it. Also, it isn't all forest. There are a lot of clearings in it with villages and agriculture.
"The people who lived there swore their oaths of allegiance to a lord. But they have the right to move, which means that they don't necessarily live within that lord's territories. They might rent a farm somewhere else. Or sometimes what once was a single piece of territory has been split up between two lines of heirs, one Catholic and one Protestant. Or a family of lords who were Catholic died out and their estates escheated to a Protestant overlord. Or vice versa. Anyway, what it means in practice is that we've run into villages where eighteen of the families are Catholic and fourteen of them are Protestant, depending on who is their lord. It might be the count of Castell on one side of the street and the bishop of Würzburg on the other side. Or, sometimes, if people have moved into houses across the street, all intermixed.
"For every rule, there are a half-dozen exceptions."
"How long has that been true?" Estelle McIntire asked. "The part about everything being mixed up, I mean."
Salatto considered the question, for a moment. "Well . . . say a century or so. Since the beginning of the Reformation, in lots of places. In the Steigerwald area, for sure. There was a very famous lady named Argula von Grumbach—yes, that was her name, believe it or not—who corresponded with Martin Luther and brought Lutheran preachers onto her estates already in the 1530s. When our team went there the first time, some of the local farmers from a village called Frankenwinheim took us to see the house where she lived, and the pulpit from which the first Lutheran pastor preached."
"In other words," Maydene Utt interrupted, a bit impatiently, "`Catholic' Franconia has a lot of Protestants in it. Lutherans, like in Thuringia?"
Salatto nodded. "Most of them. But a few are Calvinists—and some others are Anabaptists or Jews. They're not supposed to be there at all, in theory. But there they are, anyway."