On that thought, he went to bed.
Dave Stannard, who had been supervising the NUS voter registration project in Franconia since the fall of 1632, had a word with Steve on the way into staff meeting next morning. So Steve recognized him first.
"I think that Johnnie F. is right. We should do this. It's been hanging fire too long." Dave waved at the letter from Arnold Bellamy, which was back on the table, carefully quarantined in the middle where it couldn't seem to be claiming any one administrator as its patron. "We use the voter registration lists. We've got those. It won't take the Amtmaenner an hour to cross out anyone who has died and add on anyone who has turned eighteen since last summer. Then we blitz them."
"Why bother blitzing?" Anita asked.
"Because we've left it too long," Dave answered, "so we've made ourselves a problem. We should have started earlier, like the commissioners did in Coburg. If we had, a few teams could have handled it and we'd have been done by now. Or close to done. Leaving it this late, unless we do it all at once, we'll get into bad weather and have to stop. Then the folks in Unterpicklesdorf will start complaining that we valued the folks in Oberrelishhausen more than them, because we took the oaths of all the Relishes before the bad weather and left the Pickles unsworn for a whole season. No point in letting people manufacture grievances. God knows, they have enough real ones that we need to deal with."
Everyone at the table nodded. The Swedes had pretty well devastated this region during their campaign in 1631.
Dave continued, "As Dad always said, `People don't need an important issue to fight about. They'll take anything available and inflate it to the size they need.' So just do it all at once. Every single one of us, in Bamberg, in Fulda, here in Würzburg. Out into the Aemter and take the oaths. Before the Pickles get their feelings hurt."
He grinned. It was a remarkably predatory grin. Dave was another Masaniello cousin from the out-of-town crew who had been at Vince and Carla's wedding anniversary. He'd been a Baltimore County child welfare officer before the Ring of Fire; his father Archie had been a fire department battalion chief. Dave had cut his teeth on Baltimore local politics. "Consider it a preemptive strike on the `moan and groan' contingent. And invite the guys in the villages who aren't eligible to take the oath to the ceremony. Feed them dinner, too. Let 'em hear all the great speeches about citizenship and patriotism."
"All of us?" Steve asked.
"Yeah, all. I mean the army privates and the copy clerks. The ground is frozen, but we haven't had a lot of snow yet. The roads are passable. If we start tomorrow, we can get it done before Christmas."
There was consensus.
"I suggest," Dave added, "that you radio Fulda and Bamberg tonight, as soon as we get a window of opportunity, and tell them to do it the same way and the same time. Total stand-down for the ordinary routine; everybody out into the field."
"I suggest," Meyfarth interjected in a very soft voice, "that you use the auditor team as well as the permanent staff. I have determined that they are not contractors, but are indeed employees of the NUS. Or of whatever you are going to call it, now. Then your permanent staff will not complain that you have given the auditors special privileges or exempted them from an onerous duty. As you said about not giving people the chance to manufacture grievances . . ."
Chapter 5: "Prophesy to the breath"
Bamberg, early November, 1633
There was a ladder leaning against the side wall of Kronacher's print shop. Noelle Murphy tilted her head against the sun, which was, if thin and watery, at least out for a change. Hanna, Else Kronacher's far-from-young maid, was up on the ladder, scrubbing the morning mixture of mud and manure off the wall. The diamond-pane windows were partially open. Through them, the unmelodic sound of Frau Else screaming at her sons came out to join the other noises in the alley.
The screeching was followed by a clatter; then by a crash. Either Melchior, who was seventeen, or Otto, just turned fifteen, had apparently been grabbing type from a bin and throwing it at his brother. Or, possibly, they had been throwing it at one another. That wasn't at all unlikely. The crash was probably one or the other of them upsetting a bin. Or shoving his brother, who fell and upset a bin. In either case, lead type would be scattered all over the floor of the working part of the shop the way uptime kids tended to strew Legos.
Noelle walked around the corner and entered by the front door, wrinkling her nose at the odor of the boiled linseed oil that constituted the base for printer's ink. "Good morning, Martha. Chaos reigns, I take it."