Martha rubbed her temples again. "I won't marry one of them, either."
"What on earth?"
"If you bring journeymen from Magdeburg. I won't marry one of them, either. I don't intend to be anyone's sacrificial lamb." She glared at Noelle. "Not for my brothers. Not for anyone else, either."
"Look, honey." Noelle put an arm around Martha's shoulder. Martha was a little older, twenty-five to Noelle's "going to be twenty-three next month." Equal stubbornness was the main foundation of their rapidly growing friendship. "People are just teasing when they call you the `ewe lamb' and say that since your mom is the Ewe, you're destined to marry Helmut. Whoever he may be in real life. Nobody really expects you to marry him. Or one of these guys, whoever they turn out to be."
"Some of them are serious." Martha circled her shoulders. She had spent most of the morning cleaning display cases. "I've got to be realistic. Mutti has turned into a revolutionary. That's fine, I suppose. We need a revolution. About some things, at least."
Noelle laughed. Martha was far less of a flaming radical than her mother. Whose radicalism also had very sharp limits. "Realistic about what?"
"Well, people do tend to marry inside their own trade. There's some marrying across guild lines, but especially in the highly skilled trades—glass making, printing, lens grinding, and the like—families are a lot more likely to arrange marriages into the same trade, even if it means looking outside of your own town. We—the family, I mean—aren't really printers any more in the sense that we're part of the guild. We're revolutionaries. So it's not that odd that people are thinking that she'll find a revolutionary for me to marry. That someone like Helmut would make a suitable match."
"So what do you have against the idea?"
"He's . . . Well, I don't care whether he's been to the university or not, he's just crude," Martha proclaimed. "He can speak Latin, but he's just as crude in Latin as he is in German. Not all the time, but a lot of it. When he's not being a public person. He's been teaching out in that village in the Steigerwald so long that he's practically become a peasant himself. That's . . . I don't want a husband like that. I want one who is just as cultured at home as he is when he's speaking in the city council chamber."
"Cultured?"
"Music," Martha said. "You know. Poetry. Literature. I know that Helmut does lesson plans, and he's smart. Shrewd. He did the annotated version of Common Sense that we published."
She elaborated, from her point of view. Helmut was not only crude, but loud. If Martha wanted loud, all she needed to do was stay home with her mother and brothers, who were loud enough to drive a person mad. Helmut had a voice that boomed. Which was good for giving speeches to large numbers of people in open fields, but would become terribly tiring if it were inside a small house.
Inadvertently, by listing all the reasons she didn't in the least want to marry Helmut, she gave Noelle more information concerning the Ram than any other uptimer had. Everything, practically, but his name and the exact location of his headquarters.
Walking back up the alley, Noelle checked to see that it was Melchior rather than Hanna on the ladder. She wondered if she was legally or morally obliged to share what she had just learned with Vince Marcantonio and Steve Salatto and their various official subordinates. By the time she had reached the episcopal palace which was serving as administrative headquarters, she concluded that she wasn't. What they didn't know, they wouldn't feel obliged to do something—anything—about. After some reflection she decided that she didn't think she would even tell Johnnie F.
The Ram movement needed a little breathing room, was her sense of things. That had certainly been the gist of the private messages she'd gotten from Mike Stearns, when he'd been the President of the NUS. Now that he'd moved up to Magdeburg and become the prime minister of the new United States of Europe, she no longer had any direct contact with him. But the two messages she'd gotten since from the new President of whatever-the-NUS-would-wind-up-calling-itself, Ed Piazza, made it clear that nothing had changed.
Well, some subtleties, perhaps. Stearns had been more prone to relying on the Committees of Correspondence than Piazza seemed to be. But that hardly indicated any new formalization of affairs, as far as she was concerned. Ed Piazza simply substituted working through the Genevan fellow Leopold Cavriani instead. It had been Cavriani who had obtained, no doubt through his usual tortuous means, the duplicating machines.