At the head of the table, Frau Else looked up. "I know someone," she said. "A very respectable widow and her house is conveniently located. I will be happy to introduce you to her."
Meyfarth thanked her solemnly.
Most of the conversation was political.
"Thanks again for the dinner, Frau Else," Noelle called back as she went out the door.
Martha followed her. "Umm."
Noelle grinned at her. "Everyone in Würzburg says that the pastor is a really nice guy. And he's a poet. Very cultured. Everyone says so."
"We, ah, sort of stopped being Lutherans back when I was a teenager. Because of the bishop, you know."
Noelle raised her eyebrows. "That's one of the beauties of freedom of religion, Martha. There's nothing to say that you can't start being Lutheran again. If you're interested in theology, of course."
"Oh." Martha looked back a little nervously at the door where Pastor Meyfarth and Herr Thornton were still standing, talking to Egidius Junker. "Oh, of course. Theology. Err, Noelle."
"What?"
"That `respectable widow' Mutti mentioned to Pastor Meyfarth." Martha squirmed a little. "She's the mother of Judith Neideckerin. The woman you asked if I could find some way to put you in touch with. The woman I wrote you about. The one that Helmut mentioned the last time he was here."
"Freiherr von Bimbach's mistress, you mean?"
"Yes. Her. Mutti has talked to her mother. The one with the room to rent. She can put you in touch with Judith. If you still want to be, that is."
Noelle thinned her lips, pulling them in between her teeth. "Oh, yes. I would very much like to be put in touch with Judith Neideckerin, if Helmut is willing. His Bimboship presents problems. Judith Neideckerin may offer opportunities."
Würzburg, mid-January, 1634
The rector of the University of Würzburg had come to talk about libraries. Specifically, the wonderful library of the late Bishop of Würzburg, Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn. Before Gustavus Adolphus had assigned the prince-bishopric to the New United States in the fall of 1632, the king of Sweden's troops had managed to pack up the library. The rector had last seen it crated up, on wagons, on its way to improve the cultural ambiance of Stockholm.
The rector's message, Steve Salatto noted ruefully, was quite clear. He wanted the library back. Or, if the uptimers could not get it back, an equivalent library. Which would cost a lot of money. Which he wanted the administration to provide.
Steve's new chief of staff, Georg Rodolf Weckherlin, cleared his throat significantly and started to discuss the removal of the library of the late elector palatine from Heidelberg to Rome at an earlier stage of the Thirty Years War. Weckherlin was the son of a Württemberg bureaucrat. Although he had spent time in England even before the marriage of the luckless Bohemian Winter King whose adventurism had been the trigger that started the Thirty Years War, to Elizabeth Stuart, his ties to the country had been strengthened through that marriage and he had worked for the electress palatine for a while.
The rector brought up the Peace of Augsburg and the fact that the Calvinism of the late elector had made him an outlaw within the Holy Roman Empire in any case, whereas this was a clear case of theft of property from an institution which followed a religion that was legal under the constitution of that empire.
"Recriminations," Steve said, "will get you nowhere. I can't guarantee you any money. You know what the budget looks like just about as well as I do. But there is one thing that I can guarantee, which is that if you keep raking up old grievances, there won't even be a budget request."
He looked at Weckherlin. "That goes for you, too. If you want to keep your job."
Weckherlin smiled back quite cheerfully.
Steve thought for a while after Weckherlin left to show the rector out. "Tinker to Evers to Chance." Oxenstierna to Stearns to Piazza, who had sent Weckherlin to Franconia. Steve had not had anything to say about it. He wouldn't have any more to say about getting rid of him.
At least, being a poet like Meyfarth, Weckherlin was more than willing to write propaganda pieces. And Steve couldn't complain that they had stuck him with an incompetent. Weckherlin had studied law and been a low-level diplomat as well as writing poetry. He had married an English girl, the daughter of the Dover city clerk, in 1616; she was here in Würzburg with him and they had a couple of kids. He got full-time employment in the English government in 1626, became an English citizen in 1630. The entry under his name from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, kindly provided by Ed Piazza, indicated that uptime, he had joined the Parliamentary forces during the English Civil War, becoming John Milton's predecessor as "Secretary for Foreign Tongues" under the Commonwealth. In this world, he had caught a boat from Dover to the continent in a timely fashion, before the royal troops who had nabbed Oliver Cromwell caught up with him.