The Ram Rebellion(177)

The Amtmaenner had counting the votes down pat, too. The results were tallied, certified, and delivered to Würzburg within a week.





With a few exceptions like Bamberg and some of the industrial towns nestled against the Thuringenwald, the towns and cities had not been enthusiastic. The guilds had led a bitter opposition, largely based on the argument that if incorporation passed, the "foreigners" would impose points six, seven, and eight of the "Twelve Points." In most of the towns, incorporation either failed or barely squeaked by.





However, eighty percent or more of Franconia's population did not live in chartered towns.





Some villages were solidly opposed; some few were a hundred percent opposed. Dave Stannard proposed to take a look at possible undue pressure from landlords, here and there, in spite of all the precautions that he and Scott Blackwell had taken in regard to secret ballots. The simple truth was that if a precinct only had a dozen voters, if one of them disagreed with the local boss, the boss could probably find out who it was. Even with a ballot held secret, there were a very limited number of choices about who it might have been.





Overall, however, sixty-three percent of the registered voters cast ballots in favor of the incorporation of Franconia into the State of Thuringia and citizenship for its inhabitants.





Grantville, State of Thuringia




On March 5, 1634, the Congress of the State of Thuringia adopted a formal name change, subject to a future referendum, from the State of Thuringia to the State of Thuringia-Franconia. There had originally been some discussion to the effect that as a courtesy and in the name of welcome, the name of the new region should be placed first. Arnold Bellamy pointed out that this would result in the acronym SoFT, not an image which the USE or its component states wished to present to the League of Ostend just now.





Therefore, it was SoTF. Unpronounceable, of course, but also not evocative of any undesirable associations whatsoever.





Until the next crisis, which occurred very shortly thereafter, Bellamy was in an unusually good mood.





Franconia, mid-March, 1634




Several minor lords, mostly Protestant, whose lands were enclaves within Würzburg and Bamberg, objected vociferously to the incorporation vote. Especially the Fuchs von Bimbach family, which turned out to have not only a Protestant branch centered in Bayreuth but also a Catholic branch with estates intermingled among those formerly belonging to the prince-bishop of Bamberg.





This, Johnnie F. found out from Meyfarth on one of his jaunts up to Bamberg, was not at all unusual in Franconia. A lot of the Reichsritter, Freiherren, and lesser local nobility had split into Catholic and Protestant branches, in order to have a foot in each camp and someone among the relatives with an arguable and viable claim to the family's lands whenever the politico-religious situation underwent a minor shift or major earthquake.





Bamberg, mid-March, 1634




"So how are the CoC English lessons going?" Janie Kacere asked.





Eddie Junker sighed. "Apprentices. Unruly apprentices."





" `Amid gloom and doom' is the normal situation for first-time teachers," she consoled him.





"Most of them are just antsy and energetic. If I tell them to write a sentence using the words pink, green, and yellow, they'll toss paper airplanes at one another—those are quite a fad, these days—but they'll write something like, `I got out of bed, put on my pink shirt, harnessed up my green wagon, and looked at the yellow sun.'"





"That's not bad," Stew Hawker said.





"Yeah." Eddie sighed deeply. "Then there's Otto. Frau Else's younger son."





"He wrote?"





"The telephone greened. Green, green. I pinked it up and said, `yellow!'"





"I take it," Janie said, "that he knows better."





"Oh, sure. He's the best student I've got. He's just . . . Well, he knows he's the best student I've got and he takes advantage of it. None of the rest of them are anywhere near to the point of making puns in English."





Noelle shuffled through the mail that had arrived at the Bamberg Schloss in the diplomatic pouch and picked out the letter from Ed Piazza to be read first. The one from the administrators in Suhl, second. Arnold Bellamy's went to the bottom of the pile.





Fuchs von Bimbach is going to be the key. That was the gist of Piazza's letter.





Well, she didn't disagree. Here on the ground in Franconia, His Bimboship maybe looked even more key than he did from Grantville. Or from Magdeburg. There was a letter from Don Francisco Nasi's office, too.





"I have to get inside," Noelle said that evening. She rapped her knuckles on the table in front of her.