"Montaigne again, I assume?" Jeffie said.
"Yes."
David Kronberg, Riffa's husband, otherwise known as the mailman although he was actually a post office clerk, shook his head. "What Eberhard was hinting, Tata, is that even though we're willing to admit that a lot of the searchers volunteered just because they wanted to help, still—there was a reward out. Your publicity campaign is going to have to work around that."
She glared at them both. "We'll manage."
Frankfurt am Main, October 1634
Derek Utt sat on his horse, watching, as Veronica—Gretchen's grandma, Henry Dreeson's wife, and terror of the known universe—disembarked onto the pier and greeted Henry, who was halfway through his goodwill tour of Buchenland County, SoTF, in preparation for the upcoming elections. While the crowd watched Veronica and Henry, he switched his eyes to the man dressed all in black in the back of the boat.
A couple of other passengers got off. Veronica, bless her miserly soul, had bought the cheapest possible ticket on a regular passenger barge—not, of course, that the barge captain didn't know who she was. He had made every effort to provide her with a comfortable trip up the Main.
According to one report, Duke Bernhard's man, Raudegen, who had accompanied the old terror on the Rhine portion of her journey back from Bavaria, had threatened, in the hearing of everyone on the Mainz pier, to break the fingers of all the barge's crewmen if they did one single thing that would cause him to receive one more complaint from Veronica Schusterin verw. Richter and verh. Dreeson.
The man in black slid out of the group, heading directly toward Utt, holding out a sheaf of paper. Credentials and more credentials, including a salva guardia from Nils Brahe in Mainz and another one from Wamboldt von Umstadt.
His credentials were much more impressive than his appearance. Personally signed safe conducts from Brahe and the archbishop of Mainz equaled "another VIP on hand."
Utt, who had to stay with Dreeson for the entire time he was scheduled to be in Frankfurt and then return to Fulda with Grantville's mayor safely in his charge, passed Johann Adolf von Hoheneck on to a junior officer with orders to take him up to Fulda with an escort. For the time being, Wes Jenkins could worry about him.
Barracktown bei Fulda, October 1634
"Every cartoonist in the country must be about to fall dead with exhaustion this month." David Kronberg threw a stack of newspapers on the sutlery sales counter. "Look at this. Dreeson and Veronica leading the march against the taverns in Frankfurt where the anti-Semitic agitators were congregating. Here's another one showing the treaty between Gustavus and the king in the Netherlands."
Simrock grabbed it. "Hey, this is a van de Passe. Here are Fernando and Maria Anna, Mike and Rebecca, Frederik Hendrik."
Margarethe giggled. "And here, on the next page, are all the prominent fat nobles, wealthy fat merchants, and their wealthy fat wives in the Spanish Netherlands, fighting over invitations to Maria Anna's wedding."
Jeffie took a look. "He's lightening up on all those dark lines he used to have in the background. Opening up his spaces." He handed the folded newspaper across to Pierre Biehr, the Barracktown schoolteacher, who shared it with Theo Pistor.
"There was an article in the Jena university paper a while back," Theo said, "The student paper that publishes technical stuff. Someone in Grantville took a camera and photographed a bunch of 'plates' she found in art books and encyclopedias. Some were English, by a man named Hogarth. Some were French. The article mentioned a man named Daumier. She—the photographer in Grantville was a woman—sent a package of them to van de Passe in Utrecht."
Simrock nodded. "Even though he's about seventy, now, he's not afraid of changing his style some. The lines here are different from what he was doing last spring. Let me run back to the barracks and get my cartoon folder." He dashed out.
"Tonight's CoC meeting is hereby cancelled," Tata announced. "I can tell already that everyone's going to be reading the papers instead of paying attention."
Fulda, October 1634
Johann Adolf von Hoheneck talked. Then he talked some more.
Wes Jenkins kept taking his glasses off and polishing them. Andrea Hill kept pushing her pencil into her hair, pulling it back out, and sticking it in somewhere else. Harlan Stull looked at the table as if his life depended on finding some kind of a bad spot in the beeswax polish. Roy Copenhaver looked at the ceiling. Fred Pence chewed thoughtfully on his thumbnail.
About an hour into Hoheneck's presentation, Derek Utt got up, walked over to the window, and leaned against the sill.
"So," Hoheneck concluded, "I told the priest who had been in the torture chamber, the one observing Gruyard at his work, to mark Schweinsberg's grave. I left for Mainz the same evening." He bowed.