The Tangled Web(13)

"Okay by the standards of seventeenth-century mercenaries, which leaves quite a bit of leeway, so to speak. Once you get to know them," Derek answered.

"It's not as if any of the existing churches spend much time trying to improve conditions for those poor women and children," Andrea said. "There's sort of a vacuum there."

"And nature abhors one. Thanks, Orville. I guess. At least for letting me know," Derek said.

"By the way," Andrea asked, "what have we done about getting a grade school set up out there?"

They all looked at her.

"Well," she pointed out, "the people in Fulda won't let those kids go to the town schools."

"Prejudice," Derek said.

Everybody started to talk at once.

"Not in the district limits. There were rules about that up-time, too. We've made a little settlement where there wasn't one before."

"Can we make the town take them?"

"Not if we're serious about self-government."

"We're not in the school business."

"What about Ronnie Dreeson?"

"Maybe the abbot could set one up."

"Using what for money? We've swiped all his revenues. It would have to be a charity school of some kind."

"It's a peculiar religious mix out there at Barracktown," Derek said. "People who are supposed to be Catholic and a bunch of different kinds of Protestants, all tossed in together. Plus one Turk that I know of who has a Portuguese wife. And an Armenian."

"If we'd quartered the soldiers out in the villages, the kids could have gone to the village schools."

"We're not quartering soldiers on civilians, remember. That's why we have the barracks. And Barracktown."

"Anyway, the village schools around here are all Catholic and the Protestants wouldn't want to send their kids. There's no such thing as an irreligious school. Non-religious school. Nondenominational school. Whatever."

"Maybe Clara can think of something."

"H . . . I mean heck, Andrea. Why'd you have to bring up those kids?" Harlan stood up, gathering his papers together. "As if we didn't have enough on our plates."

This Troublesome Monk

Bonn, Archdiocese of Cologne, May 1633

"You could file a complaint of witchcraft against him," the man in the gray hood suggested. "It's much more likely to attract public attention than simple collaboration with the enemy."

"Against the abbot?"

Johann Adolf von Hoheneck would prefer to be abbot of Fulda himself, rather than just the ex-provost of the ecclesiastical estate of Petersberg, which had been confiscated by the New United States in any case, which made him just a chapter monk of Fulda now, much to his chagrin. Still, Schweinsberg was the abbot and he found the idea of bringing him down a little distasteful. Particularly in the way of setting precedents. A person had to think long-term.

"Isn't the abbot the only person we were talking about?" someone muttered under his breath.

Hoheneck looked at the Capuchin, shaking his head. "We don't have anyone on the ground there to file it, even if the rest of us agreed. The only monks who stayed were the ones from Saint Gall, who surely won't. Perhaps a few of Schweinsberg's supporters have come back, but not in any numbers, as far as I have heard. They wouldn't either, in any case."

"Maybe if we made it worth someone's while, one of them would." The archbishop's confessor was a tenacious man.

"Not in the chapter, then," Franz von Hatzfeld said. "But, surely, there must be someone in the town of Fulda? Someone among the city councilors and guildsmen?"

"Why not file the accusation against one of the up-timers?" Hoheneck was uneasy at the prospect of trying to bring down the abbot. The more he thought about it, the uneasier he got. The bishop of Würzburg wasn't the only high ecclesiastical official with a desire to expand his jurisdiction. He did not consider Cologne to be exempt from it—especially not when the archbishop was a Bavarian duke. How would it be to his advantage to bring down the abbot if the archbishop mediatized the abbey in the process?

"I don't think that is prudent right now," Hatzfeld said. "But you could include the down-time woman they sent to advise him in the accusation. That always allows for all sorts of sexual innuendoes."

"But the abbot . . . who's going to investigate the charge?" Hoheneck asked. "And how, since the up-timers have abolished witchcraft as a crime?"

"Why, the bishop of Würzburg, I presume," the man in the gray hood said smoothly. "Fulda does fall within his ecclesiastical jurisdiction, after all. Or so he contends, at least." He looked directly at Hatzfeld, who was, after all, the bishop of Würzburg. "The Holy Father has never ruled definitively in the matter."