The Tangled Web(131)

Ferdinand of Bavaria, archbishop of Cologne, assumed his most arrogant expression. "Without Werth and Mercy, my brother has been very handicapped in sponsoring anything that requires mobility for nearly a year. This has made him irritable. Dragoons are not cavalry, precisely." The archbishop looked down his ample nose. "Still, dragoons are better than nothing. Maximilian refuses to send me money with which to pay you . . ."

Walter Butler nodded. Rumors of Duke Maximilian's refusal had been current for the past couple of weeks.

"He is, however, willing to hire you. I have consented . . ."

However grudgingly, Butler thought, and only because you're scraping the very bottom of your strongbox. There's no way you'll be able to pay us for another quarter unless you can find additional revenues. He looked down, gauging the archbishop's mood. "If . . ." he began.

"I will pay you for the last quarter, the one ending last month, when you leave," his employer answered. "You and the other Irishmen."

Butler closed his mouth.

He had intended to say, "If you value your skin, you will scrape together the money to pay us from somewhere for this quarter and for the next quarter. If we leave, the king in the Netherlands will come, and by the end of March, you will find yourself as one more nationalized, mediatized, Spanish-style prelate, just as the archbishop of Liége had already found himself, with your left bank lands an integral part of those very Netherlands." He snorted. If the archbishop didn't want to listen to professional advice when he had a professional available—well, blast him to hell.

* * *

"We'll have to move out by late February," Deveroux said. "I loathe winter marches, but they can be done. At least, we'll be moving south rather than north. And if the old skinflint does actually pay us, we can buy provisions. Late winter and early spring are the worst times to forage."

"Moving to the south is no guarantee of better weather." Geraldin rubbed some frost crystals off the window pane.

"It improves the odds. If we prepare for a winter march and are blessed by an early spring, so much the better."

"Aside from the mud and the floods. We have to cross the Rhine somewhere if we're going to finally put an end to Horn's endless Fabian maneuvering. He's managed to keep Bernhard and Maximilian practically immobilized for nearly four years now, without ever hazarding a battle, playing a damned chess game across the map of southwest Germany. 'You move here and I'll move there.' Pray for winter until we're across and spring in Swabia. I do not want to cross the Rhine river bottoms in the mud. I do not want to ride through the Black Forest on icy roads."



Anna Marie von Dohna huddled as close to the Dutch-style ceramic stove as she could get. The stove was the best thing about the miserable, skimpy, low-ceilinged rooms that her husband had stuck them in for the winter. It managed to make some heat from even scanty amounts of damp peat—the only fuel available—and she idled away long hours of boredom by making up stories about the people in the designs on the tiles. Burning peat smelled like, well, burning peat, of course . . .

Her husband walked in and broke the news.

"Leaving?" she screeched. She stood up, throwing off her cloak. "Leaving in six weeks? Leaving before the end of winter? I'm not leaving. I'm staying right here."

"I am leaving and you are coming. You don't have a choice. I know for a certainty that you have nearly used up your gold. Frittered your gold away. Wasted it on luxuries over the holidays. I've come home almost every day since Epiphany to find you curled next to a fire with a bonbon in hand. Soon it will be 'peat gone, sweets gone.' Poor countess, reduced to eating stringy goat meat like the rest of us poor peasants."

"You only want me to come because I'm not pregnant yet. If I were breeding, you would find a way to leave me here. That's the only reason you keep dragging me from here to there to somewhere else."

"Why the hell else would I have married you, if I didn't want a son from the deal? What's the point if I don't get a son?"

In winter quarters, at least, he had a door to slam.

Dislav came in, carrying a blanket he had warmed in front of the kitchen fire downstairs.

Anna Marie, over twenty-five and childless now in two marriages, wrapped her cloak around the blanket to hold the heat in and went back to the stove.



That evening, Dislav spent an hour drinking with his new friend Lorenz Bauer. It wasn't much of a tavern. The floor boards were slick from recent spills or sometimes sticky from long-past spills. The tables were simply sticky. But the beer was cheap.

Bauer, the next day, made a short visit to the honorable holder of the tuna tin.