The Tangled Web(140)

There was one resident for whom spring had no charms. "I wish I could have gone with Fritzi," Margarethe wailed. "I should have gone with Fritzi."

"Look at the cartoon, Margarethe," Justina said. "It's lovely. Another van de Passe, with the archbishop of Cologne cowering in a tent somewhere out in the dreary countryside."

"I don't want to look at cartoons. I just want Friedrich to come home."

Kunigunde and Ursula each handed her a handkerchief.

"If this weren't our own taproom," Reichard Donner said, "I would go out for a beer. Your wailing may drive me to it yet. Girl, if you don't stop sniveling, you are going to damage the child you are carrying. It will be born with the marks of teardrops running down its cheeks, not to mention snot dripping out of its nose."



"At least the plague doesn't seem to have advanced east beyond Lorraine. Thus far. Except for the little pocket that our people stopped at the Rhine." Reichard Donner looked out at the meeting of the Mainz Committee of Correspondence. It could not be considered one of the larger or more effective CoC groups in the USE, but it no longer fit into the taproom at the Horn of Plenty. They had to rent space at the Freedom Arches. The holder of the Mainz franchise was of the opinion that business was business.

"Unless, of course, some of the dragoons had already contracted it and carried it into Swabia when the Irishmen managed to cross ahead of Brahe and Utt."

"You are a pessimist, Philipp Schaumann," Kunigunde said.

"It has stood me in good stead throughout my life."

"Does that mean," Margarethe asked, "that if Friedrich and Papa and Theo do capture the Irishmen, they might get the plague?"

Ursula handed her a handkerchief.

Justina sighed. "Pregnancy takes some girls this way. They weep from beginning to end."

"If I had to choose between that and morning sickness," Kunigunde observed, "I think I'd rather cry."

At the podium, Reichard was saying, "In regard to our campaign against the anti-Semitic agitators in response to the dastardly assassinations of Mayor Henry Dreeson of Grantville and the Reverend Enoch Wiley . . ."



"No," Wamboldt von Umstadt said to Johann Adolf von Hoheneck. "No, I do not approve of riots, or of mobs taking the law into their own hands. When it comes to my obligations in connection with protection of the Jewish population in the archdiocese of Mainz, however . . . Suffice it to say that I believe that the actions of the Committees of Correspondence have greatly lightened my burden for the next few years. That isn't to say, of course, that the organization won't be taking other positions and actions in the future that will make other aspects of my burden heavier."

Hoheneck pantomimed weighing items on the scales of justitia.

"A pagan goddess, if there ever was one," the archbishop said. "It's amazing how thoroughly we have managed to incorporate her into our supposedly Christian ideas about life."

Kornwestheim, Duchy of Württemberg, May 1635

"I have to give Butler credit," Brahe said. "I'd have thought it over ten times, and then ten times more, before bringing even mounted dragoons that close to Stuttgart, given how heavily Horn has it garrisoned."

"We're just lucky that our scouts caught them turning south. Horn's infantry—most of it—has stopped at Göppingen. He reports that he is prepared to turn them. The cavalry is going on north, in case the Irishmen head east again.

Waiblingen, Duchy of Württemberg, May 1635

"He's drunk," Dennis MacDonald's batman said, his face impassive.

"Since when hasn't he been drunk?" Geraldin turned around.

"He was possibly sober for about two hours, late Sunday morning. Father Taaffe conducted a field mass, with homily, that went on for ages and the colonel didn't remember to bring a flask."

The batman's answer was completely deadpan.

"So he's drunk. Old news."

"This time, he's drunk and riding a horse. He's gone outside the camp. When the sentry tried to stop him, the colonel cut him with his riding whip."

"Damn and blast. Send someone after him."

"Butler and Deveroux are riding ahead. They want to get into Schorndorf before the city council realizes we are coming. You're the only person here of the same rank as Colonel MacDonald. If you just send people after him . . ."

The batman didn't say it, for which Geraldin was grateful.

If Dennis was drunk enough to fight and sober enough to remember, he would have every member of the party sent to retrieve him up on charges of insubordination. Striking a superior officer. Who knew what. Floggings would ensue. Floggings at a minimum.