"Overall, though," Simrock said, "that was quite a roundup. Butler and Deveroux are in custody."
"Do we have Gruyard?" Derek was far from forgetting Schweinsberg's death and the popular reaction to it in Fulda and Grantville.
"We have what we are told is his body," Klott said. "Or the remnants of it. Searchers found it in the prison. It will be turned over to you."
"What else do I need to know?"
"Butler's wife is demanding to be allowed to leave. She rode out the fire on the far side of the castle and has her own staff, including a big, tough footman who seems to have been badly injured. Rather than accompany her husband to Fulda and stand by him during the trial, she wants to go back to Bohemia."
"Using what for money?"
"Some of Butler's accumulated loot, probably." Klott looked at Utt. "Have you dealt with her?"
"Not personally, no."
"General Horn has. She was demanding to be assigned one of the houses in the little suburb for her own personal use on the grounds that her chambers in the castle are all sooty. He's reached the conclusion that whatever she makes off with, it will be money well spent just to get rid of her."
"There sure isn't much of it left," Merckel said. "Great buildings turned into heaps of stones, into dust and ashes."
"The back part of the church. What's it called? Where the priests pray." Kolb sucked on his pipe. "That's still standing."
"The chancel. That back part is called a chancel. The front part is called a nave."
"Where'd you ever learn all that stuff, Lutz?"
Merckel looked away. "My father was a pastor. Back in Saxe-Weimar."
Kolb drew on his pipe again. "There are two complete houses standing. Count 'em. Two, both over against the wall, on the side the wind was coming from. Quite a few partials on the west side of town. Maybe some of them can be shored up."
"We're using the standing ones for infirmaries. After dark last night, we ran into a little old man in a black robe, standing by one of them and hugging a batch of old records. He is—was—the clerk at the Holy Spirit Hospital. That's all he managed to save—he said the whole civil archives, with people's wills and such, went up in smoke."
"Captain Duke Eberhard got the marriage and baptism records out of the church. That's what he was doing when . . ." Kolb looked down at his feet.
"And the castle. It's still there. Ugly clunker, with those big round towers at each end. If nobody had ever built a castle here to start with . . ."
Kolb shook his head. "In this location, right on the east border of the duchy? Nah. If it hadn't been our dukes, it would have been somebody else. It's a place that just begs for someone to plunk a fort down in it."
"It was a pretty enough town. Do you suppose they'll ever be able to build it all back?"
"Our duke!" the Dekan exclaimed in horror. "The young man who was so severely injured in saving me is truly our duke?"
"You got it in one, man," Jeffie Garand answered. "Eberhard saved your stinking hide." Then he switched to German. "The medics say they won't be able to save him. If he hadn't breathed in so much smoke that his lungs are bad, he might have a chance to get over the trauma of a double above-the-knee amputation. If his legs hadn't been crushed by that beam, he might have survived the smoke inhalation. He'd have had serious long-term lung damage, but he would have lived. As things stand, though . . ." Jeffie gave the Dekan a hard look. "If I were you, I'd go back, sort through all the things you swore absolutely had to be gotten out of your church building, and hope you have your funeral book."
The Dekan rose.
"Even better, if I were you," Jeffie added, "I'd make myself scarce before Hertling, Merckel, Kolb, and Heisel find you. Not to mention Colonel Utt. I wouldn't describe anyone in the Fulda Barracks regiment as being real happy right now."
A tent outside Schorndorf
"It's odd," Eberhard rasped. "Even after von Sickingen's men killed Ulrich, even after the Irishmen killed Friedrich, I didn't really expect to die. Not yet. Not now. Not so soon."
Tata nodded.
"Do you have my Montaigne? Where were we in the reading?"
"In the middle of the essay about cannibals."
He nodded.
Tata smiled. "Ah, yes. 'Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of the courage and the soul; it does not lie in the quality of our horse or our weapons, but in our own. He that falls obstinate in his courage—' " Her voice trailed away. She looked down toward the far end of the cot. " 'Si succiderit, de genu pugnat.'—I learned that much Seneca from you in this last year. Sometimes, I think you love Seneca even more than you do Montaigne. Maybe even more than the Bible, though you shouldn't."