The Tangled Web(18)

Waited some more.

"He forges documents. That's how he makes most of his money. If someone needs 'evidence' and doesn't have any, van Beekx will come up with it. There's a lot of 'evidence' against me on file in Cologne. It looks very real. Any court would convict me on it. If he's involved in this, with Gruyard, there's probably a lot of 'evidence' against you tucked away somewhere, just waiting until some court asks for it. If you don't mind, I'd just as soon go back to the church, sir. It's been a very peaceful place for me these last few years."

"As soon as you make a deposition and sign it."

The artist's shoulders drooped. Andrea's lawyer, whose name Wes could never seem to remember, led him out.

Wes dismissed the city council. They left the conference room but kept milling around in the vestibule. Captain Wiegand closed the door from the outside.

"Okay," Andrea said, "tell me something." She picked up the pamphlet with which the morning had started, again between thumb and forefinger.

"What?"

"Who from here went up to Cologne and described Clara to this van Beekx creep? The 'Salome' doesn't look a thing like the prioress. It's just a sort of generic nun, and not even wearing the same kind of habit that the Benedictines do. But the 'Clara,' even if there wasn't a name to the picture, you could almost recognize."

Orville Beattie looked at it. "The abbot, too. Even when he's a snake."

"It's this van Beekx who's the snake," Wes spit out.

"Yeah," Fred Pence said. "Pretty good caricaturist, though."

"Or maybe someone sent them sketches. If that artist ever came out of the church and took a look at us, who would notice? He didn't look very happy about making a deposition. I've got an appointment, guys." Dropping that happy thought on the table, Orville left.



They delegated the delicate task of acquainting Clara with the existence of the placards, all of which had been pulled down before the Special Commission returned from Neuenberg, and the pamphlet, to Andrea.

"My goodness," Clara said. "How . . . unusual . . . to see my own face on a depiction of the Whore of Babylon. Because I speak with you foreigners, I suppose. The tower of Babel and all that. And the prioress is the Whore of Rome because she's a nun, I suppose."

She giggled. "But the idea of depicting the abbot as a snake with a forked tongue is really rather ingenious. Considering what he is doing with it."

"Aren't . . ." Andrea's voice quavered. "Aren't you even a little bit shocked?"

"Well, I don't like the witchcraft accusation," Clara said pragmatically. "Those can be dangerous, over here in Franconia. But I've seen woodcuts like that all my life. With this kind of iconography."

"Where?"

Clara looked at her with surprise. "Illustrating Lutheran pamphlets about the nature of the pope as the anti-Christ, of course. We read some of them in confirmation class."

Andrea started to make strangling noises.

"Fourteen-year-olds have a rather crude sense of humor, of course. Our favorite was one of the pope. You could tell it was the pope because he was wearing a triple tiara, but he had breasts that drooped down to here"—Clara gestured expressively—"and a big swollen belly covered with fish scales and was giving birth to the Leviathan, that's the great beast from Revelations, while the devil stood behind him and . . ."

"Stop," Andrea said. "I think I get the idea."

Clara thought a moment. "I expect that they, the Catholics, make that kind of picture about us, too. But I wonder why Catholic propagandists in Cologne, if you say that's where this came from, used the Whore of Rome image? That's ours, not theirs."

After she had thought for a couple of minutes, Andrea began to wonder about that herself.



"Mark," Andrea said the next morning. "I think there's something we need to talk about. About the Special Commission. There's something that came up when I was talking to Clara that made me think that, maybe, the road to getting seventeenth-century Europeans to get to the point of religious live-and-let-live is several thousand miles longer than any of us ever dreamed."

"Maybe," Mark said after he had heard her out. "Maybe. But you're forgetting something."

"What?"

"She is working with us on the Commission. And so is the abbot. Captain Wiegand is really pretty decent. No matter how much of this conditioning they got as kids."



July seemed to go by in a blur. Sitting in Würzburg, Steve Salatto got the latest mailbag from Fulda and wished that he had better communications. In Grantville, Ed Piazza pointed out to Arnold Bellamy that the folks in the field were pretty exposed and that he was planning to continue letting them function on a fairly long leash. No, he said. He really did not think that Wes went overboard. Under the circumstances. Maybe a little ballistic, but not overboard.