The Tangled Web(26)

"How does that work?"



"Hmm," Wes Jenkins said. "Around here, when someone says, 'A man's home is his castle,' I guess he really means it. This hall looks bigger every time I see it." He was standing with his back to the fireplace. Wearing an overcoat.

"It wasn't that hard to design the presentation," Clara said. Her breath made little patterns of steam in the air. She was wrapped up in three shawls.

The rest of the delegation now appreciated her insistence on bringing along three folding screens to this meeting. When they were set up in a semi-circle around the fireplace, they not only cut down significantly on the drafts but also to some extent reflected the heat from the fire back on the group. Otherwise, it would have dissipated into the cavernous hall.

Andrea shivered. "Do you suppose that reasonable nobles like Count Ludwig Guenther deliberately build themselves modern houses? Or is it living in freezing Burgs like this one that makes the unreasonable nobles the way they are?"

After their first three days as guests of von Buchenau, they had all come to appreciate that one of the main advances in modern architecture—seventeenth-century modern German architecture—was the ceiling. In this old fashioned great hall, what little warmth the fireplaces produced just floated up and up and up until it went out an unglazed window. When they got back to Fulda, they would have to say something nice to the abbey's one-time construction foreman, now the NUS administration's construction foreman, about the ceilings in the administration building.

"Actually, I thought it went pretty well, this time," Wes said. "Some of them don't buy into it at all, of course. Von Schlitz is still in hiding somewhere and I'm sure that several of the others share his opinions. And some of the ones who were considering it at the meeting will relapse into their old ways of thinking before the election."

Clara got up and moved over toward the fireplace. "Of course, I left something out."

"Left something out?"

"As we have presented it to the knights, it is very strong in showing that they will become direct citizens of the United States of Europe if they accept the constitution of the New United States. Well, now, the State of Thuringia. It will be the same constitution, with just a few name changes."

"So?"

"Ah. Haven't you noticed? I left out entirely that all of the people who are now their subjects will also become direct citizens of the United States of Europe, in all ways equal to them, and will have just as much right to vote for their representatives in congress and parliament and the president of the State of Thuringia as they do."

Wes stared at her. Now that he thought about it . . .

"Really, I just thought it was prudent to omit it." She looked at the rest of the delegation with an innocent expression on her face. "In some ways, it is very convenient that this is such an isolated backwater that the more extreme propaganda of the Committees of Correspondence has been slow to reach it. Possibly even von Ilten does not realize that if the election succeeds and Franconia becomes part of the State of Thuringia, all the little local legal jurisdictions will be abolished. It is in a subordinate clause, after all, in a subparagraph."

"Clara," Fred Pence started.

"If they aren't bright enough to figure out for themselves that although they will not be mediatized, neither will they any longer mediatize their tenants, was it our duty to stir up trouble by mentioning the matter?"

Fulda, February 1634

"It's a pretty complicated ballot," Fred pointed out. "It has a lot of 'if, then' items on it."

"What do you mean?" Roy asked.

" 'If' the person votes in favor of incorporation into the State of Thuringia-Franconia, 'then' there's a question about whether it will all be one county, Fulda and all the imperial knights together, or whether each little imperial knighthood will be its own county. Or county-equivalent, depending on what they decide to call it. Then a question for choosing the name. Of course, someone who votes against incorporation can still vote about the name, but it's hard to see why he'd want to. Or she. I've tried to make it as clear as possible. Do you think we ought to offer some kind of voter assistance, Orville?"

"We can't very well put someone in every single precinct to answer the voters' questions. We just don't have enough people."

"I've trained as many volunteers as I can, working from the voter registration lists. Picking a couple of people out of each precinct. It's been sort of trickle-down, but I've done it. It's not going to be perfect. Nothing is. But I've sent stuff with the directions out to the provosts and the Amtmaenner and the village mayors. They've been, or most of them have been, holding meetings to explain it to everyone. At least, I hope they have. In most cases, it's probably a bunch of guys sitting around in the village tavern and having a beer. If that. And the League of Women Voters has helped."