The Tangled Web(3)

"How did you hear about the job?"

"Miss Susan Beattie told Mrs. Kortney Pence who told Mrs." She paused. "Schandra? Sandra? Tsandra? Prickett."

"Chandra," Ed said.

"Mrs. Prickett. Who told me, all at a meeting of the League of Women Voters. Miss Beattie thought of me because her father knows Mr. Birdie Newhouse who knows my brother Dietrich."

Ed sorted it out in his mind. From Orville Beattie's daughter to Andrea Hill's daughter who was married to Fred Pence to Wes Jenkins's daughter. All adult children of members of the NUS administration in Fulda. Grantville had been a pretty small town, after all, before the Ring of Fire.

" 'Because you are offering a salary.' That is the most forthright reply I have had from anyone applying for this job. When I asked why he wanted it, I mean. Or she. Would you care to explain, Mrs. Stade?"

"My husband went bankrupt. Nobody can blame the Ring of Fire for that. He went bankrupt before it. He died in April 1631. Because of the bankruptcy, he didn't leave me any money to live on. He didn't leave a business for me to fight with the guilds about over whether or not a woman can run it. All of this was in Arnstadt, though he was born in Stadtilm. His father was born in Badenburg, which is how I came to meet him and marry him. I am from Badenburg. I married and went away from my family. Now I am a widow, childless, and do not want to go back and live on the charity of my brothers and sisters. I have used up my dowry. I want work, my own income."

She nodded emphatically. "I also consider myself qualified. My husband was a councilman before he failed in his business; my father is a councilman. I presume that one of my brothers will succeed him on the council. I know politics—more widely than most, since I have ties in three cities, and through my brother Dietrich and the problems with Herr Newhouse's land, have come to know a fourth, your own. I can also help the administration figure out where the disputes are between the Fulda city council and the abbey, I think. There are bound to be a lot of old grudges."

She paused and smiled, reaching through the slit in the side of her skirt for her pocket. "And I carry the constitution of the New United States with me, everywhere I go. I have learned it by heart. As well as anyone, I can tell your administrators in Fulda what the abbot can and cannot do, under the down-time law. I will be very happy to tell the abbot of Fulda what he can and cannot do under this constitution."

Ed got up, walked to the side of the room, and moved an upholstered office chair from its place near the wall. "Have a more comfortable seat," he suggested.



Johann Bernhard Schenk von Schweinsberg was not happy. He was nearly fifty years old and had never before heard of such a thing. He glared at Ed Piazza.

"It's 'take it or leave it,' " Ed said. "The condition of our permitting you to go back to Fulda is that you take along our appointee to serve as a liaison between you and the NUS administration there."

"It is wholly inappropriate," the abbot of Fulda said. "Utterly inappropriate."

"My name is Clara Bachmeierin," the woman said. "Widowed Stade. I am from Badenburg. I am Lutheran. We have dealt with the up-timers since they first arrived. You have not. You have been away, among the imperials. We have learned to understand their politics. You have not. Stop making a sour face at me. I have reached an age at which no one will consider my presence scandalous or shocking. I am thirty-six, no girl. I will share the quarters of Mrs. Hill. She has an apartment upstairs. Her son-in-law, Mr. Pence, has an apartment downstairs in the same building, which he shares with two other men. He thinks it is safer for Mrs. Hill to be upstairs."

"You are a Protestant."

"That's what I just said," she answered.

"A Protestant and a female. Not a suitable advisor for a Catholic ruler. Not a suitable advisor for an abbot."

"Listen, Schweinsberg," Ed Piazza interrupted them, "at least half of your former subjects were Protestant, when you became abbot in 1623 and began a stronger enforcement of the Counter-Reformation. That is, half of them were still Protestant after the last three or four abbots had been using their authority over the past half-century to try to coerce them into becoming Catholic again, using differential tax rates, forbidding Protestants to hold public office, giving them the option of conversion or exile."

"It is our duty to bring people back into the fold of the church," Schweinsberg said. "It was our guilt that the Protestant revolt occurred in the first place, damning so many souls to hell. Since you are supposedly Catholic yourself, Herr Piazza, you should be doing the same."