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The Tangled Web(33)

By:Eric Flint & Virginia DeMarce


"No comment." The servant slammed the door.



Franz von Hatzfeldt looked rather anxiously at Johann Adolf von Hoheneck. "Is this appointment of a cardinal-protector for the USE something we should be taking into consideration in regard to Fulda?"

"There's nothing that we can do about it. It's too late to call the Irishmen and Gruyard back. We don't know exactly where they are. We have no way to communicate with them. And, in any case, we aren't paying them."

Schlitz, July 1634

"So I went into the town to get some news," Gruyard muttered. "I got it, didn't I? We can't sit walled up on top of this stupid hill forever. It isn't as if there's anyone in Fulda who might recognize me."

"It just goes to show," Karl von Schlitz orated, "that the demonic up-timers are in league with the Roman anti-Christ."

"Come down off it," Geraldin said. "Who do you think that you linked up with when you sent those feelers out to Hoheneck? Martin Luther?"

The two sons howled with laughter.

Gruyard smiled.

Walter Butler didn't think it was that funny.

Fulda, July 1634

"What do you suppose this means?" Johann Bernhard von Schweinsberg asked. "Will Gustavus Adolphus allow the archbishop of Mainz to come back to his see? How does it affect the status of the Mainz possessions around Erfurt that voted themselves into the State of Thuringia-Franconia? Will there be a new appointment to the see of Bamberg? How will it change the status of the bishop of Würzburg? Does it mean that Thuringia-Franconia will be granted its own bishop? If so . . . that would be wonderful."

"Why?" Harlan Stull asked.

"Well, there would be someone who could ordain priests. And confirm children. None of that has been done in the Stift for three years. Unless the suffragan down in Würzburg has done confirmations in some of the southern parishes that the diocese claims are under its jurisdiction."

"Why don't you ask him?"

"If I asked him, he could interpret it that I was asking him for favors. He could perhaps even interpret it to mean that I was tacitly acknowledging that the abbey of Fulda is under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Würzburg."

"Look," Harlan said. "You don't have the property any more. All you've got are a bunch of parishes with people in them. How about cutting out the turf wars?"

Schweinsberg looked at him wearily.

"Herr Stull, I have come to like and respect all of you. But in the course of the history of the church, Grantville has been a factor for only a short, a very short, time. The abbey of Fulda has been here for eight hundred years. I hope that it will still be here in another eight hundred years, if the last judgment does not intervene. I cannot and will not unilaterally renounce its rights."



"The truth is, Schweinsberg," Wes Jenkins said, "that I quite honestly don't have the vaguest idea what this will really mean. I'll write to Ed Piazza. And I'll set up an appointment for you to meet with Henry Dreeson before he goes home. Once he gets here, that is."

"I took a bunch of newspapers out to the barracks," Derek Utt said. "It should give them something to talk about besides peasant revolts. Distract their minds, sort of. I'm having them practice their new anthem, too. Mary Kat's grandma picked it out. The kid teaching school in Sergeant Hartke's loft translated it into German poetry for me and he is assigning the parts. Biehr, his name is."

Dubious Saints

Fulda, August 1634

Andrea was feeling increasingly frazzled. She was the senior civilian administrator in Fulda. Someone else should have been back a couple of days ago. They couldn't all have been delayed. Or if they were, at least one of them should have sent in a message. Pushing her bangs out of her face, she started out into the hall.

The land claims lawyer was just coming in, followed by his relatives, the school teacher and the speech writer. And by the little artist who lived in St. Severi church and painted murals.

Andrea stopped and looked. They had an amazing resemblance to one another when they were lined up like that. All four of them, Etienne Baril, his nephew, the teacher, and the artist. No one could ever seem to remember their names. Maybe it was deliberate. Last night I met upon the stair, a little man who wasn't there, she thought to herself. These Calvinist refugees survived as a kind of professional migrant labor force, from France to Antwerp to Frankfurt, from Lucca to Geneva to Hamburg, from Scotland to Nuernburg to Hungary, making themselves inconspicuous as they worked away to make the bottom line come out even in the cracks and crannies of administrative back rooms all over the continent. Survival by invisibility.

"What is it?" she asked.