"You're looking pretty happy," Andrea said. "Aren't you going to miss dear old Fulda?"
"Not the town. And Mel Springer will do fine here in the interim, until we get an elected board of commissioners in the spring and can transfer authority. I have full confidence that all of you will back him up."
The strains of the Fulda Barracks Regiment singing its anthem came up from the square in front of the administration building. Wes got up and walked to the window, looking down, then over at St. Michael's church.
"But. I never thought I'd say it, when he first showed up. But honest to goodness, I'm going to sort of miss Schweinsberg."
He looked up, toward the Vogelsberg, out over the hills that surrounded the town. "The guy was more of a politician than a monk, I guess, but still, I'm sorry that the search parties never found him. There are a lot of places he could be, out there. If we had found his body, at least, we could have brought it back so the abbey could give him a decent burial with all the others. He was the abbot. He belongs there."
The Fulda Barracks Regiment down below redoubled its efforts.
Wes glanced back at the table. "Derek, what is that song called in English?"
Derek Utt looked at him. "For All the Saints."
Mail Stop
Home, Sweet Home
Frankfurt am Main, March 1633
Martin Wackernagel drew up his horse, first looking back at the route he had just completed and then forward toward the walls of Frankfurt am Main.
Via regia. Die Reichsstraße. There would never be anything to equal the Imperial Road. Sure, if you wanted to be prosaic, it was just one more trade route, a commercial connection between the great cities of Frankfurt and Leipzig and their fairs. It had been for centuries.
But it was more than that. He hoped that it always would be. Merchants, teamsters, journeymen looking for a new place to demonstrate their existing skills and acquire new ones. Crowned heads, princes of the church, pilgrims on their way to the great shrine of St. James of Compostella, Santiago, in Spain. Victorious soldiers who had triumphed and beaten soldiers in retreat. Unemployed soldiers looking for work, entertainers looking for audiences, peddlers, and beggars. Sometimes it was hard to tell them apart, but they all used the road.
Martin loved the road. He had been riding it as a private messenger for fifteen years, ever since he finished the apprenticeship that his father had forced on him and refused to go ahead and become a journeyman in the trade. Not that he had anything against Uncle Reichard. He had been a good master, but he was a belt-maker. Belts were necessary, of course, but not very interesting.
So, then and now, he carried messages from Frankfurt to Erfurt via Hanau, Langenselbold, Gelnhausen, Wächtersbach, Soden and Salmünster, Steinau an der Straße, Schlüchtern, Neuhof, Fulda, Hünfeld, Vacha, Eisenach, and Gotha to Erfurt; then back again. Sometimes he had covered the further stretch to Weimar, Naumburg and Leipzig if there was no one available in Erfurt to pick up the rest of the run, but Frankfurt to Erfurt was his regular route. Or had been, until he started adding the leg that took him to the new city of Grantville, which sent out a truly amazing amount of correspondence.
He knew that all of this caused his mother a lot of distress. She recited with some frequency—every time he got back to Frankfurt, in fact—a lament that she was beginning to wonder if he would ever settle down and get married.
It wasn't as if, being a widow, she needed him to marry and make a home for her. She lived very comfortably with his older sister Merga and her husband Crispin Neumann. She just wanted him to settle down and marry. No special need for it—just a want.
She just could not understand why he loved the road so much.
Good Lord, Mutti, he thought. Do you suppose you could let it go just this once?
Mechanical Ingenuity
Bonn, Archdiocese of Cologne, March 1633
Arno Vignelli had something to sell. Of course. He was an Italian engineer. Most engineers were Italian. They made incredibly ingenious machines in Italy. Italians produced clever devices and then crudely set out to make their fortunes by selling them to that portion of Europe's population that lived north of the Alps.
Evrard Holmann's job, at the moment, included investment in new technology on behalf of Duke Ferdinand of Bavaria, Archbishop of Cologne. He shuffled through the papers on his desk. The man now standing in his office was the student of someone famous. Holman shuffled again. He had the information here somewhere, he was sure. He moved the pile in front of him to the side and snagged another one which should have the letter of introduction. Vignelli had also been to Grantville. He had built this particular device on the basis of something he had observed there.