The Tangled Web(63)

Martin looked at the rabbi for a few minutes. Then, in the up-time manner, he saluted him.

Frankfurt am Main, November 1633

"Where did you get it?" Crispin asked suspiciously.

"The administrator in Fulda for the New United States said that he owed me a favor. So I said that he could do me one, since they had confiscated it as evidence. It's the duplicating machine that Menig had at his paper mill, producing those scandalous pamphlets. It's yours legally. I have receipts."

Crispin looked at it with distaste. "Do you have an exorcist to get the evil spirits out of it?"

"Not exactly. But you'll be paying for it for several years, so don't feel that you got something for nothing."

"How?"

"I brought Menig's son to apprentice with you. He's at my rooms. No fee."

"I thought he was the one who actually ran the machine."

"He is, but the up-timers think he is not old enough to be held, as the woman named Mrs. Hill put it, 'criminally responsible.' I offered you and Merga as an alternative, which Mr. Wesley Jenkins accepted. He is, from what I have observed so far, an incredibly ingenious boy who will occupy a great deal of your time."

Merga looked at her husband.

"All right," he said. "We'll take it. Him. Both of them. The machine and the boy."

"What about the girl?" Merga asked. "Bodamer's daughter. Liesel. What have they done to her?"

"Gone to her mother's people, for the time being, at least. Bodamer is one of Schlitz's subjects and the Ritter's lawyers asserted jurisdiction on his behalf, even though he is under arrest himself. Mrs. Hill was very angry about it."

"Beyond that," Martin asked after a while, "how's business?"

"I'm developing a new line," Crispin said. "Merga's idea. We haven't heard from the merchant selling the duplicating machines, yet, but then he is certainly not in Frankfurt. These things take time. I am creating a new small newspaper to circulate locally and present advertisements for things that people want. There must be many people in Frankfurt who want some item, and other people who have it but no longer want it, but who do not know one another. With the duplicating machine, now, the cost of production for these 'want ads' will be reduced a lot . . ."



"Stop delaying, Martin," Merga said. "You have to go upstairs and say hello to Mutti."

When Wackernagel came back down the stairs, he moaned. "You've got to do something, Merga. You absolutely have to get her off this 'settle down and get married.' Find her an avocation. A 'hobby' as the up-timers say. Some other interest."

She looked up from the stand where she was watching Emrich Menig piece the duplicating machine together. "Getting you married and settled down is more than an avocation. It is her vocation, her calling."

"Merga, you have got to do something." Martin's desperation was clear from the tone of his voice. "I can't settle down. Not here, not anywhere."

"Why on earth not, Marty?"

"Because I am married. In Erfurt. Well, in a village right outside the city. And in Vacha. And in Steinau. With calling of the banns and everything. They were all such darling girls when I met them. I couldn't bear to disappoint them, so I told the local pastors that I was an orphan from Breslau. And if any one of them finds out . . . ever. Or the church! There are a lot of really good reasons that I love the Imperial Road."

"How many reasons?" Merga asked. She put as much "foreboding" into the tone of her voice as she could possibly squeeze through her vocal cords.

"Besides my girls? Eight, right now."

Merga gasped.

Her brother gave her the grin he had used—in his older sister's opinion, with an unreasonable degree of success—to get out from under impending disciplinary measures since he was three years old. "But Maria is expecting again."





Happy Wanderer



Frankfurt am Main, July 1634

"Settle down and marry. Or marry and settle down. Or marry and don't settle down—keep riding the Reichsstrasse, for all I care, though your wife may have different ideas. But marry."

Martin Wackernagel left Frankfurt am Main with his mother's admonitions ringing in his ears. This time with the variation that now that his sister Merga and her husband Crispin Neumann had taken in "that unmanageable boy"—otherwise known as Emrich Menig—if he didn't marry and settle down, everything would, in all probability, be inherited by a stranger.

"Emrich's not likely to be a stranger by the time we all die," which had been his first ploy, didn't go over very well.

Neither did, "Abraham named Eliezer of Damascus, a stranger, as his heir. And Eliezer would have been, if God hadn't intervened with a miracle for Sarah. If he wants Merga to have a miracle at her age, I presume that he's still perfectly capable of giving her one."