The Tangled Web(7)
"Riches I heed not, nor man's empty praise:
"Be thou mine inheritance now and always;
"Thou and thou only the first in my heart;
"O Sovereign of heaven, my treasure thou art."
So far, so good. The choir was on key. Brian threw a smile to his sister Linda at the organ, who pulled a few stops. Then for the final verse he broke the choir out into the other arrangement he had, not in the hymnal—John Leavitt's, the one set to "Thaxted" from the Jupiter movement of Gustav Holst's "The Planets."
"Great God of heaven, my victory won,
"May I reach heaven's joys, O bright heaven's Sun!
"Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
"Still be my vision, O Ruler of all.
"Great God of heaven, my victory won,
"May I reach heaven's joys, O bright heaven's Sun!
"Amen!"
* * *
"Outrageous, of course," Tino Nobili said to Schweinsberg after mass. "I'm sure that you agree with me. A woman as organist and women in the choir! Irish folk music and modern composers rather than plainsong. Trust me, sir, this is not the direction the entire church had gone, not even in the up-time world. I was a member of the Pope Pius X Society. I have their mailings. I will give you some of them to take with you, to read."
The abbot thanked him gravely. Personally, he had enjoyed the music and no one expected a parish in a small city to follow all of the liturgical prescriptions for the choir of the Sistine Chapel, of course. Or even those for the choir of the Abbey of Fulda.
Fulda, February 1633
"Do you prefer to be called Mrs. Stade or Miss Bachmeier?" Wes Jenkins asked.
Clara thought a moment. "I am a widow, so I am certainly not Mrs. Stade, even though Herr Piazza calls me that. Caspar has been dead for almost two years. How about Ms. Bachmeierin? I understand that Ms. covers every marital status for your people. And I do prefer the feminine form of my family name. I am a woman, after all—not a man. Being called Bachmeier sounds very odd to me."
"That'll do fine," Wes said, leaning an elbow on the mantel.
They were all standing up. The cleaning crew had taken the table and chairs out of the conference room so they could mop and wax the floor.
She was leaning against the window sill. The administration building had windows with sills. The immediately past abbot, a guy named von Schwalbach, had torn down some medieval monstrosity about twenty years ago and built a nice little renaissance-style palace with corridors and paved floors and big windows with clear glass panes.
The afternoon sun came in at an angle, making a bright narrow stripe across her hair and face. And body, above the waist. He found himself thinking that whatever she called herself, she was definitely a woman. A fine-looking woman. He hoped that the late Caspar had appreciated his good luck. Then he realized that he hadn't cared what a woman looked like since Lena was left up-time.
"If you don't mind," Andrea Hill said, "since we will be sharing an apartment, I will call you Clara. And call me Andrea, please."
She looked at Wes watching the German woman and thought, chaperone time? Lenore, Wes's older girl, wasn't much younger than her own daughter Kortney. She'd have to ask Kortney, next time she wrote, if Lenore and Chandra had their fingers in whatever pie led up to shipping Ms. Bachmeierin over to Fulda. She knew they had been worried about having their dad walking around like one of the living dead for so long.
Well, she couldn't blame Wes. She'd felt that way herself for quite a while after her husband Harry died back in 1997, but gradually the world had turned itself back right side up. She had felt it worse when her first husband left her in 1965. Harry, at least, had not wanted to go. But if Bob hadn't left, she wouldn't have gone back to school and gotten the A.A. degree that led her to this job, or married Harry, or had her two girls, so . . .
"When's the abbot due?" Harlan Stull asked.
"In about a half an hour. Maybe I should have asked you first, but I thought it was reasonable to agree when he wanted to go to the monastery first, before he came over to meet all of you. He's supposed to be in charge of it, after all," Clara answered.
"Supposed to be?"
"I'm not sure how much support he has. Neither is he, really. That's one thing he wants to find out."
"Brief me," Wes said, thinking he might as well find out sooner than later what caliber of person Ed had picked.
"Well, he was elected abbot in 1623. Three years later, he brought in some reformed Benedictines from someplace in Switzerland to help him reorganize the abbey. The year after that, that was in 1627, after he got their report, he talked the pope into sending the nuncio—that was Pietro Luigi Caraffa back then—as a papal visitor, a kind of inspector to conduct a visitation of the abbey. Caraffa issued a whole batch of reform decrees that pointed out that according to the rule of Saint Benedict, authority belonged to the abbot. They were pretty critical of the way the noble-born monks in the Fulda chapter had encroached on it. After Caraffa left—he couldn't very well stay here permanently—the provosts, the monks who administered the abbey's property, got up a rebellion against the changes."