No, Reichard was a practical man. His comment on the arrangement had been that this was the greatest stroke of luck the Donner family had ever had and was ever likely to have.
Still, there was such a thing as tact. Maybe not where Merckel was concerned, though.
Besides, with increasing exposure, Eberhard was gradually becoming more interested in the political portion of his evenings. Still, though, the Horn of Plenty's primary attraction for him had a neat figure rather than a lot of economic figures. Feminine cooperation rather than the need to establish a purchasing cooperative was the crucial element that led to the extension of the captain's regular presence at the inn and the protection that resulted from that presence.
It was protection that they needed, in Justina's opinion, as long as Reichard kept flirting with those radical CoC ideas. She intended to take full advantage of it as long as there was a window of opportunity. Which meant, in effect, as long as Eberhard remained interested in their daughter. Which would be long enough, she hoped, to get the protection in some way institutionalized and make the continued existence of the Horn of Plenty and the Mainz CoC somewhat less precarious.
"Uh," Hertling said. "The captain will have something to say about it, I suppose, once he talks to the boy."
The subject of their discussion, having dressed somewhat less hastily than Tata, wandered into the taproom. Duke Eberhard of Württemberg yawned. "Which one of the boys is in trouble this time? About what?
Hertling duly saluted the square-faced, brown-haired, slightly long-nosed young man. Personally, he thought that his noble captain looked more like most people's idea of a sturdy peasant than a dashing cavalier, no more aristocratic than anyone else on the streets of Stuttgart or Mainz, including, for what it was worth, himself. That wasn't an opinion he was given to sharing with other people, though. Der gute Walther was prudent for his years.
"Neither of your brothers, sir. Simrock. If you could come down to General Brahe's headquarters with us . . ."
"I suppose that's not a request?"
Tata's eyes followed their departing backs. "So much for the idea of taking a boat down the river to Bingen with Friedrich and Margarethe and looking at Castle Ehrenfels today."
"Castles," her father said. "Castles, bah!"
Reichard Donner surveyed the room. The view was depressing. Mainz just wasn't a hotbed of revolutionary fervor. Perhaps he would have been better advised to move to Heidelberg. However, to be practical, there hadn't been an inn for him to take over in Heidelberg, whereas, in Mainz—owing to a fortuitous series of childless marriages and deaths from smallpox and plague, not to mention dysentery and measles, running through several imperial cities and tying all the way back to his long-ago godfather, one Reichard Wackernagel, belt-maker in Frankfurt am Main, husband of Justina's Aunt Maria—the Horn of Plenty had become available.
Even so. In addition to the two students, Pistor and Simrock, the attendees were not politically promising.
Pistor's sister Margarethe only came because her brother and her boyfriend did.
Philipp Schaumann, perpetual belt-maker's journeyman, aged about sixty-five, the hapless and hopeless perpetual suitor of his sister-in-law Kunigunde, came because Kunigunde lived here as well as because he was the younger brother of Justina and Kunigunde's late uncle's equally deceased wife. Also, he had been an acquaintance of Reichard's own late godfather back when they were both journeymen.
Sybilla Binder, about fifty and never married, was a friend of Kunigunde and the unhappy daughter of a belt-maker. She faced being thrown out of work when her father retired or died—one of which was certain to happen soon—and had no wish to spend her declining years spinning in the municipal hospital.
Ursula Widder, about fifty, Sybilla's friend, also never married, was the equally unhappy daughter of a tanner who had died and left her no option but to go into service. So she was now Kunigunde's general maid-of-all-work in the kitchen of the Horn of Plenty. It wasn't as if she had to put forth much effort to attend the CoC meetings.
Plus four soldiers and a corporal who were definitely not from a CoC-raised regiment and who attended because they were tasked by Gustavus Adolphus's commander in Mainz to see what they could do to prevent problems with . . .
. . . three very young dukes of Württemberg, one of whom was sitting with his arm around Tata's shoulder and twirling her reddish-tawny hair and fondling the various bits and pieces of her rotund body that he could conveniently reach.
The rest of his children were already in bed, which was some comfort.
"It's not an up-time idea," Simrock was insisting. "It's in Montaigne's Essays and they've been around for, oh, at least fifty years." For Simrock, not quite twenty himself, fifty years was ancient history. "How did he put it? 'No matter that we may mount on stilts, we still must walk on our own legs. And on the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.' "