Theo, upon noting that neither Jeffie nor Joel had ever heard of Calixtus, was profoundly struck by the glaring gaps in their education. "He's a professor at Helmstedt, of course. For the last couple of years, he's been advocating religious discussion between representatives of the various confessions based on the Holy Scriptures and the proponents of Catholic doctrine. He seems to think that if people just went back to the early church, before Constantine, everything would work out and the world would be full of sweetness and light. He's even been to Jena, lobbying Gerhard and the other orthodox Lutheran theologians."
Chaplain Pistor would have been proud of the disgust dripping from his son's tongue.
"He's a Philippist," Simrock's voice was mild. "An extreme Philippist. The Flacians hate him."
"And Helmstedt is what and where?" The derisory tone of Jeffie's voice was designed to disguise the fact that he really didn't have the vaguest clue.
"I'm not so sure that Montaigne had the right of it about peasants," Theo whispered to Margarethe. "They just plain haven't been educated sufficiently at all."
Hertling looked over Joel's shoulder. "Who are the two guys so loaded down with olive branches that they're staggering under the weight?"
"Well, one of them's the count from Rudolstadt, over by Grantville." Jeffie grinned. "You can tell him because he's wearing a gimme cap with the bill turned backwards. I don't know the other one."
"Heinrich Friedrich von Hatzfeldt," Margarethe said. "He's the oldest brother of the prince-bishop of Würzburg. The Catholic bishop of Würzburg, in Franconia, where the people just voted to join the up-timers." Margarethe's voice was much calmer than her brother's had been. She was sitting in the taproom looking like a misplaced, very small, medieval Italian madonna, with dark brown eyes, straight dark brown hair, and a perfectly oval face.
Simrock interrupted. "Their mother's a von Sickingen. Their father worked here for the archbishop of Mainz most of his life in various kinds of administrative jobs. He's a canon at St. Alban's—you can look him up, if you want to, because he's right in town still. He didn't leave when the Swedes came in. Franz, the bishop, is in Bonn with the archbishop—this archbishop—and Ferdinand of Bavaria, that's the other archbishop, most of the time."
"They don't call this part of the Rhineland 'priests' alley' for nothing," Reichard Donner muttered.
Margarethe tossed her head. "This man, the bishop's brother, goes back and forth. People say he's trying to broker some agreement for Franz to go back to Würzberg and work along with the up-timers, sort of like the prince-abbot did in Fulda."
Walther Hertling grinned. "I don't suppose the archbishop—the Mainz archbishop, not the Bavarian in Cologne—would complain if the Swedes let him come back to Mainz, either."
Joel turned around and looked at Hertling. "Don't hold your breath. For the deals to get anywhere, they'd both have to do what the abbot did—drop the 'prince' part out of their titles."
"In that case," Duke Eberhard said, "I certainly won't hold mine."
The morning and the evening of the fifth day
"At least," Jeffie whispered, "the town's small enough that we can pretty much see it in one morning. Be grateful for small favors."
Simrock, assuming the duty of host since he was a local boy, had just explained as much as he knew—as much, that was, as his teachers at the Latin School in the city had known—about Mainz's "Roman stones," which turned out to be forty-seven still-standing columns from a long-gone nearly five-mile-long aqueduct, not to mention every other relic of antiquity he was aware of.
Jeffie proved to be only minimally enthusiastic about educational tourism. He kept whispering to Joel. "I could see some point if it was still carrying water, but a batch of rock pilings is a batch of rock pilings, no matter now old they are. I could have looked at pilings back home."
Reichard Donner, who had come along out of sheer curiosity, overheard him. "Yes. Too old, too old."
Ulrich hopped down from on top of one of the pilings, landing with a solid thunk. "Well, if this is too old, let's try the cathedral."
"It's Catholic," Theo said.
Ulrich swung himself into place next to Jeffie Garand, but looked at Theo. "You do 'glum' pretty well. 'Morose,' too. Fifty years from now, I'll be laughing at you because you're such a cantankerous old man."
The cathedral, which they had seen from a distance on their way into town, since it was far higher than any other landmark, proved on closer inspection to be, in Jeffie's whisper, "a great big pile of red brick with a lot of gingerbread." He looked at it critically. "It's not any prettier than St. Mary's in Grantville."