The Tangled Web(91)

"So, if Brahe were to send them up here for a short course in Americanization—where are the potential pitfalls?"

"Eberhard doesn't racket around in whorehouses, if that's what you're asking," Joel said. "He's got one girl—Agathe Donner, they call her Tata—and he'll probably bring her along if he comes up to Fulda."

Derek swallowed. "Tata?"

"Yeah." Jeffie winked. "She's got quite a pair of tatas on her, really impressive, but that's not the reason for her nickname. It's just short for Agathe. One of her little brothers couldn't say her name right when he was learning to talk. I don't think it would be smart to tell them what it means in English."

"Really, Derek—ah, that is, sir," Joel said. "It's not as if she'd be the only informal alliance out at Barracktown. Sure, he sleeps with her, but otherwise, he pretty much keeps it zipped up, which is pretty fair behavior for a nineteen-year-old kid who was brought up to think the world ought to be his oyster and then got slapped in the face by real life the year after his dad died. Some 'grand tour' his mom could afford by the time the uncles got their claws into what was left after she dealt with their dad's debts—their Junior Dukeships got to go to Strassburg, Basel, Mömpelgard, Lyon, and Geneva. Then they came straight back home. I suppose you could stretch a point and say that Lyon counts as France, but . . . they didn't make it to Italy or Austria or England."

"Who's the girl?"

Jeffie grinned. "Would you believe the daughter of the head of Mainz's Committee of Correspondence? Such as it is."

"Ah," Derek Utt moaned. "No."

"Her dad's perfectly happy about it. He's a lot happier than the father of Lieutenant Duke Friedrich's girlfriend."

"Who is?"

"The chaplain for the Calvinists in Brahe's regiments."

"The father's the chaplain, not the girlfriend," Jeffie said deadpan.

"He's from Hesse—from Kassel, really. His name's Marcus Pistor. A real extremist, in a Calvinist sort of way. The way Eberhard put it was, 'He studied under Gomar himself and is fanatically anti-Vorstian,' as if that was supposed to mean something to me. Well, hell, it definitely means something to him, so I guess we ought to look it up." Joel sighed.

"Her name's Margarethe and believe me, her dad has really pissed her off, not to mention vice versa." Jeffie grinned. "She looks like Bambi's mother, but don't believe all that sweetness and light for a minute. Margarethe looks harmless, but it's deceptively harmless. Theo even calls her Rehgeißchen when he wants to make her mad."

" 'Little Doe," Joel nodded. "Like some made-up American Indian maiden in a movie."

"They don't like making it easy on themselves, do they?"

"Not really."

"Ensign Duke Ulrich doesn't have a steady girlfriend," Jeffie offered hopefully.

"He's only fifteen," Joel snorted.

Jeffie plowed on. "He's getting to that age, though. But I made it clear that if they do come up to Fulda, I have dibs on Gertrud Hartke."

"Does Gertrud agree to this condition?" Wes Jenkins asked.

"Oh, sure." Jeffie beamed confidently. "She absolutely adores me."

The morning and the evening of the seventh day

Essen, May 1634

Louis de Geer stood at the window, looking out at the ever-expanding industrial base of his new republic. It wasn't pretty, but neither was his copper mining franchise in Sweden. The beauty of industrialization lay in the money that arrived in an entrepreneur's bank account.

"The rumors seem to be," his informant was saying, "that the archbishop of Cologne has hired three, maybe four, Irish generals—well, colonels, at least—with their mercenary regiments, out of Austria. Supposedly, he made the down-payment the end of April. People seem to expect that they'll arrive in Bonn by the middle of May."

"Which ones?"

"Butler, Geraldin, and Deveroux, Deveroux, something like that. Dennis MacDonald is supposed to be with them, but none of my men have actually seen him. They managed to get their cavalry across Swabia somehow. Maximilian let them cross Bavaria, of course, since his brother wanted them. As for their route the rest of the way, I hear that Nasi is peering suspiciously at Egon von Fürstenberg. He is not at all happy about the proposal that the emperor is floating to unify Swabia and set a Lutheran margrave of Baden on top of him as administrator. Probably with a Lutheran military commander, too, if Sweden leaves Horn with the USE after this year's campaigns."

"We could have lived happily and successfully without the arrival of those three—without all four of them, really. Oh, well." De Geer turned to his secretary. "Send a memo to Nils Brahe in Mainz."