Eric Flint: Grantville Gazette.Volume XV

His answer had her and her new guest sitting in a chair in the back office ten minutes later, with some tea brewing on her small hot plate. Cecelia grabbed the phone and started dialing.

Marietta Fielder wished she were dead. Dead would be easy, dead would be warm and less painful. Every winter since she was a child she had caught the latest sniffle, cold, or exotic flu. Regular as clockwork for the past ten years, she'd made a point of getting her flu shot early November, either at the mall in Fairmont, or from the doctor in town. Most of the time it had worked, and winter wasn't as bad as it could have been.

This year was worse than 1969. This time it hurt. No shots, no Advil for the migraines, precious little lemon juice. But she was mobile-just enough that she could be left safely at home alone during the day.

Shuffle to the toilet wrapped in an old dressing gown and bunny slippers, cough and splutter back to bed. All that was available was Gribbleflotz aspirin and some peppermints. Yuck!

Shaking her head in disgust while standing was a visceral mistake. Marietta gasped, held onto the rail at the top of the stairs waiting for her vision to return and slowly worked her way back to bed, levering herself back slowly under the quilt.

A thrash metal rock band erupted from the phone next to her head. More vision loss in an attempt to grab the handset. "What'cha want? No respect for the dead?" the corpse moaned down the line

Cecelia was gabbling at her. Marietta could hear her also coughing, spluttering, and the odd sneeze, but still gabbling.

"Marietta, we have a visitor, from England, insisting that he wants to meet you, sniff," Cecelia chattered away. "He has presents and everything."

Marietta was sure there was a combined chortle, giggle and a wet snort in the middle of that sentence.

Cecelia looked down at the map roll emptied onto the desk between her and their visitor. She ran her hand over "A Mappe of Massachusetts Bay Colony for His Worship Governor John Winthrop" and a package of papers marked "Inventories and Maps of Plymouth Colony, 1621" that were signed by a Captain Christopher Jones.

"He's a walking, talking librarian's Christmas present." This time Cecelia lost it completely, and barked out a laugh. Oooohhhh! More sore ribs, but worth it.

Her guest stared, frozen, with goggle eyes, perhaps wondering what had gotten into this sniffling, grumpy lady with the stupid smile. She waved one hand, mouthed, "Wait."

"Marietta, do you remember your first term taking your M.A.? Indexing and Classification Systems… Middle Ages to Victorian?"

Now she was enjoying herself. Life at the libraries had been a hell for the past couple of years. It seemed that God was having a little joke with the last two qualified librarians (or was that first?) in this universe. "You have someone here who uses the Caesarean Library Index-ACCCDEFGJJNOTTVV"

Getting into it (and being a smarty pants to boot), Cecelia quoted by rote from her college days, " Augustus, Caligula, Claudius, Cleopatra, Domitian, Faustina, Galba, Julius, Justinius, Nero, Otho, Tiberius, Titus, Vespasian, and Vitellius."

Tom nodded sharply, a grudging smile on his face.

A short garbled mutter from down the line, Cecelia answered sharply, "No chance, the British Library won't exist for another one hundred and twenty years, before that… where did the British Library get the Caesars' Index?"

More waiting, and then Cecelia heard a particularly painfully sounding exclamation from the handset. Finally, Marietta was getting very close.

"No, not him. His son. Yup! His father died over a year ago." Looking directly into Tom's sad eyes, Cecelia proclaimed, "I have Sir Thomas Cotton from London right in front of me, proposing some kind of library exchange program with the Guildhall in London, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and Sir Robert Cotton's Antiquarian Library at Connington Manor."

Tom was satisfied that his family's reputation for preserving books and manuscripts had survived.

1633 June, Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire

Francis Russell opened the shutters of his reception room window, looking down on the fallow deer grazing on the lawn in the late afternoon sunshine. He tossed his satchel with the paperwork from London onto his oak desk, and sat back to light his favorite pipe; smoke curling gently to the ceiling.

The now not-so-secret mission to Thuringia had not yet returned when Francis was summoned to Blackfriars Palace in April. Wentworth had informed him he had traded all of the king's twelve thousand acre interest in the Levels Corporation to others: selected landowners, merchants, minor lords and barons.

A condition was that Francis was to keep the "New Men" closely involved in the project, out of London and away from court. No doubt Wentworth was playing chess games with information from the history books. And Vermuyden-him too: no speculating on the London market, no crazy ventures in mining, keep him and his out from under the king's feet.

At the time the offer was a gift from heaven. Real investors with capital were always preferable to King Charles Stuart, who was always glad to spend other people's money with the slash of a pen. After the ham-fisted affair at St. Ives with Squire Cromwell's family, the king's boast that he could govern well without Parliament was going very sour, and Francis was pleased he had severed all current financial ties with the court. His bankers had also indicated with an improved rate of interest, and had also accelerated payments for the building work on Covent Garden Square on improved terms.

Now his old childhood playmate, Robert Weasenham had come back-alone. To be fair, he had delivered everything Francis had commissioned, and more. Tom Cotton had died in Grantville from a hot winter fever; however his bookwork had mainly been completed with precise collation of information that indicated that the Lynn Measure would fail.

"Whilst clear on certain details, the histories indicate the Measure will fail due to bad weather, thus some of the ditches and dykes must fail during some winter storm in 1636 or 1637. The other landowners also complain that the drainage is insufficient."

Francis' own encyclopedia entries had recorded that King Charles had assumed the project after the failure in 1638, and the impetus to complete the works had been lost until after a civil war. It also suggested that in that other history Cromwell was the coming man, and he had supported the completion of the project during the 1640s. Cromwell was a prickly subject for Wentworth and the king. Francis knew well enough to stay away from that subject in London.

A page from a 1994 road map of England (What was a "rental car"?) and encyclopedia entries for the towns in the Fen area showed the revised works during the late 1640s and thereafter for the next three hundred years. Francis now knew that they needed another parallel drainage canal for the Ouse, changes to the outflows of both the Nene and Ouse, high tide retaining gates at the river mouths, flood relief reservoirs. The list went on and on and on. This warranted more capital, more men, and he still had only five years to finish. Francis shook his head in wonder. The existing investors and the New Men would certainly have enough to keep them full occupied, and Francis had decided to delegate the financial arrangements more than he usually liked.

And for himself-only eight years left to manage his affairs. God! Seeing your own life history written down would sear any man's soul. Robert had assured him that these "Americans" believed God had changed what was written by bringing Grantville to this time. Francis had huffed and puffed at Robert, especially not understanding the story about the butterfly, and dismissed it as a piece of whimsy. Francis was a practical sort of man, what was written is written. He had immediately updated the will and inheritance clearly onto his children.