Eric Flint: 1635:The Dreeson Incident

"What, exactly, do they want?" Annabelle Piazza stood in her kitchen, holding a piece of paper against the wall next to the phone while she tried to scribble notes with a worn-down pencil.

"I thought I'd better call Ed at home," Henry Dreeson repeated for the third time. "I wasn't sure that it's really SoTF state business and I know he's trying to keep civil service and politics separate. Which is good and right, I suppose, but pretty hard to do when a man has to get elected. Anyway, what I think it amounts to is that Wes Jenkins and Harlan Stull think it would do the Fourth of July Party some good in Buchenland County in these upcoming elections for me to come over on a politicking trip some time this fall. Buchenland County-that's what we used to call Fulda. Because they're having some fallout from this Ram Rebellion that's going on down in Franconia and all. I'll call Joe, too, since Harlan's his nephew. And Chad, since Wes is his brother. Maybe they've heard something about what's up."

"I'll pass it on. It could be legitimate SoTF business though, it sounds like. So maybe you should call him at the office."

"Seems to me more like Fourth of July Party business. I can't go anyway, of course. Ronnie's still among the missing and I can't go haring off and leave Annalise to watch over the rest of Gretchen's orphans all by herself. Not even with a cook and a sort of nanny in the house. There has to be somebody who's in charge. Gretchen's had more than a year to organize the Committee of Correspondence in Amsterdam. You'd think that she'd be getting herself organized by now and come home and take care of those kids. Especially with Ronnie still down in Bavaria, somewhere, as far as we know. The shooting war's been over for nearly three months. Why's Gretchen still in Amsterdam, anyhow? But maybe somebody else could go over to Fulda. Can you ask Ed that, to do me a favor?"

He was about to put down the phone, when the doorbell rang. Annabelle was saying something about Ronnie and Mary Simpson, though, so he kept hold of the receiver. "Annalise," he called. "Can you answer that?"

She came scurrying from somewhere at the back of the house, opened the door, and stood there talking for a couple of minutes to someone outside. Just as he finished up with Annabelle, she turned back into the front hall leading by the hand another girl who looked so much like her that she could have been her sister. "It's my cousin Dorothea and her fiance. From Grafenwohr. Oma sent them here so they can get married. She's Catholic. He's not. They can't get married in the Upper Palatinate. They've been on the road ever since Oma got kidnapped."

She pulled the girl into the living room, turned her head, and waved at the couch. "Sit down, Dorothea, for goodness sake!"

Dorothea sat.

Pregnant, Henry thought. Annie sat down that way when she was carrying Margie. Margie sat down that way when she was carrying all three of her kids. A kind of bottom-heavy thump, like her rear end couldn't wait to meet the chair.

"Hell," he said. "Let me call Jenny Maddox. I'll waive the waiting period for the license and we can take care of it after supper, over at city hall. Run into the kitchen, will you, Annalise, like a good girl, and tell Martha that we're going to have two more at the table, so she can set places. Then come back and explain about civil wedding ceremonies to them." He grabbed his cane and stumped back out into the hall to use the phone again before she could object.

When he got back into the living room after he'd gotten Jenny to agree to go back to the Bureau of Vital Statistics as soon as she had finished eating and fetch a marriage license, the girl-Dorothea? Yep, Dorothea-had slid off the sofa down onto the floor. She was rolling a ball back and forth with Gretchen's two-year-old Joey. Annalise and the boy-all right, young man, somewhere in his mid-twenties, probably, but he had one of those eternally boyish faces-were talking a mile a minute about civil weddings. He was a Calvinist, not a Lutheran, and Calvin had originally been in favor of having weddings be civil, it seemed, because marriages were legal contracts. It was all right with him.

Henry looked at Dorothea on the floor. She was Catholic, Annalise had said, but it didn't look like she was the kind to argue with her future husband. After he'd gotten the two of them good and tightly married, Annalise could call someone over at St. Mary's, explain it all, and let them worry about fixing the situation up with the priests. Seemed to him that this was one of those better to beg forgiveness than ask permission situations. If they could fix it up. He wasn't sure what the Catholic church rules were, either up-time or down-time. Jesuits were supposed to be good at figuring the angles, though.

Dorothea was still rolling the ball with Joey. Will came in from the back yard. He watched a couple of minutes, walked over, and leaned against her shoulder, his blond hair falling against hers. She kept rolling the ball with her left hand and put her right arm around the older boy's waist.

Family. Annalise's cousin, so Gretchen's cousin, too. Knew how to deal with kids.

"I'd like to invite the pair of you to stay with us, here at the house," Henry said. "Not for just a few days, but until Nicholas here finds a job and the two of you have a chance to look around and get settled permanently. No hurry about that. You're welcome to stay as long as you like. It's a big old house. We've got plenty of room."

Laurent Mauger climbed down from the wagon. The driver had set out the set of portable folding steps he took along when he traveled, so he managed it with considerable dignity. He stretched his legs, crooked a finger at the porter outside the Higgins Hotel, and walked in.

It was such a wonderful world in which a man's dutiful service to the Huguenot cause had the side effect of allowing him to stay in the Higgins Hotel in Grantville on quite legitimate business, which he could expense to the company.

Quite legitimate business. He was a wine merchant. While the local wines grown around Jena weren't bad, and the Franconian wines were really superb if one liked a dry white, there was a lot of money in Grantville now. Some of that money belonged to people who were convinced that Rhine wines, Moselle wines, sometimes even Italian red wines, but above all French wines, were better. Or, if not better, at least more impressive when a man served them to his dinner guests.

Down-timer money, mostly, when it came to wine marketing. Most of the up-timers preferred beer. The men, at least.

Money to be made. That was how he had come to know Isaac de Ron in Frankfurt. Money to be made quite honestly, along with the thrill of doing something a little devious, perhaps, for his fellow religionists. And a town with a class structure so peculiar that nobody thought it odd to see a wine merchant talking to a garbage collector as long as they had made it known to anyone who cared to listen that they shared a common church affiliation.

He huffed his way up the steps. In deference to the local creek's tendency to flood, the ground floor of the Higgins Hotel was devoted to service area. The splendid reception room was on the first floor, some distance above the street.

All this, and a hot tub, too.

Mauger felt no obligation to identify "my contact" as the host of Zum Weissen Schwan in Frankfurt. Then his own mouth betrayed him by speaking the name. "De Ron." Merde! Conspiracy wasn't as easy as it might be. He might as well keep going, now that Dumais knew who the intermediary was.

Paranoia. What a wonderful word. A wonderful thing, too. It made the life of a field agent so much simpler. Jacques-Pierre Dumais stretched out on his pallet, propped his feet up on his trunk, and started a mental diagram. It didn't look quite like a spider web. More like two webs, blown together by a strong wind, not meshing, but intersecting in certain areas.