Eric Flint - 1635 - The Cannon Law

Besides, Frank realized a little later at bedtime, the state of mind his mother almost certainly spent most of her pregnancy in didn't seem to have done him any harm. So far as he could tell, anyway.

The next morning, after breakfast and after an hour or so getting the carriages unloaded and Piero and Nicollo on their way home, Frank took a moment to check out the neighborhood. They were on the northern fringe of the Borgo, which was apparently one of Rome's roughest neighborhoods.

Frank could well believe it. Half of the neighborhood, even though it was right between the Vatican and Castel Sant'Angelo-you could just about see the dome of St. Peter's from an upper-story window-was in outright ruins. The rest would need a lick of paint and a good sweep just to look shabby.

Even mid-morning, there was hardly anyone about, just a few samples of street-life, a couple of stray dogs and a whole bunch of cats. Frank wondered, at first, where everyone was, but then remembered that Maestro Bazzi had told him it was one of the poorest quarters of Rome, that only the truly desperate lived there, and on no account to go south of the street called Borgo Angelico during the hours of darkness, unless he took several heavily armed friends with him.

Frank could believe that, too, and Borgo Angelico was a whole block over from where he stood surveying the street scene. Still, staying out of the genteel neighborhoods would keep them away from the attention of the authorities until they got established. Hopefully they'd be set up and running smoothly by the time they got their printing press, because that'd be a sure signal for Massimo to come visit, and if there was a man with a talent for putting out propaganda by the ton, it was Uncle Massimo. It would be about then that trouble might start.

It was while he was musing in this way that he felt a pair of slim arms go around his waist from behind. "Slacking, husband?" said Giovanna.

He laughed. "For a couple of minutes. Just thinking about all we've got to do here."

"Oh, yes. A crib to make, and baby clothes to make, and Dottoressa Sharon to see. You have responsibilities, now."

He turned around in her grasp. "You too," he said. "Mind what I said about the wine, hey? One glass, watered, with dinner, and if Sharon tells you to stop, stop."

She nodded, solemn for a moment. Then the smile came back. "It's a nice neighborhood, isn't it? So much space and sunlight."

Frank chuckled. "I guess it would look that way after Murano. I was just thinking it was a bit run-down around here."

"All the better!" For a moment Giovanna was all Revolutionary and a hundred per cent Marcoli. "If we are to bring the news of Freedom and Justice to the oppressed, we must go where they are, no?"

"True. But we'll start with the social side of things. Maybe run a school, like Uncle Massimo does, hey?"

"Sure," Giovanna said, not sounding very convinced. "Meantime, we got work to do, husband."

They went back inside and got on with scrubbing their new home.

Rome

When Sharon came in to her office after breakfast there was, as usual, a stack of paperwork waiting with Adolf Kohl, her German chief of staff, clucking over it.

"This uppermost packet, Fraulein Nichols," he said, tapping a bundle of papers wrapped in ribbon and sealed with a blank seal, "was brought to our door by a street-boy who says he was given a few coins to deliver it by a man he did not know. The boy demanded an assurance that it be given into your hands directly you had finished breaking fast before he would leave, Fraulein. The remainder is invitations and routine correspondence from yesterday's deliveries and mails, for which I have taken the liberty of having draft replies prepared."

He hovered, plainly intrigued by the mystery. Before he'd been hired by the USE's infant State Department he'd been a foreign-correspondence clerk for some middle-ranking noble or other. The novelty of dealing with actual matters of an actual state still hadn't worn off, quite, and years of a light and boring workload had left the gangling, nervous Saxon with a tendency to cluck like a mother hen when business departed from the utterly routine. It was a mark of the man that while Sharon had managed to get him, in private, at least, to unbend a little as to the Your Excellencies, he couldn't seem to bring himself to address her as informally as by her first name.

"You haven't looked to see what it is?"

"Fraulein Nichols!" he exclaimed in genteel horror. "This packet is most clearly marked private and for the attention of the ambassador."

Sharon kept her face as straight as she could and picked up her letter-knife to open the seal. "Well," she said, "let's see what was so all-fired mysterious it couldn't have been delivered by a proper messenger."

Pretty much everything else that came arrived with either a liveried man carrying it or one of the more-or-less professional messengers who carried things around any town of any size. So that much about this packet was unusual. Sharon unfolded the wrapper and noted that it contained a couple of dozen sheets of high-quality paper, closely covered in an elegant penmanship. She looked closer. It was all in Latin. She sighed. That wasn't a language she had a good grasp of, although a year spent speaking almost nothing but one dialect of Italian or another had given her a leg up on learning it. She sat forward at her desk and began puzzling it out to see if it was worth getting a better translation.

By about halfway down the first page, she realized that it almost certainly was. And that the radio guys up in the attic were going to be damned busy tonight.

Magdeburg

Don Francisco Nasi waited on the sofa in Mike Stearns' office for the report he had prepared to have the impact he was predicting. It had been something of an effort for him to get an unscheduled meeting with Stearns, as the increasing pressure on the office of the Prime Minister of the United States of Europe was filling the man's day from end to end and frequently had him burning the midnight oil. The appearance of free time in the prime minister's daily schedule of meetings was a rare event, and it was only the sheer unwontedness of Nasi needing more than his usual twice-a-week briefing session that had persuaded Stearns' secretary to squeeze him in between one meeting and the next.

They were not in the usual conference room-the office staff was taking the opportunity to get that cleaned out and ready for the next session-but in Stearns' actual working office, which had come to remind Nasi of the kind of room his relatives in commerce and legal practice tended to inhabit: filing and paperwork on every surface, and a complete nightmare for the cleaning staff wherever you looked. The office of a man, in short, who toiled hard at important work and was usually too busy to pay much mind to the details, and furthermore did not make life any easier for his staff.

Even so, Stearns managed to be more effective in his role than most of his equivalents. A willingness to work hard-the contrast with Sultan Murad IV of Nasi's own personal acquaintance was striking, and Murad had the entire Ottoman Empire to run-and to get much of the work done himself set him so far apart from other rulers as to defy comparison. It also made Nasi worry, for he had come to think of Stearns as a friend and, in the two years of their acquaintance, Stearns had visibly aged.

Which made bringing him this latest piece of information something of a trial for Nasi's conscience. Although a sly grin seemed to be Mike Stearns chuckled. "You know, Francisco, there are some aspects of twentieth-century spy mastering you've missed."

Don Francisco Nasi raised an eyebrow and tilted his head to one side. He recognized that tone. Mike Stearns, prime minister of the United States of Europe, had a decidedly odd sense of humor. He waited for the punch line.