Designed to Fail, page 8
part #20 of Ring of Fire: 1632 Series
Gustafsson protested that not only did he like Margaretha; she also liked him.
That was not unlikely. She was seventeen and he was dazzlingly good-looking.
Christian Ulrik handed over a letter from the governor that could be summarized as, "Thou shalt not seduce the daughter of a wealthy supporter of one of the mayors unless both the father and the daughter are willing and see advantages to it."
Gustaffson kicked a hassock, impatiently. "I’ve already seduced her. It’s not the kind of thing that you can take back."
“"Do you have a chaplain?"
"Dreary old stick!"
✽ ✽ ✽
Unruly Osnabrücker somewhat soothed, Christian Ulrik returned to Münster, three weeks later than expected. He arrived back wet, half-frozen, and determined to marry Bente right now if not sooner.
Frederik’s promised chaplain was, presumably, still on his way from Strassburg. At least, he had not yet shown up in Münster, which was no surprise considering the weather. The governor drafted a Lutheran pastor who had come into the city a couple of weeks earlier, traveling with a party of merchants which was, in turn, still stuck at the inn because of the same weather.
That, of course, caused a variety of jurisdictional questions to arise, all of which the lawyers from Rinteln pounced upon with glee. The ordination of the traveling cleric was not in question, as he was well known to his companions, but he had no call to a parish in the city. Nor was Lutheranism yet so well organized in the Oberstift that there was any Lutheran superintendent or consistory. It had been less than a year since Archbishop Ferdinand of Bavaria’s vicar general had been energetically prohibiting Lutherans from living in the town at all.
Frederik swiped his hand through his unruly hair. Lutheranism wasn’t organized at all, yet, anywhere in the Oberstift. Or Niederstift. Could he as governor appoint himself as summus episcopus, recruit a cadre of duly ordained clergymen, and set it on its way, more or less as he was managing his spiritual obligations in Bremen and Verden?
He made a note to ask the lawyers.
For the time being, the traveling pastor could make the entry in the church register of his own parish when he got back home.
The German pastor, who spoke no Danish, raised an eyebrow. "Bente?" he asked. "Is that a name?"
"It would be 'Benedicta' if the register were written in Latin," the bridegroom said.
The pastor recorded it as Benedicta. The groom’s surname as Guldenlöwe. The permanent residence of both as the imperial city of Hamburg, since that was where they told him that Bente’s father was currently residing. Christian Ulrik said that his mother was deceased, so his father went into the register as Wittwer—a widower. A father named Christian Guldenlöwe, residence Glückstadt.
When the weather broke, he returned to a small town near Freiburg im Breisgau, where, since the couple were not his parishioners, he copied the information into the few pages at the back of the parish ledger that he reserved for the baptisms, marriages, and funerals of "vagabonds." Nobody was ever able to locate a copy of the official marriage record on the various occasions that it was called for during the ensuing half-century.
Christian Guldenlöwe of Glückstadt, otherwise known as Christian IV, king of Denmark, was not pleased by the marriage and expressed that to Frederik in forceful terms. However, he was less displeased than he would have been if Christian Ulrik had carried out his threat become an officer for the Spaniard in the Low Countries.
On balance, Frederik thought, it was not a bad outcome.
Christian Ulrik took stock of the "couldn’t locate any other pastor" situation and promptly arranged the installation of a primitive but usable radio connection for Frederik with the other major locations within the province, all the time thinking rather ruefully that when it came to technology, someone was going to have to haul his otherwise fairly admirable older half-brother, kicking, screaming, and dragging his heels, into the modern world.
Chapter 8
March 1635
Grantville
On the fourth of the month, in the midst of an anti-Semitic riot taking place in front of the miraculous town’s synagogue, a re-purposed building from the up-time, someone shot a man named Henry Dreeson, the Bürgermeister, and another named Enoch Wiley, a Calvinist minister. The assassin was presumed to be one of the anti-Semites.
In Westphalia, Frederik read through the news reports with considerable annoyance. This was almost guaranteed to make his life more difficult.
Bremen
In Bremen Altstadt, the most widespread of the outrage was focused on the appalling news that one of the victims was a Calvinist minister. Among the city’s Calvinist ministers, at any rate, but most members of the old patriciate shared that perspective. The offence was featured in at least a dozen sermons.
Schorfmann expressed admiration for Buster Beasley. "Like our Roland, in the market square."
Bemmeler managed to work that into the CoC propaganda pamphlets, along with regular sidebars condemning anti-Semites. Tönnies Breiting moved from family gatherings to evening card games, music recitals to prayer meetings, dropping carefully calculated words into the ears of his prominent relatives.
Breiting’s mother went to the bookstore every couple of weeks. She wasn’t a great reader, but enjoyed the new romances and usually kept a devotional manual on her bedside stand for the edification of her husband. As Frau Breiting browsed the Harlequins, her maid Jutta loitered by the stand of cheap pamphlets, surreptitiously adding a few more radical ones that she pulled out of her pocket to the moderate titles that the store owner had agreed to stock.
As the unrest among the quarreling internal factions in the city of Bremen intensified, Emil Jauch arrived as the governor’s emissary plenipotentiary.
Frederik admitted to himself that he had probably assumed emergency powers that he did not have in regard to the Bremen city government by making this appointment. He proposed to ignore that minor issue. If the mayors and council complained, Rist could send back a letter that featured the word "temporary" in several places.
Avoiding the word "expedient."
Knaub and Jauch both sent him reports. They did not bear much resemblance to one another.
Mainz
Gustav Adolf’s appointed governor of the Province of the Main, the Swedish general and nobleman Nils Brahe, decided to get his younger sister Christina and her slightly younger-than-that new husband Erik Stenbock out of his hair by giving one of his colleagues a present. He would send them to Westphalia to work for Frederik.
It was not a long trip from Mainz to Münster. "Call me Kerstin." A young woman strode briskly into Frederik’s office. "I don’t care for the Latinized form of my name."
Frederik managed a practiced smile and produced it at intervals for the remainder of the day until he and his closest advisers finished up the welcoming dinner, Lütkemann said a blessing, and he ceremoniously saw them off to their hastily located and probably inadequate rental quarters. There was very little housing available these days.
After which he dropped the smile and retired thankfully up the stairs.
He had bought a second easel. He now had one in his office and another in his private sitting room.
A dot. Has Brahe sent them to keep an eye on his doings for the Swedes?
Another dot. Or for the USE? Is the emperor irritated because of young Gustafsson? Has the boy complained to his father?
A third dot. It is known that Brahe has become close to the up-timer from the State of Thuringia-Franconia, Colonel Utt. Does their assignment to Westphalia involve the up-timers? The FoJP?
That led to a fourth dot. Have they been sent to monitor the election process in the province?
A process that was in process, so to speak. His staff had put in a lot of work to get things set up throughout the province.
Quedlinburg
Iona Nelson moved around the band room, filing sheet music into the assigned cubbyholes on the wall. When she was feeling a little homesick for at least one aspect of Fluharty Middle School in Grantville over the Christmas break, she had persuaded one of the carpenters who worked for the Stift to construct a replica of its box wall.
She had nowhere near as much music as had been in the band room at Grantville, but she had an acquisitions budget. As pieces came off presses in Grantville, presses in Jena, presses in Dresden and Magdeburg, Frankfurt and Hamburg, she ordered what she needed. Then, if there was still money on the black side of the ledger, what she wanted.
She fingered two pieces of paper, stuck together. Probably a student who came in with a bit of jam from breakfast still on her fingers! There were some ways in which down-time students weren’t noticeably different from up-time students.
The music sheets didn’t separate as a result of the fingering. She walked over to her table and dropped them. Rather than risk tearing the paper, she’d bring back a damp cloth after lunch and carefully coax them apart. She finished filing the rest of the pile, looking over her shoulder toward the bottle-glass windows as the room suddenly darkened. The early morning had been nice, but if clouds were coming in, it would probably be raining again before she could go out for her evening walk.
On her way to lunch, she stopped half way down the second corridor to check the weather. The band room was in an older section of the building; this part had larger, modern, glass panes.
Lunch was Salat. Fresh vegetables drenched in a hot, vinegary, heavily herbed, sauce. She suspected that the other main ingredient of the sauce, besides vinegar, was melted bacon fat. It was not, for certain, olive oil. But such a treat after mid-winter’s endless salted meat, salted fish, and pickles. Counting sauerkraut as a form of pickle, which in fact it was. She waited politely while the few other teachers who were not simultaneously Stiftdamen finished their meal in the small dining room assigned to them. The senior teacher started the common table prayer. She stood up, placed her napkin neatly at her place, asked the work-study girl (one of the innovations introduced by the abbess) who was waiting on them for a damp rag, and walked back.
Even if it rained this evening, she probably got in her mile-a-day transversing the halls of the building.
The sheet of paper stuck to the back of Elgar’s "Pomp and Circumstance" wasn’t another sheet of music. It was a sample Fourth of July Party ballot for Magdeburg Province.
Not one girl in band was old enough to vote.
She hardly knew what to do about voting. She wasn’t a citizen of Quedlinburg, certainly, the way down-timers defined citizenship in a locality. She was a citizen of the USE, with the right to vote, but not of Brunswick and not of Quedlinburg.
She’d have to ask the abbess, once she got back from Magdeburg, where she was being political again.
She certainly was not going to ask that stuck-up prioress!
She folded the ballot and absentmindedly stuck it in her pocket. Ballots, Veleda Riddle, and the League of Women Voters. Some of the women standing right there when someone shot and killed poor Henry Dreeson and Enoch Wiley last months were her own good friends.
Poor Veronica. Poor little Annalise; the child’s life had been filled with losses. Although the girl was not a child any more; she must be graduating from high school this spring.
It might be best to request an absentee ballot from Grantville. There was time.
She had her own stamps. Almost everyone else put their letters in a pile and the Stift franked them, but she wasn’t about to ask so much as postage from that stuck-up prioress!
Who the next morning circulated an indignant memo that some intruding vandal had left FoJP sample ballots scattered in rooms throughout the building.
Magdeburg
Ben Leek looked at his granddaughter Bethany, who had just proclaimed her admiration for Buster Beasley. He hadn’t expected her to start picking up liberal ideas, much less radical ones, when they decided to send her to high school at the DESSSFG (Duchess Elisabeth Sophie Secondary School for Girls, if you wanted to be technical), given that it was sponsored by the duke of Saxe-Altenburg, whose economic views were generally sound.
"Well I certainly don’t approve of anti-Semitism. What do you think of me, Bethany, girl? But if those CoC people start rampaging around, initiating riots, I say that the emperor should step in with the army. If you ask me, 'when the looting starts, the shooting starts.' That’s as good a remedy for urban unrest as I’ve ever heard."
"Grandpa," Bethany said. "They’ll shoot back."
Bethany’s mother, dedicated to organizing support and raising funds for the new Magdeburg Memorial Hospital sponsored by the Leek family in memory of little Jennifer Rush, who had died three years earlier of a childhood leukemia that was untreatable down-time, heaved a sigh and sent up a silent prayer of thanks that her daughter would go off to Quedlinburg in the fall and no longer be a daily irritant to her father-in-law.
Bremen
Tönnies Breiting pointed out that the FoJP was certain to win a majority of the vote in the city as a whole—not in the Altstadt, but when a person included the Alte Neustadt. Bremen was in the process of counting the vote more efficiently than most of the USE. Things had been lopsided for the FoJP in the Alte Neustadt. There were a lot of Bremen’s patricians who now regretted the annexation. As things turned out, it would not enable them to exercise more control over the unruly inhabitants across the Weser.
"Close doesn’t count," Peter Schorfmann countered. "Bremen is one district in Westphalia. Overall, it’s pretty sure the province will vote majority Crown Loyalist."
"Minden will elect one of our men," Breiting protested.
"But a lot of the Crown Loyalists absolutely swear that as soon as Wettin takes office as prime minister, he’s going to roll back this reform or that reform. If the expected transfer of power in June goes smoothly, then … " Gerrit Bemmeler had turned into a planner; the closest thing to a strategist that the movement had in Bremen.
Knaub, nervous, had a long conversation with Jauch. Jauch, less nervous, had numerous conversations with the four Bürgermeister in regard to the changes in Bremen’s city government that were likely to be adopted. The new city charter proposed by the reformers would pass, almost certainly. Narrowly, but it would pass, just as the annexation of the Alte Neustadt had passed in the local election.
Which meant that there would be city-wide special election in three months, as soon as the expected transfer of power at the national level was completed. The existing Bürgermeister and members of the Rath were going to have to run for office and contest for the popular vote.
Some of them against … women!
For the Bremen patricians, there was little joy in Mudville, Agnes Bemmeler said. She had developed a strong interest in up-time popular culture.
And was going to run for the Senat.
Münster
On the last day of the month, the mail delivery from von Bargen in Bremervörde included a long letter—another long letter, be it said—from Gerdruth von Campe about the woes afflicting Himmelpforten and her general lack of success in retrieving those property items that had disappeared with Matthias Kalkhoven.
She was pondering the institution of a lawsuit, with the prince-archbishop’s permission. The cathedral canons were proving reluctant to cooperate with her and Provost Marschalck was worse than useless in the matter, although it was his obligation …
Frau von Campe was a Lutheran lady. So was Christian Ulrik’s Bente. So was Kirsten Brahe who might or might not be here as her brother’s extra pair of eyes. So, for that matter was Gustafsson’s nubile Margaretha. Even Kirsten Munk, with the near-demonic beauty that had caused his father to decide that he absolutely had to have her, even at the price of a morganatic marriage, with all the grief that followed, was a Lutheran lady.
Frederik took a deep breath.
Lutheran ladies were quite sufficient. He was profoundly glad that Catholic ladies were not in any way his problem.
Chapter 9
Münster
1 April 1635
There were advantages to the radio system, Frederik admitted to Christian Ulrik. On the same day that the vomit-splattered body was found beneath an open window, he received the news of the death of Duke Ferdinand of Bavaria, the pluralist archbishop of Cologne who also held the see of Münster.
For the time being, the old man’s suffragan bishop would continue to do what vicars general did—within the parameters that his authority was now limited to Roman Catholic ecclesiastical matters. He had not stopped being a fanatical representative of what Frederik, in his own mind, classified as the most extreme measures of the Counter-Reformation; neither had Petrus Nicolartius, S.J., in Cologne, ceased to urge him on.
The parameters didn’t mean that the vicar general stopped trying to interfere in the civil administration of the Hochstift, but they meant that Frederik could just say "no"
As for a likely successor … it would probably be some time before the canons and the pope could agree upon one.
He wrote a note for Rist to get in touch with Gisenius up in Bremervörde and tell him to recruit as many Lutheran clergy as possible for the Hochstift. He would deal later with the Calvinist nobility who were convinced that they had a perfect right to determine the religion of the residents of their own estates. While the cat was away, the Lutheran mice might as well have a high old time of it. Postscript: and someone who has experience in organizing consistories and superintendencies, because I don’t have time to do it myself.
Frederik diagrammed various considerations of what the current tumult in the Catholic church might mean for Westphalia.
Factoring in that he would have to go to Magdeburg for some space of time; he was a voting member of the USE House of Lords.
Then news came in from Italy. No longer was it simply that the cathedral chapter and the pope would have to agree on a successor to Ferdinand of Bavaria. Now it would be the canons and a pope (any pope). Yes, it would probably be quite some time before a successor would be elected and installed over at Cologne. As for Münster, which the old archbishop had held in pluralism, it might be even longer.
