There was a wagon, also, to take Susanna and Frau Dreeson to the boat, and guards. Duke Bernhard had offered to provide the guards, on the pragmatic grounds that the first part of the route would take them through territory that he held-and held firmly. Horn, Swiger, and Gordon had agreed only on condition that the two women had an equal number of guards from the USE Horse Marines at the embassy. Marc looked at the captain of the guards uneasily, then suspiciously. It was the same Bavarian who had chased them so relentlessly.
Raudegen looked down at him, and smiled thinly. "I'm a professional, boy," he said. "I cut my teeth on the Hungarian frontier. I'm in the duke's service now. When he says capture her, I try to capture her. When he says protect her, I use everything I know to protect her. Not just until your relative from Lyons joins her. All the way to Brussels. Advantage is advantage. If Duke Bernhard can't use her as a pawn for exercising pressure on the archduchess, he will harvest whatever gratitude there may be for delivering her safely to a mistress who values her services. He has no truck with cruelty for its own sake. Nor, for that matter, do I."
For traveling, Susanna was wearing the cream-colored turtle-neck sweater with a pencil-slim, ankle-length, mahogany brown velvet skirt. The side of the skit was slit to above the knee, which would allow for such functions as walking or climbing into carriages. She had her left hand thrown back, carrying a matching jacket over her shoulder. The sweater outlined her tiny breast. Marc tried conscientiously to keep his eyes focused somewhere in the region of her nose.
He took her right hand. "Ah, good-bye. Good wishes. It has been a pleasure make your acquaintance." He tried again. "I hope it all works out well for you."
"Kiss him." Marc heard Frau Dreeson's voice coming from the wagon. "See if it's worth all the speculation you've been devoting to the matter. If it isn't, it will save you a lot of bother in the long run."
Susanna looked at her, startled. Then she dropped Marc's hand, stood up on tiptoe, threw both of her arms around his neck, pulled herself up a little farther toward his face while bending his neck down a bit, and kissed him.
Their noses bumped, but they managed to rearrange things. After a while.
"Enough," Veronica interrupted. "There's your food for thought, girl. Time to get going."
Margrave Friedrich V of Baden-Durlach managed to persuade both the Basel city council and Duke Bernhard that he should be allowed to move freely between the city and General Horn's headquarters. Gustav Adolf had kindly sent both Duke Bernhard and the city council a formal letter pointing out that the younger margrave's father, Georg of Baden-Durlach, was now the USE's administrator for the Province of Swabia. The amount of public respect that Margrave Friedrich was getting had rapidly ratcheted up several notches.
By noon, he and Leopold Cavriani were having a nice chat about development funding for the iron ore in the Wiese Valley. Margrave Georg was, after all, the legal overlord of most of the iron-bearing seams that Marc had identified-if Duke Bernhard went away again, now that he had so conveniently removed most of the Austrian garrisons from the region and was no longer serving the French.
Leopold gave him a copy of Marc's report before forwarding two on to Jacob Durre. One through the regular post; one by special courier. One, of course, he had left with his regular banker in Basel.
He took the last one along when he and Marc left for home the next day.
Thinking all the while that it was very much too optimistic to hope that Duke Bernhard would go away.
Grantville, State of Thuringia-Franconia
Ed Piazza worked his way through a long radio message that had just come in from Jack Whitney, reporting from Horn's headquarters.
I know you are buddies with Leopold Cavriani, Whitney said in the message, so I thought you might want to know that he and his son left for Geneva right after lunch. Cavriani mentioned, sort of casually, that you might be interested in knowing that he's going to send the kid to Naples for a couple of years.
Casually? Leopold never did anything casually. Naples?
Ed jogged down the hall toward the radio room. Mike needed to know this. Preferably yesterday.
France
"It is not," Louis XIII said, "that we currently have any options. Not that there is anything that France is in a position to do about it. Of course, it is in the interest of France to have the Netherlands divided from the other Habsburgs."
"Possibly not in the long run, Sire," Cardinal Richelieu replied. "Not if the two of them have a dozen healthy children. Don Fernando is calling himself 'king in the Low Countries' and 'Netherlands' is a quite expansive concept. Much of the coastline of northern France is quite low-lying."
"The coastline of northern Germany," the king of France pointed out, "lies even lower. Consider the actions of Ostfriesland. Oxenstierna made it very clear at the Congress of Copenhagen that the Swedes were not happy about that. Personally, I consider it inspired on the part of Count Ulrich to have petitioned for admission to the United Provinces even before his dear cousin Gustav's army got into his territory. Of course, both of their mothers were sisters of the old Lutheran prince-bishop of Bremen who's being supplanted by Prince Frederik of Denmark now. I certainly hope that the thought of the low-lying coast of his new 'Province of Westphalen' keeps Gustav Adolf awake at night, damn his hide."
Somewhere in Swabia
"Well, fuck," said Major Simpson.
"That's getting to be a distressingly common expression in your lexicon," said his commanding officer, Colonel Heinrich Schmidt. The tone carried more in the way of amusement than reproof, though.
Tom ignored him, as did Lt. Commander Eddie Cantrell. Both of the young up-time officers were too intent on glaring at the radio transcript.
"Fuck a duck, " was Eddie's useless contribution. He looked around almost wildly at the countryside. Then, his eyes came to rest on the artillery train.
The great, huge, heavy, ponderous, unwieldy, break-your-back-befor e-breakfast-rupture-you-by-lunch-and-put-you-in-a-grave-by-nightfall artillery train.
"You mean to tell me we've dragged these fucking cannons halfway across Europe for nothing? "
"It was your idea in the first place," pointed out the colonel. "The two of you both. I was an innocent party to the affair, brought in only after the fact."
Tom ignored that too. "Now what?" he demanded.
Heinrich grinned. Seeing the expression, Eddie winced. Then, leaned over and rubbed his leg just above the peg that supported it. "Oh, my aching foot-and-pegleg. Don't tell me."
The colonel shrugged. "We can hardly leave the valuable things just sitting here somewhere in Swabia, after all. No, gentlemen, I'm afraid it's back we go-and we'd best not dally, either, or winter will be upon us. Imagine having to haul these monsters through snow drifts as well."
"Well, fuck," said Tom.
"Maybe something will turn up," said Eddie, ever the wild optimist.
Something did turn up, to everyone's surprise. A miraculous intervention by the emperor himself, in the form of a radio message that came the next morning.
Pointless to bring them back to Luebeck. Even the admiral has now given up salvaging the Monitor for more than parts and the steel. Take the guns to Ingolstadt. I might want to use them against Maximilian, before too long. Or against Austria, perhaps. There are many possibilities down there. So best to keep them in place.
"Ingolstadt's not so bad," mused Eddie.
"Still be a back-breaker," cautioned Tom. But he was clearly in a much better mood. No matter how you sliced it, getting from Swabia to northern Bavaria was a lot better proposition than returning the guns to the Baltic.