"Growing up with Velma," Pam said, "I got a lot of practice disguising my feelings about people. I was home the night that Gina Goodman shot at Will Wiley. I was sixteen. In the next room, doing homework. The newspapers said that they were in bed together, but actually, by the time she let the gun off, he had jumped out and was standing up, trying to talk to her. The slug came through the wall and went about three inches above my head. Walls in mobile homes aren't very thick. I didn't have time to have hysterics. Tina and Susan were asleep in the room beyond mine. I walked out into the hall, looked into Mom's bedroom and saw the three of them, suggested to Gina that I thought it would be a really wonderful idea if she put that gun down, walked on into the living room, and called the police. If I hadn't disguised my feelings, I would have reverted to monkeydom and been hanging from the ceiling by my tail, gibbering."
Don Francisco wondered what monkeys had to do with it. "We will pay you an hourly rate."
"I don't believe this," Pam said. "I'm a spook. An actual on-the-payroll spook. Just like Cory Joe."
"Your brother," Nasi said piously, "is in military intelligence. That's something quite different."
Pam reacted to the news of her betrothal with even greater disbelief than she had reacted to the discovery that she was a salaried spy. And did not bother to disguise her feelings.
"The least you could have done was ask me!" she shrieked, to the general interest and entertainment of everyone in the state library's main reading room. "Cory Joe, what in hell were you thinking?"
"Err… I assumed that he had. It didn't seem likely that we would be drawing up a marriage contract if he hadn't."
"But…" Jean-Louis protested. He had come with Cory Joe. It was their first stop upon getting back to Grantville. They had come to break the happy news. "Don't you want to?"
She stared at him. Of course she wanted to. She knew it. He knew it. They knew it.
"You could have asked me first, you creep. You really could have."
She sent him back to Leiden without a "yes."
For one thing, it was obvious that Jean-Louis was having real trouble getting his mind around the concept of marrying a bastard after Pam brought it up.
Jean-Louis couldn't seem to help feeling like that. Down-timers' minds worked that way, most of them.
Sometimes you had to wonder if their heads were screwed on straight. What could a kid do about what his parents got up to before he was born? Or she was born?
After he left, Pam cried herself to sleep.
The next morning, she discovered that he'd left a poem in her mailbox.
It was pretty expressive. Descriptive of her charms. Both the ones he had seen and the ones he hadn't. As to the latter, Jean-Louis had a very good imagination. She hoped he wouldn't be disillusioned when confronted with reality.
Sometimes she could almost strangle Jean-Louis. Just when she was maddest at him, he would do something like that.
It was probably just as well that she'd started learning French. And Dutch.
She'd better read through the marriage contract, too. Cory Joe had left it on her desk at the library.
Besancon, the Franche-Comte
Henri de Rohan finished his letter to Francisco Nasi and sealed it. He would have it sent off on the morrow.
Most likely, of course, Nasi would not be the USE's spymaster for much longer. But Rohan was not concerned about whoever the incoming prime minister Wettin might appoint to the post. Even if that person was competent-a chancy proposition, given the way the Crown Loyalists seemed to be handing out posts as a reward for past favors rather than skills-they wouldn't know enough to be a problem.
Nasi was the one to worry about. He and his somewhat frightening master, Stearns. Best to move quickly to deflect suspicion, by being open and honest about almost everything. Hopefully, the old ploy would work again: make a full confession unnecessary by freely offering a partial one.
Needless to say, the duke of Rohan had not seen fit to inform Nasi that Jacques-Pierre Dumais, now known to be employed by Mauger's expanding subsidiary in Leiden, was actually his own agent. There was the unfortunate matter of the riot at the hospital, to which the SoTF authorities might take exception.
He had warned Jacques-Pierre not to become overconfident. "Always prepare for a fall when fortune puffs you up, for it is then that peril comes closest."
Haarlem, the Netherlands
"Ah, Madame Mauger," Jacques-Pierre said, kissing her fingertips. "What an unexpected pleasure to meet you again."
And again, he thought. Very probably, again, and again, and again.
He had thought he was rid of Velma.
Now he held a position in her husband's firm. Quite a responsible position, in fact.
What had the duke warned him? "Do not become overconfident. Always prepare for a fall when fortune puffs you up, for it is then that peril comes closest."
So. Clearly, it was Meant, possibly even foreordained by divine providence, that Jacques-Pierre should endure this woman's conversation, la migraine or not.
"I was desolated when our pleasant conversations in Grantville were necessarily ended by your marriage."
"Me, too, Jacques-Pierre," Velma said. "Have you met Laurent's sisters, yet? Marie and I work on interpreting our horoscopes when she comes to the villa."
Ah, monsieur le duc de Rohan, he mused. The things that a man must endure for the good of the Huguenot cause. Little do you know the travails to which you subject me.
Grantville
"You know," Wes Jenkins said to Clara. "It's really getting harder and harder to define this whole war as a nice, neat conflict of 'us' against 'them.' "
She nodded.
He continued. "There was a comic strip, up-time. 'Pogo,' it was called. 'We have met the enemy and they are us.' Or at the very least, it seems, they're our relatives. Our in-laws."
"Of course," Clara said. "It will come to be more so, the longer that Grantville is here in the Germanies. Perhaps it will help the up-timers understand better how someone like Wilhelm Wettin feels about his brother Bernhard and what is going on in Swabia and Alsace."
PART NINE
April 1635
Farewell! happy fields,
Where joy forever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail
Infernal world!
Chapter 56
Grantville, April 1635
Every guest who lived inside the limits of Grantville proper climbed somewhat inelegantly out of the back of Ray Hudson's flatbed farm truck, which was doing Easter Sunday taxi service today. Vera Hudson was waiting at the front door. "Where is Missy?" she asked, as she surveyed the guests.
Debbie went into the hall and concentrated on putting her coat on the rack, trying not to look at her sister Aura Lee's face. Easter was April 8 this year, not really an early date for it, but the weather was still chilly. "I told you that she was going to dinner at Wes and Clara's, Mother. I told you that last week."
"She should have come with you."
Debbie concentrated on taking deep, regular, breaths. "I also told you why. That since you preferred not to include Ron and Gerry Stone in your Easter, she has chosen to have dinner at a house to which they had also been invited."
"I had no obligation to invite those boys."
"Nani," Bill Hudson said, turning around from his immediate preoccupation with Jessica Booth, who was simultaneously Vera's apprentice as a master gardener and his own fiancee. "If you don't want to acknowledge that there's something between Ron and Missy, that's your business. But Ron is, in fact, my partner. I am living in his house right now."