Wackernagel said they could all spend the night at this family's house, where he stayed, but it would be crowded. Henry could have a bed, but he and Cunz, the drivers, and the soldiers would have to sleep on the floor.
A couple of hours before dark, though, three companies of orange-uniformed men on horses, led by Derek Utt himself, showed up in Vacha. The Fulda Barracks Regiment was thoroughly spooked by what had happened to the civilian administrators and doubly determined that it wasn't going to happen again. They'd been camping five miles or so outside of town all week and kept a couple of lookouts in an inn on the Fulda side of the town.
The lookouts had spotted the problem. One of them had slipped out, picked up his horse from a farmer's stall, and gone down to collect the whole troop.
Sergeant Hartke was now having a few words with Hesse-Kassel's border guards.
Derek moved Henry from the outside picnic table in the friendly woman's yard over to an inside parlor in the Fulda-side inn where the scouts had been staying.
Wackernagel said he'd spend the night at the house like usual and meet them at the ATVs in the morning.
Henry nodded. He supposed the woman counted on having the income from her regular customers and Wackernagel knew it. She had three little kids, that he'd seen.
That night he didn't just have the three soldiers from Grantville staying at the same motel with him. These roadside inns were really motels, when you came right down to it. He had two orange-colored guards inside his room and a couple more standing outside his door all night.
He felt a little bit ashamed that he'd kicked up such a big fuss when Piazza insisted on sending the second ATV. Utt seemed to take the problem seriously. Real seriously.
Chapter 10
Frankfurt am Main
Ron Stone wiggled his legs around. There wasn't a lot of leg room on the barge that the crew was slowly poling up the Main River.
Joachim Sandrart, sitting next to him, had a dreamy expression on his face. Joachim had been mentally counting his future money all the way down the Rhine, since their visit to Duke Henri de Rohan.
In other words, Rohan had turned out to be a reasonable man. A reasonable man who was interested in art. A reasonable man who was interested in art and had money. The ambitious young painter's dream patron, perhaps.
"When are we going to get there?" his brother Gerry asked from the narrow single seat at the back of the barge.
Ron twisted around. "Haven't you outgrown that by now?"
"Nah. It was the first thing I learned to say in German. And Italian. Well, the second, I guess. The first thing was, 'What's for supper?' "
"A couple more hours," the crew captain answered.
Gerry subsided back into silence.
"I don't suppose we have reservations," Reverend Jones said ironically. Down-time travel did not lend itself to advance reservations.
"Rohan's secretary recommended a place. The host's name is de Ron and the inn's called Zum Weissen Schwan."
Sandrart shook his head. "Don't stay at an inn. After you were so cooperative about letting me go over to meet with the duke, the least I can do is extend the hospitality of my father's house. We've got plenty of room."
"Vengeance," Ouvrard said. "We have this wonderful chance to avenge the failure of Ducos' plot to assassinate the pope in Rome. It has fallen to us, into our laps like a ripe plum. We did nothing to seek it out. The Stone brothers. Two of the three culprits are right here! To think that Antoine Delerue predicted that we were unlikely to encounter them again."
"Antoine is scarcely a prophet. Certainly not an infallible one. Count your lucky stars that they're staying at Sandrart's house," Brillard said. "And keep your face out of public view. Maybe they wouldn't recognize any of us, and wouldn't remember having ever seen us talking to Michel anywhere in Italy. But then again, one of them might. Talk about good luck. If the Sandrart son hadn't invited them, they'd be right here at the Swan and we'd be huddling in the sleeping chambers all day to avoid them."
"Another heaven-sent, predestined, foreordained, clearly God-given opportunity wasted because of Michel's…" Ouvrard shut up before Guillaume could tell him to.
"Working within the limitations that our leader has placed upon us is an exercise in humility," Locquifier said. He didn't look at his hands. These past two days, he had chewed his own fingernails down to the quick in frustration.
"At least tell Michel about it. Why did he and Antoine have to go as far away as Scotland? What can they possibly be trying to accomplish in Scotland, of all places?"
"Robert." Locquifier paused. "I will send another letter to him, explaining what has happened. After that, all we can do is wait for his further directions."
There were musicians at one end of the room. A sort of string quartet. Lots of candles in sconces reflecting off the window panes, of which there were also a lot. Downtown Frankfurt mostly looked sort of Gothic in its architecture, but it was clear that Sandrart's father had remodeled this house not too long ago. Modernized it.
There was a buffet table at the other end of the room. A big one, loaded with more food than Ron had seen in one place since the last reception he'd attended at the Barberini mansion. Off in a corner by himself, behind the table, Gerry was eating a plate of fruit and cheese and keeping one eye on Artemisia's little girl, who was standing right by the table, eating everything sweet that she could identify by the sugar crystals sprinkled on the top. That was okay.
There were polished blue and white tiles under foot. They had to be marble. Marble was a rock, when you came right down to it, and these were as hard as rocks. Joachim Sandrart's mother would start the dancing up in a few minutes, he expected, and he'd be expected to punish his feet on them. She'd be dancing with the Burgermeister. He'd be dancing with whatever girl they told him to dance with. He'd gone to a depressing number of fancy parties since that first one in Venice, and was getting, in his own opinion, depressingly good at doing what he was supposed to do at them. Bourgeois, his dad would say.
Overhead-Ron took another surreptitious glance upward. Woodcarvings and murals. The murals were a bit amateurish. He wondered it Sandrart had painted them on the ceiling in his own father's house. Maybe for practice, when he was a teenager?
Simon was sitting down, talking to a middle aged man garbed in what Ron had come to think of as the Calvinist preacher's uniform. A Geneva gown, they called it. Black pleats and a white collar. He thanked his lucky stars that Simon still had diplomatic credentials, in case the other guy took offense at some of his theological opinions.
Joachim was-he looked toward the big fireplace with its ornamental mantel-over there. Ron had met the man he was talking to, earlier in the evening. He was a banker, another Calvinist refugee from somewhere, named Philipp Milkau. The girl next to Artemisia was his daughter Johanna. Milkau's only daughter and sole heiress. Fraulein Walking-pots-of-money. The girl that Sandrart was going to marry, most likely. She was exactly the kind of wife that a promising young artist with ambitions to enter the diplomatic service needed. Paying for a reception like this a couple of times every week wouldn't even start to drain the exchequer she would bring along as a dowry.
She seemed nice enough. Pleasant looking. Good manners. Couldn't be more than about sixteen. Of course, Joachim hadn't ever met her until this week, but his relatives and her father had reached a sort of preliminary arrangement. Nothing legal, like a betrothal. An understanding that was contingent on the main parties to the agreement not taking a dislike to each other on first sight and developing an even greater loathing on longer personal acquaintance.
But they seemed to be getting along fine. She had her hand on Joachim's arm. He was sort of sniffing at her hair. Which was a good thing, Ron supposed. Sandrart said that his own family could only afford to put on a party like this once a month or so.