Ancelin shook his head. "It was exactly what he said, probably. A concession to our desire to actually do something. Not just sit in de Ron's back room and talk. Now be quiet. I'm trying to listen."
"Why? Nothing important is going to happen on this stupid boat. I don't think I've ever come across such a pessimistic old lady."
In addition to the two of them, the bodyguards, and old woman, there were several other passengers. One man, dressed in black riding clothes, sitting by himself at the far front, had been escorted to the pier by a couple of Nils Brahe's Swedes.
A courier, probably, Ancelin thought.
Frankfurt am Main
As soon as the barge tied up, the man in black got off. He walked up to the lanky, freckled redhead who was commanding a group of sickly-shade-of-salmon-pinkish-orange-uniformed soldiers. That had to be Utt, the commander of the Fulda Barracks Regiment. Ancelin could figure out that much from the newspaper reports he had read in Mainz. And doesn't that color clash with the man's hair? he thought. Terrible. No sense of style at all. If he had chosen a rich brown, or even a deep shade of rust…
Before he became a conspirator, Gui Ancelin had been a tailor.
But that had been another world. Before Richelieu's siege of La Rochelle, he had also been a man with a wife and three children. A father and two sisters. Before the starvation and the plague brought by the siege. Louis XIII's siege. Richelieu's siege.
The newcomer was waving a sheaf of papers. Utt turned and told off a half-dozen mounted soldiers. They moved away, one of them calling for a water boy to bring up one of the remounts.
A courier, then. Nothing to get excited about. Couriers came and went all the time.
Then the bodyguards debarked. Followed by Frau Dreeson in full spate.
An elderly man limped down the quay to meet her.
"Henry, what were they thinking of, sending you on such a strenuous trip? What if you had fallen? Remember what Doctor Nichols told you. Hip replacements are a thing of the past. Or of the far future, depending upon how a person looks at it. Or the ATV had an accident and you were thrown out? You could have been killed. What good would a hip replacement have done you then, even if you could have one?
"What were you thinking, for that matter, going off and leaving Annalise alone with the children.
"No, it does not matter that Thea and Nicol are there. It is just as well they didn't die, I suppose, but being alive is no remedy for being fools. They were alive when I met them in Grafenwohr and fools there, already. Just one more expense for you, I suppose. It would be too much to hope that they are paying their own way."
By this time, she was halfway up the pier, the bodyguards closed in behind her. Ancelin and Deneau stayed at the rear of the other debarking passengers, but they could still hear her voice, ranting away.
Then she reached the head of the pier, where the formal reception party was waiting. Stopped. Lifted her head and smoothed her face.
"I am honored to make the acquaintance of the Burgermeister and councilmen of Frankfurt and their gracious wives."
The Burgermeister turned to another man. "Permit me to present you to Monsieur le duc de Soubise, a guest in our city."
The wrinkled old harridan curtsied quite properly.
Ancelin couldn't quite believe it.
Of course, he had never encountered the Abbess of Quedlinburg.
The Burgermeister had turned to his prominent guest again. " Monsieur le duc, may I present Mayor Henry Dreeson of Grantville. Herr Wesley Jenkins, the State of Thuringia-Franconia's administrator in Fulda. His wife. Major Derek Utt." He proceeded through the litany, having carefully memorized the list that his secretary had given him the evening before.
Soubise inclined his head. "It is my pleasure. My brother, the duke of Rohan, has already met one of your fellow-countrymen, Monsieur Thomas Stone. In Padua, where he presented him with an autographed copy of his translation of the life of Duchess Renee of Ferrara. He was very favorably impressed with Monsieur Stone's lectures and delighted to extend hospitality to his son Elrond at his current headquarters in Switzerland. He finds him to be a very promising young man."
The Grantville contingent blinked but, all things considered, bore up well under this rather startling information.
Occasionally, the newspapers did miss something.
Chapter 16
Frankfurt am Main
"Angry people are, mostly, just angry people," said Henry Dreeson. "It's their nature. Solve one of their problems and they'll find something else to be angry about. Maybe because you solved it and took away their gripe."
Henry figured that this ceremonial banquet with the Frankfurt bigwigs was going fine. Shop talk was shop talk, wherever you found it. Names kept floating past his ears. Gunderrode. Zum Jungen. Both of them named Hector, which was sort of peculiar. He hadn't met any Germans in Grantville named Hector. Maybe they were relatives.. Stalburger. A couple of men with a "von" in front of their names, though he didn't understand why nobles would be city councillors. But "Baur von Somewhere" didn't actually sound very much like he descended from some medieval knight in shining armor, and neither did "Wei? von Somewhere Else." Recent promotions, maybe-guys who had bought the farm, or at least the estate, in the most literal sense of the word.
Down the table, past the Burgermeister, one of the councilmen was starting to rant about the dangers of popular revolution. Sounded like Tino Nobili going full tilt. He turned his head a little to direct his good ear toward the man. "Popular election to choose the council is the worst idea I've ever heard. And I've heard it before. If you let these CoC rabble into the city government… Why, the last time, twenty years ago, it took us two years to get the movement under control."
As usual. The municipal equivalent of generals fighting the last war.
"The gates of the ghetto are barricaded. The main difference from twenty years ago is that this time the defenders are armed, as well." The printer Crispin Neumann finished his report. He was known to have connections in Frankfurt's Jewish ghetto, although most people were too polite to specify what they were-namely, that his grandfather had been a convert to Lutheranism; he still had relatives who lived there.
The members of the Frankfurt city council looked at one another.
"Isn't there any way you can head it off?" Henry figured that maybe he wasn't expected to talk, him not being a citizen of Frankfurt; but, what the hell, the Burgermeister had invited him to come to the meeting. He looked at the militia captain. "I mean, this town can't be that different from Grantville. Our police know to keep an eye on the 250 Club when certain sorts of things come up. Don't your watchmen do the same thing? Have a sort of list of trouble spots, that is? Even if it's in their own heads and not written down anywhere?
The captain nodded; started to say something.
In the back of the room, someone stood up. Henry peered through his glasses. Sergeant Hartke's wife? The Danish woman, Dagmar?
"It is work righteousness to attack the Jews!"
Everyone in the room blinked.
"These men in the taverns are not good Lutherans! Think, only think!"
Her German was beginning to fray a little at the edges, but she clearly had something to say. Cunz Kastenmayer slid, as inconspicuously as possible, away from his post. He had been standing behind Mayor Dreeson's left shoulder, translating whenever a conversation between the Grantvillers and the leading lights of Frankfurt politics became too complex for either the councilmen's limited English or Dreeson's less limited, but still far from fluent, German.
"Think of the words of Paul Speratus!"
Every Lutheran in the room, obediently, thought of the words of Paul Speratus. They could do that effortlessly, of course. The hymn "Salvation Unto Us Has Come" had been a staple of the Lutheran liturgy for a century. They all knew it by heart.