Not that Soubise wouldn't like to be commanding a few ships again, himself. Or many ships.
Garrison commander in Geneva would have been good, Soubise thought. Not that Henri had asked him. His older brother was well into his fifties, not as young as he used to be. A comfortable municipal post from which he could face down the dukes of Savoy would have been-not bad, in Soubise's humble opinion. Which it was now too late to express.
He opened the second letter in the stack.
Cavriani's son was off to Naples. Leopold himself had discovered that he had urgent business matters in Strassburg.
Very few really urgent business matters, Soubise thought, involved conferring with history professors. Not that Matthias Bernegger at the University of Strassburg didn't have an interesting network of his own, but it rarely involved exalted financial transactions.
After Strassburg, Leopold anticipated that he would be passing through Freiburg im Breisgau. Then Basel. One might almost think that he had seen enough of Basel when he was there with the Austrian archduchess, but perhaps not. Basel, Buxtorf, and Wettstein. Then back to Strassburg. Then… Besancon.
Oh.
No particular reason for Henri to go to Geneva right now, if Cavriani wasn't there.
But. As a response to Henri's ploy, Richelieu would certainly start making life more difficult for the duchess and for Anne. For the girl-his niece Marguerite.
If Rohan was to continue as Rohan, they could not let Henri's daughter be forced into marriage with any Catholic peer.
Roi, je ne puis,
Duc, je ne daigne,
Rohan je suis.
No, they lacked the lineage to be kings. But they must remain themselves. "I am Rohan."
What they needed for Marguerite, as a husband for the Rohan family's only heiress, was, obviously, a Protestant.
Soubise frowned. He was not sure that Henri was wise to be considering a match with Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar so seriously. If the lineage was to continue, they shouldn't choose a man who would absorb Rohan into his own career and use its assets to further his own ambitions. They needed a man who would become Rohan for her. With her.
Soubise prayed that Marguerite would mature to have the same spirit as her grandmother, Catherine de Parthenay-Larcheveque, who had written to Henri from La Rochelle during the great siege, insisting that they must achieve "secure peace, complete victory, or honorable death." The old motto of Jeanne d'Albret, Henri IV's mother-never to be forgotten by the Huguenots.
Not if they hoped to survive in this world, at least.
Not for nothing did the Rohan descend from Isabelle d'Albret, aunt of that very queen of Navarre.
Grantville
Noelle threw the newspaper on the table.
"Would you like me to say 'damn' for you?" Eddie Junker inquired politely.
"I am so sick of how the Crown Loyalists are insulting Ed Piazza because of Barclay and that bunch." She looked across the table. "And you, too, Mr. Jenkins. I'm sorry about the whole thing. If we only could have stopped them."
Chad Jenkins put his toast down. "At least they aren't using it much in the campaign on the national level."
"I suppose that's better than nothing. But it still isn't what anyone could call good." She looked at her uncle. Who was married to the sister of Chad Jenkins' wife. She was still sorting out all the dozens of new relatives and relatives-by-marriage she had acquired when she officially became a Stull instead of a Murphy. Consanguinity and affinity, the church called it. "What do you think, Joe?"
She still hadn't managed to talk herself into calling any of them "aunt" or "uncle." Not when she called her father by his first name.
"You should have shot the Hungarian when you had the chance. Or at least shot into the barge instead of into the river. With any luck, it would have sunk in the Danube, right there at Regensburg. The garrison could have fished them out and sent them home, we could have tried them the same way we did Bolender's bunch, and we'd be done with it by now."
His wife Aura Lee looked at him, reproachfully. "Don't be mean to Noelle."
"It would have taken really a lot of luck," Eddie pointed out. "Considering Noelle's marksmanship. She was lucky to hit the river."
Chad Jenkins laughed. "No point in crying about spilled milk. Duke Albrecht and Kay Kelly are going to make the most of it in the campaign, and that's all there is to it." He leaned back. "I hear she's actually gotten Gustavus to order delivery of ten of those 'Dauntless' planes, just as fast as Bob can build them."
Joe, who was also the SoTF Secretary of Transportation, was on solid ground, now. He leaned back and began to summarize resources, warehouse space, how far the various companies that were starting to manufacture aviation engines had gotten, delivery schedules for parts and components, availability of skilled personnel, and testing procedures.
It didn't seem like Gustavus was likely to get those planes any time soon. He should thank his lucky stars if he got a couple of them in time for next spring's campaign.
"I don't think that Mom's really designed to hit the campaign trail," Missy told Ron. "Honestly, she hates it. She tries to hide it, but she just hates it."
"Well, your dad keeps her out of it, as much as he can," Ron said. "And you've got to admit that Willie Ray is in his glory. Your grandfather's having a wonderful time."
"Oh, yeah." Missy giggled. "Just like the old days, back when he was in the state legislature. He's having a ball."
"He and Dreeson make quite a pair."
Chapter 38
Frankfurt am Main
"The Vignelli machine is broken." Deneau looked up in annoyance.
"What did you expect?" Brillard put down the stylus with which he was making a stencil. Another stencil. One of the many deliberately amateurish stencils that Locqufier's group had spent their time making this winter. They offended Brillard's pride. He had been a properly apprenticed type maker, once upon a time. Before the lead type had been taken by de Rohan's soldiers, to make bullets. Before the dysentery that the soldiers brought to his home town carried off his master and fellow apprentices. Before he had been caught up in the first of de Rohan's Huguenot revolts and become a soldier himself, nearly fifteen years ago.
He started to count on his fingers. "First, the unfortunate machine has been asked to make hundreds of pamphlets opposing the practice of vaccination. For many reasons. Not only those set forth in the up-time materials that the man in Grantville sent to de Ron, but also for new reasons that we invented, such as that getting a vaccination indicates that a person is not meekly submitting to the will of God.
"Then, from the encyclopedia, Gui found out that the up-timers-not the ones now in Grantville, but their ancestors a century and a half before the time they came from-had opposed these new 'lightning rods' for much the same reason. So we requested of the poor machine that it be so kind as to produce hundreds of pamphlets opposing lightning rods.
"Plus Antoine's ordinary diatribes against Richelieu.
"Plus manifestoes for Weitz.
"Followed by the need for Guillaume's 'rumors of assassinations' pamphlets by the thousand. What did we expect? The poor machine is overstrained. 'Stress' that up-time reporter, Waters is his name, calls it in his 'American' newspaper."
Ancelin walked over and gave the roller a disgusted poke. "Whether it is stressed or broken, it will not produce any more pamphlets. We can still make the stencils ourselves, of course. But until Fortunat can find someone to fix it, we're out of the pamphlet business."
Locquifier shook his head. "We cannot fall behind now. There are printers in Frankfurt who have Vignellis. We must hire the use of one. Not give our stencils to him, of course. He might read them. We can't risk having the authorities discover the source of so many of the pamphlets in circulation. Just hire the use of the machine after the man's normal working day. We can demonstrate to him that you know how to work it, Fortunat. And find someone to fix ours."