De Melon’s voice was calm, but insistent.
“Agreed.”
De Melon looked surprised.
Bernhard shrugged his shoulders. “What’s the point of trying to hold on to the lands I have gained if I don’t leave children? Wilhelm’s a commoner now. He has three healthy sons and Eleonore is pregnant again, but he has declared that even though she has chosen to keep her birth title, their children will take his rank and be commoners also. Little Wettins. The up-time encyclopedia says that Albrecht’s marriage in the other world remained childless; he went ahead and married Dorothea in spite of that. Ernst will inherit much of Saxe-Altenburg’s property when he marries little Elisabeth Sofie. If they go overboard and have eighteen offspring in this world, as they did in the other, I can only say that they will deserve to have to find a way support that many children themselves.”
“What about a sweetener?” de Melon suggested. “Throw in the agreement of both parties that if the two of you leave no surviving children, aside from what reverts to Tyrol and will thus be an integral part of a USE state anyway, the County of Burgundy as a single entity will become a USE province.”
Bernhard raised that eyebrow.
De Melon spread his hands wide. “Hey, it was just a suggestion.”
“It’s a damned good one,” Kanoffski said. “Carrots with your sticks, Bernhard. We’ll all be dead by the time it might happen. Offer Gustavus some carrots.”
Magdeburg, late March 1635
“ Modus vivendi,” Mike Stearns marveled. “Four months ago, who’d’a thunk it?”
Wilhelm Wettin just shook his head. “Not I.”
“It’s a genuine offer,” Sattler said. “I sat in on almost all of the discussions, as did de Melon. Including their reiteration of the point about carrots.”
Frank Jackson snorted. “Right now, Gustavus is simply slavering at the thought of carrot stew.”
“Is there any point,” Hermann of Hesse-Rotenburg asked, “in mentioning to the emperor just how remote the possibility is that the County of Burgundy would ever revert to the USE? Claudia de Medici has an established reputation for fecundity. Bernhard’s parents produced eleven sons.”
Sattler shook his head. “Not, I think, when the emperor’s succession is entirely dependent upon one rather small girl, with no prospect for more heirs.”
“So.” Mike looked at Wettin. “Your brother, your call. You’re the incoming prime minister. Rebecca insists that I say this. If you absolutely can’t live with this proposal that Bernhard has made, for whatever punctilious points of honor that seem to be so important down-time, tell me now.”
Wettin put his hand flat on the table. “Follow it up.”
“All right, then. Sattler, you and de Melon go back to get this finalized. Stop by Bolzen and get the Tyrol proposal finalized, too. TEA has put the Monster at your disposal. Not as an act of charity, I regret to say. I hope the budget office is really into heavy short-term investment for the prospect of long-term solid gains.”
Bolzen, March 1635
“If We do not even try for more,” the regent said, “then We certainly will not receive it. We have not observed that the USE is in the practice of distributing bonuses or free gifts. Moreover, if one perceives the matter properly, it could almost be said that We deserve this.”
Even Dr. Bienner looked skeptical.
The regent persisted. She was nothing if not tenacious.
“There is no precedent for this in the organization of the USE provinces,” Sattler protested.
“Make one.”
“There is no provision for this in the USE constitution.”
“Amend it.”
“I am far from certain that Prime Minister Stearns will, under any circumstances, consent to the admission of a state which has a hereditary governor’s office, settled on your children and the heirs of their bodies, independently of whether or not titles of nobility should at some future date be abolished.”
“Who runs the USE? The prime minister or the emperor?”
Sattler didn’t feel like pushing the point just then. He was fully aware that in the view of Gustavus Adolphus, his desk was the one that held the sign that proclaimed “The buck stops here.” He was equally aware that Stearns was not fully with that program.
He was tired of starting to think in up-time terms and phrases.
Overall, he would find it a relief when Wettin took office in June.
“The threat of a plague epidemic has weakened the governments of many of the smaller entities along Swabia’s border with Bavaria. We fear that Duke Maximilian might come creeping in. We have already extended Tyrol’s protection to Irsee, to Ottobeuren, to Fussen, to Mindelheim, to Roggenburg. We would have been happy to do the same for the prince-bishopric of Augsburg, but Margrave Georg Friedrich of Baden forestalled Us by doing the same first.”
Claudia paused, a dissatisfied expression on her face. She hadn’t thought that the old man was still capable of carrying out a preemptive strike.
“Having thus sheltered them from foreign dangers, We feel it is only reasonable that they be incorporated into the new ‘state’ of Tyrol rather than into the Province of Swabia that was proposed in June 1634 at the Congress of Copenhagen.”
Philipp Sattler, on behalf of the USE, somehow did not see the matter the same way. He particularly did not see it the same way when she offered to extend Tyrol’s “benevolent protection” to his home town of Kempten.
Sometimes, even Claudia de Medici did not get everything she wanted.
“God be thanked,” Matt Trelli said to Marcie in the privacy of their rooms. “I didn’t go to all those little abbeys and manors and things to snitch them up for Tyrol. She told me that I was going to organize the local authorities to be in a better position to cope if plague passed the quarantine lines. I don’t want to go down in history as a lackey of the imperialist forces. The damned woman’s a shark.”
Eventually, however, Sattler completed the commission with which he had left Magdeburg. Signed, sealed, and delivered. Tyrol and Burgundy, both. He had even managed to sneak a few protective provisions into the document establishing a new Tyrolese regency council for Claudia’s sons.
“So far, so good,” he said to de Melon as he packed his briefcase for the return to Magdeburg. “But if you ask me, she’ll be back. This won’t be the end of it. Not tomorrow and not next year, but that woman could play the starring role in some story, perhaps one of these ‘movies,’ that Herr Piazza was telling me about. “The Tomato That Ate Cleveland,” I believe was the title. I am not certain why Herr Piazza refers to the regent of Tyrol as a tomato.”
Epilogue
Some Months Later
Rebecca and Amalie Elisabeth contemplated the newest map of the area that would have become a nice neat USE Province of Swabia if real life had not intervened.
“It looks like knotted fringe,” Amalie said. “Down at the bottom of the map, all the way from the Rhine to the Bavarian border, like a table runner hanging over the edge.”
Rebecca shook her head. “No. I think it’s more like up-time macrame. I saw some in Donna Bates’ house-the woman whose daughter has married Prince Vladimir-back the first year or so after the Ring of Fire, when I was living in Grantville. The maker starts with a lot of strings fastened to a dowel or rod. She brings them down and knots them, over and over, to make a pretty design.”
She shook her head again. “Poor Michael.”
Upward Mobility
June 1634
“We are almost at the border of Grantville, Herr Miro.”
Estuban Miro tried to nod an acknowledgement, but the motion was lost amidst the greater swayings and jouncings imparted by the wagon’s passage across yet another set of muddy ruts. Miro had heard of the wonderful roads in and around Grantville, of their many improvements, but this was not one of those major thoroughfares. Political unrest in Franconia had peaked in the past few months, prompting the regional teamsters to give it a wide berth. Ultimately, that had meant a final approach on this narrow, twisting pike that pushed into Grantville out of Hersfeld, well to the west.