1634: The Baltic War: Chapter Fourteen

Magdeburg

    “Well, go in, why don’t you?” Eric Krenz had his arms crossed, his hands tucked into the folds of his heavy coat. “It’s cold, Thorsten. I always hated January even before an up-timer told me we’re in the middle of what they call ‘the Little Ice Age.’”

    Thorsten was very cold himself, it being one of those clear-skied days in mid-winter when everything seemed to turn to ice. But he still wasn’t ready to take the last few steps to reach the entrance to the settlement house. Mostly—so he told himself, anyway—because the settlement house was actually a large and impressive-looking monastery. The oldest surviving structure in the city, in fact, founded centuries ago.

    The Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen, as it had formerly been known. The literal translation into English was “the Monastery of Our Loving Women,” but it was actually a convent dedicated to the Virgin Mary—and it was still referred to as such by Magdeburg’s more devout inhabitants, who cast a skeptical eye on the new activities to which the ancient building was being put today. The Lutherans, perhaps oddly, even more than the Catholics from whom the monastery had been seized after Gustav Adolf established his control of the city and began rebuilding it from the devastation left by Tilly’s army in 1631.

    But perhaps that was not so odd. There weren’t that many Catholics in Magdeburg, which had been the center of Lutheranism in Germany since the previous century. Or, at least, not many who made a point of it. Feelings could still run high about the horrible massacre, which had happened less than three years earlier. Since the emperor had allowed the Catholics to retain the small cathedral of San Sebastian not far from the huge Lutheran Dom, and his soldiery—the CoC, still more so—kept the religious peace in the city, Thorsten imagined the city’s Catholics were inclined not to make a fuss about the former Kloster.

    “Thorsten, I’m freezing. And we’ve only got a one-day leave. Either shit or get off the pot. If you can’t work up the nerve to see the Americaness again, then”—Eric snatched a hand from beneath his coat and pointed to the north; then stuck it right back—“there’s a nice warm tavern not two blocks away.”

    A tavern sounded… very tempting. Warm, good beer—and most of all, a familiar and comfortable situation. As opposed to marching into a monastery-become-peculiar-charity-project, where lurked a young female who intimidated Thorsten almost as much as she attracted him.

    In the end, the decision was made for him. The big door to the settlement house opened and Caroline herself emerged. With the same incredible smile on her face that Thorsten vividly remembered.

    Did more than remember, actually. In the weeks since he’d last seen her, he’d used the memory of that smile to fend off the image of Robert Stiteler being slaughtered. That worked very well, he’d found. He was having fewer and fewer nightmares and flashbacks as time went on.

    “Do you always make a habit of this?” she asked him cheerfully.

    Peering out the same frosted window through which Caroline had first spotted Thorsten Engler standing outside, Maureen Grady smiled almost as widely as Caroline. “Well, this is shaping up nicely. I am so fond of men who aren’t always cocksure about everything.”

    Anna Sophia, the dowager countess of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, half-rose from her seat near the window and looked out also. “Is that the young man you mentioned to me last week?”

    Her nineteen-year-old niece-in-law Emelie, born a countess of Oldenberg-Delmenhorst but the new countess of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt since her marriage the previous summer, rose from her chair and came to the window also. “Nice-enough looking fellow, I will say that. But are you sure he’s suitable for our precious Caroline?”

    Maureen started to say something, but broke off in a half-choked laugh when she spotted the expression on the face of the older countess. Anna Sophia was looking very prim and proper indeed. Much the way a middle-aged and eminently respectable lady reacts to something unmentionable being spoken aloud in public. Silence, that somehow still manages to exude wordless disapproval.

    “Yes, I’m sure,” Maureen said, when she recovered. “The dowager countess is none too pleased about it, mind you. But I checked with my contacts in the Committee of Correspondence.”

    Emelie glanced at Anna Sophia and smiled. “Your very extensive contacts in the CoC.”

    “Well, yes. In this instance, I checked with Gunther himself. Then, after hearing his story, I had my husband ask around in the navy yard. If anyone has anything bad to say about Thorsten Engler, they’re keeping very quiet about it.”

    “As if anyone could hide anything from those people, with their spies in every house,” the dowager countess said stiffly. “I do not approve, Maureen. I say it again. No good will come of this.”

    She didn’t add mark my words, but she might as well have.

    Her niece-in-law resumed her seat. “Oh, stop it, Anna Sophia. We’ve had no trouble with the CoC at all. What really upsets you is that our work depends so heavily on them.”

    “We should be relying on the churches,” the older countess insisted. She and her niece-in-law shared the same birthday, June 15, but they were thirty years apart in age—and at least that far removed in some of their social attitudes.

    Maureen slouched back in her chair with her elbows on the armrests, and steepled her fingers. Then, gazing at Anna Sophia over the fingertips, said: “I will be glad to, Countess—as soon as you can find me more than three churches in the city whose pastors or priests don’t insist on imposing doctrinal qualifications on our clients. I will add that the only one of those three churches which carries any weight is—brace yourself—the Catholic church.”

    Anna Sophia’s lips tightened but she said nothing. If she had, Maureen suspected, the words she’d have said would also have been: Those people. With perhaps even more disapproval in her tone than when she used those people to refer to the Committees of Correspondence. Like most upper class Lutherans in the USE—young Emelie being one of the exceptions—the dowager countess of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt viewed the recent upsurge of the Catholic church in Magdeburg with great alarm.

    By what insidious devices had the miserable papists come to wield so much influence over the masses in central Germany? Until very recently, a bastion of Lutheran orthodoxy?

    In public, they usually ascribed the phenomenon to the well-known deviousness and cunning of the Jesuits, “the damned Jesuits” being a handy catch-all explanation for Lutherans of their class. Or they ascribed it to the supposedly massive immigration of uneducated Catholics into the burgeoning capital city. But Maureen wondered how much they really believed that themselves. The great majority of immigrants into Magdeburg came from Protestant areas of Germany and Europe, not Catholic ones. And while the reputation of the Jesuits was well-deserved in some respects, the near-magical powers ascribed to them by their enemies was just plain silly.

    No, the explanation was far simpler, and required no formula to explain beyond the well-tried and ancient one. As usually happens with powers-that-be, the Lutheran establishment in central and northern Germany—laity and churches alike—had gotten fat, self-centered and complacent. And more than a little selfish. The headway made by the Catholic church was no more mysterious than the headway Protestant churches had made against Catholicism in the Latin America of the world Maureen had left behind in the Ring of Fire.

    But there was no point in raking this old argument over the coals again. Anna Sophia was one of a dozen important figures in the Lutheran establishment in Germany—which, in this area, was essentially identical with the political establishment—who’d been willing to serve as public sponsors for the settlement house. With no lesser a person than the Queen of Sweden herself as the figurehead—and her very energetic seven-year-old daughter as a frequent and enthusiastic visitor.

    For Maureen Grady’s purposes, that was plenty good enough. Emelie was the only one of the “Elles,” as Caroline called them—“Eminent Lutheran Ladies”—who had a get-your-hands-dirty involvement in the daily work of the settlement house, anyway. Whether as a matter of personal temperament or simply because she was by far the youngest of the Elles, being still a teenager, Emelie had no trouble working with either the CoC or the Catholic church in Magdeburg.

    In any event, it was time to break off the gossip session. The door was opening and Caroline was ushering the Engler fellow into the room.

    Thorsten’s relaxation at Caroline’s obviously friendly attitude vanished the moment he went through the door she’d led him to. Other than Maureen Grady, he knew neither of the women in the room beyond. But everything about them, from the obviously expensive clothing they wore to their hair styles to subtleties about their expressions and mannerisms made it clear as day that they were noblewomen. Probably Hochadel, to boot, not lesser nobility.

    Thorsten didn’t share the automatic hostility toward the German aristocracy that most CoC members possessed. But he was certainly not partial to them, either—and, more to the point in this situation, had had so little personal contact with any real ones that he didn’t know how to conduct himself properly. The one Reichsritter who’d lived near Engler’s village had been a very small landowner without much more in the way of pretensions—and certainly not refined manners—than any prosperous farmer in the area.

    Fortunately, the younger of the two noblewomen smiled and extended her hand for an American-style informal handshake. That much, Thorsten had long since mastered.

    “A pleasure, ma’am,” he said, managing to get the words out smoothly and evenly.

    “I am Emelie, the countess of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt,” she said. Then, gesturing toward the older noblewoman sitting by the window: “And this is my husband’s sister-in-law Anna Sophia, the dowager countess.”

    There being no offer of a handshake coming from that quarter, Thorsten simply bowed. “A pleasure, ma’am.” The elderly countess nodded in return but said nothing.

    “This is the inner sanctum, Thorsten,” said Caroline. “I figured I’d bring you in here first, so you wouldn’t think this place was being run according to principles of anarchy. Appearances to the contrary. But we can go now, and leave the ladies to their machinations. See you later, Maureen. Emelie. Countess.”

    And off she went, taking Thorsten by the hand and leading him out. He made no protest. Leaving aside his own desire to escape, this was the first time they’d had any physical contact. He was quite thrilled.

    After the door closed, the dowager countess of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt emitted a sniff. “I find myself wondering if your precious CoC fellow made any recommendations about her. She’s quite shocking at times, you know.”

    “Don’t be silly, Anna Sophia. I find Caroline immensely refreshing.”

    Maureen looked from one to the other. “For what it’s worth, I share Emelie’s enthusiasm for Caroline—and, yes, Anna Sophia, sometimes the girl practically defines the term ‘bluntness.’ But what I mostly care about, seeing as how I really know very little about Thorsten Engler, is that I’m seeing a human being’s emotional paralysis finally coming unraveled.”

    Now simply interested, the older countess raised her head. Maureen nodded toward Emelie. “She knows the story, but I don’t think I’ve ever told you. Caroline’s not a native of Grantville like most of us here. The only reason she was in town when the Ring of Fire hit is because she was one of Rita Stearns’ college friends attending her wedding to Tom Simpson. Part of the reason she came is because she thought she might pick up some good tips—seeing as how she was supposed to get married to her own fiancé six weeks later. In Philadelphia, where he lived—and where the Ring of Fire left him.”

     “Ah.” Anna Sophia looked out the window again. “I wonder if we will ever understand God’s purpose there. I don’t think so, myself, whatever the parsons say. The learned arguments they advance today to explain the Ring of Fire are no more learned, after all, than the arguments I can remember them advancing not so many years ago—which sagely explained why the age of miracles is long past and will never return until the Christ himself.”

    Maureen was startled by the words, as she always was whenever someone spoke of the Ring of Fire that way. She shouldn’t be, really, since this was hardly the first time she’d heard a similar sentiment expressed. Looked at from that viewpoint…

    True enough, the Ring of Fire was a palpable, physical miracle, like something right out of the Bible. The parting of the Red Sea might have been more spectacular, perhaps. But those waters had returned, after Moses and his people passed. Whereas all anyone in Europe had to do—as untold thousands had done, by now—was travel to within three miles of Grantville to see the modern miracle with their own eyes. Nine-hundred foot tall cliffs that had not existed an eyeblink before God made them to be; rivers running in new courses; lakes drained and lakes created. Perhaps most of all, if a bit more subtle, thousands of sometimes peculiar people set loose in the world, who had in less than three years been the human equivalent of an earthquake.

    The problem was that, despite her own sincere Catholicism, Maureen Grady simply couldn’t think that way. She knew Grantville, having lived there for years since she’d left Chicago to take a better job at the big Veterans Administration center in Clarksburg. The idea that she and her neighbors—her cop husband, too, with his mania for baseball? their two sons, with a worse mania? their three dogs, with their mania for stealing the best seats in the house and shedding fur all over them?—were all part of a miracle just seemed completely absurd to her. Miracles were like Star Wars. They happened long, long ago in places that were far, far way—and had names that were hard to pronounce. They did not happen nowadays in dog-food-out-of-a-can plain old West Virginia.

    They just didn’t, unless God was a lot more like an American Indian style prankster deity than the one Maureen had grown up with and worshipped. So, Maureen had long since plunked herself down on the “unknown natural causes” side of that debate. She could accept that blind nature might pick West Virginia for the Ring of Fire.

    Why not, since nature had given them the seemingly-immortal Senator Robert Byrd? Nobody ever explained him as being due to any sort of miracle. The occasional Republican whispers that he’d sold his soul to the devil could be discounted, she thought.

    “This is the day care center,” Caroline said, as they entered a section of the settlement house that was a newly-constructed extension from the medieval monastery.

    Thorsten looked around carefully. The great one-room wooden structure was really just a huge barn, with what amounted to big stalls for children instead of horses or cattle. True, the floor was wood instead of dirt, and was amazingly clean given the swarms of children everywhere. But the design and craftsmanship of the extension itself was just about exactly what you’d get with a well-made barn. Very sturdy and solid, to be sure, but with no frills whatsoever.

    The one thing that puzzled him at first was how they managed to keep such a big wooden structure warm enough in the winter. He saw no signs that the walls were insulated by anything except a double layer of planking. But then he spotted one of the peculiar-looking new American stoves that were becoming quite popular in the city. “Franklin stoves,” they were called. Thorsten’s own landlord had been talking lately about getting some for their apartment building.

    He looked around again, and spotted two more. Apparently, they had such a stove in almost every one of the stalls for children. 

    “Well, what do you think?” Caroline asked. Glancing at her, Thorsten realized that he’d been silent for quite some time, as he’d given the day care center much more than a casual examination. His friend Eric teased him about that characteristic quite often. Thorsten supposed it was probably true that he tended to concentrate on something to the point of being half-oblivious to the world around him.

    “It’s very sturdy,” he said. “Former farmers built it, I am thinking.”

     “Well… yes, I suppose it could have been. It was done by a crew sent from two of the construction workers’ unions. Most of those men are from rural areas, true enough. I don’t know if they were farmers, though. Why do you say that?”

    Thorsten waved his hand about. “It’s designed like a big barn, Caroline. Better made than usual, but that’s what it is.”

    She looked a little startled. “A barn? I wouldn’t have said so!”

    Fearing that she was on the verge of becoming offended, Thorsten chose his next words carefully.

    “Ah… I don’t mean to be impertinent, but I take it you were not born and raised in a country village?”

    Caroline’s burst of laughter reassured Thorsten, as well as intriguing him. She had a raucous, almost harsh-sounding laugh, quite at odds with her actual voice. Everything about the woman was fascinating.

    “Hell, no! I’m the o-riginal city girl, Thorsten. Born and raised in and around Washington, D.C. When I was growing up, going on a ‘country outing’ meant finding an Eritrean restaurant instead of the run-of-the-mill Ethiopian ones. The first time I saw a cow was when I transferred to WVU my junior year because I didn’t like—well, never mind. Let’s just say it took Rita Stearns fifteen minutes to walk me through the differences between a cow and a horse so I could tell them apart.” She frowned rather dramatically. “And she’s never let me forget it even though the truth is I could have managed it in two minutes if she hadn’t been laughing her head off the other thirteen.”

    Thorsten tried to imagine not being able to tell the difference between a cow and horse at a glance. Finally! Something about the woman that was clearly far from perfect. It came as a great relief.

    “For someone like me, Caroline, a good and well-made barn is nothing to sneer at. Many people live their whole lives in much worse. I meant no offense.”

    She turned her head and looked at him for a long moment, without a trace of her usual smile. “I believe you,” she said eventually. “I think you’re one of the nicest men I’ve ever met. And none of it’s phony.”

    He didn’t know what to say to that. But the smile returned, and she took him by the hand again and led him elsewhere. The “soup kitchen,” she called it, even though they were serving no form of soup at all, so far as Thorsten could determine.

    “So how was the food?” Eric asked him that evening, over beers in the tavern. He’d left the settlement house much sooner than Engler, of course.

    “Who cares?” was Thorsten’s reply.

    “That silly smile has no business on your plain German farmer’s face,” declared Krenz. He turned to Gunther Achterhof, who was sitting at the table with them. “Don’t you agree?”

    “No.” Gunther studied Thorsten for a bit. He really did seem quite distracted.

    “Still having dreams?”

    “Oh, yes.”

    Gunther drained his beer. “I changed my mind. You’re right, Krenz. That is the silliest smile I’ve ever seen, on anybody’s face. Better he should have kept suffering, like a farmer should.”