1634: The Ram Rebellion: Section Twenty Eight

Part IV: The Ram Rebellion

Wuerzburg, Late August, 1633

    Johann Matthaeus Meyfarth had, somehow, managed to appoint himself as office dragon. He wasn’t officially Steve Salatto’s chief of staff, but he had his desk in the outer office in Wuerzburg’s episcopal palace and fiercely defended the time of the New United States’ chief administrator in Franconia from those who would waste it. Or even might do so.

    He looked at the latest arrivals with some surprise. Three up-time women. They scarcely qualified as the Three Graces. Not one of them had ever been as attractive as - say - Fraeulein Murphy, who was no more than moderately pretty herself. They were accompanied by a down-time man about thirty. He had to be a down-timer, Meyfarth thought, because no up-timer would ever look quite so at ease in a bureaucrat’s formal robe. The man’s forehead was practically inscribed with the words: treasury official. Each of the four was trailed by a quite young man, in his late teens or early twenties, all of whom appeared to be down-timers, even though two of them were dressed in up-time style clothing. Each of them was carrying a load of ledgers and papers.

    The largest of the women announced, “We’re here.”

    Meyfarth cleared his throat. “And you are?”

    Not one of the Saxe-Something dukes for whom Meyfarth had worked over many years had a duchess who could have matched the arrogance of her answer. “The Auditors.” The capital letters were inherent in her tone.

    It had slipped his mind that when Herr Bellamy, the Deputy Secretary of State of the New United States, made his visit to Wuerzburg earlier in the summer, Herr Salatto had, in passing, mentioned that it would be a good thing for the administration of Franconia to have auditors. Apparently, it now had them. Forcing to his face the kind of smile with which people almost universally greet the announcement of an investigation by the General Accounting Office, Meyfarth rose, invited them to take chairs, and went into Herr Salatto’s office.

    Steve was pushing papers. At the announcement of auditors, he asked, “Who?” and pushed another piece, this time right across the desk and onto the floor.

    Meyfarth retrieved it. “They announced themselves by function, not by name. As in, ‘the bishop’ or ‘the baron.’ They seem to think that you expect them and know all about it.”

    “Let me take a look through the peephole.” One of the first amenities that Meyfarth had added to the inner office was a small aperture, screened in the outer office by a large vase of dried flowers, through which Steve could look out and get a preview of the people to whom he would shortly be speaking.

    Twenty seconds later, Steve said, “Holy smoke,” and sank down on the hard bench on which his visitors sat. Then: “Coffee. Have one of the kids make a whole pot of coffee. Smile, tell them you’re ordering coffee, and that I’ll be right with them. Then come back in here through the rear door before you go into the reception room again.”

    Meyfarth left. Steve headed toward the back offices where his wife Anita and several other Grantville natives worked. This was beyond an old Baltimore boy. “Anita,” he beckoned. “I need a fast low-down.”

    Among the things for which Meyfarth admired his up-time boss was that he was so fast with a summary. By the time he had ordered coffee, Anita Masaniello—she had kept her maiden name—and Fraeulein Murphy, who was in the back room with her, had scribbled down the following for him to read on his way back to the outer office.

    Estelle McIntire. The skinny one. About forty-five. She was born Estelle Colburn; she’s Huddy Colburn’s cousin; he’s a big muck-a-muck in real estate in Grantville. Married to Crawford McIntire. One grown son. Methodist; she got her husband to change over from Presbyterian when they married.

    Willa Fodor. The short one. About the same age as Estelle, maybe a year or so older. Born Willa Voytek; she’s Cyril Fodor’s wife. One married daughter-that’s Lynelle, married to Paul Calagna who is here in Wuerzburg with the Special Commission. You’ve met Lynelle-she wasn’t about to be left behind in Grantville for who-knows-how-long; she packed up the kids and came along. Willa is Catholic, as you can guess. Cyril and Willa had a couple more kids, lots younger than Lynelle, left up-time, one in college and one in the army. Willa finished high school after she had Lynelle; then started college and had finished two years, going part-time, when she got pregnant again. About then, Cyril and his brother decided to start their own business, an auto repair and body shop. She quit school for a while to help manage bookkeeping end of it; then the next kid came along and she never got around to going back to college.

    Maydene Utt. The big one. Born McIntire. Also a year or two older than Estelle. She’s Crawford’s sister, so she’s Estelle’s sister-in-law. Also switched from Presbyterian to Methodist when she got married. Bit of hard feelings in the McIntire family there. Belva, the third sibling, has gone off to Geneva with her husband so he can be trained as a super-deacon to help Enoch McDow at the Presbyterian church. Two grown sons; one of them, Farley, has a down-time wife.

    All three of the gals are corkers. Estelle and Maydene have some college, too. They worked outside of Grantville as commuters before the Ring of Fire. In offices, somewhere. I don’t know exactly what they did. Some early meeting after it happened, one of the less perceptive of the Civil War re-enactors got up and started spouting off about how, now that we were back in the past, the ladies would go back to their proper roles and stay home drying vegetables and keeping house. Estelle, Willa, and Maydene stood and started yelling about the stupidity of expecting Grantville to waste half of its talent. Things got pretty lively from there.

    Terry Sterling saw the right temperament and grabbed all three of them right away as auditor trainees for his accounting firm.

    Added at the bottom, in Steve’s handwriting, were a few more sentences. “One of Arnold Bellamy’s letters must have gone astray in the mail. Check whether they are here as NUS employees or contractors. Don’t have the vaguest idea who the down-timers are. Find out tactfully.”

    Meyfarth read through it hurriedly on his way back to the reception room. What was a “corker?” The essence was clear, however.

    “Not the Three Graces,” he murmured to himself. Probably the Three Furies. He shoved it into the side pocket he had had a tailor add to his robe and returned to the outer office wearing a professional smile. “Ah, Mrs. Utt, Mrs. Fodor, Mrs. McIntire. We are so pleased that you have made the trip successfully. Would you be so kind as to present me to your associates?”

    The obvious treasury official was one Johann Friedrich Krausold. He was indeed a former Saxe-Weimar and now New United States Kammerverwalter assigned to Jena. The four young men were the next generation of trainees. Johannes Elias Fischer, from Arnstadt; Michael Heubel, from Stadtilm; Samuel Ebert, from Saalfeld; Ambrosius Wachler, from Weimar.

    Meyfarth smiled at the young men quite genuinely. Not so much in greeting as because he recognized the eternal verities. Having brought astonishingly few bureaucrats from the future, the up-timers were now growing a supply. Government would go on. He led them into Steve’s office.

    “The books and encyclopedias in Grantville that told those of us in the administrative teams that got sent to Franconia about such general concepts as cuius regio as deciding a principality’s religious allegiance and the requirement that subjects accept the religion of the ruler...”

    Steve Salatto placed his hands on the desk, leaned forward, and gave the three lady auditors sitting in front of him a smile. “I won’t go so far as to say they were junk. But they were at least as misleading as they were useful. Or maybe the problem’s been with us, and our assumptions, coming to it out of an American background. We thought there would be one piece of ground here and all of its residents would be Catholic; then there would be a border; then another piece of ground over here and all of its residents would be Protestant.”

    He shook his head ruefully. “When it came to Franconia—dream on!”

    He gestured toward the window. “For instance, the Steigerwald—or Steiger Forest, we’d say—takes up a space roughly twenty-five miles or so from Volkach to Bamberg, west to east, and a little under fifty miles from Knetzgau down to Windsheim, north to south. Or, maybe, five miles or so more in each direction, depending on how you count it. Also, it isn’t all forest. There are a lot of clearings in it with villages and agriculture.

    “The people who lived there swore their oaths of allegiance to a lord. But they have the right to move, which means that they don’t necessarily live within that lord’s territories. They might rent a farm somewhere else. Or sometimes what once was a single piece of territory has been split up between two lines of heirs, one Catholic and one Protestant. Or a family of lords who were Catholic died out and their estates escheated to a Protestant overlord. Or vice versa. Anyway, what it means in practice is that we’ve run into villages where eighteen of the families are Catholic and fourteen of them are Protestant, depending on who is their lord. It might be the count of Castell on one side of the street and the bishop of Wuerzburg on the other side. Or, sometimes, if people have moved into houses across the street, all intermixed.

    “For every rule, there are a half-dozen exceptions.”

    “How long has that been true?” Estelle McIntire asked. “The part about everything being mixed up, I mean.”

    Salatto considered the question, for a moment. “Well... say a century or so. Since the beginning of the Reformation, in lots of places. In the Steigerwald area, for sure. There was a very famous lady named Argula von Grumbach—yes, that was her name, believe it or not—who corresponded with Martin Luther and brought Lutheran preachers onto her estates already in the 1530s. When our team went there the first time, some of the local farmers from a village called Frankenwinheim took us to see the house where she lived, and the pulpit from which the first Lutheran pastor preached.”

    “In other words,” Maydene Utt interrupted, a bit impatiently, “’Catholic’ Franconia has a lot of Protestants in it. Lutherans, like in Thuringia?”

    Salatto nodded. “Most of them. But a few are Calvinists—and some others are Anabaptists or Jews. They’re not supposed to be there at all, in theory. But there they are, anyway.”

    For the first time, one of the auditors smiled. Willa Fodor, that was, whom Steve had already tentatively pegged as the most easy-going of the trio.

    “Sort of like illegal aliens back in the USA up-time,” she said.

    Steve returned the smile. “Pretty much, yes. Except there’s no Immigration and Naturalization Service here to chase after them and get them deported. Not on a national scale, for sure, or even a regional one. Now and then, one of the local authorities carries out a little campaign. But all that does is just mix everything up still further. Franconia’s even more of a crazy-quilt of principalities than most of the Germanies. If a group gets rousted from one area, all they usually have to do is move a few miles and they’re in somebody else’s official jurisdiction.”

    Fodor was still smiling, but Maydene Utt had a frown on her face. “It sounds a lot more... I don’t know. Tolerant, I guess. Than what I’d expected.”

    Salatto leaned back in his chair and shrugged. “It is, and it isn’t. Depends on the time and place. The Catholic parts of Franconia actually had even more Protestants in them until just shortly before the Ring of Fire. But during the years 1626-1629, the Bishop of Wuerzburg started a big campaign to force the re-Catholicization of the Steigerwald.

    “And by ‘force,’ I mean just that. He sent troops into villages that had become Protestant to drive out the Lutheran clergy, confiscate their rectories and any tithe grain they had in storage, re-program their churches to be Catholic, and generally pushed pretty hard. In some villages, if there was resistance, the episcopal troops took the adult men as hostages, carried them off to prison in the nearest walled town where they had a garrison, and told the rest of the people in the village, ‘either promise to convert or we start shooting your husbands and fathers one by one.’”

    All three auditors were frowning, now. Steve continued:

    “That’s made a lot of the Catholic administrators whom Grantville sent down to Franconia really uncomfortable, as you can imagine. But that’s what the bishop was doing, and we can’t close our eyes to it. Because of the bishop’s campaign, it isn’t really surprising that a much higher percentage of the population in the Prince-Diocese of Wuerzburg was Catholic, officially at least, in 1632 than had been the case five or six years earlier. It also isn’t really surprising that a lot of the ex-Protestants are still holding grudges and think that a new administration installed in the episcopal palace ought to be a good time to start getting their own back.”

    Willa Fodor chuckled. “What a mess. I imagine you weren’t all that happy when the NUS administration hit you with the Special Commission on the Establishment of Religious Freedom.”

    Steve matched her chuckle. “Well... we certainly had mixed feelings about it. Just when we thought we were starting to get a handle on things...”

    He shrugged again. “But I’m not complaining. The Commission probably helps more than it causes me headaches. Truth be told, I’m a lot more bothered by the ongoing corruption in the area. Government in Franconia—if you can even call it that—has been so screwed up for so long that people have gotten accustomed to cronyism and personal contacts and swapping favors as the way to do things. Can’t say I even blame ‘em, really. But I’m bound and determined to get that problem turned around, at least, by the time we can think of scheduling a regional election sometime in the spring of next year.”

    He gave the three women another smile. “That’s why I asked for auditors to be sent down here. Whatever else, I’ve got to see to it that those ingrained habits don’t start infecting our administration.”

    “What are you mostly concerned about?” McIntire asked.

    “Contracting problems,” Steve replied immediately. “Every time we put out a contract, I know blasted well that most of them wind up getting steered to somebody’s friend or relative. People here don’t even think about it, really. Cronyism has gotten so ingrained in their habits that they take it as a law of nature.”

    Maydene Utt’s frown deepened. “We can fix that.”

    Steve thought she was over-optimistic. Wildly over-optimistic, in fact. But he figured Utt and the other two auditors could at least make clear to everybody that from now on they’d have to hide their corruption.

    That was progress of a sort, he supposed. Thinking ruefully—and not for the first time—of those innocent days when he’d been an administrator for Baltimore County, Maryland. Not that Maryland, or West Virginia for that matter, had ever been anyone’s ideal of “clean government,” he’d admit. A high percentage of the state’s politicians, including governors, had wound up in prison, after all. Still, by the standards of down-time Franconia, even the most sticky-fingered West Virginia politician had been a veritable paragon of public virtue. Arch Moore excepted, probably.

    Willa Fodor interrupted his musings. “We’d best get started, then.”

    “I’d say so!” That, from Maydene Utt. Very firmly.

    Estelle McIntire didn’t say anything. She just nodded. Very firmly.

    Steve ushered them out of his office, smiling all the way.