Slowly and carefully, as a man will when he’s worn out, Johann Heinrich Bocler lowered the handles of the wheelbarrow until the weight had settled firmly on the braces. Then, finally letting go, he staggered backward a couple of steps. He might have fallen, except that Bonnie Weaver came up quickly and steadied him.
“Easy, fella,” she said. “It’s done. Don’t hurt yourself now.”
He grimaced, thinking of the damage he’d already inflicted upon himself. By tomorrow, his muscles would be aching all over. Bocler was stronger than he looked, but his life was mostly a sedentary one.
The worst would be his hands, though. He dreaded to look at them. He hadn’t stopped once during the journey and he was quite sure he had a number of blisters.
Weaver had figured out as much herself. “Let me see your hands,” she said. He held them up, unresisting. May as well learn the worst now, he supposed. She took them in her own and gently turned them over so she could see the palms.
He heard a little indrawn hiss and saw her wince. “Let’s go over to the light,” she said. “I can’t see well enough just by the moon.”
Franchetti had the burners going by now, and the flames were very bright. Once they got near, Weaver resumed her inspection of his hands.
“Well, I won’t lie to you, Herr Bocler. I’ll see if I can find some salve and bandages. But even if I can, your hands are going to hurt like the dickens before too long.”
The term “dickens” was unknown to him, one of the many English words that slid in and out of Amideutsch according to the whim of the speaker. No German dialect was standard in this day; Amideutsch less than any. But the meaning was clear enough.
He shrugged. The gesture was minimal, since she was still holding his hands. “The problem should only be temporary.” He smiled, a bit ruefully. “I was not planning to do any more writing for a while, anyway.”
She chuckled. “Writing? I know you have a reputation for being meticulous, Herr Bocler, but I can’t imagine there’s any point in keeping records for a while. The Bavarians will already be turning everything upside down and inside out.”
He shook his head. “I was thinking of my book, not the province’s records.”
She cocked her head and raised an eyebrow quizzically. “Book?”
Bocler realized he was speaking too freely. He was usually quite reserved, especially in the presence of women, but Bonnie Weaver had a relaxed and friendly manner that invited casual intimacy. Between that and his own exhaustion, he was being less guarded that he should be.
“What book?” she repeated.
He cleared his throat. “I am…ah. Well, it is an ambition mostly. So far I have a great deal of notes, but nothing I suppose you could properly call a book.”
“That’s how most books get written, I figure. What’s it about?”
“It’s a book on history.” He’d hoped he could leave it at that, but the expression on Weaver’s face made it clear she expected a fuller explication. “A record of our own times,” he added.
“Good luck with that! I remember Ms. Mailey saying in class once that it was impossible to analyze human events dispassionately until at least two centuries have gone by-and not always, even then. Anything more recent than that, according to her, was just current events. She said that with a sniff, as if the term was synonymous with gossip. She didn’t teach current events, of course. That was taught by Dwight Thomas, who doubled as our driver’s education teacher.” She smiled. “They didn’t get along real well. Being fair to Mr. Thomas, he was a pretty good driver’s ed teacher.”
Bocler had no intention whatsoever of asking the formidable Mailey woman her opinion on his book project. Or anything else. She was the sort of person his father and grandfather would both urge him to avoid at all costs. His father was a Lutheran pastor; his grandfather, a school director. Neither was a profession noted for taking risks.
Thankfully, Weaver seemed willing to let the matter drop. Bocler really didn’t like to discuss his book with anyone. Some of that was his natural reticence. Most of it was the reluctance of an unpublished author to discuss his ambitions openly. The printing press was less than two centuries old, but it had already been well established that the phrase “unpublished author” was a ridiculous oxymoron.
Johann Heinrich Bocler had a horror of looking ridiculous. In that, as in many things, he was a faithful son and grandson.
Weaver looked away, toward the work being done to ready the airship. The envelope was now beginning to fill out completely, as the hot air produced by the burners did its work.
The moon was almost directly behind her, so her profile was well-illuminated. She had a short, blunt nose, above lips that were slightly imbalanced. Her lower lip was thin; the upper, rather fleshy. Her chin was round, as were her cheeks. Like Bocler himself, Weaver was someone who would constantly tend to be plump.
Her figure, also well-illuminated, was much like her face. Not obese, certainly; but not at all slim, either. She was attractive, in a modest sort of way, but not a woman anyone would consider a beauty. Or even particularly pretty.
Bocler felt a sudden, powerful attraction to the American. He was taken completely off-guard. What had triggered that impulse?
He was a bit alarmed, too. He was only twenty-five years old. A rich man’s son or a nobleman would contemplate marriage at such an early age, but someone from Johann Heinrich’s modest origins would not be able to sustain a household until he was in his late twenties or early thirties. He had no business getting interested in a woman yet. Any woman, much less an up-timer.
The thought of pursuing a mere dalliance never even occurred to him. A considerable number of people-most people, truth be told-thought Bocler was a prude. But at least he could claim the virtues of prissiness as well the vices. He was not a man who would toy with anyone’s affections.
Bonnie Weaver wasn’t thinking of the man next to her at all. Her concentration was on the man tending the burner that was filling the airship’s envelope.
Stefano Franchetti. Slender, dapper in a commoner’s sort of way, quick-witted; altogether charming.
He reminded her a lot of Larry Wild. The reminder drew her to him and repelled her at the same time.
Bonnie and Larry hadn’t exactly been involved, but they’d been very close to it when the Ostend War started and he went off to fight the Danish fleet attacking Wismar. He’d been killed in that battle, when his rocket boat attacked the enemy ships.
Foolishly, in hindsight, Bonnie had probed hard and long to find out exactly how he’d been killed. When she finally learned, she wished she hadn’t. Cut in half-literally, cut in half-by a cannonball. They never found any part of his body. The upper half had been sent flying into the sea, where it would have long ago been eaten by sea life. The lower half had stayed in the rocket boat, but the boat itself had blown up a short time later when it rammed one of the Danish warships.
October 7, 1633. More than two years had gone by since then, but she still had nightmares about it sometimes; even flashbacks to something she’d never actually seen.
The worst of it was that she couldn’t grieve properly. It wasn’t as if she’d lost a husband or a fiance or even an established boyfriend. Just…a possibility, forever gone. She still wondered what might have happened between them. Not just from time to time, either, but often. She was beginning to fear she’d developed an obsession over his memory.
Hearing a sound next to her, Bonnie turned her head and saw that Bocler had a tight expression on his face. That had been him, issuing a little hiss of pain. What was she doing, mooning over a dead man and his Italian doppelganger when she had an injured man to tend to?
There was a first aid kit in the gondola, she remembered. She’d never looked inside it, but it had to hold bandages and some sort of salve or unguent. Bandages, for sure.
The problem was that the envelope had been inflated enough to come completely off the ground. Stefano and Amanda and Dina were scurrying around with last minute preparations. This was the worst possible time for her to start rummaging around inside the gondola. She wasn’t even in it yet.
Her thoughts must have shown in her face, because Bocler cleared his throat and said, “There is nothing you can do for me at the moment. Once we are in the air, we can see if there are medical supplies in the…what do you
