as possible.”
“Marguerite de Rohan? She’s a little older. Almost eighteen, I think.”
“She’s in Brittany, on the goddamned other side of France. Plus, Henri de Rohan, for all the respect I have for the man and what he has done to advance the Huguenot cause over the years, will want to control her husband. He wouldn’t refuse me. In fact, he’s suggested the match already. I turned it down.”
“Why in heaven?”
“The duc de Rohan wants to buy a competent general for his daughter and heiress, to fight his wars now that he’s aging. I have no desire to become a puppet hanging on strings that another man is manipulating.”
“What about Christian IV’s daughters?”
Der Kloster regretfully dismissed the daughters of the Danish king as not only the products of a morganatic marriage, but apparently extremely self-willed. Poyntz brought up stories about Eddie Cantrell and Anna Cathrine that were making the rounds of European courts, to general hilarity and multiple rude and obscene comments.
Bernhard gritted his teeth. “That one, the oldest one, is the same age as Elisabeth of the Palatinate. The rest are even younger. Did you hear me? They are too young. The next of the Danish king’s daughters after Anna Cathrine is exactly half as old as I am. ”
“Your Grace,” Kanoffski said politely. “Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel is not likely to die conveniently so that you can marry Amalie Elisabeth.”
“I would,” Bernhard said. “If she weren’t already married, I would snatch Amalie right up. She’s interesting. She’s intelligent. She’s politically astute. I like her a lot.”
“She’s too old,” Caldenbach squalled. “She’s older than you are, Your Grace.”
“Only two years older,” Bernhard said mildly. Then he smiled. The smile was not mild. It was wicked. “She’s a magnificent breeder. They already have six children living in addition to the four who died. Anyone want to bet me on how many more children she will give Wilhelm? I’ll wager ten thousand USE dollars on five more. Two thousand at each birth.”
Chapter Three
Magdeburg, late January 1635
“What do you think, Ed?” Mike Stearns tipped his chair back. “I’m really glad that I caught up with you before you left. All this campaigning has left me getting up in the morning not sure whether I’ll be going north or south or east or west before the day is out.”
Ed Piazza steepled his fingers. “First, to be honest, I’m just surprised. I can’t say it’s the last thing that expected, because it wasn’t on the list. The possibility that the regent of Tyrol might do this never even crossed my mind.”
“Do you see any disadvantages?” Francisco Nasi asked.
“From the perspective of the SoTF? Hell, no. It would be great for us. But, then, again, it’s no skin off our noses to add another mainly Catholic province to the USE. Wettin and the Crown Loyalists may not be so happy, given that one of their themes is ‘narrower citizenship’ and another, slinking along under the ground with the anti- Semitic agitation, is still ‘we’re here to defend Protestantism against the forces of the anti-Christ on Earth.’ How’s Gustav reacting?”
Mike pantomimed a cat pouncing upon a bird. “I doubt that he’s ever seen a piece of real estate that he didn’t classify as a desirable acquisition. He tends to stop and think about the complications offered by the inhabitants after he’s taken that irreversible first bite. If he can acquire it without expending any of his military resources, it’s ‘Roll over, Beethoven’ or ‘Full speed ahead. Damn the torpedoes.’ ”
“There will be complications,” Nasi said. “Swabia…”
“Every time somebody shows up to talk to me about Swabia,” Mike grumbled, “I think I understand what Shakespeare said better-that bit about dying a thousand deaths before you die. Not that I would want to call myself a coward, but when it comes to thinking about the geography down in the southwest, I flinch. Clearly, my hopes at the Congress of Copenhagen were premature. To say the least.”
“My darling,” Rebecca said. “I doubt that you will ever understand how things work in the southern portions of the Germanies. You would love to have one villain-Duke Maximilian. You could fight him. Perhaps, you could even endure his having a limited number of allies. You could fight them. But, truly, outside of Bavaria, which is fairly good sized, mostly in Swabia all you will find is that you are being bitten to death by little, almost invisible, ants.”
“Up-time, we said, ‘Nibbled to death by ducks.’ Or, sometimes, by fishes. ‘Better to be snapped up by a crocodile than nibbled to death by minnows.’ It depended on the context.”
“What do you think?” Hermann of Hesse-Rotenburg asked. The USE secretary of state fiddled with his pen. “Perhaps we can ask Basel to take this on.”
Frank Jackson shook his head. “Don’t listen to him, Mike. Diane is swamped with Swiss affairs, with Baden and its problems, and with the possibilities of what Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar might do next even though he doesn’t show any sign of doing it right now. Tony Adducci-young Tony-is a big help to her, but he’s just an assistant. Besides, she’s assigned him to the anti-plague preparation team. Anti-plague prevention team. The team that’s supposed to prepare to prevent the plague. Whatever the hell they’re calling it.”
Hermann fiddled some more. “Somebody needs to go to Tyrol, or else the regent needs to come to us. Face- to-face discussions. Radio is wonderful, but not for something this complex.”
“She’s been here before,” Nasi pointed out. “She flies on the Monster. But she says that she can’t, right now. Something has come up.”
“So pick someone. Send someone,” Mike said. “Have done with it.”
This time Hermann twirled his pen in a circle on his tablet. “Who?”
“Philipp Sattler,” Nasi said. “That’s one of the reasons Gustavus picked him as his personal liaison to the USE administration. He’s from Kempten, right down in the middle of that Swabian chaos.”
“If things come up that are higher than his pay grade?”
“It’s hard to get much higher than the emperor’s personal liaison, Hermann. Not unless you go yourself.”
The secretary of state gave one of his rare smiles. “I can always ask my brother Wilhelm if he’s willing for Amalie to undertake an occasional mission for the government. After all, it’s customary for women of high rank used as diplomatic negotiators. She and the regent might like one another.”
Chapter Four
Schwarzach, mid-February 1635
Schwarzach was in the Rhine river bottoms. The “hill” on which the ancient Romanesque cathedral stood might better have been described as a modest hump.
“Gee whiz,” Matt Trelli commented as he climbed out of the Monster after the more senior members of the delegation had already descended. “If they grew corn as high as an elephant’s eye around here, the top of the corn and the top of the hill would be just about even with each other.”
Marcie nodded. “It’s about as big a change from the Alps as we could have found.”
Kanoffski presented the members of Der Kloster to the regent.
De Melon presented the members of the Tyrolese delegation to the duke.
Dr. Bienner made a gracious speech and adumbrated the issues that were to be negotiated.
Bernhard’s chancellor, hauled up from his customary and ordinary duties in Besancon for the occasion, replied. Then he presented the representative from the USE embassy in Basel to the regent and the duke.
The senior delegates retired to their quarters in the episcopal residence to prepare for a diplomatic reception.
Even though Tony Adducci was five years younger than Matt, thus separated from him in the up-time by the
