Gretchen looked back at Gustav Adolf. “I see. And what would you want from me in exchange? By ‘me,’ of course, we’re referring to the Committees of Correspondence.”
“Actually, no—or at least, not entirely.” The emperor leaned forward and fixed her with an intent gaze. “Much of this is specific to you. What I want in exchange—will insist upon, in fact—is that you must agree to run for election as the governor of Saxony.”
Of all the things Gretchen had foreseen as possibilities, that one had never occurred to her even once.
“Me? Governor?” She almost gasped the words. “But—whatever for?”
Gustav Adolf nodded at Ernst Wettin. “I will let him explain. Since it was his proposal to begin with.” He grinned and barked out a laugh. “Ha! And be sure I was just as astonished then as you are now. What a mad idea!”
He leaned back in his chair, still chuckling. “But… one with great merit, once he explained.”
Gretchen looked back at Wettin.
“It’s quite simple, really. I’ve spent months with you in Saxony now. Me as the official administrator of the province—and you as the person who really wields the power.” Wettin shook his head. “The arrangement is simply untenable, Gretchen. It must be settled—whichever way. The formal power must coincide with the real power, or government itself becomes impossible. Certainly in the long run.”
“But… but… I have been assuming all along, Ernst, that if Saxony became a republic that you yourself would run for governor.”
Ernst nodded. “And so I will. I would say ‘with the emperor’s permission’ but he’s already given it to me.”
“More precisely, I insisted on it.” Gustav Adolf pointed at Wettin with a large forefinger. “Make no mistake about it. Ernst Wettin has my confidence and I will certainly be urging all Saxons to vote for him instead of you.”
He grinned again. “Ernst tells me, though—I find this quite shocking!—that the pigheaded and surly Saxons are likely to ignore me and vote for you instead. If you run, that is.”
“And if you don’t,” said Wettin, now leaning forward himself, “here is what will happen. The Fourth of July Party will certainly run a candidate, but they won’t garner more votes than I will. They don’t have much of an organization in Saxony, as you know. I estimate we would each wind up with about thirty percent of the vote. The rest…”
He shrugged. “The Vogtlanders will probably pick up fifteen percent or so. The reactionaries—assuming they manage to form a common front—could pick up perhaps ten percent. If they run as squabbling individuals, which is more likely, they’d wind up with less.”
Gretchen’s Latin might be wretched but her arithmetic was excellent. She’d had no trouble following the calculations. “That leaves fifteen to twenty percent.”
“The church, I think. In one form or another.”
She followed that logic also. Saxony had a solidly Lutheran population and the clergy commanded a great deal of respect. Everyone who was uncertain would tend to listen to their pastors—would seek them out for advice, in fact.
“A mess, in other words,” Wettin concluded. “No one would have a majority. I’d probably have a plurality, so if we adopted an American-style governor structure—what they call the presidential system—I’d become the new executive outright. If we adopted the more common German system wherein a republican province’s executive is not separate from the legislature—the parliamentary system, in the up-time lexicon—then I’d have to negotiate with others to form a cabinet.”
He threw up his hands. “And wouldn’t that be a delight! Assuming the Fourth of July Party is the opposition and the Vogtlanders bloc with them—which they generally would—I’d have to form a coalition with pastors and reactionaries. The first of whom tend to be impractical when it comes to world affairs and the others…”
He smiled now, albeit thinly. “There’s an American quip I’m fond of—which they stole from a Frenchman, I think. ‘They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.’ That summarizes perfectly, I think, the state of mind of the nation’s reactionaries. What would really happen, of course, is that effective power would continue to be in your hands. It’s just not workable, Gretchen. Either I rule or you rule—one or the other. Straightforward and visible to all.”
Gretchen had already seen the flaw in the logic. “Then why not simply ask—insist, if you will—that I leave Saxony altogether?”
She looked away from Wettin to Gustav Adolf. “There’d be a great deal of unrest if you did, but it wouldn’t rise to the level of violence. Not unless I called for it, and I’m not that stupid. That would be—”
She managed to cut herself off before saying: would be playing into your hands.
The emperor nodded, as if with satisfaction. “It’s nice to be negotiating with someone who’s not a fool. You’re right, of course. You could rouse the people to rebellion against a brute like Báner, who was threatening a massacre. But against Ernst? Or even worse, against me? When all we asked was for one person to please leave the province?”
But she’d already left all that behind because she’d finally realized the true nature of the proposal.
She was quite startled. She wouldn’t have thought that an emperor—first among nobles—would be that shrewd and astute.
He probably wouldn’t have come up with the idea on his own, of course. But he’d been shrewd enough and astute enough to be persuaded by Ernst Wettin.
“You don’t want me to leave Saxony,” she said. “You want me to stay.”
She gave Wettin a look that was almost accusatory. “Because you think I’d win the election.”
“In a landslide, if we have a presidential system.” Wettin shrugged. “More complicated, with a parliamentary one, since you’d have to run officially as a member of a party rather than as an individual. But that would just add a minor curlicue. The Fourth of July people would be delighted to have you take up their banner. But if you chose to you could simply run as the candidate of the Gretchen Richter Party.”
She looked back at the emperor. And, for the first time in her life, had a sense of what a wild lion or tiger felt when they confronted a tamer.
Gustav Adolf apparently sensed her thoughts because his expression became quite sympathetic. “Don’t think of it as being housebroken, Frau Richter—or may I call you Gretchen, in private?”
Mutely, she nodded.
“This is something that Michael Stearns has always understood, you know. Eventually, a revolutionary must either”—he looked at Wettin—“what’s that crude but charming expression he likes?”
“Shit or get off the pot.”
“Yes, that one.” He turned back to Gretchen. “Once you become powerful enough—which you are, today, certainly in Saxony—then you must decide. Either try to overthrow the existing power or claim it for your own. But what you cannot do—not for long—is try to straddle those two options.”
“You want me to become respectable.” The word came out like an accusation.
She could see that Gustav Adolf was doing his best to suppress another grin. “Ah… Gretchen. I am told there exists a painting of you done by no less an artist than Rubens that hangs in the royal palace in Brussels. Apparently the King in the Netherlands, as he likes to style himself, thinks it makes a useful cautionary reminder.”
She sniffed. “Yes, I’ve heard about that.”
“And in that painting—”
“My tits are bare. Yes, I know. I remember quite well. It was a cold day and I maintained that pose for hours. What is your point?” A bit belatedly, she remembered to add: “Your Majesty.”
“My point is that I think no matter how long you live you will never have to fear the horrid fate of slumping into dull and undistinguished respectability.”
“I will need to think about this,” she said.
The emperor nodded. “Yes, of course.”
“And I will need to discuss it with other members of the Committees of Co
rrespondence here in Magdeburg. That will include, you understand, Spartacus and Gunther Achterhof.”
“Yes, of course. May I also suggest you discuss it with Rebecca Abrabanel. And Herr Piazza also, if you choose. He’s resident here.”
“Yes, of course,” she said.
The emperor rose. “That’s it, then. When may I expect an answer, Gretchen?”
She came to her feet as well. “Soon.”
He smiled. “Just as I thought.”
Chapter 9
The Scots cavalryman came racing toward Jeff Higgins at a speed which he considered utterly reckless given that the horseman was galloping across an open field rather than a well-groomed racetrack. He’d ascribe the man’s deranged behavior to his Celtic genes; these were the same people, after all, who saw no problem in walking through wild vegetation in kilts and thought bagpipes were an instrument of musical entertainment. But Jeff had seen plenty of German, Spanish and French cavalrymen do the same thing—and Polish hussars would do it wearing heavy armor, which made them certifiably insane.
The Scotsman arrived at Jeff’s side, pulled up his horse, pointed in the direction from which he’d come and said something which Jeff interpreted—more or less—as: “The bastards are over there! Bavarian cavalry! A mile away!” Linguists would probably insist that the man was speaking a dialect of English, whereas Jeff considered it the equivalent of a foreign tongue altogether. By now, though, he’d had enough experience with Mackay’s troops to be able to make some sense out of it.
“Which way are they headed?” he asked.
The Highlander understood real English much better than Jeff understood his language—his “dialect,” rather. He rattled off something in reply which Jeff interpreted as the cowardly bastards are running away from us.
Translating that derisive remark into coherent military tactics meant that the enemy scouts were probably doing what they were supposed to do once they made contact with the enemy, which was to report back to their commanders. Just as this Highlander had done himself, no doubt ordered to do so by Alex Mackay.
Jeff turned toward one of the two men riding just behind him who served as his couriers. The man was close enough to have heard the Scotsman’s words himself, but Jeff wasn’t sure how well he’d have understood them. “Report to General Stearns that Colonel Mackay has encountered Bavarian cavalry. They’re apparently engaged in reconnaissance since they retreated as soon as contact was made.”
The man raced off—galloping his horse just about as recklessly as the Scotsman had done. And yet he seemed to all appearances to be a sober and level-headed Westphalian. Jeff sometimes wondered if there was an unknown characteristic of horses—a parasite, perhaps, or maybe a virus—that infected people who spent too much time in close proximity and caused them to lose their minds. He determined—again—to spend as little time on horseback as he could manage.
In a civilized historical period, he’d have been able to send a report to his commanding general using a radio while seated in a natural form of transport like a Humvee—hell, he’d settle for a World War II era Jeep, for that matter. In this day and age, though, officers were expected to ride horses. And while the army did have radios at its disposal, there still weren’t enough yet—or enough qualified radio operators, which was often more of a problem—to make them a widespread form of communication. Jeff’s Hangman regiment did have its own radio operators, as did every regiment and artillery battery. Unfortunately, the operator Jeff regularly used, Jimmy Andersen, was somewhere a few hundred yards back—where he’d been ordered to stay so as not to risk the regiment’s one and only headquarters radio. Jeff would have had to send a courier to the radio operator in order to relay the message, and if the courier had any trouble finding Jimmy—which he almost certainly would since an army of more than ten thousand men on a march through a seventeenth century countryside on seventeenth century so-called “roads” was anything but neat and orderly—it would take the message longer to get to General Stearns than just having the courier do the whole thing himself.
Such were the realities of “combined technology” as the basis for military operations. Sometimes it worked. More often than not, it was a muddle. Sometimes, a sorry joke.
As he did whenever he found himself sliding into what he called early modern angst, Jeff pulled himself out with a memory of Gretchen. In this instance—o happy remembrance—with an image of the way she’d looked the morning after they re-encountered each other when the Third Division relieved the siege of Dresden. She was smiling up at him while lying in their bed wearing absolutely nothing, which—o happy coincidence—was exactly the costume he’d been wearing himself at the time.
They’d been a little reckless the night before. Gretchen was normally as disciplined as a Prussian martinet when it came to maintaining the rhythm method of so-called birth control. But… It wasn’t every day, after all, that husband and wife were reunited right after escaping death and destruction, which they’d both faced the day before.
Another memory came to him now, of the way Gretchen had looked just a few weeks ago on the morning he’d left with the Third Division to march to Regensburg. Looking at him—fully clothed, this time—with a smile on her face that was perhaps a tad rueful but mostly just what Jeff thought of as Gretchen Richter taking life as it comes.
“I think I’m pregnant again,” she’d said. “Won’t be sure for a while, but I think so.”
By now, she’d probably know one way or the other. But how she’d get the word to him while he was on campaign was uncertain.
Jeff could remember a time—though it was a bit vaguely, now, because it was back up-time—when the possibility that a wife might have another child would be a source of either great joy and anticipation or anxiety and doubt. Leaving aside the pack of children whom Gretchen had adopted, she and Jeff already had two kids of their own. Jeff wasn’t the natural father of the older boy, Wilhelm. But he’d been an infant, less than a year old, when Jeff and Gretchen had gotten married so the issue was irrelevant. Jeff was the only father Willi had ever known.
But in this as in so many ways, the attitude of people born and raised in the seventeenth century was rather different. In an era of haphazard birth control methods and high infant mortality, people had a much more pragmatic attitude toward bearing and raising children. It could sometimes seem downright cold-blooded to up-timers.
Down-timers were less reliant on the nuclear family than up-timers were accustomed to. It was taken for granted that children would spend much of their time growing up with other relatives and even, for well-to-do people, with nursemaids, governesses and tutors. In some of the more extreme cases, parents might see very little of a child of theirs from the time it was weaned until it finished his or her education.
Jeff and Gretchen had done the same thing—which Jeff, at least, often felt guilty about. Gretchen… not so much, possibly because her bona fides as a surrogate mother were so well established.
For the whole year they’d been out of the country before and during the Baltic War, their children had been taken care of by Gretchen’s grandmother Veronica. Then, after they got back and Veronica made it crystal clear that she was done with babysitting, they still had plenty of caregivers in the big apartment complex they moved into in Magdeburg.
The children were left entirely in the hands of caregivers after Jeff went off to war and Gretchen moved to Dresden. It hadn’t been until the crisis was over—not more than two months ago—that she’d gone back to Magdeburg to fetch their two boys and bring them back to stay with her. The adopted children had remained behind, since they were much older and all of them by now had settled into work or education situations they didn’t want to change. The only one of the original group who would have been young enough to come with her, little Johann, had been joyously reclaimed by his natural family a couple of years earlier.
From here on in, hopefully, things would settle down. Jeff and Gretchen had discussed the matter—along
with a number of CoC leaders—and everyone had agreed that Gretchen would stay in Dresden rather than moving back to Magdeburg. Willi and Joe would now be raised mostly by their mother, with their father helping out whenever he wasn’t on active duty.
And now, it seemed, another child might be added to the mix. Gretchen’s reaction to the news hadn’t been quite a relaxed shrug, but pretty close. Jeff was doing his best to take his cue from her. And... having only middling success. There was a part of his brain—he thought of it as the part labeled “raised on too many up-time anxieties and touchie-feelie TV talk shows”—that kept shrilling at him: Bad parent! Bad parent! Your children will grow up to be drug addicts, derelicts, serial murderers and hedge fund managers!
To Jeff’s surprise, the same courier he’d sent out now came racing back. More time must have passed than he’d realized, while he was musing on things gone by and things still to come. Looking around, he saw that the regiment had indeed made a fair amount of forward progress. It was easy to lose track of exactly how far you’d gotten when you were in the middle of an army on the march.
“The general says we will continue toward Ingolstadt,” said the courier.
That was the answer Jeff had expected. There’d been a meeting of the Third Division’s staff and regimental commanders before the march began, where Stearns had explained that he intended to threaten to close on Ingolstadt from the east along the south bank of the Danube, while General Heinrich Schmidt and the SoTF’s National Guard closed in from the north. Hopefully, the maneuver would force the Bavarians to abandon the city rather than run the risk of being encircled and trapped in a siege. Both Stearns and Schmidt thought there was a good chance of success, since Duke Maximilian had to be mostly concerned now with holding Munich.
The courier reached into his coat and pulled out a letter. It was just a small sheet of paper folded twice and sealed with a blob of wax. General Stearns must have received the letter and given to the courier to bring to Jeff.