Freinsheim inclined his head. "Thank you, Your Grace."
Basel
"The USE embassy is not really under siege," Diane Jackson said. "That is not the right way to say it. I told Frank so, this morning. Even though Swiger and Gordon act like we are under siege. We are just as comfortable as we were before the city council's 'honor guard' showed up. They let the grocer and the butcher deliver food every day." She nodded her head. "Sometimes they even let visitors come. If they have diplomatic credentials. Like you."
She nodded at Margrave Friedrich V of Baden-Durlach who was sitting at the foot of the table. There was a member of his staff at his right. The margrave had brought a copy of the note which the duke had sent in response to his suggestion for negotiations.
Diane read the note, listened to the margrave, and answered rather drily, "Duke Bernhard has a point. It is not normal for the man with the biggest army to go away because someone else tells him that he should play nice. Maybe he did not pay attention to his kindergarten teacher."
Margrave Friedrich looked at her, wholly baffled. Then at the others around the table. It made him rather uneasy that he was the only man present, other than his secretary and a young up-timer called Tony who was also taking notes, as well as sitting next to Frau Dreeson and whispering in her ear. A vague echo of the Scots pastor's pamphlet First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women drifted through his mind.
These four. Frau Simpson's presence, he could understand. Somewhat. The archduchess, perhaps, although she certainly had no official status among the up-timers, since much of the focus of the negotiations was upon her person. But Frau Dreeson? He had not brought along the wife of the mayor of Basel to the discussion.
Frau Admiral Simpson smiled kindly. "Diane is referring to an up-time book, Your Grace, about the importance of what children learn during their earliest years. Our schools for small children are called kindergartens, which is a German word, but which does not yet exist in
1634."
Margrave Friedrich nodded. Certainly, everyone realized the importance of molding a child. Even the Bible spoke of it. "Bring up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it."
"You think that Duke Bernhard was badly brought up?" he asked.
"I understand," Mary Simpson said, "that he was the youngest of a very large family of boys. He was really just a baby when his father died. Rulers or not, they did not have much money. I have spoken to Wilhelm Wettin, more than once. Duke Bernhard's allowance from the Saxe-Weimar lands, under their father's will, was much less than the annual salary of a colonel in one of the regiments that your father commands, Margrave Friedrich. Nor were the sons to have separate lands of their own. They were to govern Saxe-Weimar as a committee, so to speak, with Wilhelm, as the oldest survivor, serving as CEO-chief executive officer, that-or chairman of the board. I am not sure if there is a down-time word quite equivalent."
"And why," Margrave Friedrich asked, "do you see that this has caused Duke Bernhard to betray first one Kriegsherr and now another? 'War lord?' Would that be the correct word?"
"Literally, yes," Mary answered. "But 'war lord' has different connotations for us. It sounds more, well, feudal. Old fashioned. Obsolete. Or third-world, such as the conflicts in Somalia. A Kriegsherr is really something more straightforward. A ruler who employs a military contractor. Your problem with the ethics of Duke Bernhard is that he does not fulfill his contracts. Not that he violates some kind of mystical oath of fealty."
"He has broken oaths," Margrave Friedrich said rather stiffly.
"That is true," Mary answered. "But what we are talking about this morning, I think, is not that he has broken oaths, but why he has done it. He challenged you to understand why, didn't he? If I understand this letter correctly?"
"At first, when he pulled back from Mainz," Margrave Friedrich said, "my father's assumption was that it was part of a wider movement of French troops, no matter now improbable that might have seemed after the crushing defeat that Torstensson inflicted upon them outside of Luebeck. My father predicted that some other regiments would move into the Mainz front through Lorraine. He expected that Bernhard would make a major movement against General Horn here in Swabia; perhaps that he would probe through Wurttemberg against the USE frontier, possibly against Thuringia-Franconia itself at its most vulnerable point."
Veronica Dreeson spoke up for the first time. "That was what Henry thought, too, and the other men in Grantville. They sent everyone they could spare down to that point earlier this summer. They even called up a lot of the reservists like Jack Whitney and sent them down to Horn."
The young man, Tony, next to her, put her words into spoken French at the same time he was noting them down in the minutes.
Margrave Friedrich felt obscurely comforted. Though why it should be comforting to hear that the opinions of an experienced military leader and diplomat such as his father were shared by the mayor of a small city was not clear to him.
"But Bernhard did not attack the State of Thuringia-Franconia," Maria Anna pointed out. "He sent most of his troops back into Alsace and into the Franche-Comte -except for the ones here, under his personal command. Now he has moved into the Breisgau and the rest of the Austrian lands in southern Swabia. He has not, in truth, moved against General Horn this summer. If they meet on the battlefield this season, it will be because Horn seeks him out."
"There was another book, up-time," Mary Simpson said. "I am not sure whether Grantville has a copy any more. I had one, but it was left in Pittsburgh, of course. I can check with the library after I get home, if anyone is interested. It was written by an Englishwoman. The title was A Room of One's Own, or something similar. Margrave Friedrich, I think that you might, possibly, ask Duke Bernhard if he intends to obtain a room of his own. I am sure that he would prefer not to hear the option presented in those exact words, of course. It might be more prudent to ask him if all his moves have been calculated to bring him an independent principality of his own."
Freinsheim looked up, startled.
"Perhaps," she continued, "since he was always the 'baby brother' in his own family, a principality larger than any lands that the older Saxe-Weimar sons have any reasonable prospect of ruling."
Diane Jackson reached behind her. "Lee Swiger drew me a map," she said. "It is not big enough, but this is the biggest piece of paper that the printer had. This is three of the biggest pieces of paper the printer had. No tape here, down-time, but I put flour paste from the kitchen on strips of paper and glued them together from behind." She rolled it out on the table.
"We are here, in Basel. This is the Rhine River. Here are Becky and Gretchen, in Amsterdam, at the other end. This, on this side, this is what was last year. This, on the other side, this is what is now."
Maria Anna understood the implications of the two drawings first. She stood up, pointing with her finger. "Duke Bernhard has occupied a lot of territory on the Upper Rhine. It's almost as large as the Swiss Confederacy itself, without conflicting in any way with the Confederacy's cantons. It draws almost equally from what were French lands and what were the lands of the Holy Roman Empire. That is important, yes. A new principality within the empire. Mary's 'room of one's own'. But also…" She pointed. "Along here. Your cartographer has not drawn it, Diane, but along here is crucial. If he holds this, he will have broken the Spanish Road from Italy to the Netherlands. That means…"