Janie snorted. "If Rosemary's five years older than I am, then Amy's ten years younger. She doesn't have any excuse. It's a gumption issue with her, if you ask me. Pardon my French, since she's your mother and all."
"Herr Matewski, you do have it all?"
Joe Matewski looked up. "Yes, I have it all."
"The addresses of the professors in Padua, and the others who have been hearing the lectures of Professor Stone?"
"Yeah."
"The glassblowers whom we are recommending?"
"Yeah?"
"Our new addresses?"
"Yeah."
"Our letters to Dr. Sims and Dr. McDonnell."
"Yeah."
"I am most anxious to enter into correspondence with both of them."
"I'm sure."
"It is the gold that is important. Remember that. It is the gold. If indeed they can draw brass fine enough to make these hypodermic needles for drawing blood to make this 'serum-based antitoxin' and one of the main problems is that blood corrodes the needles so quickly, it is the gold that is important. They must coat these brass needles with gold."
"Yeah," Joe Matewski said. "I've got it. Really I do. I figure that this is really important to you. The medical types in Grantville and Jena will get the short version over the radio tonight and this"-he held up several hundred pages of closely written paper-"just as soon as I can get it there. A couple of weeks, at most."
Gatterer expressed profuse gratitude.
"I'll radio the short version to Venice for Stoner, too. Express-courier the second copy to him."
Gatterer grasped his head and kissed him on both cheeks.
Matewski thought that a friendly handshake would have been just plenty, but he managed to keep from backing off.
He didn't enjoy going to those Hearts and Minds lectures, but maybe they did some good, after all.
Bamberg, Franconia
October 1634
"What do you think, Vince?" Janie Kacere turned a couple of pieces of paper over and then turned them back again. "Were they a Trojan horse that we sent into Kronach? Successfully, I have to admit, the way Matt"-she waved toward him down at the end of the table-"pulled things off. Or…"
"… were they a Trojan horse that the Duchess Claudia de Medici planted on us?" Cliff Priest finished her sentence. "And if she did, why?"
Vince Marcantonio shook his head. "I don't know which one. Not yet. Maybe we won't know for years." He grinned suddenly. "But she's damned determined that they're going to see Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar next, whether they want to or not, so I've gotten the better of Guarinoni's complaints that their 'old bones' wouldn't stand a trip over to Swabia at his age."
"Vince." Stewart Hawker looked apprehensive. "What have you done? They are over sixty, after all. Guarinoni and Weinhart both. And Gatterer's no spring chicken, either. He got his M.D. more than thirty years ago. They were pretty wiped out when they came in from Innsbruck last March, even though the duchess paid for a carriage so they didn't have to ride out in the weather. The trip from here up to Kronach wasn't easy for them, either. And the summer didn't exactly count as a vacation, either."
"I asked him if he was open to new experiences. Of course he's so full of himself that he had to say 'yes.' And what with the fact that there's a landing field at Rheinfelden now…"
"You got hold of a plane?" Stew spilled his coffee on the flagstone floor.
"Yep. A Gustav is coming to drop a couple of high-ranking diplomats off in Bayreuth. The pilot will transport the good doctors and deposit them right on Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar's doorstep. Bernhard isn't going to let our medical people from Fulda into his territory, I don't think. We have to live with that. But he seems to be willing to take these men from the Duchess Claudia. Don't know why. Maybe parts of the Catholic and Austrian territories that he's scooped up aren't as docile as he had hoped."
"Nobody's ever as docile as a person hopes." Bennett Norris spoke in the world-weary voice of anyone who has ever parented a teenager. Vince ignored him. Bennett was starting to succumb to short-timer-itis. As soon as the national election was over and done with, in February, Ed Piazza was transferring him and Marian to Mainz.
"They're the best that this time and place has to offer, and they can take some of our tricks with them. Maybe they can contain the plague that's scheduled to sweep up through Swabia and Wuerttemberg into the USE in the next couple of years. Maybe Bernhard's just self-interested enough not to want half the population of his new sandbox dead. God, I hope so. And even if they can't pull it off…"
It didn't look like Vince was going to finish the sentence.
Janie looked up at the cherubs on the ceiling. "… there's always the possibility that we've sent a secret weapon."
"What?"
"Guarinoni may bore Duke Bernhard to death with extended lectures on a healthful lifestyle. Replete with mnemonic tricks and pompous admonitions."
Together, most of the SoTF administrative staff in Bamberg chanted, "Let's all be gesondt."
Bozen, Tirol
October 1634
"God rest his soul," Duchess Claudia said. She was referring to her late brother-in-law Ferdinand, the Holy Roman Emperor.
Dr. Bienner crossed himself.
"Ferdinand was never seriously interested in the Austrian holdings in Swabia."
Bienner nodded cautiously.
"Our nephew Ferdinand is not likely to make them his primary concern, either. He worries about Hungary. And the Turks."
"As well he should."
"The Austro-Hungarian Empire?"
"Premature, perhaps. But not unreasonable, given the situation in the Germanies."
"Which leaves Tyrol to worry about Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. If, of course, the Swede does not manage to smash him." The duchess-regent smashed her hand down on the table. "I like that English word. It has such a satisfying sound."
"General Horn is not given to smashing."
"So I have heard. Duke Bernhard accepted Our physicians?"
"And, apparently, their advice. There is the whole winter to prepare for what we may, according to the up-timers' encyclopedias, expect next spring. They will work with the up-time 'nurse.' "
"Perhaps our agents in the Vorarlberg should initiate diplomatic relations with him?"
Dr. Bienner stroked his beard without replying.
Duchess Claudia walked to the window. "We are well matched in age. I am only thirty and proven fertile."
Dr. Bienner nodded. Her first marriage, little over a year in duration, had produced a child who still lived. Female, unfortunately. The second, five children in eight years, four of them still alive and healthy and two of them boys. Claudia de Medici was a woman to gladden any ambitious dynast's heart.
While his mind wandered, she had continued talking. "Perhaps it was prescient that Leopold and I chose to name our first daughter Isabella Clara. Two years before this 'Ring of Fire.' If the king in the Low Countries and Maria Anna have a son right away, the age gap will not be too great. A boy is old enough to beget years before a woman has matured enough to give birth with maximum safety. And the symbolism should appeal to them."
Dr. Bienner nodded silently.
"Duke Bernhard is a heretic, but that is no insuperable obstacle. After all, the pope granted a dispensation for the French king's sister to marry that stupid Englishman. Lutherans are no more heretical than Anglicans."
She tapped her fingernails, one by one, on the window pane. "I am scarcely in Vienna's confidence, of course. But if it should happen that Our cousins are too preoccupied to think seriously about the, um, 'challenges and opportunities' presented by the situation in Vorderoesterreich and the Breisgau… ah, not to mention Alsace and the Franche Comte…"