1633

Chapter 18

The English Channel was brisker than usual, even for September. Despite the bright sunlight, the temperature hovered around no more than fifty degrees, and the wind blowing out of the northeast had teeth to it. It put a lively chop on the Channel's blue water and whined in the rigging, and Maarten Harpentzoon van Tromp, lieutenant-admiral of Holland, drew its freshness deep into his lungs as he stood on the quarterdeck of his flagship and gazed astern at the other ships of his fleet.

"They make a goodly sight," the man standing beside him said, and Tromp glanced at him. At thirty-four, Vice-Admiral Cornelisz Witte de With was two years younger than Tromp, which made both of them very young indeed for the posts they held. But there seemed to be a lot of that going around lately, Tromp told himself with a small, crooked smile.

"That they do," he agreed, turning his eyes back to the weather-stained canvas of the ships forging along in Amelia's wake. Their formation keeping was indifferent, to say the very least. But that was typical of a Dutch fleet, and even from here he could almost taste the confidence, born of forty years of victory at sea, which filled their crews. "I'd like it better if more of them were regular Navy ships," he added after a moment, and de With chuckled.

"Wouldn't any of us?" he responded. "But the States General is doing well to keep forty ships in commission. There's not much left, even with the French subsidy, after they pay for the Army and the border fortresses' upkeep. And it isn't as if we're not used to it!"

"No. No, it isn't." Tromp shook his head and thought about the purloined pages he'd been shown by Constantjin Huygens, Prince Frederik Hendrik's secretary. They'd been frustratingly vague, not to mention fragmentary and incomplete, but they'd also been fascinating, especially with their hints of how countries of the future would maintain their fleets. Still, he wasn't sure he approved of the notion of a nation which maintained hundreds of state-owned naval vessels. The expense must be staggering, if nothing else. Besides, the long-standing practice of hiring and impressing armed merchant ships in time of war favored a nation like the United Provinces. The Dutch bred the finest seamen in the world, which turned the Republic's enormous merchant marine into one vast naval reserve. His present command boasted only twenty-seven regular warships, but they were supported by eleven more vessels of the East India Company's fleet and another thirty-six well-armed, well-found merchantmen.

Most of them were smaller than his own Amelia's fifty-six guns, and all of them were built for the shallow waters of the North Sea and the Baltic. Other countries-like Spain-might build larger, more heavily armed ships. There were rumors that Charles Stuart had recently decided to lay down a ship which would mount over a hundred guns, although the current restiveness in England might disorder his plans. But no one built handier ones than the Dutch. Or put finer crews aboard them. And the Dutch Navy had the first officer corps of professional seamen in European history, as well.

Seventy-four ships. Cornelisz was right; they did make a goodly sight, and he allowed himself a moment of unalloyed pleasure as he surveyed it. But the moment was brief, and he turned back to de With with a frown.

"Tell me honestly, Cornelisz," he said, his voice half-buried in the sound of wind and wave. "What do you think?"

"About what?" The taller de With looked down his proud prow of a nose with an expression of artful innocence, and Tromp grimaced.

"You know perfectly well what," he growled, and waved a hand at the ships trailing along behind Amelia, including de With's own flagship, the Brederode. "This-all of this. You and I, Richelieu and Oquendo. And these 'Americans'!"

"I think we live in wondrous times," de With replied after a moment. "Beyond that, I don't begin to understand… and God hasn't gotten around to explaining it to me yet."

Tromp barked a laugh and reached out to slap de With on the biceps.

"Perhaps He's decided explaining doesn't do much good, given the way the lot of us have been squabbling over the things He specifically told us about in Holy Scripture," he suggested. "Maybe He thinks he can distract us from killing one another in His name if He gives us something so obscure we spend all our time puzzling about it instead of fighting about doctrine!"

De With considered the proposition, then shook his head.

"You could be right. And if that's what He's thinking, I suppose we have no choice but to accept it. For myself, I could wish He'd chosen to be just a bit less mysterious. Or confusing, at any rate."

"I can't argue with you there," Tromp murmured, and scratched the tip of his own equally proud but sharper nose while he frowned pensively. "Still, I suppose He expects us to do the best we can. So tell me what you think about the 'Americans.' "

"I think they're dangerous," de With said quietly, and there was no more humor in his voice. "I think they're probably the most dangerous thing to be introduced into the world since Jan Huss first twisted the pope's nose. The only thing I haven't been able to decide is who they're most dangerous to."

"You don't think the fact that they're a republic makes them our natural allies?" Tromp asked, and de With snorted.

"I don't believe in 'natural allies,' " he said. "If there were any such thing, Catholic France wouldn't have to bribe Protestant England into siding with us against Catholic Spain!"

"And Protestant Holland wouldn't be worried over the threat posed by its 'natural ally' Protestant Sweden, either," Tromp agreed. "Even so, wouldn't you say two republics have a certain… commonality of interest with one another? Especially when they're both surrounded by monarchies?"

"Not when the other one seems to be a true republic," de With said bluntly. Tromp looked around quickly, but no one else was in earshot, and de With smiled thinly at him. "From all I've been able to discover-which isn't much, granted-these 'Americans' seem to have very little use for jonkers. Or for princes. And this 'Congress' of theirs seems to be far more accountable to their citizens. Not to mention their bizarre notion of a 'universal franchise' and enough religious toleration to make a Remonstrant dizzy!" He shook his head. "I have a feeling our own government would find notions like that far more threatening than any monarchy."

"That sort of blunt spokenness can be risky," Tromp cautioned.

"Of course it can. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong, does it?" de With chuckled harshly. "Or was there another reason you were about to resign before they offered you this command?"

Tromp grimaced, but he didn't disagree. He couldn't. He and De With had known one another too long, and de With knew all about his own long-standing feud with Filips van Dorp.

Dorp was an imbecile. He was also more venal than most, and inept to the point of total ineffectualness. He'd demonstrated that convincingly enough to be dismissed from his post as lieutenant-admiral of Zeeland, but he was also the son of jonker Frederik van Dorp, one of the Sea-Beggar captains who'd won his own barony serving William the Silent. Which meant that even though Zeeland had gotten rid of Filips, the States of Holland had seen fit to make him Holland's lieutenant-admiral. It was a decision which had inevitably brought him and Tromp into bitter conflict. The Navy was too important to allow an idiot to ruin it through mismanagement, and the man's total inability to deal with the Dunkirker privateers only underscored his basic incompetence. Unfortunately, the States-and Prince Frederik Hendrik-had believed a nobleman would somehow exercise more natural authority than a man of humbler origins… like Maarten Tromp.

To be honest, things had always been that way. Personal alliances and patronage were the way of the world everywhere, Tromp supposed. Even in the Dutch republic, those noble families known collectively as the ridderschap dominated the top military and naval posts. And the situation had become even worse in the fifteen years since Prince Mauritz organized the downfall of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt to break the primacy of the States of Holland and reassert the House of Orange's control of the Republic.

"I still hadn't actually made up my mind to resign," he said after a moment, and de With snorted in splendid derision. "All right-all right!" Tromp admitted. "I was going to. There. Are you satisfied?"

"That you didn't? Of course I am. But, you know, it's all the Americans' fault that you changed your mind. Or, rather, that the stadtholder changed his mind about Dorp."

"It wasn't just the Americans," Tromp said a bit somberly. "Richelieu had a little something to do with it, too."

"I know. And that does tend to make one wonder where the advantage lies for him in getting rid of Dorp, doesn't it?"

Tromp made a wordless sound of agreement and folded his hands behind himself. He rocked up and down on the balls of his feet, eyes distant as he gazed once again-this time unseeingly-at the sails of his fleet. The fact that Richelieu had intervened so directly was, as Cornelisz had just intimated, enough to make anyone nervous. The only thing more certain about Richelieu than his brilliance was his deviousness. He always had at least three different motives for anything he did, and Tromp was far from happy knowing that it was he who had delivered the pages, stolen from one of the Americans' history books, that had prompted Frederik Hendrik to summarily demand Dorp's dismissal and Tromp's own appointment in his place.

The mere fact that those pages had described a "history" which hadn't happened yet-and which never would, now-was enough to make any good Calvinist uneasy. In his own thinking, Tromp was much closer to Arminianism's toleration of individual conscience than he ever allowed most people to realize. He found Simon Episcopius' argument that different perspectives on Scripture could only enhance the fullness and richness of Man's understanding of the Almighty convincing. Just as, privately, he thought the unyielding insistence on the doctrine of predestination of the strict Calvinists seemed to devalue and deny human freedom of will. But despite any secret religious liberalness he might entertain, this tinkering with the life he'd been "destined" to live before the Americans arrived to turn the entire world topsy-turvy still smacked of the supernatural… or something worse.

Yet what worried him more at the moment than theological questions was the fact that the American embassy to Amsterdam and the one from Richelieu carried such different warnings. Left to his own devices, his natural instinct would have been to pay close heed to anyone who disagreed with Richelieu. Unfortunately, he knew enough of this so-called "United States' " situation to recognize its desperation. Powerful as the protection of a king like Gustavus Adolphus might be, the new republic was surrounded by implacable, unyielding enemies. The threats it faced were at least as great as those the United Provinces had faced in their long war with Spain, but without the natural frontiers which had been Holland's salvation. For all of the reputed wonders of their craftsmen, all the deadliness of their weapons and their other marvelous devices, the odds against the Americans' survival were high, even with Gustavus' protection.

Under those circumstances, anything they said must be considered as carefully as if it had come from Richelieu himself. Tromp had never personally met any of the Americans, but he'd spoken to those who had, and even the most jaded of them had spoken glowingly of the beauty and brilliance of the Jewess who represented them. Even the most intolerant of Counter-Remonstrants had been impressed by her, although, of course, as a Jew, anything she said was automatically suspect in their eyes.

Tromp himself was unconcerned by her origins or religious beliefs, but his awareness of how the multitude of threats her new country faced must shape her message was something else. And yet…

He shook his head impatiently. If only they had more information! The pages Richelieu had sent with his ambassador offered a frustratingly incomplete glimpse of the future which would have been. The paper on which they were printed, and the printing itself, not to mention the breathtakingly lifelike illustrations, had been proof enough of their authenticity. No printer of this time and place could possibly have produced them, or the strange English in which they were written. No doubt that was the exact reason Richelieu had sent them rather than a transcript. But there were less than a dozen sheets of paper, which seemed all too frail a basis upon which to decide the course of a nation's foreign policy, even if they had come from three and a half centuries in the future.

"It wasn't just the Americans' 'history,' you know," he muttered to de With. "Oh-" he looked up at the taller man "-that was what caused the stadtholder and the States General to sack Dorp and give me the command. And I'm none too happy, just between us, to know I've been given my job on the basis of how well I would have performed in battles that will never be fought now! But the decision to accept Richelieu's new anti-Habsburg alliance wasn't made solely on that basis."

"Of course it wasn't," de With acknowledged. "But I can't quite free myself of the suspicion that the pages he chose to send us served his purposes damnably well."

"Oh, come now, Cornelisz!" Tromp chuckled. "It would be expecting a bit much of any man-much less Richelieu-for him to have sent us anything that wouldn't have served his purposes!"

"I know. I know. I'm just… uneasy. Especially with the Americans, who obviously had the entire book he sent us pages from, telling us not to trust him."

"We hardly needed them to warn us about that," Tromp said dryly. "And according to Frederik Hendrik, nothing in the books they showed his representatives disagreed with the pages Richelieu had sent."

"The prince saw their complete history books?" De With's bold eyebrows rose in surprise.

"Not their 'complete' history. From all accounts, they could fill a couple of galleons with their books, without half trying. But they did allow us to examine a short history of the Republic." De With was staring at him, and Tromp shrugged irritably. "I don't know what it said. No one told me. And, frankly, I'd sooner not know. But the key point is that nothing in it contradicted the information from Richelieu."

"Did they realize we had anything to check it against, I wonder?" de With murmured thoughtfully, and Tromp shrugged again.

"I can assure you that we didn't tell them," he said even more dryly. "On the other hand, I'd be very surprised if they were such fools as not to suspect the possibility, at least."

"So both sides are busy giving us glimpses of the future-or, at least, a future-to convince us that they're right." De With laughed with very little humor. "Life was so much simpler when no one was trying to be quite so helpful to us!"

"I know what you mean." Tromp bounced on his toes a few more times, then shook his head. "Only a fool would believe that Richelieu would help anyone simply out of the kindness of his heart. In some ways, I actually prefer someone who thinks like that. At least we know he'll do whatever he decides is in his own best interests. And he was clever enough to make that very point to us, you know."

"He was?"

"Oh, he most certainly was!" Tromp chuckled. "And he pointed out that the Americans will do the same-that they have no choice but to do the same, any more than our own Republic, if they intend to survive."

"Are you in favor of their surviving?" de With asked quietly.

"I don't know," Tromp admitted, and pursed his lips thoughtfully. "There's much about them which I find admirable, even on the basis of the limited information I've been given. But Richelieu is right. Terrible as the war in Germany has already been, or as our own wars with Spain have been, the conflict this new United States will provoke will dwarf all of them. Unless it's crushed immediately, of course, and somehow I don't think that will be as easy as its enemies believe."

"Do they really believe that? Or is it simply that they need to believe it?" De With's expression was troubled. "If the reports about what the Americans managed to do at the Wartburg and the Alte Veste are accurate, then coupled with Gustavus' Swedes…"

His voice trailed off, and Tromp frowned.

"From all reports, the Habsburgs-both branches of them-are terrified of exactly that combination. But I think Richelieu's estimate is probably more accurate."

"Richelieu's?"

"Oh, he hasn't shared it with us in so many words," Tromp admitted. "But if he weren't convinced that the Americans can be dealt with, then I feel certain he'd be looking for some way to enmesh them in his coils, not urging us to reflect upon the danger they represent to us. He sees them as a threat, yes. As a very serious threat, in fact. But if he thought they were impossible to defeat, he would be seeking some sort of accommodation with them rather than looking to conclude alliances against them."

"So he is shoring up his defenses against them? And, of course, urging us to follow his example?"

"He is. And I wish I knew whether or not we should take his advice. One thing I'm certain of, though; the Swedes and the Americans won't go easily. What's already happened in Germany is nothing compared to what it will cost the emperor yet to crush this threat. And a war on that scale has a nasty habit of spilling over onto other people's territory. That's where the real danger to us lies, I think. We're not that far from Thuringia and Franconia, Cornelisz, and in the end, it's not just the Habsburgs who will be lining up to crush the Americans. Denmark, Spain, the Empire, even France. I won't be surprised to see the Poles and Russians getting involved! None of their 'neighbors' can stand the threat of all of their knowledge and marvels in the service of a new Swedish empire. And if they're truly as serious as they seem to be about building their style of republic, then they're a greater danger to Europe as a whole than even a Sweden which entirely dominates the Baltic and Northern Germany.

"So, much as I may distrust Richelieu, I understand his logic. Best to go ahead and deal with the Spanish branch of the Habsburgs while we can. Remove at least one threat and protect our backs before we find ourselves forced to deal with the multitude of new threats these Americans and their 'Ring of Fire' are going to bring to us all. Besides-" he shrugged with a chuckle, "-according to the history books, you and I 'already' smashed Oquendo's fleet at The Downs in 1639. As a matter of fact, Richelieu seems quite put out with Philip IV for moving early this way. I don't know if Olivares' spies have been as good as Richelieu's, but it seems apparent that something's gotten Philip moving faster than he did in the future the Americans came from. From what Huygens told me, it sounds as if Richelieu tried approaching the Spaniards with the notion of an anti-American alliance only to discover that Philip prefers to seek a military victory and impose terms on both us and the French in order to free his own hands to deal with the Americans directly.

"So all we're really doing is moving The Downs up by five or six years. And at least this time, as you say, Richelieu has managed to bribe the English into being on our side instead of standing to one side and cheering for the papists!"

"Which papists?" de With asked. "Our noble French papist allies? Or our mortal enemies, the servants of Satan Spanish papists?"

"I think we'd best settle for dealing with one set of enemies at a time," Tromp told him. "And-"

De With never learned what Tromp had been about to say, for a lookout's shout interrupted the lieutenant-admiral. Both men looked up, listening to the report, and then, as one, stepped to the rail and peered to the west. Landsmen's eyes might have mistaken the slivers of white on the horizon for more of the Channel's whitecaps, but Tromp and de With had spent too many years at sea to make that mistake.

"And so it begins," de With said, so softly Tromp felt certain he was speaking to himself.

"So it does," he responded anyway. "And whatever else, I'm glad to see them."

"True enough," de With agreed.

The combined French and English squadrons numbered little more than half as many ships as the Dutch fleet by itself, but if their spies' reports were as accurate as usual, Oquendo was headed to meet them with over a hundred Spanish and Portuguese vessels. It was a smaller fleet than the one Medina Sidonia had led against England half a century before, but not by very much… and Oquendo was no Medina Sidonia. He'd demonstrated that in 1621, at the end of the Twelve Years Truce with Holland, when he broke the Dutch blockade of the Channel ports. Even with the assistance of his allies, Tromp's combined force would have only the thinnest margin of superiority, and many of the Spanish vessels were larger and better armed than anything in his own fleet.

"I only hope they can carry their own weight when it comes down to the melee," de With murmured, still gazing at their allies' topsails.

"Well, I suppose we'll find out soon enough," Tromp replied. "One way or the other."

Chapter 19

In very many ways, the officers gathered in Santiago's great cabin were completely typical of their class. Hidalgos, one and all, with fiercely trimmed mustachios and beards, strong Spanish noses, and rich clothing, bright with embroidery and gems. They stood with that complete and total confidence, that arrogance, handed down from the conquistadors who had conquered empires and squeezed the gold of Mexico and the Andes into the coffers of Spain like Incan tears. They carried the legacy of Don John, the victor of Lepanto, of Gonzalvo de Cordoba, father of the invincible tercios, and of Cortes, the conqueror of Montezuma and Cuauhtemoc. Any trifling defeats they might have suffered along the way, like the minor mishap which had befallen Medina Sidonia and his Armada, were powerless to breach the armor of that assurance.

Don Antonio de Oquendo understood that. Their background was his, as well, after all. But he also understood that Spain could not afford that blind arrogance. Not any longer.

The waiting officers broke off their side conversations as he and the cardinal-infante entered the cabin, and there was more than a hint of wariness in some of the faces they turned toward him. Which was as it should be. The fragmentary glimpses of the future Oquendo had been granted in the books the duke of Olivares' spies had acquired left him with no illusions. Incomplete as that glimpse might have been, its message had been clear enough. More than anything else, it had been the hollow arrogance of hidalgos choosing to live in the glories of the past, rather than acknowledge the defeats of the present, which had doomed Spain to decline and impotence in that other future. And so he had made it his business to bring his officers ruthlessly to heel.

In that, if nothing else, he and the prince at his side were in full agreement. Oquendo was still not certain of Don Fernando's character as a whole. But even in the short time since he and the cardinal-infante had begun working together to shape the campaign they were about to launch, Don Antonio had been reassured by the young prince's attitude. Despite his youth-or perhaps, because of his youth-the king's younger brother seemed to understand that Spain's greatness had not been created by unthinking arrogance. However bold the long line of Castilian rulers had been who, over the centuries, carried through the Reconquista and the unification of Spain, they had been neither stupid nor prone to under-estimating their enemies.

As he surveyed his assembled officers, Oquendo knew how greatly his record of success at sea had helped him in breaking their stupidity, as well. Arrogant and contemptuous of their foes though they might be, even his subordinates recognized that for forty years the accursed Hollanders and English had humiliated and humbled proud Spain upon the waters of the world. Whatever triumphs the Crown's tercios might have attained on land, naval victories-especially beyond the confines of the Mediterranean-were few and far between, which meant his own accomplishments lent him a special aura when he… admonished them.

The severity of his habitually stern expression threatened to falter for just a moment as he recalled some of the councils of war in which he had accomplished that admonition. But he suppressed the smile as he made his way to the head of the waiting table, accompanied by Don Fernando.

"I see we're all here," he observed dryly as he and the cardinal-infante seated themselves in the waiting chairs. He waved for the others to find seats where they could. Despite the relatively generous dimensions of the great cabin, space was at a premium. There were far too few chairs to go around, and the silent assertions of precedence which raged as eye met eye until the seating had been apportioned reminded him of a cabin full of tomcats.

Strange, he reflected. That's an image which would never have occurred to me before I read those pages from the Americans' books.

He brushed the thought aside and straightened in his own chair as the officers-seated and standing, alike-settled once more about the table.

"I will not keep you long, gentlemen," he assured them, letting his gaze sweep the circle of their faces. "All of you know our purpose and our plans. This morning, Don Mateo-" a courteous gesture indicated Don Mateo de Montalva, captain of the Princessa "-spoke with an English merchant out of London. Her master confirms that Tromp and de With have indeed reestablished their blockade of Dunkirk and Ostend.

"They seem to be making no effort to find us. No doubt they feel confident that I will move promptly to break the blockade once more… at which point, they and their allies will fall upon us like wolves. Under the circumstances-" he smiled thinly, and something like the soft, satisfied snarl of a wolf pack, indeed, ran around the cabin "-I see no reason we should disappoint them."

"Your pardon, Don Antonio," one of his senior captains said respectfully, "but may we assume from your words that all continues to proceed as planned?"

"You may," Oquendo replied. A part of him wondered caustically exactly what else anyone might have been expected to conclude from what he'd just said. But he allowed no trace of the thought to touch his expression or his tone. After all, he'd worked hard to ensure that his subordinates would risk their precious dignities by asking precisely that sort of question if there was any doubt in their minds.

"There is no way to be absolutely certain that all will continue to unfold according to our plans, of course," he continued. "But at this point, it would appear God is being good to us. Now it becomes our part to ensure that we do not waste the opportunity He has granted us."

"Well, at least Don Antonio is prompt," Maarten Tromp observed wryly to Captain Mastenbroek.

He stood on his flagship's poop deck beside Amelia's captain and gazed through a telescope at the approaching Spanish fleet. The telescope's brass barrel was heavy and awkward in his hands. He managed it anyway, with the ease of long practice, but even now a corner of his brain enviously recalled the "binoculars" the Americans had presented to Frederik Hendrik. (Tried to present, rather. The prince, mindful of the need to keep a certain distance from the Americans due to the exigencies of Dutch factionalism, had accepted them only through an intermediary.) Huygens had allowed him to examine the optical device at the same time the secretary had shown him the pages Richelieu had sent. The stunning visual clarity, featherlight weight, and exquisite craftsmanship of the binoculars had been convincing evidence of the marvels of which American artisans were capable.

Tromp's eye ached from staring through the glass, but he continued his examination until he was completely satisfied. The Spaniards were advancing boldly, their squadrons in line abreast. Their sail handling was no more than indifferent by Dutch standards, but their formation was better than his own ships were likely to maintain. That was impressive, but not really any less than he'd expected from Oquendo. And neatness of formation wasn't everything. In fact, it wasn't even close to everything.

"They look confident enough," Mastenbroek remarked, and Tromp snorted. The captain sounded downright complacent as he regarded the oncoming enemy fleet, like a lion debating which antelope he might dine upon. And well he might. That tidy alignment wasn't going to help the Spaniards much once Tromp's sea wolves got to grips with them!

He felt no need to waste precious time trying to pass any additional orders. Sending messengers by boat would have taken far too long, and time was the most precious commodity any naval commander could possess. Besides, all of his captains and crews, from Cornelisz down, knew precisely what they were supposed to do, and so he simply nodded to Mastenbroek.

"Indeed," he said. "They do look confident. I believe it's time we did something about that, Captain. Be good enough to get underway, if you please."

Mastenbroek nodded and turned to begin bellowing orders. In most navies, that would have been the task of the sailing master, not the ship's captain. But that was because most "navies" assigned command to men whose only trade was war-professional soldiers, rather than professional sailors. Such men might be extremely capable at fighting battles, but they had never acquired the expertise to actually manage a ship under sail. That was a task sufficiently difficult to require a lifetime's study in its own right, after all.

But the Dutch Navy was different. It, even more than the Army, was the real reason Holland had been able to win its freedom from Spain and keep it, and in the process, it had thrown up a new breed of naval officer. Men who were both professional warriors and professional seamen. Men like Captain Jan Mastenbroek, or Maartin Tromp himself.

Now men swarmed up the ratlines at Mastenbroek's orders. They scurried out along the yards to set more sail, and Amelia heeled slightly under the press of the additional canvas as she headed directly for the enemy.

The rest of the Dutch ships followed her promptly. Indeed, several of her consorts began to jockey for position, trying hard to steal the flagship's lead and reach the Spaniards first.

"We can't have that, Captain!" Tromp said, pointing at the sixty-gun Dordrecht as the other ship began to overtake and pass Amelia. Mastenbroek scowled at Dordrecht and snapped orders at his own crew, and additional canvas blossomed as Amelia set her topgallants and began to forge ahead once more.

Tromp nodded in satisfaction. Dordrecht's captain was just as eager as he was to get to grips with the enemy. His confidence boded well, and Tromp was delighted to see it, but that didn't mean he was prepared to allow Dordrecht to win the race. The lieutenant-admiral wasn't blind to the irony inherent in otherwise rational men racing to see which of them could expose themselves to hostile cannon fire first, yet it was that eagerness, that impetuous drive to fling themselves bodily upon their foe, which made the Dutch so dangerous at sea. Tromp could recognize and admire the discipline with which Oquendo's ships held their formation even as the Allies sailed down upon them, but time and again the men of the United Provinces had demonstrated that discipline alone was not enough.

No formation, however disciplined, could be maintained against the savage, unrelenting onslaught that was Holland's stock in trade. Supremely confident in the quality and experience of his captains and crews, Tromp intended to bring on a general melee as quickly as possible. It was the sort of fight at which the Dutch were best, closing in on their more massive Spanish opponents in twos and threes in brutal, close-range hammering matches. Not close enough to let the Spanish board and use their traditional advantages in manpower in hand-to-hand combat. No, Tromp and his captains would take a page from Lord Effingham's book. They would pound the Spaniards with artillery fire, as Effingham had, but their guns were far heavier than anything Queen Elizabeth's navy had been able to bring to bear against Medina Sidonia. And so, where Effingham had been forced to hit and run, the Dutch would hit and stand, smashing away until this armada was destroyed outright.

Tromp had discussed his plans, not just with de With and his own captains, but with the commanders of their French and English allies, as well. The compte de Martignac, the French admiral, had looked a bit dubious, but Tromp had expected that. And truth to tell, that was the real reason he'd organized the fleet as he had. The Dutch would lead the attack, charging down upon the Spanish fleet which had been obliging enough to present itself from leeward, while the French and English followed in their wakes. Officially, that would permit his allies to bring their weight to bear most advantageously once they had seen how the action was developing. In fact, he was less than completely confident of their stomach for the sort of brutal, short-range action he intended to bring on. If they were going to hesitate to engage, he wanted them behind him rather than in front.

He was probably doing them an injustice by doubting their determination in the first place, of course. Sir John Tobias, the English commander, obviously would have preferred to be someplace else. He'd been subdued, almost distant, in his two private meetings with Tromp. But the lieutenant-admiral suspected that any reluctance on Tobias' part reflected his monarch's prejudice against the Dutch rather than any lack of courage.

The range dropped steadily but scarcely quickly. Even under optimum conditions, a ship did well to make good a speed as high as eight knots. Under present sea and wind conditions, the Allied fleet was able to close with the Spaniards at no more than three or four, and the approach seemed to take forever. Amelia, at the head of the jostling, elbowing Dutch as they jockeyed for position in their efforts to reach the enemy first, had already entered the theoretical maximum range of the Spaniards' guns. But whatever a cannon might be capable of ashore, no naval gunner-and especially no Spanish naval gunner-was going to hit a target from the deck of a moving ship at two thousand yards. Besides, the crushing moral effect of the first, carefully aimed broadsides was too precious to fritter away at anything beyond point-blank range… and point-blank range was no more than a tenth of maximum.

With Amelia closing at perhaps a hundred yards a minute, she would require over a quarter-hour to reach point-blank range from the closest enemy ship. That slow, steady approach to carnage was always the hardest part for Maarten Tromp. He'd experienced it too often, and memory and his active, acute imagination replayed every one of those other battles, all the sights and sounds and horror, as his ship carried him inexorably into their midst once again. But those memories and imaginings, like the experiences which spawned them, were something Tromp had learned to deal with long ago, and he turned his thoughts resolutely away from them.

He looked astern, instead, and nodded in satisfaction. A sizable gap had opened between his own ships and his allies, but that was only to be expected. The French and English squadrons didn't share his own captains' instinctive awareness of the way his mind worked, and they'd been a bit slower off the mark when he bore down upon Oquendo. Coupled with their starting positions, farthest up to windward of any of the Allied squadrons, that meant they were at least forty or fifty minutes behind Amelia. But they were working hard to catch up, and Tobias was actually taking the lead away from the French. The Englishman obviously intended to be in the thick of things after all, whether he liked Dutchmen or not!

Tromp grinned at the thought, but then the dull thud of cannon fire brought his attention back to business. He turned to look forward once again, and found himself torn between a scowl and a laugh as he realized Dordrecht had somehow stolen the advantage from Amelia after all. The other ship was shortening sail now, slowing her speed once more but reducing vulnerable target area aloft, even as she exchanged fire with the lead Spaniard. He could hear her crew cheering in the intervals between the crashing discharges.

Captain Mastenbroek was bellowing orders of his own, and the courses on main and fore disappeared as if by magic, brailed up to the yards as Amelia, like Dordrecht, stripped down to her topsails. Her speed dropped, and the deck vibrated and quivered, shivering under Tromp's feet like a living creature, as the guns ran out in a savage squeal of wooden gun trucks.

"There!" he shouted, pitching his voice to cut through the bedlam, and Mastenbroek turned to look at him. "There!" the lieutenant-admiral shouted again, pointing across the water at a galleon in the middle of the Spaniards' second squadron. "That's your target, Captain!"

Mastenbroek followed the direction of his hand, then grinned savagely as he recognized the standard of the king of Spain flying at the head of the galleon's mainmast. He nodded in understanding, and turned back to his helmsman, gesturing and pointing himself. Tromp watched him for a moment, then grunted in satisfaction as Amelia altered course slightly to bear directly down on Oquendo's flagship.

More cannon fire thundered and bellowed as the Breda followed Dordrecht into the teeth of the Spanish squadrons, and then-finally-it was Amelia's turn.

The flagship had closed to less than two hundred yards from Santiago. The wooden deck planking seemed to leap up and hit the soles of Tromp's shoes like a hammer as her own guns roared. Amelia carried twenty-two twenty-four-pounder cannon on her lowest deck, with twenty-four twelve-pounders on the upper gundeck, and her starboard side vanished in a cloud of spurting flame and choking powder smoke. Before the rising smoke could obscure his vision, Tromp saw the heavy roundshot smashing into Santiago's side. At such a short range, the twenty-four-pounders' shot hammered straight through even the Spanish ship's massive timbers. The jagged holes in Santiago's outer planking looked deceptively small, but Tromp's experienced mind pictured the horror and carnage on the Spaniard's packed gundeck as the five-and-a-half-inch balls erupted into the gun crews amid a spreading hail of lethal splinters… if hull fragments which might be six feet long and as thick as a man's wrist could be called by a name as innocuous as "splinters." Then the blinding, lung-choking billow of powder smoke blotted away the sight and went rolling downwind towards the target of Amelia's rage.

The obscuring cloud seemed to lift suddenly, flashing with a deadly fury, as Santiago's broadside hurled back defiance. Amelia shuddered and bucked as Spanish roundshot blasted into her, but Santiago's gunners were less experienced than their Dutch opponents, and their fire was less accurate. No more than half a dozen of the thirty or forty balls they fired managed to hit Amelia, even at such short range. Most of the misses went high, whimpering and wailing overhead like damned souls, lost and terrified in the smoke. One of them punched through the lateen mizzen sail above Tromp's head with the sudden slapping sound of a fist, others cut away rigging like an ax through spiderwebs, and one carved a divot out of the starboard bulwark barely twenty feet from him. A cloud of splinters hummed across the upper deck, and a gunner at one of the swivel-mounted serpentines atop the rail shrieked and stumbled back, clutching his face in both hands. The butt end of a splinter thicker than one of his own thumbs protruded between his fingers, and then he slumped to the deck. His hands slipped from his face as he thudded to the planks, the jagged splinter protruding from his ruined eye socket.

More screams came from underfoot as the Spanish roundshot which had found their mark crashed into Amelia's side. The shrieks rose like the Devil's own chorus, but Tromp's was an experienced ear. Terrible as the sounds were, they were far less terrible than they might have been, and he knew Amelia's fire had hurt Santiago far more than she had been injured herself.

Mastenbroek knew it, too. The flagship's captain strode back and forth across his deck, waving his hat to encourage his crew even as he shouted the orders that edged Amelia still closer to her target. The Dutch ship turned on her heel, ranging up directly alongside the Spanish flagship to run parallel at a range of barely a hundred yards. Her port broadside belched fresh fury, and Santiago fired back, barely visible even at this range, a poorly seen ghost in the rolling bank of gun smoke. Tromp waved his own hat, adding his encouragement to Mastenbroek's while the gun crews bent to their pieces like damned souls laboring in the flames and stench of Hell itself.

The firing became increasingly ragged on both sides. The precisely coordinated, concentrated blows of the initial broadsides gave way to a fierce pounding match, crews firing independently, as quickly as they could serve their guns. The concussions of scores of guns-hundreds of them, as more and more of Tromp's fleet scrambled into action-hammered the ear like mallets, and in the fleeting intervals between them, the lieutenant-admiral could hear the cheers-and screams-from other ships.

Two more Dutch ships, Joshua and Halve Maan, came charging in to support Amelia against Santiago. The Spanish Argonauta intercepted Joshua, and the two of them squared off in a furious duel of their own, but Halve Maan took station just astern of Amelia and began hammering away at Santiago's starboard quarter. The Spaniard fired back at both her foes with the courage and determination only to be expected of Oquendo's flagship, but even that stouthearted ship found herself in increasingly desperate straits as the two Dutchmen pounded her.

Tromp dragged his concentration away from Santiago by sheer force of will and made himself look up at the sun. It seemed incredible, but the two fleets had already been engaged for the better part of an hour, and their units had become hopelessly intermingled, smashing away at one another as they stood literally yardarm-to-yardarm. Santiago was barely twenty yards clear of Amelia's side now, and still the guns bellowed their hate back and forth.

He shook himself like a drunken man and then turned to stare up to windward, searching for his allies. The rolling pall of smoke to port was all but impenetrable, but looking to starboard he could see both the French and English squadrons, still out of action but closing rapidly now. The French seemed to have fallen a bit further astern of the English, but they were making up for it now, crowding on sail with an almost Dutch-like eagerness. Indeed, he was surprised and more impressed than he might have cared to admit by the way the two squadrons were massing together. They might not yet have come into action, but that was about to change, and when they hit it would be as a concentrated fist, punching into the center of the Spanish formation almost directly behind Amelia.

He nodded in satisfaction and turned back to the battle, squinting as he peered through the smoke, trying to make out details even though an admiral of his experience knew how futile the effort must be. As always in a sea action, the universe of each combatant shrank to the world of his own ship, or perhaps two or three more on either side. It was literally impossible to see any more than that in a fight this close and furious, but he could just barely make out de With's Brederode, locked in a brutal close-ranged hammering match with the San Nicolas. Brederode seemed to be beating down the Spaniard's fire, but she'd lost her own mainmast in the process. Other ships on both sides had taken damage aloft, as well. Indeed, it seemed to Tromp-although he couldn't be positive, under the circumstances-that even more than usual of the Spanish fire had gone high. Amelia's own spars had taken relatively little damage, although strands of severed rigging blew out in the smoke and her topsails seemed to be almost more hole than canvas, but Brederode was far from the only Dutchman to have lost a mast.

Yet whatever rigging damage Tromp's ships might have suffered, the Spaniards were in far worse condition. While their fire was going high, punching through canvas and severing cordage, the Dutch guns were lacerating their hulls and massacring their crews. The Dutch ships might be becoming progressively less manageable, but that wasn't going to be enough to save Oquendo's fleet. Here and there an individual Dutchman, especially among the armed merchantmen, was hard pressed, but the tide of battle was setting strongly in Tromp's favor. He could feel it, sense the pulse and rhythm, the steady decline in the weight of Spanish fire as his own gunners beat it down. Frankly, he was amazed at the way the Spaniards continued to stand and fight; under similar conditions in other fights Oquendo's fleet would have been shedding entire handfuls of ships by now. But not today. Today, they stood to their guns, pounding back with a determination that fully matched the Dutchmen's own.

Which was going to make their ultimate defeat even more crushing, Tromp realized. His fleet might have been brutally hammered, but the Spanish had taken even more damage, and even those which might have escaped from his own lamed ships were too damaged themselves to escape the French and English now beginning to thrust vengefully into the fringes of the battle.

Santiago's fire finally began to falter, and he peered at her. Amelia's deck was littered with bodies, screaming wounded, severed limbs, broken cordage, and huge bloodstains. Her bulwarks were holed and feathered with splinters where enemy roundshot had chewed pieces from them, and he heard the doleful clank of the pumps in the fleeting instants between gunshots. But as the smoke thinned slightly he could see that the Spanish flagship was in a far worse state. Her starboard side seemed to have been beaten in with hammers-indeed, it was so badly damaged that three of her upper gundeck ports had been smashed into a single, gaping wound-and he could see thick, glistening tendrils of blood seeping from her scuppers, as if the ship herself was leaking away her life. Bodies were heaped at the feet of her masts, heaved there by the surviving members of her crew in order to clear the recoil of her deck guns, and at least half a dozen of those guns had been dismounted by Amelia's fire. Tromp could make out officers moving amidst the carnage and confusion, fighting to impose some order upon it, and one officer-he rather thought it was Oquendo himself-clung to the shattered poop deck rail, supporting himself while blood streamed steadily down one of his legs.

It was obvious to Tromp that even that stoutly fought ship had no option but to surrender. It might take a little longer, cost a few more Spanish lives, but Santiago was too badly wounded to run and her crew was too savagely maimed to continue the fight.

He turned away from her once more, listening to the howling bedlam of the battle, and looked back at Brederode as Revenge, Tobias' flagship, altered course very slightly in order to cross astern of de With. Obviously, Tobias intended to rake San Nicolas as he crossed her stern, then range up on the Spaniard's disengaged side and smash the already crippled ship into submission.

The Englishman's bowsprit was no more than sixty or seventy feet clear of Brederode's high, ornate poop as Revenge started across her wake…

And then Maarten Harpentzoon van Tromp's face went bone-white under the soot and grime of powder smoke coating it, as the English flagship poured a deadly broadside through Brederode's stern.

For perhaps two heartbeats, Tromp told himself it had to be an accident. A colossal blunder. But no "accident" would have been that accurate. The Englishman's guns fired two by two, upper and lower deck together, carefully aimed, and the impact of those deadly shots turned Brederode's stern windows into the gaping cavern mouth of an abattoir.

De With's flagship was over four hundred yards from Amelia, but even at that range Tromp could hear the English roundshot hammering home, crashing the full length of her hull in maiming, mangling fury. An entire twenty-four pounder slammed forward, flung two-thirds of the way out its port as a screaming roundshot dismounted it and shattered its carriage. Even as Tromp realized in horror that the attack was deliberate, Brederode's foremast toppled like a weary tree. It pitched over the side while the ship wallowed in agony, and Tromp heard English voices baying in triumph.

The Americans were right, a small, numb corner of his brain told him. Richelieu's offer was too good to be true.

He spun around as fresh, concentrated broadsides thundered, and his belly knotted as more of his "allies" poured fire into his own ships. The French flagship surged past Dordrecht, firing as she went, and Dordrecht staggered. Her already damaged mizzen mast toppled into the smoke, splinters flew from her "disengaged" side, and she began to fall away to leeward as the French fire killed her helmsman and smashed her wheel.

From triumph to despair. The transformation required no more than a minute-two, at the most. That was how long it took Maarten Tromp to realize that the Dutch Navy had just been destroyed. It might take some time still to accomplish that, but the outcome was inevitable, and he knew it. Everywhere he looked, as far as he could see through the smoke and spray and splinters, French and English warships vomited flame and fury as their fresh, carefully aimed broadsides crashed into his weary, already damaged vessels. And he understood now why the Spanish fire had been so "badly aimed." With their rigging mangled and crippled by Oquendo's gunners, his ships would be unable to outrun their undamaged "allies."

Fresh cheers went up, this time from the Spaniards' bloodsoaked decks as they saw the trap they had paid so much in life and limb to bait spring. And then Tromp flinched in shocked disbelief as Revenge's fire found Brederode's magazine and de With's flagship vanished in a single, terrible explosion.

The explosion, and the sudden blow of realizing his friend and Brederode's entire crew had just died, shocked Tromp out of his immobility. He shook himself savagely and spun away from the horrible vision while broken fragments of Brederode's hull were still rising in lazy arcs above her fireball death. Mastenbroek stood no more than fifteen feet from him, but Amelia's captain was frozen, mesmerized by the spectacle of Brederode's destruction. He didn't seem to hear the lieutenant-admiral when Tromp shouted at him, didn't even blink until Tromp seized him and shook him brutally.

"Get under way!" Tromp barked.

Mastenbroek shook his head, fighting his way up out of his own confusion.

"Make more sail-now!" Tromp commanded harshly. Mastenbroek stared at him for a moment longer, and Tromp flung out an arm, sweeping it in an arc which indicated the ruin encompassing their fleet. "All we can do is try to run for it," he grated. "So make sail, Captain! Make sail now!"

Chapter 20

"And so, while the final reports have yet to come in, I have no doubt what they will tell us." Armand Demerville, comte de Martignac, smiled thinly at Don Antonio Oquendo. "So far, over sixty of the enemy have been definitely accounted for."

"I see." Oquendo sat on Santiago's poop deck in the only one of his chairs to have survived the action intact. Well, not entirely intact, he reminded himself, his face taut with pain. Its cushioned leather back was split in three places, and one arm had been entirely removed. Which made it an appropriate seat for him at the moment, since the surgeons seemed so eager to amputate his own left leg at the knee.

Of course, that decision would be his.

It was hard to believe, even now, that they had truly gotten away with it, he thought. The trap had required that the Hollanders suspect nothing until the moment it actually sprang, and that had been impossible on the face of it. Even assuming that none of the French or English officers had been in the pay of the Dutch-or Swedes-there were the crews to consider. However bloodthirsty the threats intended to keep them from letting the secret slip, they would have failed. No navy could keep its men from drunkenness once they went ashore, and all it would have required was a single drink-addled seaman-or a sober one, boasting to a whore-to alert the Dutch beforehand.

But Richelieu had had an answer for that, as well. "Sealed orders," he'd called them-another notion borrowed from the future. No one in the Franco-English force, except for the fleet commanders themselves and one or two of their most senior, most trusted captains, had known a thing about the true plan. All the others had discovered what was going to happen only when Oquendo's ships actually came into sight and they opened their sealed orders as they had been instructed to do when that moment came.

And so it had worked, he told himself grimly… however much it had cost.

"And your own losses?" he asked Martignac after a moment.

"None," the Frenchman assured him, then made a small throwing-away gesture with one hand. "Oh, we've lost a few dozen men, but nothing of significance."

"Would that we could say the same," Oquendo said flatly, and even Martignac had the grace to look briefly abashed.

All of Oquendo's ships had survived the battle, but five of them were so savagely damaged that he had already ordered them abandoned and burned, and he would be extremely surprised to discover that even a dozen of the others remained fit for further action. When the Dutch had realized what was happening, many had been too damaged-or too enraged-to even attempt to disengage. Instead, they'd set their teeth in their foes' throats like wounded wolves and continued to hammer their enemies until they were literally overwhelmed. Their casualties had been horrendous… and Oquendo's were little better.

The Hollanders and we have paid a bitter price for your master's plans, my friend, he told Martignac silently from behind his expressionless mask. The Frenchman's ship had taken no more than a half dozen hits as he and his English allies crushed the Dutch from behind, and his clean clothing and perfect grooming stood out against the wreckage and bodies littering Santiago's battered decks like some alien creature from an undamaged world. I hope it was worth it.

Maarten van Tromp slumped in the chair at the head of the table. Darkness pressed close and hard on the shattered glass of the cabin windows, but the lamplight was more than sufficient to show the smoke stains on the overhead deck beams… and the wide, dried bloodstain under his chair.

Five other men sat with him, their faces gray and stunned, overwhelmed by the disaster which had engulfed them. They were the captains of every ship he knew-so far, at least-to have escaped Richelieu's trap. Mastenbroek wasn't one of them; Amelia's captain had been turned into so much mangled meat by an eighteen-pound shot as Tromp's flagship clawed her way free of the crippled Spaniards, and Tromp had taken command in Mastenbroek's place with something very like gratitude. Desperate as Amelia's predicament had been, grappling with cutting her way out of it had been almost a relief from thinking about the catastrophe which had devastated his fleet.

Now he could no longer avoid those thoughts, and his jaw clenched as his memory replayed Brederode's apocalyptic end.

He lifted his head to survey the other five men at the table. Five ships-six, counting Amelia-out of seventy-four. It was possible, even probable, that there were at least a few other escapees, but there couldn't have been many of them. He supposed it would be called the Battle of Dunkirk, if it mattered. By any name, it was the most crushing defeat Holland had ever suffered at sea-and with the destruction of the fleet, the United Provinces' coasts lay naked before the threat of Spain. The ring of fortresses guarding the southern border could be outflanked any time the Spanish wished. And…

With the treachery of England and France-especially France-there would be nothing to stand in Philip IV's path. For decades, whenever the Spanish army had pressed the Dutch too hard, the intervention of the French forces perched on the borders of the Spanish Netherlands had relieved the pressure. Even when the French had not intervened, the simple threat of intervention had been enough to tie down a large portion of the Spaniards' forces.

"Why?" he heard one of his officers croak softly. "Why did they do it? Insane."

Tromp did not answer aloud, because he was still chewing on the problem in his own mind.

The motives of the English seemed clear enough, in retrospect. King Charles' desperate need for money to keep control over England with mercenary troops was probably enough in itself to explain it. Money which, Tromp was quite certain, had been quietly emptied out of French and Spanish coffers. But there was more, now that he thought about it. In fact, in many ways the English king's treachery would probably increase his popularity with his own subjects.

Certainly with English seamen and merchants! The Dutch had often been their greatest commercial rivals. And Tromp was well aware that Englishmen, especially seamen and merchants, were still bitterly angry over the Amboina Massacre of 1623, when the Dutch East India Company had tortured and murdered thirteen English merchants in the Spice Islands.

It was the French role in the betrayal which was so puzzling. Religious affinity be damned. For decades, Catholic France had opposed the ambitions of Catholic Spain and Austria-supporting Protestants against them, more often than not-because the Bourbon dynasty which had ruled France since 1589 was far more concerned about the threat posed by the Habsburg dynasty than they were over problems of Christian doctrine. As had been the Valois dynasty before them.

Now…

"What was Richelieu's thinking?" muttered the same officer. "It's crazy!"

On the surface, the man was quite correct. If the Spanish could reconquer the United Provinces…

Then France-already faced with a Habsburg threat from Spain itself, not to mention the threat which the Spanish possessions in Italy posed to French interests there-would be faced as well with a Spanish Netherlands on their northeastern frontier which had grown far mightier. The population and resources of the entire Low Countries, reunited under the Spanish crown, would truly be something for the French to fear.

Tromp reviewed in his mind the secondhand reports he'd gotten of the warnings the American delegation in The Hague had tried to pass on to Dutch officialdom. With hindsight, he now realized that the reports he'd been given had undoubtedly been distorted by the prejudices and preconceptions of the officials who had received them directly. And he felt a moment's anguish that Frederik Hendrik had chosen not to listen to those warnings in person. The prince himself, for all his canniness, would have been misled by those same self-satisfied official distortions.

Damn all fat burghers, anyway! And damn-twice over!-all religious fanatics. Where is your "Predestination" now, O ye sectarians?

Despite the distortions and the fragmentary nature of what he had been told, Tromp was now almost sure he could see the French cardinal's strategy. Enough of it, at least.

"We were not Richelieu's true target," he said grimly to the officers assembled around the table. "We were just in the way-a sacrifice to obtain the free hand he wanted elsewhere."

His mental chuckle was harsh. You were right, Cornelisz. The Americans were dangerous. We simply didn't recognize how. And we should have. If anyone should have remembered how twisty Richelieu's scheming mind truly is, it should have been us.

The same officer who had muttered about Richelieu's sanity stared at him. Tromp tried to remember his name, but couldn't. One of the newer and younger officers of his fleet, recently promoted and in command of a ship for the first time.

But Tromp had seen the condition of the man's ship for himself. He was satisfied that whatever the officer might lack in the way of strategic acumen, he did not lack courage. So, despite the effort not to snarl, he forced himself to provide a calm explanation.

"It's those cursed American history books everyone's been grabbing, Captain… ah…"

"Cuyp, sir. Emanuel Cuyp."

"Captain Cuyp." Tromp drew a deep breath, which, exhaled, became something like a laugh. Or, maybe, a crow's caw. "History! Now everyone thinks they can determine the future-except, of course, they immediately try to change that history to their own satisfaction. And, in the doing, transform cause into effect and effect into cause. 'Insane,' as you say-but on a much deeper level than mere statecraft."

From the blank look on his face, Cuyp obviously still did not understand. Tromp tried again.

"I'm quite certain that Richelieu is thinking two steps ahead of everyone else, Captain. He will set everyone to war here in Europe, accepting whatever short-term losses he must, in order to free his hands to seize the rest of the world. As much of it, at least, as he can. North America for a certainty."

One of the other captains grimaced. Hans Gerritsz, that was, older and more experienced than Cuyp. "That's quite a gamble, sir. It won't do the French much good to have their hands on a few overseas settlements if they lose half of France itself. Or all of it."

Tromp shook his head. "There's no real chance of that, Hans. Not for many years, at least. Think about it. Does a fresh-fed lion attack the keeper of the menagerie? Or does he go into a corner of his cage to sleep and digest his meal? Especially if it was a big meal."

Gerritsz considered those words for a moment. Then, nodded. "I see your point. Richelieu is counting on the Spanish being pre-occupied in the Low Countries." He grunted, scowling. "And not a bad guess! It's not as if we had our fleet when we began our rebellion against Spain. Who is to say we can't resume it?"

A little growl went around the table. Despite the darkness of the moment, Tromp felt his spirits lifting at the sound.

"True enough. The English, of course, will be preoccupied with their own affairs for the next few years. And by handing the Habsburgs such a triumph-not to mention removing from the board of play the one fleet which might have come to Gustavus' aid in the Baltic-Richelieu has almost guaranteed the eruption of a new major war between the Habsburgs and Gustavus Adolphus. A war, mind you, which will be fought on Habsburg or Swedish soil-not French."

Not unless that foul churchman has misgauged Gustavus Adolphus. Or-which might be even worse for him-the Swede's American allies. But Tromp left the words unspoken. In his heart, he could hope that the same Americans whose warnings had been unheeded could bloody the cardinal. But, for the moment, that was simply a hope grounded on not much of anything. He, Tromp, had immediate responsibilities-and pressing decisions of his own to make. Now.

He drew a deep breath and forced himself to consider the grim implications of his position. There was no point even contemplating a return to Holland, not with Oquendo, Tobias, and Martignac between him and Amsterdam. He might sneak past them, but it was… unlikely, to say the very least. All of his ships were damaged, three of them severely indeed. If he was sighted and intercepted at all, he would lose at least those three, and probably all six.

No. Returning home was out of the question. He could only hope that there had indeed been other escapees and that one of them might manage to reach The Hague or Amsterdam in time to give Frederik Hendrik and the States General at least a little warning before the Spanish tempest burst upon them. For himself…

"We'll make for Recife," he said. One of the other captains flinched. The others only looked at him.

"We'll make for Recife," he repeated. "It's the closest base we can hope to reach, and the West India Company will have at least a few ships to reinforce us. And we have to warn them before the Spaniards launch a fresh attack on them, too."

"What about Batavia?" Hjalmar van Holst asked.

He had been the officer who flinched, and Tromp snorted softly in understanding. Holst's family had immigrated to Zeeland from Denmark three generations ago. He looked the part-tall, thick-shouldered and powerful, like some shaggy, blond bear-and he, his father, and all three of his brothers held large blocks of stock in the East India Company.

But the fact that the captain of the Wappen van Rotterdam had a huge financial stake in what happened to Holland's Far East empire didn't rob his question of its legitimate point.

"Batavia? In the condition our ships are in?" All the officers at the table grimaced, van Holst no less than the others. Tromp shook his head firmly. "We need somewhere to make repairs. I see no real hope that our ships, as badly damaged as they all are, could circumnavigate half the globe. We'll have no easy time of it just getting across the Atlantic-especially with the hurricane season upon us."

Having made his point, Tromp decided to relent a bit. "We have to make certain Governor-General Brouwer is warned, as well," Tromp acknowledged. "I think it's almost certain that at least a few of our merchantmen will get through with the news, though. And in the meantime-I need your ship, Hjalmar. We're going to be hard pressed enough to hold on in Brazil and the Caribbean as it is."

Holst looked for a moment as if he wanted to object. But then he subsided in his chair, and if the bear's nod was angry and exhausted, it also carried true agreement.

"We'll send someone from Recife, just to be sure," Tromp reassured him. "But to be perfectly honest, Hjalmar, I think they'll be too busy closer to home to worry about Batavia or the Indies anytime soon."

Fresh gloom seemed to descend upon the cabin as his words reminded every man in the cabin once again of Holland's nakedness before the Spanish scourge.

"In the meantime," Tromp told them levelly, meeting their eyes unflinchingly across the table, "it is our duty to rally what we can. It may not be much, but at the very least we must hold the empire. As long as we do, neither Philip nor that bastard Richelieu can afford to simply ignore us."

"Perhaps not," Klaus Oversteegen, captain of the Utrecht, agreed with gallows humor. "But I suspect we're going to spend more time losing sleep over them than they are over us!"

"You may be right," Tromp agreed, and smiled thinly. "But if they do ignore us, I intend to make them regret it. We'll send out the word for every ship which can to rally to Recife. We ought to have at least the strength to hold the Spanish at bay while we gather our strength."

"The Spanish, perhaps," Holst agreed. "But what of the English and French?"

"Unless I'm much mistaken," Tromp replied, "Charles of England is going to be too busy concentrating on his arrests and executions of men who haven't yet done anything to spend much time concerning himself about us. And as for Richelieu…"

He smiled thinly. "All of his spiderweb plans depend on one other assumption: that his Spanish and English allies-Danish too, be sure of it-can fend off Gustavus Adolphus for him. The Swede, and his American mechanical wizards. But what if they can't?"

Tromp shrugged. "We will do what we must. For the rest, I suspect everyone in the world is about to discover that predestination is a province restricted to God Himself alone. History may record that we were not the only ones who failed to listen to warnings."

Chapter 21

When Melissa entered the suite of rooms in St. Thomas' Tower, Rita and Tom Simpson trailing behind her, she saw Gayle Mason and Darryl McCarthy crouched over the lid of the trunk where the radio equipment was kept hidden except when it was in use. Night had fallen and the lighting provided by the tapers was too poor to see exactly what they were doing, but Melissa was quite sure they were in the process of extracting the radio. Gayle and Darryl would have heard the sound of the escort accompanying Melissa and the Simpsons back to the Tower of London-the more so since, this time, the escort had been much larger than usual. They'd have assumed that Melissa would want to send off a radio message reporting on today's meeting with the earl of Strafford.

"Don't bother," she said. "We're going to have to wait as long as we can tonight. We may not be able to send a radio message at all."

Feeling all of her years, Melissa moved over to the window overlooking the moat and the Thames beyond. That was the window they normally used to set up the antenna. Gazing down, she saw that there were English troops patrolling the wharf. Half a dozen, that she could see in the moonlight, with at least one officer on horseback overseeing them.

Not Yeoman Warders, either. Melissa wasn't positive, but she thought this was a detachment from the new mercenary companies whose soldiers she and the Simpsons had seen patrolling London on their way to Whitehall Palace and back.

She'd expected to see them. Normally, at night, the English did not bother patrolling the wharf. Nor did she think that Strafford had any particular suspicions concerning the United States' diplomatic delegation. The earl had given no indication, thus far, that he had any conception of American capabilities with radio. For all she knew, in fact, he still didn't even know what "radio" was in the first place.

"And why didn't Richelieu warn them?" she asked herself, in a murmur. "I'm damn sure he knows about radio."

Tom Simpson had come up to stand next to her-although, in his usual courteous manner, keeping just far enough away to not crowd Melissa aside. As big as he was, "sharing" a window with Tom Simpson pressed up close would be like sharing a window with a bear. But he was close enough to overhear her murmured words.

"Yes and no, Melissa. I'm sure Richelieu 'knows' about radio. But knowing about it in the abstract and really understanding the implications… that's two different things. He's a cardinal, after all, not a technocrat. And I think Mike's scheme with the big radio towers in Grantville and Magdeburg is probably paying off."

Melissa pursed her lips. The issue of whether or not to build those radio towers had been the subject of an argument at the time between her and Mike Stearns. One of the many little contretemps that she, as a cabinet member, had had with the President who had appointed her. Cabinet meetings, under the Stearns regime, were not infrequently raucous affairs. Mike was one of those rare people who, despite being very strong-minded, had no difficulty listening to people disagree with him. That was one of the many things about the man which, despite their differences, Melissa had come to cherish deeply.

The argument over the radio towers had been typical of the disputes she usually had with Mike. To Melissa, devoting the major resources necessary to build huge stone-construction towers-taller than most cathedrals, fer chrissake!-when there were still plenty of people in the United States living in shacks, had been absurd. The more so since the towers were mainly "prestige projects." They were designed to enable the U.S. and the CPE to broadcast throughout central Europe, bringing news of the day to hordes of citizens listening on their crystal set radios-of which there were not more than a handful in existence. A fancy and expensive "Voice of America" which… had nobody to listen to it.

Her lips quirked, in a little smile of remembrance. Melissa had been her usual acerbic self in the dispute. Oh, great! We can be one of those damn banana republics which build palaces while their people are scrabbling for food!

She could also remember Mike grinning at her, completely unfazed by the heat of her remarks. We'll have the crystal sets one of these days, Melissa. Sooner'n you think, unless I miss my guess. And in the meantime, whatever else, it'll be what the Russkies call maskirovka-a masking; deception. When our enemies see us putting up towers hundreds of feet tall, built like cathedrals-it'll take months to do it, with hundreds of men working on the construction-maybe they won't realize that you don't need anything like that for military radio. It'll confuse them, at least. Nor forever, but maybe for long enough. And isn't that what we're doing everywhere? Buying time?

"Well, maybe I was wrong," she muttered. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Tom smiling faintly. Tom, like all officers Melissa knew personally in the little army of the United States, was a "Stearns loyalist." Heinrich Schmidt was almost scary on the subject. Melissa knew full well that if Mike were so inclined, he'd have no trouble getting his army to carry out a coup d'йtat on his behalf.

But… Mike Stearns was not so inclined. Whatever her differences with the man, on that subject at least Melissa slept easily at night. A strong-willed leader, yes; a dictator in the making, no.

"Maybe I was wrong," she repeated, pushing herself away from the window. She turned back into the room and looked toward Gayle and Darryl.

"If at all possible, I'll want to send a message tonight. But it may not be." A thumb over her shoulder indicated the soldiers on the wharf. "They'll be watching us closely, for a bit, and we can't afford to have them spot the radio antenna."

Rita chimed in. "The velvet glove is off, folks. That's why Strafford summoned us to the palace today. The king has announced the imposition of a state of emergency in England. New 'Royal Regiments' have been brought into London-from what we can tell, they've got 'em in most of the other bigger cities in the country too. And, yup, we're at war. It's official. The 'League of Ostend,' they're calling themselves. England and France and Spain and Denmark."

She made a face. " 'Forced to unite,' you understand, in order to resist Swedish aggression."

Her husband's expression was equally sarcastic. "Exactly why 'resisting Swedish aggression' requires them to start by attacking the Dutch remains a little mysterious. Strafford got pretty fuzzy when he got to that part of the business."

" 'Fuzzy!' " snorted Melissa. "That man could give lessons to the old Greek sophists."

Wearily, she lowered herself onto the nearest couch. "But it doesn't really matter, does it? We're at war, whether we like it or not. And while Strafford was polite as could be about the whole thing, he made it very clear that we-" Her head made a little sweeping motion, indicating everyone in the room; which included the entire delegation, now, since Friedrich and Nelly Bruch had entered from their own little alcove in the suite. "Like Rita says, the gloves are off. There's no more pretense that we're being kept here to protect us from disease. We're prisoners. Hostages, when you get right down to it, although the earl was too couth to use the term outright."

Darryl looked a bit alarmed, and glanced at the trunk where the radio was kept. Gayle had already lowered the lid and was sitting on it, half-protectively.

"Relax, Darryl," chuckled Tom. "I doubt very much if we'll be having any surprise inspections. 'Couth,' like Melissa says. Strafford's doing his best to keep the thing as civilized as possible. He assured us that our stay here would remain as comfortable as ever. They'll be watching us more closely, I imagine, but I'm pretty sure-so are Melissa and Rita; we talked about it on the way back-that Strafford will continue to respect our personal privacy."

Darryl muttered something under his breath. Melissa wasn't positive, but she thought it was "Oh, sure-Black Tom Tyrant!"

For a moment, her exasperation with the whole situation flared up. "For God's sake! Darryl-just once-can you stop thinking in clichйs? Thomas Wentworth, the earl of Strafford, is not a villain out of a comic book. The truth is, I think he's basically a rather decent sort of man. Just one who takes his responsibilities and duties seriously, according to his own lights. He'll do what he thinks he has to do, in the interests of his king and country-as he sees it-but he's not going to start pulling wings off of flies."

Darryl's face settled into mulish stubbornness. It was an expression Melissa well remembered, from the days he had been one of her students. I knows what I knows; don't confuse me with the facts.

The memory lightened her mood, oddly enough. Her next words came with a chuckle. "Oh, never mind. Hopeless! But I wonder, sometimes, how you and Harry Lefferts managed to rebuild so many cars. I'm sure the manual sometimes disagreed with your preconceptions."

A bit guiltily, Melissa remembered that one of those cars had been her own. On a teacher's salary, she hadn't been able to afford a new car, and the repair bill estimate the garage had given her had caused her to blanch. Until the next day, much to her surprise, the two most obstreperous and unruly students in her class had offered to do it for her. Free of charge, as long as she paid for the parts.

And… the jalopy had run as smooth as silk, afterward.

"It's not the same thing," Darryl protested. "Engines ain't people. They don't have bad hair days and they're never on the rag." Gayle smacked him. "Uh, sorry 'bout that last. No offense intended."

Gayle was smiling; so was Melissa, for that matter. No offense intended-and, the truth was, he meant it. Darryl could no more help being uncouth than a leopard could change its spots. And, now that she thought about it, Melissa was just as glad. The day might come when her own life depended on an uncouth young leopard's ability to deal with suave and aristocratic lions. Looking at him, Melissa suspected that she'd picked the right sort of champion for the fray.

Yeah, it was a jalopy-but it did run smooth as silk after Darryl and Harry were done.

"We'll wait," she announced, returning to the subject at hand. "Whatever else, we can't afford to have them spot the antenna. That's the one thing that might make Strafford change his mind about inspecting our quarters."

"Wait, for how long?" asked Gayle.

"As long as we have to. We're in for the long haul, now, so the one thing we can't afford is to arouse anyone's suspicions." Melissa glanced out the window. "Still too much of a moon, unless it gets overcast, which it doesn't look like it's going to do tonight."

Decisively, she planted her hands on knees and levered herself upright. "Tomorrow night, or the next day, whatever. In the meantime, we'd better figure we're going to be wintering over in the Tower this year. That means we can't fool around with the risk of disease." She glanced at a different trunk, which held their medical and preventive supplies. "Good thing we brought that stuff, I guess."

She heard Tom chuckle, and couldn't help smiling ruefully herself. "That stuff" referred to several pounds of the DDT which the fledgling American chemical industry was starting to produce. Mike Stearns had insisted the diplomatic delegations take what was available-over Melissa's objections, needless to say.

Firmly, however, Melissa squelched all feelings of self-doubt. She was going to need her well-honed Schoolmarm Authority to enforce her next command.

"And we'll set Operation Ironsides under way," she pronounced.

Immediately, Darryl scowled. "The guy's a monster, Melissa! Let him rot in hell for eternity!"

"You will obey orders, soldier," growled Tom.

Darryl looked mulish and stubborn. " 'Orders' got nothin' to do with it. I didn't say I wouldn't do it. I just think it's nuts. Really really nuts."

He looked to Melissa, and spread his hands in a gesture of appeal. "Come on, Melissa. I'm begging you! Just consider-just think about it!-that maybe you're making a big mistake here."

Melissa burst into laughter. So did Tom-who, like Melissa herself, had spent the months leading up to the departure of the diplomatic mission studying everything he could find on the history of 17 th -century England. And Tom, furthermore-being a soldier himself-with a particular concentration on all of the famous military figures of the day.

"What's so damn funny?" demanded Darryl.

"You are," came Tom's immediate reply. "You don't know it, of course, but you just quoted the monster himself."

"Huh?"

" 'I beseech you in the bowels of Christ-think it possible you may be mistaken.' " Melissa grinned. "It's a rather famous little saying. Made by Oliver Cromwell addressing the Church of Scotland."

That same night, in Paris, a young French general named Turenne examined the eight officers assembled in the salon of the house which Richelieu had provided for him. Most of the officers were as young as Turenne himself, and all were known to him personally. He had handpicked them to be the staff of the new army the cardinal had ordered him to create. An army which, in private and to himself, Turenne had given the whimsical title New Model Army.

Turenne gestured toward a long sidetable positioned next to a wall. There were eight little manuscripts resting atop the piece of furniture.

"One for each of you. The cardinal had some monks copy the books he obtained. I have been through them all and summarized what seemed to me the key points." There was another and larger manuscript atop a small table in the corner. But Turenne did not mention it. That was for later, and only for one of them.

"I will expect you to have the manuscript studied thoroughly within a week, at which time we will have another staff meeting. For the moment, just read it. In the months to come, I have no doubt we'll all be arguing the fine points." The smile he gave them was both friendly and… self-confident. Already, Turenne had begun to establish what he thought was a good rapport with his immediate lieutenants. He did not want slavish obedience. At the same time, he would insist that his leadership be respected. From what he could determine thus far, he seemed to be maintaining that needed balance.

One of the officers, Henri Laporte, cocked his head. "Is there any point in particular which seems to you of special importance?"

Turenne shrugged. "Hard to say, of course, without some experience. But I suspect the most useful-immediately, at least-will be my summary account of the American Civil War. Pay particular attention to the depiction of cavalry tactics used by such officers as"-he fumbled a bit over the pronunciation of the names; Turenne's English was not fluent-"Forrest, Morgan, Sheridan… a number of others." Again, he shrugged. "You will understand that I was forced to interpret a great deal. The histories which Richelieu obtained were more often than not rather vague on precise matters of tactics… when they addressed them at all. Still, one thing seems clear enough."

Most of the officers assembled in the room were cavalrymen. Turenne gave them a long, sweeping-and very cold-stare. "Whatever romantic medieval notions of cavalry warfare you may still possess, I strongly urge you to abandon them now. Or I will have you dismissed, soon enough. This war we are entering now will be a war like no other. The cardinal-"

He hesitated. Turenne owed his unexpected elevation and influence entirely to Richelieu's favor. He was hardly inclined to criticize the man openly. Still, he was convinced that success would depend, as much as anything else, on the extent to which his newly formed officer staff could absorb the lessons of the future.

He cleared his throat. "Cardinal Richelieu, as you all know, is an extremely astute and wise leader. But he is not a soldier-"

Again, he broke off. That wasn't quite fair, after all. The cardinal had overseen several military campaigns, and from a close distance.

"Even if he were," he added a bit hastily, "he'd be likely to misgauge the situation." Again, he gestured toward the manuscripts. "You'll find a pithy little saying somewhere in those pages, which I was so taken by that I adopted it for my own. 'Generals always plan to fight the last war.' " A soft little chuckle went up from several of the officers.

"In any event, it is my belief that the cardinal is underestimating the effect which the new technology of the Americans is going to have on the tactics and methods used by Gustavus Adolphus." Harshly: "For certain, judging from my one brief meeting with him, Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar will make that mistake."

Most of the officers were now either scowling or wincing, or both. Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar led the mercenary army which controlled Alsace, on the payroll of the French crown. His reputation for arrogance and rudeness had become something of a byword among the officers of the French army, especially the ones who were young or not of noble birth.

"Bernhard, full of vainglory, will go straight at the Swede," predicted Turenne. "And-have no doubt of it-the Swede will crush him. And would crush us as well, did we make the same mistake." Again, the little gesture toward the manuscripts. "The weakness in the Swede will be his logistics. And that is where we will strike, gentlemen. So forget any fancies you might have about dramatic cavalry charges. Dragoons, we'll be, more often than not. Raiding, where we can, not fighting; and, when we must fight, doing so on the defensive as much as possible. If any of you finds that beneath your dignity, best you let me know at once. There will be no dramatic wheeling caracoles in our tactics, and precious few if any thundering charges."

He paused, waiting. Not to his surprise, none of the officers indicated any discomfort at his words. Turenne had handpicked them carefully.

"Good," he said, nodding. "Robert, would you be so kind as to remain behind?"

It was a clear dismissal. The officers moved over to the sidetable, each taking up one of the manuscripts, and quickly left the room. When they were gone, only Robert du Barry's stack remained.

Turenne gave the stack a glance. "You should read them also, of course. But I have something more important for you immediately." He led the way toward the little table in a corner where rested a larger manuscript.

"This is more technical in nature, Robert. I put it together as best I could from the material I had available." Quickly, Turenne sketched out the assignment he had in mind. When he was finished, du Barry's already florid face was almost brick red with suppressed anger.

"I have given you no reason-neither you nor the crown nor the cardinal-to doubt my loyalty. Furthermore-"

"Oh, do be quiet!" snapped Turenne. "Robert, I have never once inquired as to your religious beliefs. Neither has the cardinal. The fact that you-like me-come from a long line of Huguenots is irrelevant." A long and notorious line, he could have added. Robert du Barry's ancestor Jean de la Vacquerie had been the central figure in the so-called "conspiracy of Amboise" in the previous century.

" 'Irrelevant,' I say-except in one respect. Which does not reflect badly upon you in the least." Turenne placed a hand on the manuscripts. "It's all here, Robert," he said softly. "Everything we need-most of it, anyway, I'm convinced-to meet the Swedish king and his American wizards on level ground. Not immediately, no; hopefully, though, soon enough. But the books give us precious few specifics. In almost every case, they tell us only what the weapons could do, not how they actually did it. Perhaps that's because their readers already knew those things, while we do not. But the mere fact that we know what can be done will guide us in determining how to do it, of that I am confident. Yet it will take a large number of the best mechanics and gunsmiths in the world to carry this out-and they won't be able to do it unless they are properly organized and led. By a man who understands them and has the skill to manage them."

Du Barry's face was still flushed, but the color was beginning to fade a bit. "Can't do it without Protestants," he gruffed. "Does the cardinal understand that?"

Turenne smiled, a bit savagely. "I think he does more than simply 'understand' it, Robert. He is counting on it." He jerked his head toward the northern wall of the room. "Where will all those fine Dutch artisans go, once the Spanish bootheel is back on their necks? Eh?"

Turenne's thumb rifled idly through the first few pages of manuscript. "To Germany, some, to be sure. Looking for work from the Swede. But our spies tell us the Dutch are already resentful of the growing American reputation for being the world's best craftsmen. So…"

A slow smile spread across du Barry's face. "So the cardinal will offer them exile, will he?"

"Exile-and work. And at good wages." Turenne smiled himself. "When you think about it, the ports and manufacturing towns of northern France are much closer to Holland than central Germany, after all. And there will be no overweening and cocksure Americans to tell stout Dutch master gunsmiths and metalworkers that they are novices at their own trade. Just the firm leadership of a French officer who understands Protestants and can gently lead them to the light of a newer day."

"Ha!" By now, du Barry's flush was back to normal. He only made one last token protest.

"I should not like anyone to think I am flinching from the field of battle."

"Please, Robert! With your reputation?" Du Barry had been one of the only two officers in the room who was well into his thirties. He had quite an impressive record in the various French campaigns since the beginning of the war.

"And, besides," added Turenne smoothly, "I will explain to everyone that I was able to prevail upon you to undertake the assignment solely by dint of much pleading and begging."

He and du Barry shared a little laugh. Given the warmth of the moment, Turenne saw no reason to add what he could have added. And, if I'd had to, I would have used the secret information the cardinal gave me to blackmail you into it. There's no doubt about your loyalty, true enough. But your brother could be sent to the executioner tomorrow.

But he left the words unsaid. Turenne would have found saying them distasteful in the extreme, for one thing. For another, like Cardinal Richelieu himself, Turenne did not really care much about a man's private conscience-so long as he was faithful, in his public activities, to his duty to crown and country.

"Ha!" repeated du Barry. Turenne had chosen him for the assignment because Robert, unlike most officers, was familiar with the world of manufacture. As Turenne had suspected-and planned-he was finding the challenge an interesting one.

Du Barry picked up a sheaf of pages and began leafing through them. "Any suggestions for where to start?"

Turenne, as it happened-and much to his own surprise-had become quite fascinated with the challenge himself. "I can tell you where not to start," he growled. "You'll be working closely with Yves Thibault-you know him, I believe?"

Robert nodded.

"Well, don't let the old man convince you to devote much effort to"-again, Turenne stumbled over the pronunciation-"these 'breechloaders' he's become a fanatic about. Oh, to be sure, he's a master gunsmith-so let him fiddle around with a few. Who knows? We might even find he can make enough to be of use. But keep his nose to the wheel, Robert. Simplicity. Learn from the Americans themselves-you'll find more than a few spy reports in that stack also. 'Gearing down,' they call it. Make what you can now, in large enough quantities to affect the world in time."

Du Barry nodded, but Turenne could see that he was already becoming engrossed in what he was reading.

Good enough. What I need.

"Percussion caps, Robert. I can't tell, from the materials I had, exactly how they were made. But from the hints, we should be able to find out. And rifled muskets-not much different from today's hunting pieces. But with a clever American adaptation which enables quick loading on the battlefield. Again, I don't know exactly how it works. Richelieu's books weren't detailed enough. So find out-try different things. But it can be done, Robert. Huge armies, larger than any in Europe today, fought pitched battles with rifled muskets-muzzleloaders, not breechloaders-with which they could somehow maintain a fantastic rate of fire. Three shots a minute-and accurate to several hundred yards."

Du Barry's eyes widened. Turenne grinned.

"The best of it all, however… They called it a 'Miniй ball.' Which-ha!-they got from a Frenchman in the first place."

Du Barry's eyed widened. Turenne barked another laugh.

"Oh, yes! Welcome to the new world, Robert-and who is to say it can't be a French one?"

Chapter 22

"The streets are in chaos," Rebecca said, as soon as she came through the front door of the U.S. delegation's house in The Hague. "I never even made it to my interview with the prince."

Heinrich Schmidt came in after her, and closed the door. "It probably doesn't matter, anyway. According to most rumors, Frederik Henrik left The Hague yesterday. On his way north, according to some, trying to find out what happened. Others claim he went south-or east-in order to bolster the Dutch forces guarding the line of fortresses."

Rebecca sighed and rubbed her face. "Rumors, rumors-everywhere. Every corner is filled with knots of people arguing and exchanging rumors. Who knows what's really happening?"

Gretchen scowled. Jeff, sitting next to her on a couch, took a deep breath. "Well… if Frederik Henrik's really gone… there went our best chance to get a hearing from anybody who'd listen."

Rebecca went over to a nearby chair. "Yes, true enough." As she sat down, her hands slapped the arm rests in a gesture of exasperation. "Damn the Dutch and their obsessive sectarianism! Ever since we got here, the burghers and the regents have had us pigeon-holed as 'Arminians.' As if we care in the least about their stupid doctrinal disputes!"

Heinrich leaned back against the door and grinned coldly. "Calvinists, what do you expect? If you support freedom of conscience-as we do-you are no better than a spawn of Satan, Rebecca. Arminians-the devil's wolves already-dressed in sheep's clothing."

Wearily, Rebecca nodded her head. "Arminianism," in the parlance of the day, was what hardcore Calvinists called the moderate tendencies within Calvinism itself. The term was a vague one, measured by any objective intellectual standards, since it swept under one label such very different men and schools of thought as the Dutchman Grotius-now in exile-or the forces gathered around Bishop Laud in England.

But that very vagueness was an advantage to the hardcore Calvinists in the United Provinces. Under the official theology lurked hard-headed immediate material interests; and the real issues at stake were at least as much political and economic as they were religious. The bastions of hardcore Calvinism in Holland-the Counter-Remonstrants, as they were called-were in such towns as Haarlem and Leiden and Utrecht: manufacturing towns, basically, whose prosperity depended largely on the textile trade. A state of hostility with Spain worked to their advantage, since the Dutch blockade of the Flemish coast and their control over the outlets of the Rhine served to protect them against their Flemish and Brabantine competitors in the Spanish Netherlands. And thus they were hostile to any tendency within the United Provinces which, along theological lines, suggested the possibility of a compromise with Spain.

For its part, Arminianism in Holland had an equally material underpinning. The strongholds of the Arminians were the major port cities-Rotterdam and Amsterdam, along with the smaller towns of Dordrecht and Alkmaar and Delft. These cities depended for their prosperity on the carrying trade and fishing, and for them the continued state of hostilities since the end of the Twelve Years Truce in 1621 had been a major burden. Fine for the manufacturers of textiles-or the Zeeland merchants who depended on the inland trade-to wax hot and eloquent about the Anti-Christ and the devious ways of Popery. It wasn't their ships which were seized by the Spanish-backed privateers operating out of Dunkirk; nor was it their trade with Iberia and the Levant which had been destroyed; nor was it their herring fisheries which were suffering.

Complicating the mix was the long-standing political tug-of-war between the various levels of Dutch government, which was a complex entity: Holland versus the other six provinces; between the town councils and the States of Holland and the States General; the ongoing conflict between the merchant oligarchs who dominated the town councils of Holland and the nobility who were still the dominant class in the more agricultural areas.

Overriding everything else, perhaps, was the role of the House of Orange, the premier noble family of the United Provinces. In the summer of the year 1618, Mauritz of Nassau-the stadtholder of Holland and Zeeland provinces as well as the prince of Orange-had carried through, with the support of the hardcore Calvinists, what amounted to a coup d'йtat. The existing Arminian regime led by Oldenbarnevelt and Grotius had been overthrown. Oldenbarnevelt had been executed, and Grotius cast into prison.

For the next seven years, until his death in 1625, Mauritz had wielded greater personal authority in the United Provinces than any man since his father William the Silent had been assassinated in 1584. He had used that power to entrench the forces of hardcore Calvinism throughout the country. By the time of his death, however, the rigidities of the Counter-Remonstrants had produced a great deal of unrest, and under his successor Frederik Hendrik the balance had begun swinging the other way. Mauritz's half brother, if he lacked some of the martial glamour of other members of the illustrious House of Orange, possessed in full measure the political adroitness and skill of their great father William the Silent. So, steadily but surely, he had worked toward a more even balance of power between the various factions of Dutch society.

And, just as steadily, toward achieving a long-lasting settlement with Spain. Frederik Hendrik had used the prestige of his victorious siege of 's-Hertogenbosch in 1629-which had caused a sensation; the first really major defeat for Spanish arms in Europe since the Great Armada of 1588-to launch an effort to reach out and achieve an acceptable compromise with the Spanish Habsburgs.

As she reviewed this history in her mind, Rebecca had to control her own anger. There were times, she thought, when the history of Europe in her era could be summed up with a phrase from her father's beloved Shakespeare: sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Nothing beyond death and destruction, that is, tearing a continent apart and leaving millions slaughtered in its wake. And for no reason beyond the narrow and petty interests of the various factions in European society which ruled the lands-just as petty, on the part of Holland's merchants, as any princeling of Germany.

For months now, since December of 1632, Dutch and Spanish representatives had been negotiating a new peace. By the spring of 1633, it had appeared that a settlement was in the making-and a very good one, all things considered, from the long-term interests of both the independent and Spanish portions of the Low Countries. If anything, even more favorable to the United Provinces than to the Habsburg provinces in the south.

But the Counter-Remonstrants dug in their heels, and by the time Rebecca and the U.S. delegation arrived in Holland the talks had already collapsed. The hardcore Calvinists had been certain that, backed by France, the Dutch had no need to make any settlement with the Spanish, and so Spain had withdrawn from the talks and turned to its fleet and Don Antonio de Oquendo. And still the hardcore had been confident, for Richelieu's France, as always, had stood ready to support them against its traditional Habsburg enemies.

Now, it seemed, their little world was being turned upside down. The Mantuan War between France and Spain had ended two years earlier, freeing up the still-great strength of the Spanish empire to be brought to bear once again on the Low Countries. And if the rumors sweeping The Hague were true, and the French had set aside their long quarrel with Spain and turned against their Dutch allies…

Jeff said it for her: "Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind, huh?"

"Yes," she said, almost biting the word off. "Damnation! Just when I'd finally managed to cut my way through all the obstacles to get my first meeting with the prince of Orange himself!"

Exasperation drove her to her feet. "Enough. What is done is done. Until the situation settles down, there will be no way for us to meet with Frederik Hendrik. Nor do I see the point in any further 'discussions' "-the word was almost sneered-"with bigoted officials whose fine theological phrases are no more than a cover for greed. So-what should we do next?"

For a moment, there was silence. Then Heinrich, pushing himself away from the door, said forcefully: "Get out of The Hague, for a beginning. I do not share your confidence that there will be any 'settling down' of the situation, Rebecca. If the French have really switched allegiance and the English are in it also-which makes sense, given the message we just got from Melissa last night-then I think the Dutch are facing disaster."

"They've held out for over fifty years," protested Jeff.

But it was something of a feeble protest. Not even his wife agreed with him. "Don't be foolish, Jeff," said Gretchen. "Without France to back them up, the Dutch survival depends on their fleet alone."

"Best fleet in-"

"Not that much better," she growled. "And if the fleet is defeated, the Spanish will be able to get behind the line of fortifications at the frontier."

"And don't think for a minute," Heinrich added, "that the Spanish army isn't still the best in Europe. Their infantry, at least. For fifty years, everything has favored the Dutch-the political terrain even more than the physical. Change the French factor in the equation…"

For a moment, Rebecca was distracted by the expression. She could remember a time-not so long ago, really-when Heinrich Schmidt would not have used the language of mathematics in his metaphors. That, too, was one of the multitude of little ways that a few thousand Americans had begun a transformation in central Europe.

She took courage from the thought, and remembered her husband's oft-repeated little mantra: Buying time, Becky, that's what we're doing. Buying time, until all the little changes we're making start merging into a river that can't be stopped.

"I do not disagree, Heinrich," she said firmly. "So-yes. There is no point remaining here. If the war goes badly for the Dutch, The Hague will be too exposed. Amsterdam is where they will fall back. Best we get there quickly, before the roads become flooded with refugees. But relay Melissa's message to Julie and Alex in Scotland first. Hopefully, it will get through to them. They should be in Edinburgh by now."

Heinrich nodded, glanced at two of his soldiers standing against the far wall, and nodded again. Immediately, understanding the gesture, they headed for the door. Those were the two members of their party who spoke fluent Dutch, and the ones they'd come to rely upon to make whatever practical arrangements were needed. They would see to the task of hiring the necessary carriages for the journey to Amsterdam.

"We should leave someone behind," said Gretchen. "Two of us, with a radio-not Jimmy, we'll need him to set up the big radio again in Amsterdam-so we can keep informed of what's happening."

"Me," said Jeff immediately. "And either Franz or Jakob."

Gretchen froze for a minute, staring at her husband. Her face seemed to pale a bit.

Jeff shrugged. "With only two of us here, one of us has to speak the language well enough. I can't speak it hardly at all. And I've got to stay because, like you said, Jimmy has to go with the rest of you to Amsterdam. That leaves me. The only-" He broke off, for an instant. Then, harshly: "That leaves me."

Rebecca understood the meaning of that hard, clipped statement. Jeff was skirting around an issue which ran deep beneath the surface in the new society emerging in what was called the United States. Would the "old Americans"-the real Americans, as some thought of it-share in the risks and dangers of what they were forging? Or would they simply guide others in the doing? Rear echelon motherfuckers, in their own crude phrase, whose skills and knowledge were too valuable to risk on the front lines.

It was an old and long-running argument, both of whose sides Rebecca could understand. The fact was that almost any of the people who had been transplanted from the West Virginia of the future-any of them, at least, who were in their late teens-had a level of knowledge and skill which made them almost invaluable. Even with no more than a high school education, someone like Jeff Higgins understood more about science and technology than any European of the day. He could debate Galileo on astronomy-and win; Harvey on medicine-and win. Absurd to place such knowledge at the risk of being destroyed by a stray bullet or the diseases of a war zone.

And yet…

Perhaps-in the winning itself-lose everything. Saddle the world coming into being with an aristocracy of the robe which was no better, in the end, than any aristocracy of the sword. Create a world where, insidiously, American blood came to count for as much as the precious limpieza of the haughty Spanish hidalgos.

She hesitated, torn. As much as anything, because she had come to feel a deep love for the young American who had once saved her life-just as he had saved the lives of his German wife and her family.

The wife herself settled the issue. "Yes, you must," said Gretchen softly. Her hand slid into Jeff's and gave it a tight squeeze. Her eyes were moist. "You must."

The U.S. delegation set off for Amsterdam very early the next morning. Gretchen was the last to board, hugging Jeff fiercely until the last moment. Then, with a final kiss, climbed into the second one.

Jimmy leaned out of the window. "You sure you don't want the incendiaries too?"

Jeff shrugged. "What for? They're anti-shipping." His head jerked a little, indicating the surroundings. "The Hague's an inland town, in case you hadn't noticed. Besides…"

He bestowed on Jimmy a grin which he hoped had an aura of bravado about it. Instead of reflecting the fear which seemed to be coiling in his belly. "Besides, who's to say you won't be the ones catching all the grief? Hell, Jimmy, before too long you might find yourself on the docks of Amsterdam firing those incendiary grenades at the Spanish fleet. You'll be glad you have them, then."

His friend grinned back. Like Jeff's own, the expression was one of pure bravado. Jeff suspected Jimmy was probably as nervous as he was himself. But, dammit, he'd keep up the front.

"So long, buddy," Jeff said softly, as the carriage lurched into motion. "See you soon. I hope."

He watched until the carriage rounded the corner and vanished from sight. Then, with a little shrug, turned to face the other U.S. soldier who had volunteered to stay behind.

"I guess we might as well spend the rest of the day cruising the town, Jakob. Hell, who knows? We might even hear a piece of actual news mixed in with all the rumors."

"Not likely," grunted Jakob. "But we have nothing else to do, so why not? I need to buy us some more food, anyway. We may be on short rations, soon."

Julie burst into the room where Alex's father lay in his bed, recuperating from his injuries. Her face was flushed with anger. "I don't believe this sh-"

She broke off abruptly, remembering that she had just met her father-in-law a few days before. The trip to Scotland had been a long one, and while Alex's family had welcomed her readily enough, she was not exactly on comfortable Appalachian-cussing terms with them.

Not yet, at least. She had hopes for her father-in-law, if not the solemn woman he had married after his youthful escapades. (One of which, of course, had produced Alex himself.) Robert Mackay, even tortured by constant pain as he was, seemed like a rather cheerful soul.

Still-

"Must be the English, eh?" said Robert Mackay slyly, glancing at Alex. He winced as his son helped him rise up a bit from the pillows. "Nothing else, in my experience, produces quite such a sudden rush of fury. If I mistake me not, your lovely wife was about to utter a most indelicate term."

Julie flushed. Her father-in-law chuckled, glancing now at the corner where his bedpan was kept discreetly tucked away in a small cabinet. "Especially indelicate for a man in my position, given the miserable contortions I must go through just to take a simple shit."

Julie tried to keep from laughing. And… couldn't. Her father-in-law's grin at her raucous glee was good-natured. Amazingly so, really, for a man who was now paralyzed from the waist down and whose chances of survival for more than a few months were dim. Horsefalls could be as devastating as car accidents, Julie had learned over the past two years-but without 21 st -century medical care to repair the damage on those who survived.

Alex was smiling broadly. Not so much at the little exchange between Julie and her father itself, she knew, but simply because he was glad to see the developing warmth between two of the three people he cared most about in the world. She knew he'd been worried about that, though he'd never spoken of it to her.

17 th -century Scot Calvinist nobleman esteemed father-meet my, ah, not-Calvinist, not-noble, ah, not-entirely-respectful, ah, sometimes-downright-impudent, ah, new wife. Did I mention she's from the future and thinks we have the toilet habits of wild animals? And thinks Edinburgh is probably the asshole of the universe?

She kept laughing. Now that she'd come to know her father-in-law a bit, she suspected that Robert Mackay might well have agreed. With the last, anyway. Edinburgh did have the reputation, even among the people of the time, for being the foulest and least sanitary town in Europe. And whatever aristocratic notions Robert possessed-plenty, of course-he did seem able to look reality in the face.

Perhaps awakened by the levity in the nearby room, the third of Alex's most beloved people began making her presence known. Loudly and insistently, as was her habit.

Julie began to turn around. "Oh, leave it be, lass!" exclaimed Robert. "T'won't hurt the girl to learn the world is a cold and callous place. I swear, you coddle Alexi."

Julie danced back and forth, torn between her new mother's reflexes and her desire not to quarrel with her father-in-law.

"What's the news, Julie?" asked Alex.

"Oh." Julie scowled. "I just got a message from Becky. Would you believe-?"

By the time she finished summarizing the developments for her husband and father-in-law, Robert was scowling as fiercely as she was.

"So it begins," he growled. "I knew it. I knew those sweet words from the king's new man were a disguise for tyranny."

Alexi's yowls grew louder. Julie, with the tender skin of a first-time mother, could no longer resist. Mumbling apologies, she hurried from the room.

After she was gone, Alex turned to his father. "Explain. Please."

Robert shrugged. The little motion caused him to wince. "Don't ever smash your spine, son," he muttered. "T'isn't worth the thrill of the hunt, I assure you."

He paused, waiting for the worst of the pain to subside. Then, speaking in short, clipped sentences:

"Wentworth. You may remember him. Was Lord President of the North when you left to take Swedish colors. Strafford, now. The king made him an earl. He gave the presbyters all they wanted. No interference with service. No English prayer book. Do as we will. But don't meddle in England."

Alex frowned. "What bothers you about that? I'd think-"

His father, visibly, restrained himself from making a violent gesture that might flood his ruptured body with pain again. "Don't be as stupid as the presbyters. Sorry damn churchmen. Sure and certain, Wentworth will leave us be. For now. Why not? Leave Scots to their own-do I need to explain this to you, whom I've never been able to legitimize because of it?-and within a year they'll be ripping at each other again. Damn all clans and sects and factions anyway."

He stared bleakly at his son. "We've always been pawns in their hands, Alex. Only the Irish are worse. At least they have the excuse of being sorry superstitious priest-ridden papists." Another pause, fighting down pain. Then: "Five years from now, ten at the latest… after Wentworth has his French state, he'll be leading his troops to the north. Promises be damned, then. England's promises are as worthless as Scotland's leaders."

Jeff and Jakob got back to their quarters by early afternoon, not having learned much of anything. The rumors were still flying all over, but they were hopelessly contradictory. Jakob disappeared thereafter, saying he had business to attend to. By the time he returned, shortly after sundown, it had all became a moot point. Jeff had just received a radio message from Rebecca. Traveling by coach, on the good road to Amsterdam, she and her party had been able to make the trip in one day.

The message was short and to the point:

ARRIVED IN AMSTERDAM. RUMORS CONFIRMED. GET OUT NOW. DO NOT WAIT. START TONIGHT IF POSSIBLE. DAWN TOMORROW LATEST. LOOK FOR US AT-

The rest was convoluted directions to find a tavern in Amsterdam where someone would meet them. Jeff didn't even try to memorize it.

"For Pete's sake," he muttered, glancing helplessly at Jakob. "Start tonight? As badly as I ride a horse in the daytime? And where are we going to get horses that fast anyway?"

Jakob smiled. "Relax. I thought of everything. While you were lounging about, I bought us some horses with the money Becky left us. Unlike you silly optimistic up-timers, I know the world stinks and news is always bad." He motioned toward the door with his thumb. "Get packed. The horses are in a nearby stable. We can be out of town in an hour. The weather is as good as possible and there's enough of a moon. Ride all night and we'll be in Amsterdam sometime in the afternoon tomorrow, even as badly as you ride. We'll be exhausted, sure, especially you. But exhaustion can be fixed. Dead is forever."

"I'll fall off," Jeff whined. "Horses don't like me."

"I bought 'mounts,' I should have said. I told you I thought of everything. For you, I bought a mule. Looks like a very nice and gentle beast." Jakob's chest swelled. "For me, of course, a proper charger! Well, of sorts."

The mule did seem like a reasonable creature, Jeff decided, after riding on it for a bit. Fortunately, Jakob was not trying to drive the animals any faster than a walk, visibility was not terrible, and the Dutch road was in fine shape.

Eventually, Jeff concluded he would survive the experience. That left him enough energy to dwell on his other grievance.

He glowered up at Jakob. Jeff was a large man, riding a small mule. Jakob, a small man riding a full-size horse. The German-born soldier seemed to loom over him.

"This is ridiculous," Jeff complained. "How did you get to play Don Quixote and I'm stuck being Sancho Panza?" After a moment: "Well, maybe it's not such a bad deal. At least you get to fight the windmills."

He could barely see Jakob's frown of puzzlement in the moonlight. "Never heard of them. And why would anyone fight a windmill?"

"They're characters in a book."

"Oh." Jakob's serene smile returned. "Another problem with you up-timers. You wrote too many books. All of them with those silly happy endings."

"It's already written," grumbled Jeff. "Thirty years ago, now. Something like that. By a Spaniard named Cervantes."

"Ah! Then why bother reading it at all? Written by a Spaniard-in the here and now? The story will end in death and destruction and horror and misery. The Spaniards are no fools, except the one who wasted his time writing it. Who needs a book to figure that out?"

Chapter 23

Jesse watched carefully as Hans completed his third landing of the flight and let the aircraft roll to a stop, as instructed. Saying nothing, Jesse motioned for Hans to taxi back to takeoff position and made a last notation on his kneeboard. Though within tolerances, the landing had been the roughest of the three and none had been close to Hans' best.

Well, you can't wait forever, Jesse mused.

"Okay, stop here and keep her running," he told Hans, when they were again pointed into the wind. He watched Hans' eyes go round as he unbuckled his harness and took off his kneeboard.

"I think I'll go talk to Kathy for a minute," Jesse said. "Why don't you take her up and do a couple of touch-and-gos, followed by a full stop?"

He opened his door and stepped out. "And-Hans!" he yelled, over the prop noise at the gaping student, "Don't screw the pooch, okay?"

Jesse secured the door, blocking the view of his startled student, and walked around the tail. He waved at the usual onlookers lounging by the edge of the field. A few of them, judging from the way their own eyes seemed to widen a bit, were suddenly realizing they were seeing something different today. The man the Germans had begun calling "Der Adler"-the Eagle-was walking swiftly away from the still-running aircraft, leaving Hans alone.

The nickname embarrassed Jesse, but he'd stopped trying to prevent people from using it. It came naturally enough to the Germans, who were still in some awe of the man who actually flew.

And now… for the first time, a German himself would be flying. Alone, with no eagle from the future to watch over him.

Jesse deliberately averted his eyes from the aircraft as he strode on, knowing that Hans would need the time to gather his wits. He heard the engine run up as he approached the control tower and saw that Kathy and Sharon had come out to meet him. Behind them came the other eight youngsters-six young men and two young women-who, along with Hans, constituted the first class of the fledgling air force. Jesse put his arm around Kathy's waist and turned back to watch the birth of a pilot.

"Do you really think he's ready?" Sharon asked nervously.

"Dunno," he replied, eyes glued to the aircraft. "We'll find out."

"Ouch!" he said, as Kathy's sharp elbow struck his ribs. "Don't worry, Sharon, I wouldn't let him go if I didn't think he was ready."

Jesse gave Sharon a smile, which she returned weakly.

"Watch carefully, now. I guarantee he'll want to talk about it later."

She looked into his calm, green eyes and nodded.

Jesse turned back to observe the takeoff with the realization that much more than his precious aircraft was at stake here. In some way, he understood, another brick was being laid in the forging of a nation-a true nation, not simply a crazy-quilt patchwork of tribes and customs. Once a boy-young man-born and bred in 17 th -century Germany could demonstrate that he, too, could do the impossible…

He took a deep breath and tried to settle his own nerves. It was easy enough, really. Truth be told, Jesse wasn't overly concerned about the outcome of the flight. Hans was a good pilot and Jesse had intentionally delayed this moment to make sure he had all the skills he needed. Still, a crash would be disastrous, both for Hans and his country.

The aircraft passed them, lifted smoothly off the grass, and climbed steadily outward. Jesse looked down into his wife's knowing eyes and absently kissed her forehead, then looked up to follow the aircraft. Kathy said nothing, which he appreciated. She knew he was still deeply in his instructor mode and would stay there until Hans returned.

The three of them waited together as Hans flew the traffic pattern in the brilliant blue sky. They'd been getting a lot of good weather lately, and Jesse had taken full advantage of it. The one thing the Las Vegas Belle was not-not even close-was an all-weather aircraft. On days with bad weather or even poor visibility, Jesse didn't go up at all. He'd trust himself in bad conditions, even with such a primitive airplane-within limits, at least-but he didn't want to risk it with trainee pilots at the controls.

As the aircraft at last turned onto final, Jesse felt Kathy's arm slide around his own waist and give him a reassuring squeeze. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kathy look at Sharon and, seeing the young woman about to speak-no doubt wanting some reassurance herself-shook her head slightly. Again, he was grateful for his new wife's understanding. Jesse's concentration was entirely on Hans and the airplane.

On course, on glideslope. Jesse mentally repeated an approach controller's standard reassuring advisory, almost as a mantra. His practiced eye detected no deviation, no wild control movements. On course, on glideslope.

The aircraft slid over the field boundary and settled onto the grass without a trace of a bounce, so sweetly that Jesse had to stifle the urge to yell an exultant "Yes!" Instead, as Hans added power and took off again, Jesse slowly exhaled and smiled at Sharon.

"What'd I tell ya?" he demanded. "Piece of cake."

Hans' second circuit was almost as uneventful as the first. Though at one point he allowed the aircraft to slide below the proper glide path, he quickly corrected and made a good, if firm, landing. All the while, Jesse's eyes never left the aircraft, mentally projecting instructions to his student, willing him to succeed.

The third and final approach was as precise as the first and, true to the old saying that a good approach makes for a good landing, the touch down was again perfect. As Hans taxied toward them, Jesse could no longer restrain himself.

"Damn, that kid is good! He reminds me of-me!"

"Jesus, pilots and their egos," Kathy said, looking meaningfully at Sharon. "Don't say I didn't warn you."

Jesse snorted, "Hush, woman! Get ready to hail the conquering hero."

"I still say we should have had someone here from town," Kathy complained.

"What, and listen to Stearns or somebody give another speech?" Jesse smiled. "Not likely. Besides, this is Air Force business today." He went to grab a set of chocks.

With the aircraft chocked and shut down, the three of them waited for Hans to emerge. Behind them, the other trainee pilots lined up and came to attention. As the door opened and Hans stepped out, a cheer rose from the group of onlookers at the perimeter fence-a very loud cheer, and one which went on and on. In fact, it seemed to be picking up steam as it went. Two young men, on horseback, began galloping toward the town.

Hans looked slightly dazed, as if just now realizing what he had done. Snapping into focus, he gave Sharon a smile, but, for the moment, his primary attention was on his instructor, the man who had taught him to fly. He walked over and stood at attention in front of Jesse. He did not salute, although Jesse could see the boy's arm practically twitching in his desire to do so. But Jesse had always thought saluting-like wearing hats-was a silly damn thing to do in the vicinity of aircraft. And since he was the commanding officer in this universe's version of an air force, he'd damn well seen to it that his own relaxed attitudes set the new traditions. Salutes were dramatic, sure, but they distracted people who should be paying attention to the aircraft around them. And hats invariably just wound up getting blown off. A waste of time, at best, chasing after them.

Coming to attention, on the other hand, was a reasonable military custom. Jesse did the same himself, and looked sternly at Hans.

"Cadet Richter." The older man raised an open hand holding a set of silver insignia. He'd quietly had it made the week before-along with a number of others-by Grantville's major jewelry store, Roth, Nasi Rueckert. "Or perhaps, I should say, 'Lieutenant' Richter, because these will be yours in a minute and the rank goes with them. On the occasion of your having successfully completed undergraduate pilot training, I am pleased to announce in my capacity as Chief of Staff that you have achieved the rating of pilot in the United States Air Force."

Jesse looked at Sharon. "Miss, would you kindly do the honors?"

Hans stood stiffly at attention as Sharon took the insignia from Jesse, carefully pinned them over Hans' left breast pocket, and gave him a quick kiss. As she stepped back, Jesse could see tears beginning to well in her smiling eyes. He looked down at the insignia on Hans' chest-shiny silver wings with the radiator shield in the center-and felt a sudden lump in his own throat.

Jesse stepped forward and solemnly offered his hand.

"Congratulations, son. Very well done. I'm proud of you."

"Thank you, sir," Hans choked out.

Jesse smiled at him, "Oh, Hans, try to remember one thing, will you?"

Hans smiled broadly in return, "Yes, sir. I promise to remember. 'Don't screw the pooch.' "

Whatever Jesse might have wanted, soon became a moot point. Within an hour, Mike Stearns was out at the airfield along with, this time, what looked to be the entire cabinet except those members of it who were out of town. All of them tried to cram their way into the lower floor of the combination control tower and Air Force headquarters. Mike and Frank Jackson were the only ones actually able to get in, because the room was already packed with those people Jesse himself considered its proper habituйs-himself, Hans, the other youngsters he was training as pilots, and their various womenfolk or boyfriends.

"I am not a politician," growled Jesse, as soon as Mike came in. "So spare me the lecture. I told you-"

"Oh, be quiet," chuckled Mike. "I didn't come here to give you a hard time, you old grouch. I just wanted to invite you to the parade."

"What parade?"

Mike and Frank were both grinning. "The one I just told Henry Dreeson to organize," replied Mike. "You may not be a politician, but I am." He shrugged. "Hey, sure, it's a dirty job-but somebody's got to do it."

"It's gonna be one hell of big one, too," Frank added. Jesse frowned. He was a little surprised by the very evident tone of satisfaction in Frank's voice. As a rule, the head of the U.S. Army shared Jesse's own skepticism about the often rough-and-tumble nature of politics in the new United States.

Frank shook his head. "Don't be stupid. We just got another message over the radio this morning. From Becky. She's in Amsterdam now, Jesse. The first rumors about the destruction of the Dutch fleet seem pretty well confirmed. And from what she can tell, the Dutch are starting to fall apart. Apparently-we still don't really know how they pulled it off-the Spanish have taken Haarlem. That means they've cut Holland in half, and they've got their troops behind the Dutch line of fortifications. You know what that means, in this day and age."

Jesse sucked in a breath. In the 17 th century, warfare was mainly a matter of siegecraft, not field maneuvers. For decades, the Dutch had held off the Spanish with their walled towns and fortresses along the outlets of the Rhine. If the Spanish had gotten behind those lines…

"It's probably even worse than that," added Mike. "Becky's not sure yet, but from what reports they've been able to piece together-the news from England matches, too-it looks as if Richelieu's alliance is moving into the Baltic. With the Dutch fleet destroyed, that means the Swedes will be facing the French and the Danes and the English alone."

"What about the Spanish?" asked Hans. "Uh, sir." Despite the gravity of the moment, Jesse had to fight down a smile. The mere fact that young Hans could even ask a question in such august company was a subtle but sure sign of the effect on his self-confidence of that new insignia on his chest.

But Jesse didn't have much trouble suppressing the smile. He's going to need that self-confidence, soon enough. God damn it all to hell.

"From what we can tell, the Spanish seem to have dropped aside," Frank replied. "Makes sense, when you think about it. This alliance of Richelieu's-they're calling it 'the League of Ostend,' apparently-is a devil's alliance if you ever saw one. Each of the parties to it has their own agenda and their own axes to grind. It's bound to fall apart, eventually, but in the meantime…"

Mike picked up the thought. "In the meantime, like Frank says, it all makes sense. The Danes get the control of the Baltic they've always wanted, the Spanish get the Low Countries, and King Charles gets the French and Spanish money he needs to clamp down in England and keep his throne-and his head. We've gotten word from Melissa that the streets of London are being flooded with newly hired mercenary troops."

"But what do the French get out of it?" asked Kathy. "For themselves, I mean. Just looking at it, it seems like they're doing a lot of fighting-not to mention shelling out money-and not getting much in return."

Mike shrugged. "They slam a hammerblow at Gustav Adolf, if nothing else. With the Baltic under their control, Sweden is cut off from the rest of the Confederated Principalities of Europe. And, while I'm not positive, I think…" He hesitated, for a moment. "I don't want to get into how we know, but we have gotten some news from the French ports."

Jesse, as commander of the little air force, was privy to the U.S. government's intelligence secrets. That'll be Uriel and Balthazar Abrabanel's network of Jewish sailors. A considerable number of the "Portuguese" seamen of the time were actually marranos-"secret Jews," keeping their identity hidden from the Spanish Inquisition.

"An expedition left a few weeks ago-pretty big one; six ships and over a thousand soldiers-heading for North America."

Kathy frowned. "But… if the French try to conquer the English settlements-"

" 'Conquer' isn't the right word," said Mike harshly. "According to our information, they are simply going to take 'rightful possession'-of properties which King Charles of England signed over to them as part of the deal. I assume, of course, that the soldiers will be used to overrun the handful of Dutch settlements in the New World."

Frank Jackson's face was twisted into a grimace. "Yeah, a bit of twist. 'Plymouth Rock' is about to become a French colony-whether the Puritans like it or not. So's Jamestown."

Jesse closed his eyes, and brought up the image of a world map into his mind. "Jesus Christ," he muttered, "do you really think Richelieu is looking that far ahead?"

"Yes, I do." Mike's voice was even harsher, now. "I think we've been underestimating Richelieu all along. He's not like the rest of them, Jesse. Charles-even Wentworth-Olivares in Spain, King Christian of Denmark-God knows that narrow-minded bigot Emperor Ferdinand of Austria and the greedy pig Maximilian of Bavaria-they're all just looking at what's in front of their noses. Say what else you will about him, Richelieu is a statesman. He's considering the long-term interests of France. As smart as he is, with the history books he's gotten his hands on, I think he's seen the overall pattern for the next several centuries: whoever controls North America is going to have the edge. So I think he's carrying through a radical realignment of French foreign policy. I think he's decided that squabbling over little pieces of territory in Europe is short-sighted and stupid. Why drain France for twenty-five years in a war with Spain, just to wind up with a handful of extra towns? When he can let the Spanish and the Danes and the English-and whoever else he can rope in-hammer away at the CPE while he swipes an entire continent? Dirt cheap, at the price."

Suddenly, Hans shot to his feet and stood at attention. "I am at your command, sir!" Immediately, the other trainee pilots followed his lead.

Mike smiled at them. "Good enough. The first thing you're going to do-right now-is be the stars in a parade."

Jesse was back to scowling. Mike transferred the smile to him. "A grouch, like I said. Don't be shortsighted yourself, Jesse. Me, I think Richelieu just goofed. And I intend to prove it by swiping a bit from French history."

"What are you talking about?" gruffed Jesse. "What I know about French history…"

Frank snorted. "You have heard about something called 'the French revolution,' I hope."

"Well. Sure. What's that-"

"What blew it wide open was when the surrounding powers of Europe invaded France. Pissed the average Frenchman off right proper, that did. And so before you knew it the volunteer columns of the revolutionary army were forming up, and… the world was never the same afterward. War stopped being something princes and mercenaries fought on top of the bodies of helpless civilians. The civilians became citizens, you see. With their own kind of army."

Frank was grinning again. "Hell, Jesse, I even learned the tune. Allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire-"

Everybody in the room winced. Jesse shot to his feet. "Enough! Enough! Even a damn parade beats listening to you trying to sing!"

By the time the parade was over, late in the afternoon, Jesse was willing to concede that Mike had been right. Truth to tell, he was beginning to suspect that Mike Stearns had the makings of a great politician-or, at least, a great politician for the times. Even, maybe-though the word made Jesse uncomfortable-a "statesman."

Mike too, he knew, was thinking in the long run. A war, in itself, is just a war. History recorded thousands of them, all but a relative handful forgotten by anyone except scholars. Every now and then, though, a war became something else.

The crucible of a nation. The forge on which a new society was hammered.

Listening to the chants and slogans which thundered throughout the streets of Grantville that day, Jesse realized he was hearing the hammer blows of that forging. The town was packed, with people pouring in by the minute from the surrounding countryside. He'd seen at least four places where the Committees of Correspondence had set up impromptu enlistment booths, recruiting people into volunteer regiments. Every one of the booths had a long line of young men standing patiently before it. Almost all of them, young Germans-and almost all of those, German commoners. The sons of farmers and artisans-paupers, too-now signing up to engage in an enterprise which, for their society, had always been the business of kings and nobles and mercenaries.

Lambs, deciding they were lions. Choosing to be lions.

Not simply civilians. Not even simply civilians who were allowed to vote.

Citizens.

There had been many slogans chanted that day. But, always, one slogan rose over the rest whenever Jesse and his little crew of fledgling pilots rode by the crowd in the pickups which had been commandeered for the purpose.

Der Adler! Und seine Falken! The Eagle, and his Hawks.

"Oh, Jesse," Kathy whispered into his ear at one point, hugging him tightly. "I'm so proud of you. They think they can do anything, now. That's because you showed them they could even fly."

Chapter 24

Momma hadn't wanted her to come.

Kristina wasn't entirely sure why that was. On the other hand, there were a lot of things she didn't understand about Momma. Not that Kristina didn't love her mother. But there were times when Momma seemed just a little… odd. She seemed to change her mind a lot. And it was important to her that people appreciated her-and told her so.

Kristina was only seven years old-well, almost eight-but it seemed to her that some of the people who kept telling Momma how much they appreciated her wanted things from her. Usually things Poppa and Chancellor Oxenstierna wouldn't give them… or let Momma give them. Which could make things around the palace very uncomfortable.

Things were especially uncomfortable in the palace just now. Everyone seemed very upset and worried about the Danes and the French. Kristina knew where France was, of course. She loved maps. And she knew all about that awful old Richelieu, who ran France instead of the French king. But only a year or so before, Richelieu had been Poppa's friend. Now, he was an enemy.

It was all very confusing. She understood why King Christian was an enemy. Danes were nasty. They wanted to keep Sweden penned up in the Gulf of Finland while they had the Baltic all to themselves. Which was ugly and greedy of them. Especially since the Baltic belonged to Poppa, exactly as it would someday belong to Kristina. So, of course, King Christian was going to do whatever he could to hurt Poppa. But just why Richelieu would help him was something Kristina was still working on figuring out.

It would have helped if someone would explain it to her. People ought to explain things to her. After all, she was the crown princess of Sweden. Someday, she would be queen, too. But except for Poppa, and sometimes her tutors (who were usually so boring about it all), people very seldom explained to her. They didn't care that she was a princess; they just treated her as if she were a baby who couldn't understand anything. Which was really, really unfair of them, because how was she supposed to understand things if no one bothered to explain them to her in the first place?

That was one of the reasons she was so happy that she was going to Magdeburg, whatever Momma thought about it. Poppa had made Magdeburg his new capital, which meant she would finally get to see him sometimes. Poppa was the most wonderful man in the world. Everybody in Stockholm said so, and even if they hadn't, Kristina thought he was the most wonderful man in the world. But he was always so busy, always off fighting the bad people. The Poles, the Russians, the Danes, the Spanish, the Germans-some of them, anyway; the good Germans were on Poppa's side-and now the Danes (and the French) all over again. He beat them all, of course. But because he had to spend so much time doing that, Kristina had never really gotten to spend very much time with him. So she was looking forward to changing that.

On top of that, it was September. It wouldn't be very long before the snow began, and they got a lot of snow in Stockholm. It wasn't that Kristina didn't like snow. It was just that once the snow began, it stayed so long. From what her tutors had told her, Magdeburg wouldn't get snowed on as much as Stockholm did.

But most exciting of all to Kristina, Magdeburg had Americans in it. Real Americans. Americans from the future, not just from Germany. Kristina had heard all sorts of wonderful tales about the Americans and their machines. Some of them, she suspected, were the sort of made-up stories people told to little girls because they expected little girls to believe anything. But it even half of them were true…

She stood on the deck of the forty-gun Margaret as the warship glided further into Wismar Harbor. Sailors hurried about the decks and swarmed up the rigging as they furled the sails. The ship slowed even more, barely moving forward at all, and then the anchor splashed into the water and disappeared. The anchor cable streamed out after it, and then, a moment later, Margaret gave a tiny shiver as the cable went taut and snubbed away the last of her movement.

Kristina wanted to dash to the rail and stare curiously at the shore. But she was a princess, and princesses (as Momma had explained to her at great length) didn't go running around gawking at things like some ill-bred peasant. So Kristina made herself stand still on the poop deck beside Lady Ulrike, her governess. Lady Ulrike had a tiresome habit of agreeing with Momma about things like running to see what was happening. Actually, Kristina was pretty sure that that was the reason Momma had wanted Lady Ulrike as her governess, and she wondered if there were some way she could convince Poppa to pick someone else. Momma wouldn't like that, of course, but Poppa was the only person Kristina knew who was perfectly willing to tell Momma to do things his way. Of course, Poppa was very brave. Everyone said so.

Kristina smiled to herself at the thought even as she tucked her hands primly and properly into her fur muff. It was cool enough out here on the water to make her genuinely grateful for the muff's warmth, but mostly she did it to keep Lady Ulrike happy and avoid any words like "hoyden."

The sailors were running around doing all sorts of mysterious sailor things. Some of them were coiling ropes neatly, others were scampering about in the rigging, tying the folded-up sails to the yards. But some of them were also bringing Kristina and Lady Ulrike's baggage up on deck, and Kristina saw a big rowboat coming across the harbor toward Margaret.

It didn't take the boat long to reach Margaret. A man in a leather coat and cavalry boots, with a sword at his side, climbed up the wooden battens fastened to the ship's side. He nodded at Margaret's captain, but he also walked straight across to Kristina.

"Your Highness," he said, bowing gravely to her. "Welcome to Wismar. I am Colonel Ekstrom. Your father, the king, has instructed me to escort you to join him at Magdeburg."

Colonel Ekstrom had a big nose, almost as strong as Poppa's (or Kristina's, for that matter), and a thick, closely trimmed brown beard. And he had nice eyes, Kristina decided. They looked very serious at the moment, but there was a twinkle hiding somewhere down in their gray depths.

"Thank you, Colonel," she told him politely.

"No thanks are necessary, Your Highness," Colonel Ekstrom assured her. "It will be my pleasure. Unfortunately," he looked across at Lady Ulrike, and the twinkle Kristina had thought she'd seen in his eyes disappeared completely, "it will be necessary for us to begin our journey immediately."

Lady Ulrike's face tightened the way it did whenever Kristina did something naughty. She opened her mouth as if she were going to say something, but then she closed it again and simply nodded. Kristina recognized that nod. It was the sort of nod grown-ups used when they didn't want to talk about something in front of children. Usually something interesting.

"If you would see to stowing the princess's baggage in my boat, Captain," Colonel Ekstrom continued, turning back to Margaret's captain, who had followed him across the deck, "we can be on our way now."

Kristina decided that she was in favor of whatever was obviously worrying the adults about her. Well, maybe not actually in favor of it, because it was pretty clear that Colonel Ekstrom and Lady Ulrike were really worried about whatever it was they were carefully not discussing in front of her. But whatever it was, it couldn't be all bad from Kristina's viewpoint, because no one was making her ride in a carriage. Kristina hated carriages. They were stuffy, and uncomfortable. Even on a good road, they bounced and jounced whenever they weren't actively swaying, and most of the time they made Kristina sick to her stomach. And, of course, there were very few good roads. Certainly, the one they were on today was a terrible one. She was pretty sure she would already have been throwing up if they'd made her ride over it in a carriage, but they hadn't. Instead, they had provided her with a horse. A wonderful horse Poppa had captured from the Austrians just for her!

Kristina loved horses, and they liked her. She was just as happy Momma wasn't here to see this one, though. Momma worried. Momma hadn't wanted Kristina to stop riding ponies, and she would have had a fit if she'd seen Kristina perched atop her new horse. Lady Ulrike didn't look especially happy about it herself, but one thing Kristina had to admit about her governess was that Lady Ulrike was one of the best horsewomen in Sweden. In fact, Kristina had heard one of the other court ladies say once that the only reason Poppa had agreed with Momma to make Lady Ulrike Kristina's governess was that he'd seen Lady Ulrike riding on the hunting field. Whether that was true or not, Lady Ulrike never fussed over Kristina's horses… although she was as quick to correct a fault in her charge's seat in the saddle as she was to correct any other error in deportment.

Kristina was so happy to be riding the new chestnut mare that it took her a little while to realize that they were riding almost due south. That didn't seem right. She'd sneaked into Poppa's study in the palace when she heard they were going to send her to Magdeburg and spent two cheerful hours with his big maps. Professor Belzoni, her favorite tutor, had started teaching her geography last year, and Kristina had put his instruction to good use as she pored over the maps of Northern Germany. Which was how she knew that Magdeburg was on the Elbe River. And the Elbe River was west of Wismar. So why were they heading south up a muddy dirt road beside a great big ditch full of water?

Colonel Sigvard Ekstrom rode just behind the princess and her companion. Although Ekstrom had become a member of Gustavus Adolphus' personal staff shortly after the Battle of the Alte Veste, he'd never previously met Princess Kristina. But he was himself the father of no fewer than three sons and two daughters of his own, so he'd been prepared to put the king's descriptions of his daughter's intelligence down to the natural pride and fondness of any father for his only child. Now, as he watched Kristina riding as naturally as if she were a part of the chestnut Andalusian mare, he realized that, if anything, the king had understated the blond-haired princess' intelligence. It was already evident to him that Lady Ulrike found herself hard pressed to stay ahead of the girl. It wasn't so much anything Kristina had said. Truth to tell, she hadn't actually said very much at all. A very well-behaved child, Ekstrom thought approvingly, especially compared to some of the highbred brats he had encountered among the ranks of Germany's aristocracy!

Yet the princess' eyes were very like her father's, windows on a sharp, incisive brain that watched everything about her. Unless he was sadly mistaken, she also nourished a healthy sense of mischief and deviltry… also very like her father, come to that. If he hadn't known how old she was, he would have guessed her age at closer to twelve than to seven, although she certainly wasn't particularly large for her age. When she actually did approach twelve, he thought, she was probably going to be quite a handful.

"Excuse me, Colonel," she said, turning to look at him almost as if she'd heard him thinking about her, "but are we headed the right way?"

"I beg your pardon, Your Highness?" he asked in some surprise.

"We're going south," she explained, pointing ahead along the muddy road-if calling such a track a "road" wasn't a gross insult to that fine and ancient noun.

"Yes, Your Highness, we are," he acknowledged.

"But we're supposed to be going to Magdeburg," she said reasonably. She gazed up at the sun for a moment, as if orienting herself, and then pointed to the west. "Shouldn't we be heading for the Elbe?" she asked.

Ekstrom felt his eyebrows rise, despite his best effort to suppress his astonishment. He'd known cavalry officers, some of them considerably senior to himself, who wouldn't have realized that, at the moment, they were headed away from the Elbe.

"In a way, Your Highness," he explained, urging his horse a little closer to hers, "we are headed for the Elbe. But not directly. This"-he pointed at the muddy ditch beside the road-"used to be a canal, which connected Lake Schwerin to Wismar. Lake Schwerin connects to the Elde River up ahead of us-" he pointed to the south, "-and another canal connects the Elde to the Elbe up at a town called Dцmitz. And Dцmitz is quite a bit closer to Magdeburg than Lauenburg, where the canal from Luebeck reaches the Elbe."

He was surprised, as he listened to his own voice, to find himself explaining in such detail to a child. But Princess Kristina listened closely, one hand gently stroking the thick, wavy mane of her horse. Then she nodded, but her expression was pensive.

"So, actually," she said, "it's faster to go this way?"

"Exactly, Your Highness."

"But if it's faster to go this way, why did this canal"-she gestured at the water-filled ditch-"get into such a mess? I mean, wouldn't it be smarter to use it instead of horses? Of course," she added quickly, "I really like horses. But boats can carry more."

"Indeed they can, Your Highness," Ekstrom agreed, doing his level best to keep his fresh surprise at her perceptiveness from showing. "In fact, your father the king thinks the same thing. That's why he's having this canal repaired and rebuilt. When it's finished, we'll be able to ship things straight from Wismar to Magdeburg."

"But why did whoever dug it in the first place let it get all clogged up?"

"Well, Your Highness, that's a bit difficult to explain," Ekstrom said. "I suppose the main reason is that it costs a lot of money to keep a canal like this working properly. The people who dug it ran out of money, so they couldn't maintain the canal and it started silting up. I mean, it started filling up with mud."

"But now Poppa is going to dig it out again," Kristina said with obvious pride, and Ekstrom nodded.

"That's precisely what the king intends to do," he said. Assuming, of course, that Richelieu and Christian between them don't finally manage to bring him down, he added mentally. But that wasn't anything to be sharing with a child. Not even one as frighteningly precocious as this one.

"It's awfully twisty, though," Kristina observed after a moment. "Wouldn't it be better if it was straighter?"

"Yes, it would, Your Highness." Despite himself, Ekstrom looked over his shoulder at Lady Ulrike. The princess' companion gave him an ironic smile, as if welcoming him into her own sometimes exhausting race to stay ahead of her charge's restlessly questing mind. For just a moment, the colonel found himself in complete sympathy with the governess. Like the rest of Gustavus Adolphus' staff, he frequently found himself feeling exhausted trying to keep up with the king. So he supposed there was no real reason he shouldn't experience the same fatigue trying to keep pace with the king's daughter.

"As a matter of fact, Your Highness," he said after a moment, "your father agrees that a straighter canal would be better. In fact, he has a team of engineers with American advisers planning a straighter route a bit west of here. But digging that canal is going to be a long and difficult task, so in the meantime, he's going to repair and improve this one."

"Why? I mean, why is it going to be harder to dig a straight ditch than one that twists and turns all over the place? Wouldn't a nice straight one be easier, since it would be so much shorter?"

"The problem, Your Highness," he explained, "is that the new route is going to require a lot more digging because of the way the land it goes through is shaped. In fact, when they dug the original canal, they followed the easiest path. As you can see, it goes around hills instead of through them or over them, and it stays down in the lowest spots along the way. It may be longer than a straight canal, but they had to do less actual digging this way than we'll have to do with the new route. And staying in the low spots made it easier for them to get the water through it, as well, although even so, they had to use locks. Like that one."

As it happened, they were just passing one of the old locks. It was in very poor repair, as was most of the canalbed, but if one knew what one was looking for, its intended function was fairly obvious. He doubted that the princess had ever seen one before, and he watched her closely, if unobtrusively, wondering if she would grasp its function.

She frowned in obvious thought, then cocked her head as she looked back at the colonel.

"It's like a little lake between two dams, isn't it?" she said, and he nodded.

"That's exactly what it is, Your Highness," he agreed. "They let water in or out through the gate at one end-when it's working, anyway-until the level in the lock is equal to the level that a boat needs to be at to keep going. That's how you get enough water to float a boat uphill."

"That's really clever!" Kristina approved in delight, and he felt himself smiling at her. She grinned back at him, every inch a little girl, then shot an almost guilty look at Lady Ulrike. "Thank you for explaining that to me, Colonel Ekstrom," she said with conscious dignity, and he inclined his head in a graceful seated bow.

"It was my pleasure, Your Highness," he told her, and allowed his horse to drop back beside Lady Ulrike. He glanced at the governess, and then fought down a most unbecoming urge to chuckle as she smiled wryly at him.

He looked away again, and the desire to chuckle faded as his eyes rested once again on the slender, slight child riding so gracefully on the horse which stood almost twice her height at the shoulder. She was as much a little girl as any child he had ever met, and yet, there was something almost frightening about her intelligence.

Perhaps it was because she was a girl, he thought. He'd been exposed to enough up-time Americans since joining the king's personal staff to come to recognize the sheer, frightening capability of many of the American women. Quite a lot of men he knew were uncomfortable around such women. Some of them, in fact, felt considerably more strongly than that, and Ekstrom had heard a few muttered comments about the unnaturalness of it all. Of course, they were careful not to utter such thoughts anywhere around the Americans themselves. Or, probably with even more cause, around the king, who had made it perfectly clear that he was not prepared to tolerate any insults to his uncanny allies. And, come to that, no one but an idiot-and probably a suicidal one, at that-was even going to think about making any such comment where Julie Mackay might hear him!

But the point was that American women, and not just up-timers-he shuddered internally as he considered Gretchen Richter-considered themselves just as capable as any man and acted accordingly. Which might be all very well for them. In fact, the colonel was prepared to admit that however unsettling he might find the concept himself, the Americans were probably onto something. Certainly it didn't make any sense to tell someone who could shoot like Julie Mackay that her place was solely in the kitchen and the nursery! None too safe to try, for that matter.

But Princess Kristina wasn't an American, any more than Gustavus Adolphus was, "Captain Gars" or no. This little girl was going to grow up to become the queen of Sweden. And if her father succeeded in his plans-as he had a habit of doing, Ekstrom reflected with a certain complacency-she would also become empress of the Confederated Principalities of Europe. No doubt brilliance would be very useful to her in that case, but how prepared would her subjects-and especially her aristocracy-be to accept a brilliant queen and empress who'd been… contaminated by American modes of thought?

He didn't have an answer for that question. But one thing he did know, even on this short an acquaintance with the princess: the razor-sharp mind behind that child's eyes was not the sort to accept compromises or subterfuges which required it to pretend to be less than it was.

Which could have all sorts of… interesting consequences for the future of Europe.

Chapter 25

After she finished tightening the gauze mask over her face, Melissa took the spray gun handed to her by Darryl. She gripped the device much the way a devout Christian might grip a heathen fetish: on the one hand, with great and squeamish reluctance; on the other, very tightly-lest the horrid thing escape and inflict unknown havoc upon nearby innocent children.

Everyone in the room burst into laughter. After a moment, Melissa couldn't help smiling herself.

"God, do I feel stupid," she chuckled.

Darryl's laugh faded into a simple grin. "Hey, Melissa-I told ya. I'll be glad to do it myself. The stuff doesn't bother me any."

Melissa sniffed. "All the more reason for you not to do it! It should bother you. You'll be careless."

Darryl's eyes rolled. "Fer Chrissake," he muttered. "It's just DDT. You're acting like it's nerve gas or mustard gas, or sumthin'."

Melissa eyed the spray gun with distaste. "Besides, I'm by far the oldest person here. So whatever the foul stuff does to me it isn't likely-I suppose-to kill me off until I'm dead of old age anyway. And since I'm past menopause, there's no problem with effects on my offspring."

Now it was Rita's turn to roll her eyes. In the two years since the Ring of Fire, Mike Stearns' sister had devoted her energies to nursing and medical studies. Although she was no doctor-nor even a nurse, by the strict standards of a pre-Ring of Fire RN-she had far more medical expertise than anyone else in the U.S. delegation to England.

"Melissa," she said, almost sighing, "how many times do we have to go over this? The health hazards involved in using DDT are long-term, and have a lot to do with how frequently you get exposed to it. It's not likely to hurt any of us to spray it once in a while, especially if we take simple precautions like wearing a breathing block-" Here she nodded toward the gauze mask on Melissa's face. "-wash the clothes used afterward, keep the windows closed while spraying so it'll settle quickly. Hell, people have even been known to eat the stuff and not die from it." A bit hastily: "Not that it's a good idea, of course. It is toxic, no doubt about it. And for a rich country like our old U.S. of A., it made plenty of sense to stop using it. But-"

Melissa waved her hand impatiently-just for a brief moment, before she resumed her firm clutch on the heathen device.

"Spare me the lecture," she grumbled. "I admit I'm probably a little eccentric on the subject-old habits die hard-but I'm not actually crazy. I know perfectly well that the fatality rate from typhus or bubonic plague makes the toxic side effects of DDT look like cotton candy. I still don't have to like it."

She waved the spray gun around, almost threateningly. "Now get out of here, all of you. To quote the Bard-whoever the hell he is, and that's something else I'd like to find out while we're here because I still don't quite believe Balthazar about the earl of Oxford anymore than I believed those slick-talking company spokesmen I can remember swearing that benzene was harmless-until the poor slobs on the factory floor who were making it started dropping like flies from cancer of the liver-and dammit, I liked the idea that the English language's finest poet and playwright was a nobody from the sticks-"

Everybody's eyes were now almost crossed, trying to follow the convoluted thought processes. Melissa stopped her prattle, cleared her throat noisily, and got to the point:

" 'If t'were done at all, best t'were done quickly.' Scat!"

The Schoolmarm's Voice, that last. Everyone scatted-hastily-while Melissa marched toward the far corner of their rooms in St. Thomas' Tower. Darryl was the last one to emerge onto the walkway connecting their suite to the inner walls of the tower. By the time he closed the door, he could hear Melissa's growls interspersed with the spish-spish of a manually operated spray pump being furiously worked.

He grinned, and pressed an ear against the door. "That's telling 'em, girl!" His voice took on a little falsetto, mimicking Melissa. " 'Die, bug, die! Out, damned louse!' And then there's something in… sounds like Latin, maybe. 'Sick sumper rickets perwacky,' I think."

Rita was grinning too. " 'Sic semper Rickettsia prowazekii,' I bet. That translates more or less as: thus to all the damned critters that cause typhus. Rickettsia prowazekii is the germ involved in that disease. It's sorta like a bacterium."

"Only good bug is a dead bug," said Darryl, nodding approvingly.

Tom Simpson chuckled. "Don't let Melissa hear you say that, Darryl-not unless you want a lecture on how most bugs are our friends and you shouldn't squash spiders."

Darryl winced. Tom started to add something else, but felt a hand on his elbow. Turning his head, he saw that one of the Yeoman Warders standing guard on the walkway-as always, keeping the Americans from entering the inner Tower except under escort-had come up behind him. Politely, the man was leaning his partisan away.

Away, yes-but the great blade of the weapon was still honed sharp, and gleamed in the morning sun.

"Yes, Andrew?" he asked. By now, Tom had made it a point to learn the names of all the Yeoman Warders assigned to stand guard over the American delegation. They all had.

"If you'll pardon my asking, m'lord-ah, sir-what are you doing in there?"

The words were not spoken in a hostile tone. This was not the query of a guard investigating suspicious conduct, simply the question of man puzzled-not for the first time-by the sometimes odd conduct of these rather eccentric Americans.

"We're spraying our rooms with a chemical we brought with us. It's called 'DDT' for short." Tom nodded toward Rita. "You'd have to ask my wife what the letters actually stand for. I've forgotten. Some long bunch of chemical terms."

Andrew frowned. "Why?"

"The stuff kills most kinds of germs-small things; you can't see them with the naked eye-that carry disease. Well, some diseases, anyway. It'll work against the germs that carry typhus-what you all call 'Gaol fever,' I think-and bubonic plague, I know that."

Rita chimed in. "Tom doesn't have it quite right. DDT doesn't kill the bacteria directly, what it does is kill the lice which transmit it."

By now, Andrew's two companion guards had come up also. All three of them were frowning fiercely, obviously lost in the "explanation." But one word did register.

"That… ah, 'DDT,' " said Andrew. "It kills lice." Reflexively, all three Yeoman Warders started scratching themselves.

"Yup," said Tom. "Deader'n doornails. Of course, you have to keep spraying an area now and then to get the full effect. But we brought quite a bit of the stuff with us, and it really doesn't take that much. I imagine we've got enough to spray all the places in the Tower where people actually live. Rita?"

She nodded firmly. "Not often," she qualified. "Some places-except the sleeping areas-probably not more than once. But DDT decays at a very slow rate. The stuff'll last for years-which is a good part of the reason, of course, that back in the U.S. of A.-the old U.S. of A., I mean-we finally decided-"

She broke off, obviously realizing that this was neither the time nor the place to delve into the long-term drawbacks of using DDT. Her husband charged into the breach.

"And it helps a lot-a lot," said Tom firmly, "if you also have your clothing and bedding regularly cleaned. They need to be steam cleaned, though, to kill the lice. Regular washing won't do it."

The three guards stared at each other. Then, back at Tom.

"What is, ah, 'steam cleaning'?" asked Andrew.

Tom started to answer, but Rita interrupted. "We can show you-but, you'll have to give us some help."

Immediately, the frowns on the faces of the Yeoman Warders changed from those of puzzlement to suspicion. "We canna-" Andrew started to say.

Rita shook her head. "I'm not talking about any kind of private or secret 'help.' You'd have to get the agreement of your own commanding officer, or whoever"-she waved her hand-"is really in charge of this place. Which I never have quite figured out. For all I know, it's the earl of Strafford himself."

The frowns of puzzlement were back. Rita smiled sweetly. "In order to 'steam clean,' we'd have to set up something we call a 'laundry.' Which doesn't mean exactly the same thing you probably think it means. We'd have to build some kind of big central heating area, run water through it to make steam, then-"

Now at a bit of a loss, she glanced appealingly at Friedrich Bruch. As was his usual manner, the always-quiet Friedrich had been standing toward the rear of the little crowd gathered in conversation on the walkway. Seeing Rita's eyes upon him, he shuffled forward.

"I worked for a time in the big public laundry in Grantville," he said softly. Softly, but not hesitantly. "I can design a steam-cleaning system for the Tower, given the necessary resources and labor. It's really pretty simple, when you get down to it."

The guards stared at him. Stared at Tom and Rita. Then, stared at the door to St. Thomas' Tower. The door was opening now, Melissa almost charging through.

"Faugh!" she exclaimed, tearing the mask from her face. Then, imperiously, handed the spray gun to Darryl. "Take this thing, would you? I've had enough of it."

Seeing the three guards, almost ogling her, Melissa gave them a somewhat savage smile. "I will say this, however. I won't be scratching myself to sleep every night. Typhus and plague be damned! That alone is worth its weight in gold."

Three Yeoman Warders, as one man, started scratching reflexively.

After the earl of Strafford had explained the situation to the man who was considered probably England's foremost doctor of the day, Sir William Harvey frowned.

"If I understand you correctly, my lord, you are concerned that this might be a subtle ploy on the part of the Americans? An attempt, perhaps, to poison the entire population of the Tower."

Strafford pursed his lips. "Not that, exactly. Perhaps." Suddenly, he heaved a great sigh. "Sir William, to be honest I don't know what it is I fear-or might fear, or should perhaps fear. If anything. For all I know, their proposal-their offer, if you will-is quite genuine. I simply…"

His voice trailed off into silence. Harvey's lips quirked a bit, into something that was half a smile of understanding and half a grimace of shared exasperation.

"Ah, yes, Lord Strafford-I do understand. Believe me! The short time I spent in Grantville was often, ah, frustrating. Never quite knowing what to believe, and what not. The great discomfort-great discomfort-of old sureties being rattled by new and-to me, at least-outlandish theories. Still-"

The doctor swiveled his head and stared out the window of the palace. His eyes seemed slightly unfocused.

"I do not think…" He took a long breath. Then, abruptly: "You've read, I suspect, the long report I wrote for His Majesty on my experiences in Grantville?"

Strafford nodded.

"Do you recall my account of a public session I attended of what they call their 'Congress'? It's a bit similar to our own Parliament."

Again Strafford nodded; the gesture, this time, accompanied by a thoughtful running of his fingers through his thick hair. "You are referring, I imagine, to the dispute that took place over the use of-what did they call it? 'Chemical warfare'?"

"Yes. 'Chemical and biological warfare,' to be precise. I sat through the entire debate, my lord. There's a gallery from which guests can observe the proceedings. I was quite fascinated-and more by the political struggle taking place, really, than the scientific aspects of the question."

Strafford grunted. "You don't believe, then, that the whole thing was a staged performance?" He hesitated for a moment, then added: "That seems to be the opinion of His Majesty himself, and most of his courtiers. Laud thinks so as well."

Harvey barked a little laugh. " 'Staged'? For my benefit, you mean? So that I might scurry back and warn everyone that the Americans have the capability of slaughtering entire nations?"

Strafford nodded. Harvey barked another laugh. "To be honest, my lord, I doubt if many of their officials were even aware that I was in the gallery. And that hardly explains the speech given by their President, when he insisted on addressing the Congress directly. You did read that portion of the report also?"

Strafford smiled. "Yes, I did. I was rather amused, despite the man's appalling language. He seems a blunt and direct sort of fellow." The earl closed his eyes for a moment, summoning his memory-which was, as always, excellent-and began reciting:

" 'If you pass this stinking bill, I will veto it. If you override my veto, I will refuse to implement the provisions in my capacity as the head of the armed forces. I will also give it a development budget too small to pay for a child's toy. If you try to impeach me for so doing, I guarantee you will be in the worst damn brawl of your lives. We outlawed this crap in the world we came from, for Chrissake-and for good reason!-so why is anybody here such a fucking idiot as to think it's a good idea in the new one? Do I make myself clear? Go ahead, try me."

Harvey smiled. "Mind you, my lord, I doubt if the proposal would have been adopted anyway. But after that little speech-he broke custom, apparently, by even appearing to give it in the first place-the thing was dropped immediately."

Strafford studied the doctor. "And what do you think? Could the Americans make such weapons?"

Harvey shrugged. "From what I could tell, based on conversations I had with various people… the answer is both 'yes' and 'no.' Yes, they could make them. But not without great difficulty, and not in such quantities as to enable them to poison entire nations."

"But possibly in enough quantities to poison a much smaller place," stated Strafford immediately. "Such as, for instance, the Tower of London."

Harvey hesitated, then nodded. He began to add something, but Strafford shook his head.

"No, that doesn't solve the problem. Obviously, they wouldn't want to poison themselves at the same time. But who is to say they don't have an antidote of some kind already with them? We've never searched their rooms or their luggage, you know. Nor, given the need to maintain at least the appearances of diplomatic niceties, am I prepared to order such a search. I am violating established custom badly enough as it is, by keeping them sequestered."

The doctor was silent. Strafford kept studying him. "And I would remind you, doctor, that according to the accounts we've received-three of them, now, from independent sources-the Americans did not hesitate to use some sort of fiendish incendiary weapon against the Spanish troops they trapped in the Wartburg."

Again, Harvey began to speak; but, again, Strafford shook his head. "No, doctor, that won't do either. I am aware, also, that the Americans seem to have taken care at the Wartburg to keep the Spanish casualties to a minimum. I am not suggesting these people are a new tribe of Tatars. Still, we cannot make too many assumptions about what they will and won't do. It seems odd to me that they make such a fuss about some forms of what they call 'chemical warfare,' but don't seem to have any qualms about roasting a man to death with another. Contradictory, that is, from any philosophical or theological or ethical standpoint I can imagine. So, at least, it seems to me."

Harvey was silent. Finally, Strafford allowed a little smile to come to his face. "Oh-say it, doctor. I am not trying to browbeat you. Simply, if you will, playing the good sophist by arguing the other side of the case."

Harvey returned the smile with one of his own. "Nor, for that matter, should you assume I am their partisan, my lord. There was much about the Americans that, frankly, I found quite distasteful. But the fact remains-"

He squared his shoulders a bit. "The fact remains that one thing I did notice, while I was there-impossible not to notice it, save you were a blind man-was the great care they take of children. Much better care, to be honest, that we often do in our own kingdom."

Strafford's lips tightened, but he did not argue the point. He had often been appalled himself, since his youth, at the condition of many of England's children. Especially those of paupers.

"The Tower is full of children, is what you are saying."

"Yes, My Lord. And I remind you that the one woman-" For a moment, Harvey's lips twisted into a grimace. "The one who seems to fancy herself some kind of 'lady.' Well. The point being, that whatever her pretensions now, she was-by all accounts-"

"A teacher of children. And for most of a lifetime."

Harvey nodded. Strafford turned slightly away from the doctor and clasped his hands behind his back. "Do not be misled by your own habits, doctor," he said softly. "I have, as it happens, spent a number of hours in the company of Lady Mailey." There was just a slight emphasis on the title. "Which you have not, I believe. That she is a 'lady,' in some fundamental sense of the term, is not subject to doubt."

Harvey accepted the mild reproof without demur. Strafford swiveled his head back toward him. "Still, as you say, a former teacher of children. And I believe you are correct in this matter, doctor. Whatever else that woman might be capable of, I find it impossible to imagine her deliberately poisoning dozens of innocent children. True, it is a sinful world. But some crimes, at least, we may have safely left behind us."

He smiled crookedly. "Which, now that I think upon the matter, is exactly what their President said to their own Congress. If not, admittedly, with such a fine turn of phrase as my own."

For a moment, he and William Harvey shared a little laugh. When that was over, Strafford issued his commands.

"We shall do it, then. Give the Americans in the Tower whatever they ask for-within reason-in the way of resources and labor. If nothing else, this might prove to be an interesting and valuable test of their claims. Their moral claims, even more than their mechanical ones-which, I think, will prove in the end to be the most important thing to know about them. I would ask you, however, to oversee the affair from the standpoint of the crown."

"Yes, my lord. Ah-"

"No need, I think, to concern King Charles over such a small matter as building a clothes-cleaning apparatus and killing insects. Nor, of course, do I expect you to take any time away from the medical demands of His Majesty and the queen."

"Ah, yes. my lord. You understand-"

"Yes, yes. I am aware that the queen's health is frail and she requires a great deal of attention. Simply give this affair at the Tower as much attention as you can."

"Yes, my lord."

On the third day of the spraying of the Tower of London, Darryl McCarthy was manning the spray gun. Toward the end of the day, he insisted on spraying the special dungeons where the most dangerous criminals were kept.

"Doesn't do any good," he said forcefully, "if you don't kill all the lice-and you know as well as I do, Andrew, that the damn things will be worse in there than anywhere else!"

By this time, the Official Sprayer was a title of great-even if informal-respect. Somewhat helplessly, the Yeoman Warder looked to Doctor Harvey for guidance. After a moment's hesitation, Harvey nodded his approval.

"But the prisoners will not be allowed to leave their cells during the process," he said firmly. "If they suffer some ill-effects, so be it. Most of them will be dead soon enough anyway."

Darryl didn't argue the point. Truth be told, he agreed with the good doctor.

When Darryl entered the fourth cell, the Yeoman Warder accompanying him curtly ordered the prisoner into a corner. Once the man was there, Andrew fastened his manacles and hastily backed out of the chamber, closing the heavy door behind him.

The moment he heard the sound of the bar being dropped across the outer door, Darryl began by spraying the prisoner himself. Most vigorously.

"Take that, you Sasanach bastard. If the Brits don't chop you, I hope this gives you cancer. Black-and-Tan asshole. Butcher of Ireland." Spish-spish-spish. "I didn't have orders, I'd shove this thing down your throat and let you have the whole lot."

The prisoner was covering his face with his hands. Still snarling obscenities, Darryl turned away and finished spraying the rest of the chamber. Then, started fumbling beneath the heavy protective garment he was wearing. Rita and Nelly had designed and sewn the thing. It was something like a combination of a poncho and a pair of "heavy duty pajamas." Very bulky-certainly bulky enough to conceal a small object like a walkie-talkie.

"Orders," muttered Darryl. "I still say this is a bad idea. Here, fuckwad-take it. Keep it hidden." He smacked the prisoner on the top of his head with the spray gun. "Dammit-pay attention! You see this button?"

Bleary-eyed, the prisoner stared up at him. Then, down at the button on the strange device. Darryl smacked him again. The prisoner nodded.

"That turns it on and off." He glanced up to make sure the cell had an arrow slit through which the prisoner could tell if it was day or night. "Keep it off except just after sundown. Then turn it on until you hear a voice. Then do what the lady says. See this button? Looks kinda like a little black wheel sticking out on the side."

Smack. The prisoner nodded.

"That's the volume control. That means the voice will sound louder or softer. Turn it down as low as you can and still hear it. So the guards don't. The gadget's set for VOX, so you just talk into it. But remember that when you're talking, you can't be listening. So shut up when you're done so she can get a word in. And that's it. Even a stinking murderous shithead like you should be able to figure it out."

For good measure, Darryl gave him a few last spurts of DDT-spish-spish-spish-and stalked over to the door. By the time Andrew opened it, in response to his hammering fist, Darryl was humming the tune of "The Men Behind the Wire."

Shortly after sundown, the prisoner did as he had been instructed. He heard a woman's voice coming out of the strange little box. Hastily, he followed the orders he had been given and swiveled the little wheel until the voice was barely loud enough to hear.

"-mwell. Oliver Cromwell. Come in. Are you there?"

A bit hesitantly, he spoke. "Aye. 'Tis I."

There was a little pause. Then he heard the woman muttering something. It sounded something like "damn Darryl-didn't he-" He didn't catch the rest.

A moment later, the woman said: "-can barely hear you. You need to hold the-ah, the thing-up close to your mouth. Talk into the grille-ah, the crosshatch-looking part-ah, what do you call it-"

He smiled. "I understand. Is this better?"

"Yes. Good! Now, listen. This thing is called a 'walkie-talkie.' With it, we can talk to you from where we are, which is in a part of the Tower called St. Thomas' Tower. But you don't have a lot of power to spare-"

He didn't understand the sentence or two which followed. Something involving "batteries," though he didn't see where massed guns had anything to do with the subject at hand.

"-only right after sundown, you understand? If you leave it on, you'll drain it."

That seemed clear enough. "Aye. Only after sundown, and then turn it off when you instruct me to do so."

"You got it. Good." There was another pause. "That's really all I've got for tonight. Any questions?"

The prisoner thought for a moment. Then, in a mild tone of voice: "Yes, actually, I do have a question. Why did the man you sent to deliver this device strike me on the head-several times-spray what I suspect is poison in my face, and bestow a truly monumental string of curses upon me? I don't recall ever meeting the fellow."

He heard another muttered string of phrases. The only part he understood was: "-kill the stupid kid, I swear I will-"

She broke off abruptly. "It's because he's Irish and you-well, the 'you' that would have been-conquered Ireland once and apparently-depends who you hear this from-either killed half the Irish or-ah, hell, never mind. He's holding a grudge for something you did about fifteen years from now. In another universe."

"Ah." The prisoner nodded. The little smile on his face widened. "It seems fitting enough. The king is peeved with me for a similar reason. So why should my-ah, allies-not feel the same?"

"Well." Another pause. "It's all pretty complicated. To be honest, I'm not sure what I think about the whole thing myself. Not just you, I mean-everything. We're from the future, you know. Americans. You may have heard about us."

"Oh, to be sure. The earl of Strafford has waxed eloquent on the subject to me, once or twice. I confess I was somewhat skeptical. Apparently I was wrong."

Silence. Then: "Okay. Well, I guess I'll sign off now. Remember to turn the walkie-talkie off."

"A moment, please. What is your name, Lady of the Walkie-Talkie? And do you have any thoughts on the subject of predestination? I have been puzzling over that matter myself, these past many weeks. Nothing much else to do, of course."

"My name? It's Gayle Mason. As for predestination… oh, hell, Oliver Cromwell. I haven't got the faintest idea. I always just figured a person should try to do the right thing and let God figure out the rest of it."

"Ah. Splendid. A Puritan after my own heart."

He heard what sounded like a snort. "Ha! 'Puritan,' is it? That's sure as hell not what my ex-husband called me."

"The more fool him, then." The prisoner's smile became something rather sad. "Enough. I'll not keep you, Lady Gayle. I suppose it is just that I have not heard the sound of a woman's voice since… since my wife died. It's a sound I miss a great deal."

Again, there was silence. The prisoner began to push the button, then paused. "Is there some proper signal I should give, before shutting down this little machine?"

"Oh. Yeah. 'Seventy-three.' But-"

"Aye?"

"Ah… never mind. I'm sorry about your wife and your son. We heard what happened from some of the Yeoman Warders. Ah… never mind. I'll call you again tomorrow night, Oliver Cromwell."

"And the nights after that?"

"Oh, yeah. Sure. Every night. And now, ah-"

"Seventy-three, Lady Gayle. May the Lord watch over you."