1635:The Dreeson Incident

Chapter 38

Frankfurt am Main

"The Vignelli machine is broken." Deneau looked up in annoyance.

"What did you expect?" Brillard put down the stylus with which he was making a stencil. Another stencil. One of the many deliberately amateurish stencils that Locqufier's group had spent their time making this winter. They offended Brillard's pride. He had been a properly apprenticed type maker, once upon a time. Before the lead type had been taken by de Rohan's soldiers, to make bullets. Before the dysentery that the soldiers brought to his home town carried off his master and fellow apprentices. Before he had been caught up in the first of de Rohan's Huguenot revolts and become a soldier himself, nearly fifteen years ago.

He started to count on his fingers. "First, the unfortunate machine has been asked to make hundreds of pamphlets opposing the practice of vaccination. For many reasons. Not only those set forth in the up-time materials that the man in Grantville sent to de Ron, but also for new reasons that we invented, such as that getting a vaccination indicates that a person is not meekly submitting to the will of God.

"Then, from the encyclopedia, Gui found out that the up-timers-not the ones now in Grantville, but their ancestors a century and a half before the time they came from-had opposed these new 'lightning rods' for much the same reason. So we requested of the poor machine that it be so kind as to produce hundreds of pamphlets opposing lightning rods.

"Plus Antoine's ordinary diatribes against Richelieu.

"Plus manifestoes for Weitz.

"Followed by the need for Guillaume's 'rumors of assassinations' pamphlets by the thousand. What did we expect? The poor machine is overstrained. 'Stress' that up-time reporter, Waters is his name, calls it in his 'American' newspaper."

Ancelin walked over and gave the roller a disgusted poke. "Whether it is stressed or broken, it will not produce any more pamphlets. We can still make the stencils ourselves, of course. But until Fortunat can find someone to fix it, we're out of the pamphlet business."

Locquifier shook his head. "We cannot fall behind now. There are printers in Frankfurt who have Vignellis. We must hire the use of one. Not give our stencils to him, of course. He might read them. We can't risk having the authorities discover the source of so many of the pamphlets in circulation. Just hire the use of the machine after the man's normal working day. We can demonstrate to him that you know how to work it, Fortunat. And find someone to fix ours."

Brillard shook his head. "No. One of us, at least, would have to go to the print shop. The man would know that we, the Frenchmen living Zum Weissen Schwan, are producing masses of pamphlets. Just get the machine fixed."

"We can't have a repairman come here, either," Deneau protested.

Locquifier pulled on his mustache. "No, no, of course not. Find out if one of the printers knows someone who can fix it. We will take it to the shop."

"Mathurin is right. None of us should take it to the shop, either," Ouvrard said. "The printer will learn that the Frenchmen living Zum Weissen Schwan have a Vignelli. None of should ask about repairs, either. It might bring the attention of the authorities to us. We can't be too cautious."

Locquifier jumped up. "Have Isaac de Ron send one of his porters around to ask who can repair the machine. Put the machine in a box. Seal the box. Have the porter deliver the sealed box to the print shop and then bring it back again. But…" He banged his fist on the table. "Fix the machine!"

The printer Crispin Neumann told de Ron's porter that he had a duplicating machine of his own and his apprentice was quite skilled in its maintenance.

So Locquifier told de Ron to have the porter remove the boxed machine from the back parlor and take it to Neumann.

Which made Emrich Menig very happy. He loved to fiddle with Vignellis.

Martin Wackernagel lounged lazily in the back room of the shop, watching Menig disassemble and then reassemble the machine.

"Stupid klutz," Menig muttered.

"What?"

"He's managed to get the silk from one of his stencils bunched up here." He jerked it out and threw it at his honorary uncle.

Who spread it out and read it. Not having anything better to do at the moment.

"Where'd this machine come from, Emrich?" Martin managed to keep his voice idle and bored.

"One of de Ron's porters brought it in. Over Zum Weissen Schwan.

The bells tolled nine. Wackernagel stood up. "Appel should have the things he wanted me to pick up ready by now." He picked up the sheet of crumpled silk. "I guess I should be getting on the road again."

Which he did. After detouring to speak with David Kronberg's uncle in the ghetto.

Hanau

The rabbi sighed. Oh, the complications. Just because he helped arrange Kronberg's job in the Fulda post office and subsequent happy marriage to Rivka zur Sichel. Whose parents were now the sutlers in Barracktown bei Fulda. Where the redoubtable Sergeant Hartke and his now-famous wife Dagmar held sway.

"Give it to Utt," the Hanauer rabbi told Wackernagel. "He can not only radio the gist of the information you have collected about de Ron's connection to the pamphlets, but also give the silk itself to someone who can deliver it directly to Nasi. Not only directly, but quickly. After all, King Christian and Princess Kristina are coming to Fulda this week to deliver the medals to Dagmar Nilsdotter. There will be a plane as close as Erfurt."

The rabbi sighed.

"As it happens, I have a priority code. Nasi casts a very wide web."

Nathan Prickett picked up his pen.

Dear Don Francisco,

Jason Waters, the reporter who's here in Frankfurt, was in Crispin Neumann's print shop the other day. He met one of Neumann's clients, a man named Heinrich Hirtzwig. He's the rector of the gymnasium here in Frankfurt. That's not a sports place, but the most important high school for boys. The kind that sends a really high percentage of its graduates to the university.

Anyway, this Hirtzwig was born in Hesse and he also writes plays. In Latin, that is, because he's a kind of professor.

Anyway, the Crown Loyalists, especially the landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, have hired him to write some plays saying that Wilhelm Wettin is right and Mike Stearns is wrong. In a lot more words, of course. I just thought you might want to know.

Neumann, the printer, said to Waters that it's too bad that the up-timers with all their maps hadn't managed to arrive with all their maps fifty years earlier, because someone named de Bry would have been delighted. I have no idea what that's all about.

There was still half a page. And these steel-nib pens, even if a guy had to dip them, really were a lot handier than the quills had been.

There's a kid named Emrich Menig who works for Neumann. He was mixed up with those anti-Semitic pamphlets that came out in Fulda when my father-in-law Wes Jenkins was there. But he was just a kid and innocent, so Wackernagel brought him down to Frankfurt.

He's come out to Sachsenhausen a couple of Sunday afternoons to watch the militia drill. I've been showing him how the guns work. He's not particularly hot on shooting, but he has a real knack for mechanical stuff. If he wasn't working for a printer, Blumroder would love to have him.

Anyway, he was fixing a duplicating machine here in Frankfurt the other day and pulled a stuck stencil out of it that said a lot of the same things. But he lost the stencil, so I don't have it.

But being a kid, he was curious, so he went to talk to de Ron's porter. The porter says that there's a bunch of Frenchmen, five or six, who have been staying at de Ron's inn since last summer-July or so. That means they can't be hurting for money, given what de Ron charges. It's not some kind of a dive.

It looked like this was going to run over to another page of paper.

They don't just have this duplicating machine. They use paper by the bale. The porter has to carry the bales in and out, so he knows.

But it isn't delivered to them as bales of paper. It comes into the cellars of the inn labeled as shipments of wine from a company called Mauger's up in the Netherlands.

The guy guesses that they have some other way to get rid of the paper after they've printed things up, because they never ask him to carry it out.

Do you remember Ernie Haggerty, the guy Jason Waters brought to Frankfurt with him? He's made a lot of friends in low places. Sometimes he just sits in taverns, not looking like an up-timer. He can do that, because he's a scrawny little fellow who's going bald and his teeth aren't so good. His folks never got him braces-couldn't afford to-and he's a smoker. Of course, he broke the front one when he was a kid. His brother hit him with a softball. But the cap he has pops on and off pretty easy, so he can be snaggletoothed whenever he wants to.

Anyway, Ernie schmoozed up to the porter from de Ron's.

Vincenz Weitz, that guy who a lot of people thought up was mixed up in planning the attack on the ghetto back when Henry Dreeson was here-remember him?

He's been visiting these Frenchmen at de Ron's and taking piles of paper under his arm when he leaves again.

The guy named Curtius left Soubise's house. He's not gone back to England. Somebody told Wayne Higgenbottom that he was going to meet Soubise's brother in a town called Besancon, which I never heard of, but it's not around here.

Speaking of Wes, him and his second wife are going to have a baby. Chandra says that it's caused a fair amount of excitement in Grantville.

Best wishes,

Nathan Prickett

Grantville, late January 1635

Under the circumstances, Wes found it a little embarrassing that he was still chairing the initiative in regard to uniform statewide matrimonial legislation.

Solving the problems by simply declaring separation of church and state wasn't as simple as a person might think. Take the problems of Jarvis Beasley's wife Hedy, for instance. Even if down-time betrothal contracts were handled procedurally in the church courts, they still were included in the civil laws of the various territories as well. Even in the unlikely event that Saxony abolished its state church, its civil laws of marriage would still be in force in those Henneberg territories south of the Thuringerwald.

Until Gustavus Adolphus managed to do something definitive about John George, at least.

Unless the SoTF congress simply got rid of any variant marriage laws below the level of the province as a whole? Passed a law saying that this was a state-level matter and no longer the concern of the individual territories that had coalesced to create the SoTF?

Wes had never considered himself a radical. A conservative, rather. In no way a revolutionary. A caretaker. That was, in a way, why he had been interested in parks and such, originally. Once upon a time. Up-time.

But there were times when the thought of abolishing the whole diddly-squat mess and starting over, the way Gustavus had done with the new USE provinces in western Germany the previous June, was very appealing. Times like this one. Put the whole USE on a grid. Make it look like Kansas.

He shook his head. No. When you came right down to it, he was an old West Virginia boy. Hills and hollows, curves and bends. He'd lived with them all his life, geographical or jurisdictional. He'd figure something out.

Frankfurt

Nathan Prickett looked at the letter from his mother again.

You know, she had written, I think that I caused a lot of trouble without ever meaning to.

She explained the tour of Vital Statistics that she had given to Jacques-Pierre Dumais.

Everyone knows that's he's a friend of Veda Mae Haggerty, so I think that's the only way it could have gotten out. All the gossip seems to have started with her. But Jenny was so mad that I don't dare tell her. I don't know what I ought to do about it.

Nathan had a feeling that he knew what he ought to do about it. Had to do about it, really.

Dear Don Francisco.

I'm enclosing a letter that I got from my mom.

He finished up.

If you can think of some way to handle this without getting Mom fired from her job, I'd really appreciate it. Jenny Maddox will fire her if she finds out, but all Mom meant to do was show him how the system works and raising a stink about Chandra's dad's second marriage doesn't count as international sabotage or a plot against the USE, if you ask me.

Wes was mad as hell, from what Chandra wrote me, but they are public records. There's nothing Top Secret about a marriage license.

You might want to keep a closer eye on this Dumais character, though.

Thanks a lot.

Nathan Prickett.