Grantville Gazette Volume 25 Read online

  "Amber Higham assured me, before we hired her, that she had aptitude for comedy."

  A crash came from behind the draperies, accompanied by a shout of, "Hands off, you creep."

  Anita raised her eyebrows.

  "Mariah acts the part so deftly that it has caused Ludovic some difficulty in believing that in private life, she is perfectly capable of saying, 'no.' He stomps around in the mode of, 'I will now court her in the conqueror's style; Come, see, and overcome.' To which Mariah does not respond well."

  "That's Mariah. Aptitude, yes. Attitude, too."

  "As to Ludovic, what pity 'tis, one that can speak so well, should in his actions be so ill! If he would only transfer his attentions to Barbara, where they might be more welcome. Perhaps she would find them flattering. She would welcome some flattery these days. She was not happy when Philip told her that Mariah would be singing 'Many a New Day' henceforth. Particularly since Philip had already changed the song about the lovers' taking a carriage ride into a satire about the cost of the Forchheim bypass and given it to Curly and the chorus instead of keeping it as addressed to her. We have all the would-be lovers in Franconia complaining that since that one stretch has soaked up the whole road improvement budget, you couldn't drive a surrey anywhere else in the region if you tried. Philip told her that it was fine, since Curly was singing the shepherdess and sheep song to her, but she found no consolation in that. I have allotted her three more costumes to wear in the scenes where she appears, one of them genuine up-time. That has helped."

  Overall, the opening night—or, more precisely, the opening afternoon—of Franconia! in Würzburg, "with the genuine Grantville cast," had to be delayed for four days while the actors scrambled to learn all the rewritten bits and pieces.

  Bamberg

  "Oh, good glory. Well hit, well hit!"

  "Otto, what are you screeching about?" Else Kronacher stuck her head through the curtain that divided the sales room from the print shop, glaring at her younger son.

  "This line in the new play:"

  Pray enter.

  You are learned Europeans and we worse

  Than ignorant Americans.

  "And precisely who are 'we' in this case?"

  "A Persian salesman, slick and oily, bent upon the seduction of the heroine's friend. Presumably representative of all the reprehensible subjects of the Porte who daily threaten the peaceful tranquility of the Germanies."

  "Ach, the trash that you read. When in your life have the Germanies been tranquil or peaceful?"

  "Why Mutti, you, yourself, told me to set this Franconia! in type." Otto's gaze was the epitome of innocent hurt feelings.

  Frau Else knew better.

  "For the other, since I was born in 1618, the first year of this war, not a single year."

  "I knew you would be a source of trouble the first time I laid eyes on you."

  "Mutti, you can fairly and justly hold me accountable for some things. Quite a few things. But my birth was not a causative factor for these wars. Ask Herr Eddie. He will explain it to you."

  "Where's Melchior?"

  "Out posting the placards. May I see the play when it comes to Bamberg? Please?"

  "Why should I let you spend our hard-earned money to see a play when you have already set the whole thing in type?"

  "It has music, they say. Music, too. Printing music is not the same as hearing it. I'll do the woodcuts showing the melodic line for each song and its verses on separate sheets after I have finished the dialogue. It will be tricky to put together. On some of the pages, I'll have to end the type in the middle, because the song comes next. They don't always come out even."

  "If it looks as if that is going to happen, then use smaller type for a couple of pages until you can back the extra lines to the end of the last full page. There's no point in wasting paper. It doesn't grow on trees, you know. I'm going to the market." Frau Else pulled her head back through the curtain.

  Otto smirked at the curtain and whispered, "How sweetly sounds the voice of a good woman! It is so seldom heard that, when it speaks, it ravishes all senses." Aloud he called, "Bye, Mutti."

  * * *

  Quiet night, that brings

  Rest to the labourer, is the outlaw's day,

  In which he rises early to do wrong,

  And when his work is ended dares not sleep.

  Tom Quiney eyed the insert he had just added to the margin of a locally printed copy of Franconia! "That works, doesn't it? I nabbed it out of The Guardian. Act II, Scene 4. We just have to change it to the 'Ritter's day.' Who cares that it's not new? We're not doing The Guardian on this tour and it's not as if most of the people coming to the plays are literary critics."

  "It's fine." Otto Kronacher found Tom and Dick Quiney to be kindred spirits. "When does Herr Massinger need the revision? Give me back that copy." He jerked it out of Tom's hands. "I can't read your writing. Just tell me what needs to be done and I'll write it in."

  "He is scheduled to meet with the Committee of Correspondence on Tuesday. They have made quite a few . . . suggestions, shall we say. Modifications in point of view that a prudent man would make before the play is performed in Bamberg. They want to review the changes at the meeting. Patience, the beggar's virtue, shall find no harbor here."

  Otto waved his pencil. "There isn't any harbor in Bamberg. Not unless you count the piers on the river."

  "Quit your nonsense." Melchior pulled his brother's nose and then turned to Dick. "That's censorship. They're supposed to be defending freedom of speech. And all the other freedoms of stuff."

  "Ah. It's tricky. As Master Massinger has written, 'What a sea of melting ice I walk on!' They are not censoring us. Perforce not. They have in no way forbidden the production of the play. They have merely indicated that if certain unhappy members of the audience should happen to take exception to it as it stands, the forces of law and order might not be able to restrain them from venting their indignation at the first performance. Just a friendly warning."

  "But we have friends in the CoC." Melchior's voice was getting louder. "We know them. They aren't supposed to behave like that."

  Tom frowned. "Master Massinger says that the changes they want aren't 'substantive.' Well, he wasn't happy with their demands. But he has been censored before, in England, far more extensively. Once they required him to take a whole play and rewrite the setting from modern Spain to ancient Rome because it's comments on politics were too . . . forthright. Even then, the office did not grant him a performance license. So let us do what we must. 'To doubt is worse than to have lost; and to despair is but to antedate those miseries that must fall on us.' Mostly, they want to have their own people shown to be heroic."

  Otto grinned. "Then, like Pastor Meyfarth says, 'let us put the best construction on everything.' Don't think of it as censorship, Mel. Think of it as local patriotism. Maybe we ought to stick Pastor Meyfarth into the play, too. Just for a few lines."

  Tom cocked his head. "What's he like?"

  "Who?"

  "This pastor of yours."

  Otto provided a short synopsis of the Twelve Points of the Peasants, accompanied by the news that his sister had her eye on the pastor.

  Tom and Dick looked at each other. Tom leaped up. "Verily, I say unto you, and with only a few changes in the pronouns,"

  He, that would be known

  The father of his people, in his study

  And vigilance for their safety must not change

  Their ploughshares into swords, and force them from

  The secure shade of their own vines, to be

  Scorched with the flames of war.

  "That's got it. That's exactly the kind of thing Pastor Meyfarth says all the time."

  "Fine. In he goes. What else?"

  "The Thornton. We could put in the Thornton."

  "Let's put in Pastor Schaeffer, too. The one spouting propaganda for Freiherr von Bimbach. Someone can tell him, 'You may boldly say, you did not plough or trust the barren and
ungrateful sands with the fruitful grain of your religious counsels.'"

  Dick leaned back. "Guys, you're getting off the point. We don't need the Thornton and the Schaeffer guy. I have the notes that I took for Master Massinger at the meeting, so let us proceed onward and see what can be done to suit the CoC. Pay attention, Otto. Jud Fry has to go. Or, at least, he can't be a hired hand, even if you want to keep the name. The villain has to be either a nobleman or the son of a reactionary city council member."

  "Check. Just a minute. A nobleman named 'Jud Fry' isn't very likely, is it? Even in England. I don't think they had noblemen in America, did they?"

  "So make him the loutish son of a city council member. We don't have time to agonize. Tuesday, remember. Tuesday. Fix your eyes and thoughts on Tuesday. Here, in the long speech, William Jennings Bryan says,"

  Equal nature fashion'd us

  All in one mould.

  All's but the outward gloss

  And politic form that does distinguish us.

  "That's when Aunt Gretchen sings,"

  I'd like to teach you all a little sayin', and learn these words by heart the way you should.

  I don't say I'm better than anybody else, but I'll be damned if I ain't just as good.

  . . . sei ich verdammt, wenn ich nicht ganz so gut bin.

  "They don't want Master Massinger to take that song out, but they want Old Käthe to sing it instead of Aunt Gretchen. Because they don't want the audience to get confused with Gretchen Richter. Not that it isn't something she'd say, probably."

  Otto marked up his copy.

  "Then they want Brillo to come up and say, 'Whaddaya mean I'm no better than anybody else? I'm way better than that Merino ram." Dick sighed.

  Otto marked up the other margin.

  Tom frowned. "We'll have to make sure that Aunt Gretchen and Old Käthe and the Ewe are never on stage at the same time, because Antonia's playing all of them. Tell Mike Mundell that two of them will have to wear capes. Different capes. She won't have time for real costume changes. Which one of the three needs to be most important? That one won't wear a cape."

  "The CoC people didn't say. They ought to be happy if it's either Old Käthe or the Ewe. Those are from around here."

  Otto smiled, a wicked, wicked smile. "Does Mistress Antonia absolutely have to play all three of them?"

  "Well. She's the only actress in the company who's the right age."

  "Does the singer have to be really, really, good?"

  "Not for all the scenes. In a lot of them, the chorus is singing, too."

  "Then we can solve Master Massinger's 'Ewe problem.' And get to see the play, too. Several times, probably."

  Melchior opened and closed his mouth. Also several times. He looked like a gasping fish. He didn't manage to utter any moderating words before Otto stuck his head through the shop curtain and called, "Mutti."

  * * *

  "I don't want to hear what they told Master Massinger after it's over and done. Not even if he is willing to live with the censorship. He's been . . . Otto, what is that word Herr Eddie uses?"

  "Conditioned, Mel. Conditioned. You've got to focus on memorizing those vocabulary lists."

  "Yeah. Master Massinger has been conditioned to accept censorship. I haven't. You and Dick and Tom shouldn't be either. It's just . . . wrong, I guess . . . what they're making him do to his play. Plus, maybe he's only telling us what he thinks we ought to hear. Doing like Pastor Meyfarth and putting the best construction on everything. Maybe they've been treating him worse than he has admitted."

  "It's not likely that they're making him do things we don't know about." Otto pointed to the type bins. "After all, we're the ones who are printing the script with the changes in it. We have to know what all of them are."

  "They could be making worse threats than he's told us about. So I still want to hear what they tell him while the meeting's going on. What's to keep them from looking at this version and telling him to make more before it suits them. And still more. It's creeping . . . creeping something. I forget the word. I want to be there and listen. Wasn't one of those proverbs that Herr Eddie had us memorize that 'power corrupts?'"

  "'Power tends to corrupt.' Herr Eddie wants us to memorize them exactly the way they are written." Otto shook his finger. "Remember how Pastor Meyfarth says there's really a big difference between, 'Money is the root of all evil' and 'The love of money is the root of all evil.' Herr Eddie thinks the same way."

  Dick got up and stretched. "Master Massinger puts it this way. 'Conscience and wealth are not always neighbors.'"

  "What was it that he said? Exactly?" Tom asked.

  "Herr Eddie? 'The devil is in the details.' That's why we have to memorize all the proverbs exactly how they are written. He calls it mental exercise." Otto flipped through the pages of the script, looking at the marginal notes he had made. "Anyway, there's a sort of problem with going to listen to the Committee of Correspondence meeting, Mel. Nobody invited us."

  "And that is a problem because . . . ?" Tom raised his eyebrows.

  With Tom in charge, it turned out not to be a problem. More in the nature of a project. Monday evening, they moved Frau Else's ladder, the one they usually used to wash the shit (literal) thrown at the Kronacher print shop by various dissenting apprentices off the stucco, to a different wall of a different building.

  Nobody noticed it, particularly. It was a dirty ladder. Bamberg had a lot of dirty ladders.

  The new location happened to be the tavern where the CoC met. However, the ladder was located three rooms behind the CoC meeting room, on the opposite side of the building, and reached to a window one story higher.

  The trick was getting out of adult sight on Tuesday morning. Early enough on Tuesday morning.

  Tom and Dick told Mistress Antonia, the evening before, that they were going to the print shop again, the first thing, to check any last-minute changes, and would take their breakfast there.

  Otto and Melchior didn't tell Frau Else anything at all. They left a message with the elderly maid. Hanna, increasingly hard of hearing, got the impression that someone had borrowed the ladder the previous day and they were going to a neighbor's house to carry it back.

  Otto had counted on this. He had, perhaps, worded his message in such a way as to cultivate precisely that impression. Hanna did not question the amount of food that Otto and Melchior took with them on what should be such a brief errand. The need to satisfy their appetites frequently caused their mother to emit despairing cries when she sat down to balance the household budget.

  They found the window to which the ladder pointed. Open. Dick had kissed Christina, one of the chambermaids at the inn behind the tavern—kissed her several times—to ensure this fortuitous circumstance, assuring Tom that his efforts proved he was willing to undertake immense hardships for a higher cause. Which Tom doubted: Christina had a gamine face. She looked like a pixie with straight black hair. The hair around her face did not grow long, but rather fell in wisps down over her forehead. Tom would have been willing to kiss her himself if he had the chance. In any case, it was just as well she hadn't wanted money. Gold—the picklock that never fails—was one thing that none of the boys had.

  Dick had met Christina through Otto, who had met her at Pastor Meyfarth's church while he was chaperoning his sister Martha during her weekly devout attention to the pastor's sermons—or to the pastor who was delivering the sermons, more likely. He had taken her backstage to a rehearsal, telling her to wear her brightest clothes and then hiding her among the local hires for the chorus. Where she had performed just as well as anyone else, to his surprise. She had a good alto, even though no more training in its use than any child got in a village school.

  Christina would have been happy to open the window without the bribe of Dick's kisses. A couple of years older than any of the boys, she had been a chambermaid at the inn since she was thirteen. She was tired of it. Bored with it to the point of being willing to assume some risk if that risk brou
ght along a chance to do something else. Like join a troupe of traveling players, perhaps.

  She was waiting for them in the early dawn, giggling a little. Her brown eyes were dancing. She led them down a set of back stairs, but not into the tavern kitchen, which was already bustling with activities that involved boiling, frying, and fricasseeing. Instead, because the tavern consisted of two originally separate buildings that had been combined in a remodeling, they went through a storage pantry, up a similar set of back stairs on the other side, and down a hall. The door looked like any other door. It didn't open into a bedchamber, though.

  "See."

  A well-run inn clearly required a very large supply of bed linens. A room full of them, stacked neatly on shelves. None of the boys had ever seen so many all in one place.

  "I can't stay. I have to put the key back before the mistress realizes that I snitched it. She always leaves the key ring on the door handle for a while in the morning so the housekeeper can get things without disturbing her while she is casting the accounts. Don't stay in here. The housekeeper will be locking it and unlocking it all morning. Look."

  Clearly, the linen closet had once been the bedchamber of some wealthy Bamberg burgher. A couple of centuries before. A burgher wealthy enough to provide himself with a privy. A privy with a nice hole in the floor. A hole that, as a result of some remodeling, was now blocked off by the ceiling of the room below.

  A ceiling in which Christina, at Dick's behest, had drilled a much smaller hole.

  The hand-held drill was courtesy of Mike Mundell. Putting up and pulling down stage sets required a troupe of actors to have a pretty comprehensive set of tools. Since his dad was working in Nürnberg, he'd brought along everything in the basement except what his mom said she absolutely had to keep if the house wasn't going to fall down around their heads.