Grantville Gazette Volume 25 Read online

  Lisa practically growled.

  "But they're here now," Amber Higham said placatingly.

  "In class?"

  "Well, not this very minute. The troupe only got back from Franconia yesterday. Philip came by to enroll Dick and Tom again. You know that, which is why we're having this meeting. Then he went over to book the auditorium at the middle school for several performances of the revised Franconia! and a couple of new plays he wrote over the summer and he took Dick with him. The Massingers don't have any children, so he's sort of decided that Dick will be his heir and expects him to learn the business angles. After that, they're going to see Lorrie Mitchell and tell her that Barbara Ostertag decided to stay in Bamberg and work as a chambermaid at an inn. He says it is very respectable and that she will be well treated. They're taking along a girl who used to work at the inn and joined the troupe in Barbara's place as evidence. Tom already told Juliana and brought her a letter from her sister."

  She paused a little. "Mike Mundell is in class. Well, not in class, but in the building. At least, he's on the campus. He says that he's going to Magdeburg with the troupe when Massinger finishes up here. He plans to become a stage designer. It's okay with his mother and George is still in Nürnberg, so he really doesn't have much to say about it. Mike said that his dad just wrote back that he ought to take all the math and technical courses he could this fall, and he brought the letter to prove it. George thought that if Mike even might decide to try to get into the engineering school even part-time while he's working in Magdeburg, he should get the prerequisites now. So he's actually over at the Tech Center, I think, dual enrolling there as well as here at the high school."

  "So?"

  "So Tom is actually in class. I think." Amber smiled. "And Zach Schaupp. He's going to stay with Massinger too, though, instead of finishing school here."

  Lisa frowned.

  Amber turned to Victor Saluzzo. "But I do have good news. While Philip was here, I broke the news that I'm engaged to Heinrich Schütz and told him that I'm moving to Magdeburg, too, in December. He was delighted. He's going to see if his people can participate in the drama curriculum at Duchess, even if they aren't enrolled in any of the other classes. But, also, he says that he'll find a replacement for me here in Grantville. I know you were worried that you might have to call on the Jesuits again and some people in town have been complaining that there are too many Jesuits on the staff already. Philip says that he knows a qualified young man. M.A. from Oxford and has actually had a couple of plays produced in London. With the commotion going on in England these days, if his friend hasn't died in some epidemic already, he's pretty sure he'll be willing to come."

  The principal didn't emit any negative body language, so Amber forged ahead. "If you can stand the thought of hiring sight unseen, just on somebody else's recommendation, Philip will see you when he finishes his business this morning and send a letter off this afternoon. If the mails aren't delayed and the weather isn't so bad that it really delays travel in the middle of winter, he could get here before I leave."

  Saluzzo nodded. The seventeenth-century definition of "cultural diversity" differed from the twentieth-century version, but it was still something that he had to take into consideration when he recruited his faculty. Racial balance had dropped out of the picture, but religious balance had taken its place. The down-time citizens of Grantville, who far outnumbered the up-timers, were a fairly self-selected population. Now that central Germany wasn't an active war zone any more, those who didn't like the way Grantville did things tended to leave again and settle someplace else where life was more comfortable and familiar, since the laws and constitution of the State of Thuringia-Franconia now made settling in any of its towns a lot easier than it used to be. Those who stayed had, by and large, adapted to the concept of non-religious public schools. But they still watched the faculty closely for what they considered a "reasonable balance" of Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics among the new down-time hires. There were so few down-time Jews willing to teach in a secular school that they hardly counted. Particularly, since he was a Catholic himself, the Protestants kept an eye on how many Catholics he hired. "Just in case," one of them had told him. "Just in case you start turning it into a Catholic school behind our backs and those Jesuits convert our children."

  Which, he had to admit, the Jesuits on his staff were highly tempted to do. Converting people was their reason for being. Victor had to keep an eye on them himself. "Not on school time" had become his mantra, with a strongly worded letter from Lawrence, Cardinal Mazzare, to back him up. Even with that, he'd had to have a couple of chats with Athanasius Kircher about keeping a tighter rein on his team.

  Which meant that a Protestant English drama teacher might not be a bad idea. M.A. from Oxford. Two plays produced in London. "Tell him to go ahead," he said to Amber. "It's not as if it's a lifetime commitment. I'll write a letter for him to enclose, spelling out the salary and offering an eighteen-month contract. That's time enough to find out whether or not he'll fit in. What's the guy's name?"

  "I honestly didn't think to ask."

  "That's okay." He turned to Lisa. "Just do a generic position description, to start with. We can do the specific letter later."

  * * *

  Master Massinger and Dick weren't back by noon.

  "Lorrie Mitchell probably invited them for lunch," Lorie Lee Carstairs said. "It's the sort of thing she would do. She's a pretty nice lady." She looked at Tom Quiney across the cafeteria table. "Just who did you say this Christina Somebody was who went with them?"

  "Christina Pittlin. Or Pittl, I guess you would say. She's the replacement for Barbara Ostertag. Barbara decided she didn't like acting."

  Lorie Lee, who had inherited a lot of her mother's temperament, went straight for the jugular. "Is she his new girlfriend?"

  "More or less. I guess you could say." Tom was pretty sure that Lorie Lee wasn't going to suffer for long from Dick's diversion in another direction. Mainly, she'd be annoyed that he hadn't written and broken things off himself instead of leaving it to his brother. "Master and Mistress Massinger like her and she has good sense."

  "Is that what they call 'the handwriting on the wall'?"

  "Dick doesn't know it yet." Tom laughed. "But, yeah. Probably. If things work out over the next few years. She's a bit older than Dick. Nobody's going to make them get married, like in a play plot. But it will be easier for them to marry each other than for either of them to marry anybody else. And Christina's pretty enough. A girl almost has to be if she's going to be a heroine on a stage."

  "And he deliberately left it to you to tell me?"

  Tom nodded. "Yeah. He didn't say so, but I think that's how he managed to work things out."

  Lorie Lee munched on her hard roll. It took her about three bites to relegate Dick Quiney to his proper place in the universe, which was "long gone."

  Tom leaned across the table toward her. "Tell me something."

  "What?"

  "I went down to Sternbock's last night."

  "The coffee house."

  He nodded. "Actually, tell me two things."

  "If I can."

  "Why does 'Bohemian' mean 'unconventional and artistic'? I mean, with all due respect to Wallenstein, "left wing" isn't the way anybody would be likely to describe him. And not that I've ever been to Prague—though Master Massinger would like to do a tour there, one of these days, if things work out right—but even though Emperor Rudolf II employed a lot of artists in his day, it's not like it's Italy."

  "Umm, I don't know. We can probably find out if we go to the library."

  "Let's then, after school, unless you have something else to do."

  "Band. I have band rehearsal. We can do it after that. I'll call Mom."

  "Then, something else. For people who want to be 'Bohemian' that way, why do up-timers consider tights to be so avant garde? That's what one woman called them. They're hopelessly old-fashioned, really." Tom sighed. "My grandfather wore them.
"

  * * *

  "We need more play books," Philip Massinger was looking around the middle school auditorium. "We'll start with the new version of Franconia! We can do The Americaness and Bimbach the Buffoon. Several of my older plays should suit Grantville's tastes. The Renegado. The Bondman. We should work up A New Way to Pay Old Debts again before Magdeburg. The audiences there will expect a different play for each evening of the twelve nights of Christmas, with something special on Twelfth Night. The CoC people should support Old Debts by buying tickets. But we need something else. Some exciting attraction. If Master Saluzzo agrees to hiring my friend, he can bring his own plays. The two that have already been produced—Holland's Leaguer and A Fine Companion—and any new ones he's written since we left England. That will give us a couple more."

  "Since you'll be writing to England anyway," Dick said, "I'll send a letter to Aunt Susannah. She has a batch of Grandpa's old papers and she hates storing stuff. I'll ask her to send them along with the new drama teacher. There could be his own copies of some of his play books in with the rest of the papers, even though the ones annotated for performance stayed with the King's Men."

  Massinger nodded with approval. "Do that."

  "I never got to go to London to see the plays there. Is Holland's Leaguer patriotic? Or historical? It sounds like it from the title."

  Massinger cleared his throat. "The full title of the printed version, as I recall it, was Holland's Leaguer, or a Historical discourse of the life and actions of Dona Britanica Hollandia, the Arch-Mistris of the wicked women of Eutopia, wherein is detected the notorious sinne of Pandarisme, and the execrable life of the luxurious Impudent, with the rare frontispiece of the celebrated brothel. . . . 'Leaguer' is the name of the brothel."

  Dick interrupted. "Have you mentioned to Principal Clinter that you intend to put this on the stage of his middle school?"

  "Why should I? It was performed before the court of King Charles to great approval. His other play was also acted before the king and queen at Whitehall, several times and to great applause."

  "Because . . ."

  "The Leaguer has a moral. Even though Lord Philautus is conceited and a pleasure-seeker, encouraged in his folly by his steward and parasite Ardelio, he is brought to his senses in the end by Faustina, who turns out to be his sister." Massinger, something of an expert on the next topic, added judiciously, "Marmion handled his borrowings from Juvenal and Petronius Arbiter very well."

  "Master Massinger," Dick said. "I don't think that's going to help." He stuttered a bit, looking for the right words. "Up-timers are different. They're really, really, prudish, a lot of them. Especially when it comes to kids. Uh. Maybe we'd better save that one for Magdeburg. And don't mention it to Master Saluzzo this afternoon. Not if you want your friend to get a job teaching high school in Grantville."

  * * *

  "All right then," Victor Saluzzo said. "All we have to do is put a name on the letter. I had my secretary type it and just leave room for the address. What's his name?"

  "Shackerley Marmion."

  Victor looked up. Massinger had a perfectly straight face. For him, obviously, the name had no significant difference from "Henry Jones" or "John Smith."

  "Do you have any idea what a classroom of hillbillies is going to make of a moniker like that?"

  "What would the problem be?" Massinger asked. "Here, in town, I have been introduced to a man named Haymond Shackleton. People call him 'Stacks.' From 'hay,' I presume."

  "Yeah, but . . ." Victor paused. "I guess it's all in what you're used to. He's going to be facing a class of teenagers for whom his name will be something new."

  "I will warn him."

  Early October 1634

  "Hey, Mariah. Who's that you're with? I thought you had a date with Eddie Junker for the play." Suzi Barclay smiled maliciously.

  "He asked me, but then Tony Adducci sent him and Noelle up to Erfurt to hunt up more evidence on the Bolender thing. He'd already bought the tickets, so he gave them to me and I asked Hans-Fritz."

  "Isn't he your relative?"

  Mariah stopped a minute to think. "He's . . . my sister's . . .

  "fiancé's . . .

  "mother's . . .

  "third husband's . . .

  "stepson," she finished triumphantly. "Can it, Suzi, that hardly counts as incest."

  * * *

  "I saw it at the Middle School again. Franconia!, I mean. It's really delightful," Amber Higham said. "Ten times funnier now than the first version the boys did in class last spring. It should do well in Magdeburg."

  Annabelle Piazza shook her head. "We saw it, too. Somebody seems to have left out 'Do not' at the beginning of 'fold, bend, staple, or mutilate.' It sort of reminds me of what happens when barbed wire snaps at the post and rolls itself up. What a tangle."

  "The original version of Oklahoma! wouldn't make much sense to most of the people who come to see this play. Philip didn't like the music. Heinrich says that he doesn't care for a lot of it himself, and he is actually taking the trouble to understand how it developed between now and then. He says that Franck's students from Coburg did a really good job adapting it, musically."

  "I suppose." Annabelle looked a little doubtful. "What are they doing next?"

  "Three or four down-time plays. Then . . ." Amber grinned. "Master Massinger wrote a new play. The Americaness. Then he came back from Bayreuth with a letter letting him listen to the original cast recording of Call Me Madam!"

  "Oh yikes! There's going to be another one?"

  "Yep. Another musical. The boys are working on it right now."

  * * *

  "We have the first version ready," Dick said. "I can't believe that it took us a whole six weeks."

  "The recording only had the songs, and a little synopsis of the plot on the back. We couldn't find out any more about it," Tom consoled him.

  "We even put an ad in the newspapers to see if anyone had a video of the movie." That was Dick.

  Tom again. "But it seems like nobody does. So in addition to translating the songs, we've written all new dialogue. That's what took us so long."

  Amber Higham kept turning her head. The verbal ping-pong between the Quineys went on as usual.

  "So we moved it from the Grand Duchy of Lichtenburg to Rome."

  "For one thing, we couldn't even find out where the Grand Duchy of Lichtenburg was."

  "Some emperor probably created it between now and then."

  Amber tried to say that she thought it was meant as a fictional amalgamation of Luxemburg and Liechtenstein, but Dick and Tom just kept going.

  "So we moved it to a court in Italy."

  "That was the obvious solution. In a pinch, set any play in Italy."

  "We kept Princess Maria and Kenneth. They were sure crowd-pleasers."

  "But we've made him a Scots cavalryman instead of an American public relations flack."

  "Just to keep Jabe McDougal from getting a big head, you know."

  "And called the princess 'Giulia' instead of Maria. That name's just too common."

  "And everybody has heard how some old fogies were offended by Mike Stearns' informality at the Congress of Copenhagen."

  "Well, not everybody."

  "Everybody who's alive and awake?"

  "That'll do."

  "When we have the grand duke coming in for the first time, he's preceded by his herald."

  "The herald introduces him with a list of titles that go on for a page and a half."

  "Some of them are pretty cute, if we do say so ourselves."

  "Then, right after this proclamation, Sally Adams says, 'Call me Madam.'"

  "The chief of her bodyguards steps up."

  "He says, 'And she will call you Sir.'"

  Amber was starting to get dizzy from turning her head back and forth, but there was no stopping the Quineys in mid-spate.

  Tom picked up the dialogue again. "Master Massinger likes Irving Berlin's music a lot better than he did Rodgers and
Hammerstein."

  "Mistress Antonia really, really likes Sally Adams. She's going to play the role."

  "We've made her an ambassadress from Albion. The Scots cavalryman is the head of her bodyguard."

  Amber stopped turning her head and just listened.

  "The grand duke is facing a peasant revolt."

  "Don't tell me," she said.

  "The leader of the peasant revolt is the hero. He's named Constantino."

  "We thought that it was quite providential that the man that Sally fell in love with was named Cosmo Constantine. Surely it must have been foreordained that we write this play."

  "As if it was fate for us to meet Noelle Murphy and for her to tell Master Massinger about her grandma's recording." Tom stopped, looking a little concerned. "Has anybody found out yet exactly what happened to Noelle?"

  Amber shook her head. "Not that I've heard."

  * * *

  "Lost your boyfriend again?"

  Mariah Collins turned around with exasperation. "Eddie Junker isn't my boyfriend. I wouldn't have minded, not a bit, but it just didn't work out. Every time he asked me for a date, something came up with his work. Now nobody even knows where he is, since he went chasing out of town with Noelle after Suzi and her father and the other creeps who defected to Austria."

  "So who are you with?"

  "Hans-Fritz Zuehlke."

  "You're dating some bureaucrat from the state personnel office?"

  "Look, Micaela. Just because we did the geology survey together, that doesn't give you a right to diss my friends. He's . . . okay. All right? Somebody has to do that sort of stuff."

  "All right. No offense meant."

  "None taken."

  * * *

  "I suppose we should have expected that Franconia! wouldn't be a one-time thing." Annabelle Piazza sipped her coffee. "Ed says that the rest of the USE—the rest of Europe for that matter—isn't just going to adopt twentieth-century American culture intact. The down-timers are going to take pieces of it, modify it, put it through a wringer, and mangle it. What comes out the other end of the sausage grinder won't be a duplicate of the up-time world, but it also won't be what happened in Germany after 1648 up-time, either. That, I guess, is what Mike Stearns is aiming for. Something different, even if we can't predict exactly what it will be."