“Just so,” Mazarini echoed. “And the passage to which Your Eminence wishes to direct my attention?”
“Ah, I do apologize. I began to muse on other matters. Permit me—” Richelieu leaned over to flip a page open by a bookmark. “Here,” he said, tapping a bold-face heading.
Mazarini looked. It read: Mazarin, Cardinal Jules.
Mazarini focused his eyes on it, confirming that—as with other versions he had seen—they had gotten his birth date wrong. Two days, but still—
He looked up at Richelieu. “I have read this. Or one much like it.”
“They are all much alike, that I have seen.”
To keep silence now, that was painful. Mazarini could not. “I have spoken with—I have spoken with a number of people—”
And the words dried up. He felt his palms start again with sweat, his pulse hammer in his ears. The abstract—the dry statement of a textbook that spoke of a future world, that spoke of events that would not happen for years to come—was as nothing next to a living, breathing prince of the church directing that he read the future course of his life.
Richelieu took pity on him. “You will have heard, perhaps, that I made a number of promotions rather earlier than”—he took in the cabinet with a languid wave—”these texts say that I would have done?”
“And when last we met you offered then that I might come into—” Again, the sudden drying of the mouth. This time, the words came after only a slight fumble “—your confidence?”
Mazarini wondered that the cardinal did not hear the thunder of his heart. It was like holding the perfect hand at cards, hoping against hope that the betting could be run up to higher and higher levels without—but Richelieu was nodding, slow and liquid, dreamlike, as if under water.
“Confidence,” mused the cardinal. “As good a word as any. Knowing what you would do, what you are capable of. I saw some of it at Lyon—I greeted you thinking you came to spy, not to treat, convinced you adhered wholly to my king’s enemies. Two hours and you had convinced me of much that turned out to be for the good of everyone involved. And then your theatrical coup at Casale—magnificent!”
“Your Eminence is too kind.”
“Ah, Monsignor, but what you will do—it justifies your promise now, if my humble opinion counts for anything. Yes, justifies it amply. Revolution, war, heresy—through all of these to make France the great power of Europe for a hundred years.” A sigh, and a deep one. “And for nothing.”
“Your Eminence?”
Richelieu smiled in response, small and sad, suddenly wearing every one of his years. “Neither of our other selves was to know. Not Cardinal Richelieu, nor the Cardinal Mazarin who succeeded him so capably. While we made France anew in the image of a beautiful, strong, holy nation, the English simply spread out over the world and . . . stole it.”
Mazarini nodded. The governance of the English might be in the hands of fools and outright villains more often than not, but there was no denying the inventive, indefatigable wanderlust they seemed to imbibe with their mothers’ milk. Or the roving commission of violent larceny each Englishman seemed to grant himself as soon as he could walk. Other nations fought the Algerine or the Dunkerker to suppress piracy. For the English, it was to serve the competition a bad turn.
How typical of such, thought Mazarini, to steal the whole of a future, for there was much in what Richelieu had said that he had seen in the little of the future’s history that Harry Lefferts had known. Harry had cheerfully admitted having paid precious little attention to his studies, but his every act and thought spoke of the domination of the Anglophone peoples of the world he had come from.
On the other hand, that hegemony had also created Grantville. On which, Mazarini reminded himself, he had felt called to wager so much.
“I see,” was all he said.
Richelieu nodded. “I will not find extravagance of use, here and now, will I? I should keep my hat on, not so?”
Mazarini smiled. He remembered the theatrics Richelieu had displayed himself at Lyon, tearing off his hat and stamping on it. The cardinal as well as the monsignor could take pleasure in executing a coup de theatre.