From where, southward, one might reach the Venetian Terrafirma, the hinterland of the port that was the home of the Most Serene Republic of Venice. And, until Switzerland invented the cuckoo clock and no-questions-asked deposit banking, Venice was the only nonhostile trading partner in Europe with money to spend. And, through Venice—if the doge and the Senate and the great houses of Venice could be persuaded—there was access to the Adriatic, the Mediterranean and the Levant.
“Who to send, though?” asked Mike of the air around him.
“Hard. We cannot make the usual consular arrangements there. They don’t like Jews in Venice, even if they tolerate our presence. Oh, they like our money and our trade well enough, and they are a polite people for the most part, but we will not get far without a proper embassy with a Christian in charge of it.” Francisco sat forward, set down his coffee mug. “You have, as I see it, only two potential ambassadors left who fit the bill and can be spared from other duties.”
“Who?” asked Mike.
Francisco told him.
“Well, I will be damned. You reckon they’ll do it?”
“Yes. There is the matter of their confidence in their own abilities, but—” He shrugged. “I think they will overcome those qualms if they are convinced it is their duty. One of them is a most conscientious cleric, after all, and the other . . .”
Francisco made a vague gesture, groping for the words.
Mike laughed. “Ha! The phrase you’re looking for is ‘flower child.’ Except that he’s old enough now to be willing to grow the flowers himself.”
Chapter 5
The Reverend Jones began to cough theatrically.
Father Augustus Heinzerling, SJ, glared at him over the brim of his stout briar pipe. “Ja? We are in the open air here, not so?”
Jones looked back at the heavy German priest with an expression of stunned disbelief. “What? Is there such a thing as open air around that—that substance you smoke? Dang it, this nation isn’t supposed to be using chemical warfare.”
“Oh, knock it off, Simon.” The third pastor at the table came to Heinzerling’s rescue. Father Lawrence Mazzare, parish priest at St. Mary Magdalene’s church, Grantville, looked up from the page of the book he was holding open. “Gus, smoke if you want, but get downwind.”
“Auch Sie?” Heinzerling adopted a wounded tone, but couldn’t help his grin. As one of the seventeenth-century clerics who had joined Grantville’s cadre of twentieth-century pastors, he had had nearly a year and a half to learn the hard way about the barbaric practice of making the smokers stand outside.
It was, he reflected, one of the odder differences the “up-timers” showed. The Ring of Fire had brought a town full of twentieth-century English-speaking Americans into seventeenth-century Germany. The exigencies of diplomacy, statecraft and espionage—along with the ambition of Mazarini, one of the pope’s more promising young ambassadors—had washed Heinzerling up in Grantville. Settling down with his wife and three children—to the mild consternation of the twentieth-century Catholics in town—he was becoming less and less like the Jesuit that the Society had usually been embarrassed to admit it had. Not so much like a proper Jesuit, perhaps, but he could certainly fake being a decent parochial priest on a good day. With a following wind. It was, he thought, a good life if only one didn’t weaken.
And now they were putting the finishing touches on a paper intended for the pope—or, at least, the pope’s closest advisers. Somewhat to Heinzerling’s surprise—and to Father Mazzare’s complete astonishment—the shipment of twentieth-century Catholic texts that Mazzare had asked Mazarini to take to the pope the previous year had borne fruit. In the spring of this year, Harry Lefferts had returned from his long sojourn in Italy and France—bearing with him a polite letter from Cardinal Barberini requesting a further amplification of the texts.
The “paper” that had resulted was more in the way of two massive tomes. One of them dealt with the next fifteen years of the Thirty Years’ War, and the other with the history of the Catholic Church to the late 1990s.
Giving the war a name was odd, to Heinzerling. He’d never thought of the troubles in Europe as being one war all taken together. He had bounced around the chaplaincies of two imperial armies and an assortment of other postings out of the sight of people of quality. He had never really seen anything to tell him that the series of unpleasant events and occasional bouts of slaughter were part of some larger whole. Somehow, the war didn’t seem to deserve anything so grand as a title when you saw it from the inside. It was just an inevitable part of life’s condition that had been with him since, practically, his ordination to the priesthood.