Jones grinned. “For a man with no children you’ve got a surprising grasp of teenage psychology, Larry.”
Mazzare grinned back. “I have memories of being a teenaged male myself, Simon, before I turned my thoughts to Heaven.”
Heinzerling was looking puzzled, so Mazzare took pity on him. “Sharon’ll be the key to keeping the Stone boys under control, Gus. Even more than their father and mother. She’s the most glamorous woman they know—well, leaving aside Becky Stearns—and close enough to their own age to leave room for fantasies.”
Now Heinzerling was frowning. “She is grieving for her dead betrothed, Hans Richter.”
Jones smiled. “Yup. Like Larry says: glamorous. For Pete’s sake, Gus, weren’t you ever a youngster?”
Heinzerling shook his head. “Americans are all insane. What has ‘glamor’ to do with anything? Much less fantastical delusions? Fraulein Nichols is a respectable young woman grieving for her betrothed, and those boys are much too young to be entertaining notions of marriage anyway.
“However,” he said, shrugging heavily, “I will do as you ask.”
* * *
After Heinzerling left, Jones cocked an eye at Mazzare. “It might be good for Sharon, too, having to concentrate on keeping those juvenile delinquents out of trouble. Give her something to think about other than . . .” He groped in the air, a bit feebly.
“That’s what I was thinking.” Mazzare sighed heavily. He was worried about Sharon.
Sharon Nichols had been added to the diplomatic delegation at the very end, just two days before it left Grantville. That at been at her father’s urging.
“Anything to get her mind off Hans,” he’d told Mazzare. Seeing the question lurking in the priest’s mind, James Nichols had chuckled harshly. “Oh, I’m not worried about that, Father. My daughter is about as suicidally inclined as a brick. But . . .”
He’d groped in the air too, then, and just as feebly as Jones was doing now. Mazzare understood both gestures. Sharon’s romance with Hans Richter had been a storybook one, ended when her fiancé died in true storybook fashion at the Battle of Wismar less than six months earlier. The woman was in her early twenties, to make things worse—that treacherous age when deep grief could insidiously slide into a quasi-romantic melancholy that lasted for years and years. A lifetime, in some cases. The priest had seen it happen, from time to time.
And what a waste that would be! Not just the waste of a life, but the waste of a person whose intelligence and skills—not to mention sheer energy, when Sharon was her normal self—would be an asset to many other people. Including—Mazzare admitted to some selfish motives here—the delegation from the USE to Venice. Sharon’s hands-on medical skills would be a valuable addition to Tom Stone’s more theoretical knowledge.
He rose from his chair and went over to a window, looking out over the city. “God knows Venice could use her,” he murmured.
Loud enough, apparently, for Jones to hear him. The Protestant reverend snorted sarcastically. “And that’s another thing the guide books didn’t mention! The glamorous pestilence.”
Jones wasn’t really being fair to Venice, Mazzare thought. Or Italy as a whole, for that matter. Yes, Venice had lost about a third of its population in the recent plague. But that wasn’t an unusual percentage, in this day and age, for a city struck by bubonic plague. Many cities suffered worse. The truth was that medicine and public sanitation were more advanced in Italy in the seventeenth century than probably anywhere else in Europe.
Which . . . wasn’t saying much.
Mazzare was a conservatively inclined man, by temperament, and found the constant changes in his life more than a little taxing. In three short years he’d gone from a small town in up-time America where disease didn’t include bubonic plague and typhus, through a jury-rigged little “United States” restricted to the southern half of Thuringia, through an equally jury-rigged “Confederated Principalities of Europe,” to yet a fourth nation—the only- months-old “United States of Europe” which Mike Stearns was busily jury-rigging right now.
And—it needed only this!—one Father Larry Mazzare was the ambassador from that country to Venice. It was almost funny, in a way. He’d been appointed as ambassador from one country—the CPE—but by the time he’d finally been able to take up his post, his country had changed underneath his feet.Oh, well. He tried to brace his spirit with lines of poetry, which he murmured aloud.