Gary had started to suspect that already, during the eighteen months of his marriage to Sheila. The all-too-short eighteen months—Sheila had been left behind by the Ring of Fire.
Jonas leaned forward, resting his chin on his good hand. “Have you guys noticed that we’ve got a problem?”
“Yeah,” said Gary. “That’s why we’re here.”
“No,” said Jonas. “A new problem. The Tuebingen people weren’t here yet when the conference started. They missed the opening statements. They had heard that Carol spoke before she delivered the ELCA response today—that I guarantee. But they hadn’t seen it. They hadn’t sat there when it was happening. We could get a rerun of the first couple of days of the colloquy.”
Gary rested his chin on both hands. “Well, I don’t care what the Saxon chancellor said, Carol, they can’t have you beheaded. Two swords or no two swords. I went down to Rudolstadt last Saturday and looked it all up in the count’s library. According to the law, they beheaded those crypto—Calvinists in Saxony for treason, not for heresy. You can’t commit treason to the Elector of Saxony or even to the Duke of Wuerttemberg. You’re not one of their subjects. He’s just blowing smoke. And I’m inclined to tell him so.”
“Oh, I never really thought that he would have me beheaded here.” Carol looked a little reflective. “But if I ever went up there, I think he might actually try. His mouth was pretty frothy. And the professors from Wittenberg were just egging him on. But these guys from Tuebingen are even more so.”
“It was the ‘Philip had four daughters who prophesied’ reference that really got to him.” Jonas grinned. “Especially since Melanchthon’s name was Philip.”
Carol looked injured. “He annoyed me with the ‘women should keep silence in the church’ bit. I still don’t understand, though, why he slammed that baton on the table so hard when I pointed out that we were in a lecture hall and not a church.”
“Umm,” said Jonas. “Carol, has it ever occurred to you that you have a rather literal mind?”
Gary referred back to her earlier comment. “The guys from Tuebingen are ‘even more so,’ in a way. But they didn’t ever try to behead Kepler. They just excommunicated him and wrote lots of letters. It really wasn’t even them that were involved with having his mother tried for witchcraft—that was accusations from her neighbors and a local judge who didn’t like their family. It’s not as if these guys were out to get her…”
His voice trailed off. “I think, maybe, I’m getting an idea. Give me a couple of days to work it out.”
* * *
As the colloquy droned on the next morning, Gary sat quietly at his place on the bench, fingers laced in front of him with his thumbs going around one another in circles, first clockwise and then counterclockwise, closing out the speeches and examining his idea. Gary didn’t come up with a lot of ideas. He didn’t have one of those sparkling, scintillating minds that threw out innovative concepts right and left. Consequently, when he did have an idea, he tended to react with a certain amount of apprehension. He was looking at this one very carefully—sort of the way that Red Riding Hood would have examined the wolf if she’d been on high alert.
* * *
The weekend came. Ed, who had conscientiously refrained from asking Tanya why the counts of Oldenburg and Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt had needed four hours of private, uninterrupted, radio communications with Magdeburg, nevertheless rode home for a long talk with Mike.
The weekend went. Ed dutifully returned to Jena. With every day that passed, those benches got harder.
Monday evening, the “personal observers” again met for supper with Margrave George. Later, Ed would describe the conversation to Mike as “acrimonious,” although, in fact, as the representative of the state that had dumped the problem in the lap of the others, he had rather enjoyed it. The German word was Schadenfreude: delight in the tribulations of others.
It ran late. In seventeenth-century Germany and Scandinavia, religion was a matter of doctrine, but for the rulers, it was more. From the perspective of the princes, religion was important in the “here and now” because religion here and now was a way of making the population behave. In Lutheran countries the church was, if not simply, at least also, a branch of the executive government. Any change in church practice would affect the maintenance of public order—which was the reason, for example, that Christian IV of Denmark promoted orthodox Lutheranism although he privately favored Calvinism. The chancellor of Hessen-Kassel had made more than a few pithy remarks about the unsettling effects of religious change—he had lived through Kassel’s switch from Lutheranism to Calvinism.