1634: The Baltic War (11 page)

Rubens had seen it coming, for weeks. Partly because, from his long experience as a diplomat, he could see the logic and sense the way it was unfolding in the mind of the prince who sought his advice and counsel. But mostly for the simplest reason of all.

Pieter Paul Rubens, a man who had been faithful to the Habsburgs all his life—and he was now fifty-six years old—had come to the edge of treason. To call things by the name that almost everyone would soon be calling it. Granted, the difference between a "traitor" and a "loyalist" being something that only history could finally pass verdict upon. If Don Fernando's scheme succeeded, the world would only remember the success. All but a sullen few would forget that the triumph began with treason, for treason it surely was—just as surely as Rubens would be executed for it, if the prince's plans failed and Rubens fell into the hands of the Spanish crown.

For, even before the prince spoke, Rubens had already decided he would support the plot and do everything in his power to make it succeed.

And why? Because a titan had been set loose in the world, and the monster had a mind more cold and savage and ruthless than any king or prince of the day. Not since Constantine, Rubens thought, had such a terrible soul walked the earth. Perhaps not since Alexander.

And there, of course, lay the quandary. For had not Constantine created the basis for the triumph of the true church? Had not Alexander, before him, created the world in which that church could arise?

Let the churchmen and the theologians insist that Constantine was a saint who had been impelled by his own faith. What difference did it make? Suppose the opposite were true, and the Roman emperor had been motivated by nothing beyond his own ambition. The result was the same, no?

Rubens had reached his quarters, now. He could hear his wife chatting with a servant in the kitchen, but he passed by the entrance and went to the room set aside for his work. There, as if driven by compulsion, he opened a drawer and drew out the document. He still had the original papers the nurse had left behind. Acting, he was quite certain, on another's orders.

How to Make Chloramphenicol

The pages that followed that title gave precise instructions for how to manufacture the world's most potent medicine.

The monster's stiletto, that the creature had driven into the heart of the world's greatest dynasty, his aim guided by a dragon's cunning and the force of the thrust by a titan's thews.

Who else could have conceived such an assassin's stroke?

For a moment, he had to fight not to crush the papers in his hands. Those papers that had opened the door to treason.

A sudden burst of laughter from the kitchen drew him there, again as if under compulsion.

When he entered, his wife looked up at him, smiling. Helena Fourment, only nineteen years old, of whom he was very fond. He would have five children by her, the first of whom was now sitting on her lap. The last child would be born eight months after his death at the age of sixty-three. Which would seem to indicate that he never lost that affection, even at the end—nor the ability to express it.

Seven years from now.

Perhaps. That was his biography in another world. Who could say, in this one?

But he wasn't really looking at Helena. He was seeing another face there. That of his first wife, Isabella Brant, whom he had also loved.

But that was the past, fixed, certain. Not something even the monster and his minions could change.

Isabella had died five years before the Ring of Fire. Taken from him by disease, at the age of thirty-five, in the prime of her life.

He looked now at his new daughter. Barely one year old. He had named her Clara Johanna, in memory of his first daughter by Isabella, Clara Serena.

Who had also been taken from him by disease, at the age of twelve. One of many struck down by another epidemic.

"Is something wrong, husband?"

"No, dearest. I'm . . . simply preoccupied."

And he was, suddenly. With a glorious burst of inspiration, such as he had not felt in years. Not since he first saw the up-time book that depicted his life and work—much of which he still hadn't done, or even conceived of—and sensed a great emptiness yawning beneath him.

How does an artist paint something he has already painted? Without the master becoming his own apprentice? Ending a life full of triumphs as if he were nothing more than an understudy?

Another of those impossible quandaries the monster brought with him into the world. But Rubens could resolve it now, using the monster himself.

He came into the room and wiggled fingers at his daughter, who was staring up at him with the wondering eyes of a child barely one year into a life that, for half the children in the world—including some of his—would never be much longer than that.

Then he smiled at Helena to reassure her, while he gently stroked the hair sprouting on Clara Johanna. "You will live, girl," he said, so softly that he didn't think Helena could hear the words. He hoped not, certainly, since she would insist on an explanation later, and what could he say? If nothing else, he would carefully shield Helena from any charges of treason.

"But I must go to work now," he said abruptly, and left.

By the end of the day, he already knew it would be one of his best paintings. He had that sure sense of the thing, that always came with the very finest ones.

A painting that existed in no up-time book, because he had never conceived such a portrait in that other world. Could
not
have conceived it. He didn't think Brueghel's fevered mind could have dreamed of it—nor even the mad brain of Hieronymus Bosch, for all that the structure of the image shared the logic of Bosch's triptychs.

"The Titan's Choice," he thought he would call it. Or, better still, simply "The Titan." The choice being obvious in the painting itself. Cities wracked by flame and destruction issuing from the right hand, clad in mail and armor. The right hand that any man could resist, with sufficient will and courage. While the left hand, unarmored—the assassin's hand, with the main gauche—delivered the fatal blow. Children spilling out like fruit from a cornucopia. The blow that passed beneath any armor, any defense, any will or steadfastness or courage, because it did not strike at kings and princes and soldiers at all. It struck the fathers and husbands hidden beneath.

Of course, he would not be able to show it in public, but that didn't really matter. The joy of finally recapturing his own creation was enough.

Who could he show it to, after all? Even if Don Fernando triumphed, Rubens would have to conceal it from the prince become a king. Rubens liked the young Habsburg scion, a great deal, and he wished him all the best. A long reign over a prosperous realm, with many children to carry on his line, sired upon a convivial and comely wife he actually loved. Had affection for, at least.

For that matter, Rubens was partial to the Habsburgs taken as a whole, and hoped that Don Fernando would be able to revitalize that great family. But he also knew that Don Fernando's dreams of future Habsburg glory were already doomed. The best the prince and his heirs would manage—no small thing, of course—would be to protect and nurture one corner of the world.

The world itself no longer belonged to them. A titan had come, and shaken it loose. For good or ill, it would be his name that the future would bestow upon this time, just as it had in ages past upon Alexander. And would, in the future of the titan's world, bestow upon a man named Napoleon.

His enemies could assassinate him tomorrow, and it wouldn't matter. The deadliest blows had already been delivered. Alexander died in Babylon at the age of thirty-three—but the Persian world was already gone, swept aside by the Greek torrent brought by its conqueror. Just as surely as the world Rubens and Don Fernando had been born in was already gone.

So be it. Rubens had made the father's decision, the husband's decision. In the end, dynasties were a small thing.

He decided he would leave the face till the last. True, he could request a portrait of some sort—they might have one of those "photographs" in their possession, in Amsterdam—but why bother? That would require awkward explanations, and he would have several days to study the titan himself after he arrived, with no one being the wiser.

He came. He went. For days, that fair but plain face fascinated Rubens. He'd thought he would have to idealize it—or demonize it, perhaps—but in the end decided the face was perfect as it was. Inscrutable in its simplicity, just as were the titan's deeds themselves.

A week later, the painting was done. It was the best work Rubens had done in years. A pity it would have to remain hidden, of course. But whatever else, the work had shattered the artist's paralysis. Everything he'd done since the Ring of Fire, except this, had been a copy of something, in one way or another. If not a copy of his own works, those of another—like that portrait he'd done of the Gretchen woman and her magnificent bosom, mimicking an artist of the future named Delacroix.

Well, not some of the Jefferson portraits, perhaps. But those had been so closely tied to a public purpose that he'd felt tightly constrained.

He thought he probably still only had seven years left, himself, regardless of what happened. He'd died of gout, in that world that would have been. From what Anne had told him, there didn't seem to be any magical medical cure for that condition, not even for the up-timers. Only a dreary list of things he shouldn't eat, and a still drearier list of things he shouldn't do. It hardly seemed worth it, just to gain a few extra years. Sixty-three wasn't so bad, better than most.

He didn't care much, really. They would be seven productive years, perhaps the most productive of his life. And he always had the consolation—given to precious few men since Adam—of knowing that almost the last act of his life would be to impregnate a wife whom he would leave behind in comfort and good health.

Still, as weeks passed, he felt increasingly dissatisfied. He hadn't even dared show the painting to Helena.
Somebody
should see it, before his death.

Finally, he realized that there was one witness possible. Who better, really? And she could certainly be relied upon to hold the confidence, for a multitude of reasons.

So, in one of the many visits across the lines into Amsterdam—those had practically become a regular traffic, by then—he passed the word along. And, two days later, his witness arrived at his home.

He ushered her into the small room where he kept the painting tucked away in a closet. He'd chosen that room because, small and awkwardly designed as it was, it had the only closet in the house that was big enough. It was a very large painting.

After setting it up on an easel for viewing, he unwrapped the cloth that hid it. Then, waited while she studied his work.

By the time she was done, Rebecca Abrabanel's brown eyes were watery. "Oh, Pieter," she whispered. "It's magnificent. But it's so . . .
wrong.
"

She turned the eyes to him, her gaze almost—not quite—an accusing one. "He is not a cruel man. I can assure you of that. Very kind and gentle, actually, most of the time."

So, Rubens knew he had succeeded.

"Of course not. I never imagined he was cruel." Finally satisfied, and in full, he gazed upon his work. "Nothing but grace can wreak such havoc and destruction, Rebecca. Nothing else can even come close. Had Lucifer understood that, we would never have needed for the Christ to be sent at all."

The Tower of London
January 1634

"I think I'm going to tear my hair out," Melissa Mailey announced, to no one in particular. She was looking through one of the windows in St. Thomas' Tower that overlooked the Water Lane that separated it from the Inner Ward and the rest of the Tower of London. Glaring through it, more precisely.

Sitting next to each other on an ornate divan, not far away in the big central room of their quarters, Tom and Rita Simpson looked at each other. Then, back at Melissa.

Tom cleared his throat. "I think it's an attractive shade of gray, myself." His wife winced.

Melissa swiveled her head, bringing the glare onto Tom. "I am not
that
vain, thank you."

She was fudging a bit. Outside of being clean, well-groomed and reasonably well-dressed, in a schoolteacher's sort of way, one of the few things about her appearance that Melissa was sensitive about was her hair color. Perhaps it was because she was a natural dark-blonde who'd spent too many years being belligerent about blonde jokes. Whatever the reason, as she'd gotten into middle age she'd found herself dismayed by the gray creeping into her hair, where the wrinkles creeping into her face and the various little sags in her body hadn't bothered her in the least.

So, for years, she'd dyed her hair. Subtly, of course. Melissa Mailey would just as soon commit hara-kiri as become a peroxide blonde. In her lexicon of personal sins, being garish ranked just barely below being reactionary or bigoted.

Alas, while the seventeenth century had plenty of methods for coloring hair, "garish" pretty well defined the end result for any of them. So, since the Ring of Fire, Melissa had rationed the supply of up-time hair-coloring that existed in Grantville which suited her needs. But she'd only brought a small amount when they came to England on a diplomatic mission, the past summer. That had long since vanished in the months since they'd found themselves imprisoned in the Tower of London.

She looked back out the window. "I propose to tear my hair out not because of its coloring—which suits me well, enough, I assure you—but because of the activities and behavior of a certain Darryl McCarthy. One of
your
soldiers, let me remind you, Captain Simpson."

Tom settled his massive frame a bit further into the divan. "Oh. That."

"Yes. Oh.
That.
If he gets that girl pregnant . . ."

Tom cleared his throat again. "That'd be a neat trick, Melissa. Seeing as how—being crude about it—he hasn't managed to get into her pants yet. Well, not pants, ladies' garments being what they are in this day and age. Lift her skirts and undo . . . whatever she's got on underneath."

Rita Simpson winced again.

So did Melissa. "The operative phrase being 'yet,' I take it. You admit he's
trying.
"

"Well, yeah, sure. Of course he is. He's a dyed-in-the-wool hillbilly, Melissa. Might as well ask him to give up his pickup and Cat cap for a VW and a beret, as ask him not to put the make on a girl. He's got his self-respect, y'know. On the other hand, he's not being crude about it and he's not even really pushing all that hard. Just enough for form's sake. Being as how—miracles do happen, from time to time—he's actually got the serious hots for the girl, he's not just trying to get laid."

Melissa looked back at him, squinting a little. "And exactly how do you know all this?"

"He talks to me about it, how else?" Tom spread his huge hands. "Who else would he talk to, concerning this subject? He's a
hillbilly,
Melissa. He certainly isn't going to discuss something like this with—you know—"

His wife chuckled. "A girl. And he defines anything female as a 'girl.' "

"Well, not Melissa. He pretty much still defines her as the Schoolmarm From Hell. Her gender comes a long way second to her innately demonic essence. But, yeah, a girl. It wouldn't even occur to Darryl to talk to anyone except a guy about it."

Melissa tossed her head a little, indicating one of the rooms to the side. "There's Friedrich."

Tom shrugged. "Friedrich's a down-timer. Darryl gets along fine with down-timers, but this isn't a subject he'd feel comfortable discussing with one of them. Even a male down-timer. So that leaves me—even if I am his commanding officer."

Sitting a bit further off in a chair, Gayle Mason issued a soft, half-grunted chuckle. "Especially since rank sits very lightly on Darryl McCarthy's consciousness. It's a good thing you don't have a General MacArthur sort of temperament, Tom, or he'd have been court-martialed by now."

"Ten times over," Tom Simpson agreed placidly.

"You're
sure
about this?" Melissa demanded.

Rita spoke up. "Melissa, I really do think you're worrying too much. I spend a lot more time than you do in the Tower's residential quarters, because of my medical rounds. It's not simply a matter of Darryl's intentions. Or the girl's, for that matter. As cramped as everything is in the Tower—and as good-looking as Victoria Short is—I can guarantee you there isn't more than five minutes at a time when she's out of somebody's sight."

"The 'somebodies' involved usually being her own family," Tom added. "Who include her brother Andrew, who's a Yeoman Warder; her mother Isabel, who is definitely in the 'no sparrow shall fall' camp of parenthood; her brothers, motivated to watch her by honor, and her sisters, motivated by envy; several cousins; and, last but not least, her uncle Stephen Hamilton—"

"Eek," issued from Gayle.

"—whom nobody this side of an insane asylum, and sure as hell no level-headed hillbilly like Darryl, is even going to
think
of pissing off. Relax, willya? Yes, it's true that Darryl has the serious hots for Victoria Short. No doubt about it. But I can tell you, Melissa, that the hots are serious enough that he's even—twice, no less—uttered the young male hillbilly's ultimate curse."

Melissa lifted her eyebrows. "Which is?"

Gayle snorted again. "Can't you guess?" Her voice dropped an octave, roughened, and got a heavier West Virginia accent. "Damn, I think I'm gonna have to get married."

"Yup," said Tom. "Except the prologue was a tad stronger than a mere 'damn.' The first time it was 'I'm fucked, aren't I?' The second time it was just a simple declarative 'I'm fucked.' "

Melissa couldn't help but laugh. "O brave new world, that hath such miracles in it! Well, I hope you're right. The only thing that's made our captivity here fairly tolerable—well, I'll admit the earl of Strafford has been civilized—is that the Warders have been so friendly to us."

She gave Rita an acknowledging nod. "Mostly because they think—and rightly so—that she's kept their kids alive and in good health."

Rita's face darkened a little. "Mostly. There've still been a few deaths, and it was touch and go with some others. Still is, with poor little Cecily."

Her husband laid a hand on hers. "That's way better than they expected, love, child mortality rates being what they are in the here and now. You know it—and so do they."

Melissa looked back out the window. "Speak of the devil, here he comes."

In the alley below, Darryl McCarthy was heading for the stairs leading up to St. Thomas' Tower. The young American soldier barely returned the friendly nod the Warder on duty gave him. Not surprising, that, given the expression on his face.

It was a mix of emotions. Gloom. Frustration. Yearning. Despair.

Melissa laughed again.

Not far away, in that section of the Tower of London known as the Lieutenant's Lodging, Thomas Wentworth, the earl of Strafford, was fending off questions raised by his daughter. No easy task, that. Nan was precocious, not in the least bit bashful, and had the normal lack of tact possessed by any six-year-old child.

"But why don't
you have them standing guard outside the dungeons? A prisoner might escape!"

"There
are
guards watching the dungeons, Nan," her father explained patiently.

She waved her hand, the gesture accompanied by a derisive noise. "They're just standing on the wall, here and there. And not too alert, at that. They're lazy, those Warders. You should have at least four of them outside of every dungeon entrance."

He smiled wryly. "I can just imagine how well the Warders would take to
that
idea."

"Just tell them!" his daughter insisted. "You're the king's minister! They have to do what you tell them!"

Wentworth briefly considered trying to explain to the child that formal authority and real power were not synonyms, and that any official who routinely abused his authority would soon find that authority undermined. In practice, at least, if not in theory. In this instance, if he infuriated the Yeoman Warders by constraining them to tasks they considered irksome, pointless and annoying, they would soon retaliate by slacking off at every occasion. Be a man never so powerful, he still only possessed two eyes, neither of them at the back of his head.

As it was, whatever their sometimes informal manner, the Warders made a superb guard force for the Tower. They were elite soldiers and considered themselves such, and did so with good reason.

But, after a moment, he discarded the notion. Bright as she no doubt was, Nan was still six years old. There'd be time enough, as the years passed, for her to learn that the world was mostly composed of shades of gray, with precious little in the way of black or white.

So, all he did was pick her up playfully and exclaim to his wife Elizabeth: "I have it! We'll betroth her to the tsar of Russia! What a natural match!"

That was a joke twice over, actually. The current tsar was no Ivan the Terrible. Russia's so-called "Time of Troubles" had ended with the ascension to the throne of Mikhail Romanov twenty years earlier. But the new dynasty's hold on power was still fragile and depended at least as much on the authority of the new tsar's father, the Patriarch Filaret, as it did on the tsar himself.

"What's a Zar?" Nan demanded. "And who's Russia?"