1633

"Quite intelligent animals, actually," said Heinrich mildly. "But it's true that a pig in a trough usually can't think of anything beyond his slops."

Rebecca was starting to simmer down. From the experience of the past few days, Gretchen knew that the young Sephardic woman would be her normal calm self within a few minutes. Rebecca could not hold a grudge for very long. Unlike Gretchen herself, who could hold one for eternity.

Heinrich's next words helped. "As it happens, Jimmy finally got the radio working tonight. Not more than an hour ago, in fact." He smiled sweetly. "There's a message to you from your husband. He and the baby are fine. He sends you-"

But Rebecca was not listening. She was already through the door leading to the radio room. Heinrich transferred the smile to Gretchen.

"So impatient. It's this 'true love' nonsense the Americans talk about."

Gretchen returned his smile with one that was even sweeter. "Be careful, Heinrich. Annalise reads at least two American romance novels a week. One a day, I bet, now that summer's here and she's out of school. I think she's already gone through half the stock in the libraries."

That wiped the smile from his face. Gretchen couldn't resist the impulse to rub it in. She slid from the "Germanized English" which had become the lingua franca of the United States into the colloquial Oberpfalz-accented German which was the tongue she and Heinrich had both grown up with. "And there won't be any let-up once she does, either. Just before we left, she paid the two dollars to join the romance readers' club."

Heinrich rolled his eyes. " 'Letup,' " he muttered. "Even our good stout Oberpfalz German is getting corrupted by these newfangled terms and notions. Whatever happened to the idea that reading begins and ends with the Bible? Not even the damn Protestants tried to claim you needed more than that. Now-romance readers' clubs!' "

Gretchen grinned at him. "You should see what my husband belongs to. Something called a 'science fiction readers' club.' "

She and Heinrich had been born and raised in nearby towns in that part of the Palatinate known as the Oberpfalz. Although both of them were usually considered "Catholics" by most Americans in Grantville, the reality was far more complex. In the year 1555, in the so-called "Peace of Augsburg," the German princes had established the principle known as cuius regio, eius religio, according to which the religion of a territory was determined by the faith of the prince who ruled it. In some areas of Germany-the Palatinate being one of the most flagrant examples-what followed were decades of constant changes in official religious affiliation. In their short lives, Gretchen and Heinrich had gone from Lutheran to Calvinist to Catholic-and Gretchen's grandmother Veronica had gone through three more such switches before they'd even been born.

By the time they'd actually met, he as a mercenary and she as another mercenary's camp woman in Tilly's army, neither of them had much left in the way of practicing faith. In their day and age, before the Americans arrived and started turning everything upside down, "agnosticism" was a meaningless word. But now, it was an accurate enough description of both of them-Gretchen openly, Heinrich less so.

Still, both of them tended to retain a number of German attitudes on many questions. Neither of them, for instance, had any use for the silly namby-pamby American notions about the "evil of corporal punishment applied to children." One exception, however, was the subject of "romantic love." On that question, Gretchen had been thoroughly converted. Not by books or theory, but by the simple fact of her young American husband's own love for her. Beginning with their wedding night, Jeff's uncomplicated passion had washed her level-headed German practicality aside.

Not so Heinrich. He regarded Gretchen's younger sister's infatuation with him exactly the way Annalise's grandmother did: silliness; unpractical; Heinrich was still too young to be married, much less a sixteen-year-old girl with no property.

Gretchen patted him on the cheek and passed by him into the radio room. "Poor Heinrich," she murmured. "Like a piglet being led to slaughter."

Inside the room, she found Rebecca sitting on a chair, holding a piece of paper in her hands and reading it by the light of an oil lamp. Seeing the slump in her shoulders, Gretchen was alarmed for an instant. Then, as Rebecca raised a smiling face toward her, she realized that the slump had been simply one of relief.

"All is well," Rebecca announced. "Although I so miss them. Bad enough to be absent from Michael. Not being able to see my little daughter every day is even worse."

Gretchen came over to her and laid a reassuring hand on Rebecca's shoulder. "Sephie will be fine. I raised little Willi in an army camp, and he did well enough. Children are much tougher than you think, as long as they don't become ill."