Grantville Gazette 43 Read online

  Navratri—festival of nine successive nights of dancing, of young people of both sexes. Each dancer holds dandiya (decorated sticks); as part of the dance, he/she strikes his/her own sticks together, or hits his/her own sticks against the dandiya of another dancer.

  For further info and/or illustrations:

  http://happynavratri.blogspot.in/

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyNhh6YlilU

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Atp4ugPXpT4#!

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2rFPkElqQk

  chaniya choli—a costume of Gujarati women consisting of a floor-length skirt (knee-length for teen girls), and a quarter-sleeved, midriff-bearing, backless halter top. Sometimes a dupatta (head scarf) is included as part of the chaniya choli costume, but that would be unwise to wear to any kind of dance.

  For further info and/or illustrations: http://happynavratri.blogspot.in/

  bhagwan—literally, it means deity; when referring to Bollywood actors, it means movie star.

  Goa Inquisition—an Inquisition held in the India coastal city of Goa, during the years 1561-1774 and 1778-1812. Many Hindus and Indian Catholics were tortured.

  memsahib—corruption of ma'am + sahib. Form of address by lower-status Indians to the wife of a British colonial official. Sumitra's use of the deferential term obviously is sarcastic.

  "The rabbit chases the dog"—Quoting Wikipedia, "According to the legend [about the founding of Ahmedabad], Sultan Ahmed Shah, while camping on the banks of the SabarmatiRiver, saw a hare chasing a dog. The Sultan was impressed by the act of bravery and decided to locate his capital there. He named the city 'Ahmedabad' ('the city of Ahmed')."

  Namaste—lit., "I bow to you"; in usage, "Hello" or "Goodbye"

  -ben, -ji—honorifics when addressing an Indian woman (speaking Gujarati and Hindi, respectively)

  ELIZABETHAN

  good—a polite form of address to someone common-born

  Good Lady Stephanie—Shackerley Marmion's invented formal address, which acknowledges both Stephanie's up-timer aristocratic bearing and her common-born bloodline.

  hither—to here; hence—from here

  wherefore—why

  forsooth—indeed

  credit—believe

  abide—reside

  shewed—showed

  betide—happen, causing misfortune

  tidings—news

  forstand—understand

  mayhap—perhaps

  afore—before

  ere—before in time

  yon, yonder—that [thing] over there

  vex—to bring trouble or agitation

  custom—business, becoming a customer

  chicanery—deception by subterfuge or sophistry; trickery

  AMERICAN

  perp—perpetrator, the person who has committed a serious crime

  BFF—Best Friend Forever

  ****

  Snared by a Good Book

  Written by David Dingwall

  "Mister D'Arcy, will you stop badgering me?

  "I have absolutely nothing more to add—I've said more than enough already in court, and have absolutely no idea what the final verdict will be.

  "I'm tired, and it's been a long day, so the only thing I have to say to your listeners is that publishing and copyright mixed up with time travel gives me heartburn and a thumping headache.

  "Now take that microphone out of my face if you don't want a mess all over those nice shiny boots! Pregnant woman coming through—get out of my way—I need to go pee."

  "And those were the last words of the day from Cecelia Califano outside court number two. Mizz Califano is the founder of the American Library here in Magdeburg, and has been on the stand for two days; a hostile witness for the defense in the case of Burns vs The USE.

  "Let me remind the audience at home that this precedent setting case is now in its third week. It is finely balanced between the public domain rights declared for up-time works after the Ring of Fire, and the argument against eminent domain undertaken by the Burns family of Dumfries, Scotland, supported by the Stationer's and Printer's Guilds of Edinburgh, surrounding the rights to The Collected Works of Robert Burns.

  "After the break, we'll be exploring what eminent domain is exactly with our studio panel, and what it means for the case at hand . . .

  Jonas D'Arcy, The Legal Half-Hour, Voice of Luther,

  Magdeburg, broadcast October 1635

  Four and a half years after the Ring of Fire.

  1635, Thursday 22nd November,

  Basing House, Southamptonshire, England

  "Come in, come in. I'm almost done."

  The Irish midwife was finishing up fussing and brushing the hair of the lady of the house, who was relaxed immersed in a huge wooden bath in front of the morning fire.

  "Feeling any better today, Your Ladyship?" Lizzy, the housekeeper, asked, picking up the rolls of yesterday's newspapers from the side table.

  Lady Honora stared at the wrinkled fingers of her left hand. "I feel like a beached whale."

  "Won't be long now. Any day, Your Ladyship." The midwife's remedy to carrying twins was unusual, and certainly not the English way. The marchioness of Winchester spent most of the day floating in water, topped up by large hot stones dropped in every half an hour to keep it warm. The babes were expected to be born within days.

  "That will be all, Shauna."

  "Yes, my lady." The midwife bobbed a short curtsey, and retired to the dressing room.

  "And close the door on your way out."

  "Yes, my lady."

  "Oh, and Shauna, go down to the kitchens and bring me some cheese in about half an hour," milady shouted.

  "Anything else, my lady?"

  "Just the cheese, thank you."

  ****

  Lizzy sat in a chair next to the bath, newspapers in her lap, wearing her usual grey uniform dress. "I think we're finally ready."

  "The rooms in the west wing?"

  "Finished last night and laid out for ten, in case some wish to stay over tonight."

  "Tonight's meal?"

  "Last of the supplies should be here this afternoon."

  "And our other guests?"

  "Master Weasenham has been called away."

  The project manager of the new sugar mill and factor of the Bedford Corporation was a busy bee, always on the go.

  "And his lady wife?" Honora rubbed the stretched skin of her huge belly.

  "Deluded as ever." Lizzy pursed her mouth.

  Honora laughed at her housekeeper's discomfort.

  "And walking around the grounds with another of those god-rotted romance novels in her hands."

  "Now, Elizabeth, it would be impolite for you to be killing our other guest in front of Charles' godfather."

  Lizzy couldn't decide if Honora was being serious, or if it was just the baleful influence of a new death game played by the other ladies of the house?

  The dowager Countess,

  In the library,

  With the lead piping

  She was tired. With the important visitor due this morning, she was dog-tired getting the new house ready these past three weeks. The dining, entertaining, and logistics plans had fallen hard onto the housekeeper. Honora's difficult pregnancy and confinement was happening at the same time as the fifth birthday of Charles, the heir, and the Winter festivals.

  "Anything in the papers?" Honora queried. Unable to read and write, the marchioness depended on Lizzy's assistance here. Once a day they perused the news from London.

  Lizzy unwrapped the tube of the London Gazette, a Royalist rag started by Wentworth some time ago, but currently under the power of the earl of Cork. She fished in her pocket for her eyeglasses, which she perched on the end of her nose. The front page, as usual, was covered in notices and adverts.

  "Nothing special—new shops opening in Covent Garden." Lizzy turned the page to extra-large print headlines.

  Princess of the Blood Elizabeth of the Palati
ne survives assassin in Amsterdam. Wounded, but not in mortal danger.

  Prince Rupert, second in line to English Throne survives, kills two assassins unaided.

  Beloved English Philosopher Ben Jonson wickedly slaughtered

  Other English Lords and Ladies Killed

  Interspersed between the headlines were lurid details of assassins attacking a masque rehearsal. Lizzy reeled off the details to Honora. At the bottom of the page was a message to the people of England:

  Security at Westminster Palace tightened. King Charles secure.

  And the text continued . . .

  It has also been reported that several Lords and Ladies of England out of favour at court were involved at the scene, Wentworth, Fairfax and Hampden are missing; two were killed, Lady Fairfax and . . .

  "Continued on page six." Lizzy quickly flipped pages.

  The words blurred as she read out slowly:

  the earl of Essex.

  "Robert!" Honora wailed. She was the earl's half-sister.

  "Robert . . . " Lizzy, resigned years past to hearing about him dying falling off a horse, or in battle playing soldiers. This was so unexpected and ridiculous.

  " . . . you idiot." She was his wife.

  " Elizabeth, what are we going to do?" Honora was crying, "What are you going to do now?"

  "Honora, rest easy. We'll sort this out—Let me get your maid." Lizzy had a lot of thinking to do. She'd been hiding in Basing House as a servant these last few months because her husband was one of the leading opponents of the king, and the earl of Cork.

  Lizzy ran from the room, shouting for milady's maids, newspaper still in hand.

  An hour later

  Lizzy sat distracted, staring at her luncheon plate. The knife moved of its own accord, playing with scraps of lark, pigeon, and rabbit reposing in a thin cream sauce. Just like her own thoughts, the knife moved around and around as her thrice-cursed brain came to no conclusion.

  "A health to my Lady Essex,

  who once had lost her fame."

  Damn him, Lizzy chided, damn him a thousand times.

  It had been seven months since she had been deserted, or as Honora might put it "even more deserted." Their marriage had been a disaster almost as soon as it had been conceived during the last Parliament.

  "and to my Lord her husband

  that is so ill at the game."

  Typical. Gets away with near bloody murder, then slaughtered with a glass in his hand.

  She snorted

  Probably addled by drink

  She looked at the newspaper again.

  That maudlin, two-faced, son of a . . .

  The editorial was unattributable to the earl of Cork's coterie, of course. The death toll and injuries were to "damned traytors of King and Countrie," and at the end promoting "Life and Long Health to His Majesty."

  The king of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales sequestered away, not seen in months. Lizzy shook her head—nothing she or anyone else could do about her distantly-related fifth cousin by marriage.

  She had her own worries. She was free.

  This changes everything.

  Luckily for her, the wanted posters circulated after she fled from the mob looting and burning Essex House had been copied from a two-inch miniature portrait. Made for her engagement in 1629, that innocent, love-struck girl was fluffed, plump and primped, with hair saffron bleached and curled. Some artistic license even suggested a bosom.

  Men are idiots and fools.

  She hadn't needed much of a disguise—a bad marriage showing in her wan, thin face with its long nose every morning, with her raven black hair straight as a poker's handle halfway down her back. Hiding in her role as Mistress Lambert (her grandmother's name, the acknowledged miss of Grandpa Willie), she was playing a distant cousin (true) and helping out as housekeeper (almost true) whilst the new M'Lady Winchester was sequestered abed with child.

  Lizzy re-read the passage describing the death of her husband, shot by assassins at a masque rehearsal in Amsterdam. She barked a foul laugh, hardly recognizing the portrait laid out in the charges.

  Him—a general? Don't make me laugh!

  She scooped some sauce with a chunk of bread.

  Faithless as a husband, failure as a man.

  Chomping a piece as if biting off a head from a doll, Lizzy could think of a few other choice words beginning with "f" that would better measure her dead husband.

  And if she ever found that Oxford riddle-maker, that libellous cur, that pox-ridden whoreson of a Cheapside Jenny would be singing another tune—three octaves higher after chopping off his apples.

  "a Madam without standing,

  Fatherless boy without estate."

  She slashed with the knife at a stingy piece of meat floating in the soup. It was so easy to lose herself in blood red fury—her infant son had died in the mad dash out of London, buried secretly on an island in the middle of the Thames at Runnymede.

  This news brought a sudden change of circumstance, confirmation she was officially a widow was now public knowledge—and put her into a new bind.

  Do I come out of hiding?

  With her husband, Robert Deveraux, safely buried in Amsterdam, she would no longer be a target for a finder's fee. Cork, a tight-fisted beggar at the best of times, according to the newspaper had just cancelled the bounty for her arrest. On one hand, she might get some peace at last, no longer a major chess piece to be sacrificed at the altar of affairs of state.

  On the other hand, a nominal title with no money wasn't much use. The fifth circle of hell would freeze over before there was any chance of retrieving her dowry, which was locked in the confiscated estates.

  God rot m'lord Cork's shriveled liver—I hope his gout makes him rave in the night!

  Private assistance from the family whilst she was on the run had been very welcome. Public charity in the open later would be wearing on family obligations over time and could poison the best of relations.

  Not good—dangle the poor widow with a troubled reputation out the window, and see who comes a'courting?

  Lizzy shuddered, having been down that road six years before. Then powerless, biddable, and wheedled into marriage to curry favor for family advantage. No matter what her family might wish, after all she had been through, the one thing she was no longer was a biddable child.

  The point of her knife stabbed into the surface of the new oak dining table that could seat sixteen. The sun on this last day of autumn gleamed through the window, bounced along the sleek honey-yellow wood then reflected off the blade into her eyes.

  Lizzy looked away, staring blankly at the tapestry hanging on the walls, glistening with gold and silver thread, mixed in with vivid blues, greens, and blood red.

  Or stay the shady housekeeper a piece longer?

  The heel of her right foot scuffed and scraped back and forward over the knots of the bulrush carpet installed only last week.

  Careful, girl—you might be pushed downstairs as a servant forever.

  As a younger daughter of a country baronet, she'd seen other fourth, fifth, or sixth daughters fall into the same grey role; like Bess Arnott, Hope Grey, and second cousin Lucinda. With no money left for a dowry for marriage, in an England without nunneries, it was sad but true that some would be cut off from their families, then used up, beaten, badgered and berated like the rest of the common staff in whatever house they'd been pitched into. No longer invited for celebrations, divorced from family affairs, and never ever spoken of again.

  But Lizzy had tasted power and position, made her own way in London after separating from her feckless husband and had ran a large house on the Strand. Her position in society had been improved as a patroness of charity, governess of St. Clement Danes church school for girls, and hostess of regular Thursday salons for the Jappon Society. With enough impartial social standing at court, she had also attended the Tower once or twice to witnesses and report the health and well-being of the female members of American delegation loc
ked within.

  No. That quiet country girl had died. The idea she could go back to that level of subservience . . .

  She could just hear young Rita Simpson's scorn, the American ambassador's sneer, "Let's not even go there, girl!"

  Nope, not doing that—I'd rather die.

  With no obligations to immediate family (her brother had his own money problems at the home estate in Wiltshire), what bothered her most was the new net of schemes around her here.

  Why don't those busy-bitches just leave well enough alone?

  Known in this house only as the poor cousin with distant connection to the marquis, in her housekeeper role she was neither fish nor fowl.

  I really, really don't need this right now.

  The wild rumors about her past amongst the staff had ranged widely. Some thought her a cast off miss of some minor lording. Another pathetic story had her as the dutiful daughter caring for an aged, now dead, father, her position lost in the world when a younger brother had inherited the estate.

  Most of the staff sniffed and disapproved, and thought that allowing her to dine with the family an indulgence by the marquis, the line between servitors and those to be served breached by Lizzy's inappropriate attitude. All in all, it hadn't made her any friends below-stairs.

  And now, without a by-your-leave, she'd just found out the merchant wives of Basingstoke and the ladies of nearby county estates of were off hunting; searching for a suitor of appropriate station; some old widower or new-money merchant, all to get a poor stray cousin of the marquis married off and out of the way soon after Honora birthed her twins. Everyone knew a house could only have one lady holding the keys.

  The prospective godmother hovering around the house was the worst, obviously long-married in a love match of her own, and wishing everyone else worshiped at the temple of the court of love.

  Lizzy thought it demented, dangerous, and deadly in the extreme.

  How can anyone live their life like that? Living in a haze of romantic love doesn't put food on the table.

  As the last scrap of sauce was mopped up by the last chunk of bread, Lizzy finally conceded to herself her hopeless position.