"Come on, Larry." Jones' grin looked as forced as his tone. "If it wasn't hard, they wouldn't need us."

"Well, the women are going to be upset," said Mazzare.

Heinzerling nodded. "Ja. If Hanni saw the filth in here, she would be ganz verruckt."

That set Mazzare to chuckling. The formidable Frau Heinzerling governed domestic arrangements at the rectory with an iron will. Preconceptions about early-modern attitudes to cleanliness were crushed under her regular blitzkriegs with duster and beeswax. The place gleamed; not a surface in it couldn't have been used for surgery.

"Speaking of domestic arrangements," he said, "how are the troops and the various technical missions settling in?"

"Ganz gut," said Heinzerling. "Captain Lennox and his troops are comfortable and probably looking for a drink."

Heinzerling made a face as he mentioned the Scotsman. He and Lennox, in many ways, were two of a kind. One of the more famous brawls in the Thuringen Gardens had transpired when the two of them had debated their competing doctrines of justification one night. The Jesuit had won the debate and-narrowly, he insisted!-lost the ensuing fistfight. Lennox had paid the price in a broken tooth, two broken ribs and the finger he had dislocated on Heinzerling's jaw. Carried back to the rectory, Heinzerling had had a black eye added to his injuries by a furious Hannelore keen to enforce her ambition of getting her man to settle down to parochial respectability. Gus had behaved himself, more or less, ever since.

"And the technical folks?" Mazzare dragged himself back from memories of happier, if harder-working, times.

"Also settled. The Stone boys are suggesting a few drinks with the local Committee, and I mean to go with them."

Mazzare nodded, then frowned. "Is that wise? Should we be seen to have links of any kind with the Committee?"

"He has a point, Gus," said Jones. "If we're talking to the grandees, surely they'll take fright if we're also hobnobbing with revolutionaries and the like?"

Mazzare sat up straighter. "For the moment, let's not take risks. Gus, have the Committee here been in touch yet?"

"Not so far as I know. Frank is a member of the CoC in Grantville, as I'm sure you are aware-all three of the rascals, probably-and he will be looking to make contact." Heinzerling stroked his chin a moment. "In fact, I think it cannot be that the local Committee has been in touch, since it is all staff of the palazzo or the embassy in here so far. They will of course place someone with the servants."

"Right." Mazzare nodded. "What teenage boys do is one thing. You, Gus . . . another. So keep them out of trouble, if you can. And ask Sharon to help."

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 fiance 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.

"How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!"

Again, he'd spoke louder than he thought. Reverend Jones frowned. "Sounds like something from the King, although I don't recognize it. Since when did you become an Elvis Presley fan, Larry?"

Mazzare sighed again.

Chapter 10.

"Cool." Gerry put the enthusiasm into the word that only someone sixteen could manage.

"Yeah, it'll do," Ron drawled, looking around.

Frank couldn't quite figure out if he was looking at the decor or the help-who clearly thought the Stone brothers' various attempts on the Italian language were funny, but were being polite about it. At least, he hoped that was what they were finding funny. They had also insisted on doing, more or less, everything for him and his brothers when they had lugged their bags up to their rooms, short of-

He let that thought die a natural death. True enough, the help was worth looking at. All four of the servants assigned to them were girls about their own age. If only two of them could properly be called "pretty," all of them could certainly bear the label of "healthy" with great ease.

But if there was one thing that Frank's not-so-great weight of experience with the female of the species had taught him it was that not pushing too hard on the first date-don't hump her leg, as his dad had once put it in a jocular mood-did wonders for the success rate in the long run. Things had been decidedly fluid on that front these past two years, though, and he was a free agent for the moment. Part of that was the way in which German attitudes were rubbing off on everyone he knew-including himself, truth be told. Everyone seemed to want to get themselves set up and steady before they got romantic. Which was odd, but then again most of the things everyone had taken for granted as opportunities for dating had gone away. And then the rubbers had run out, and things had gotten decidedly chilly on that front, damn it.

So, he looked around. "It isn't quite how I imagined it."

"Oh?" Ron sounded interested.

"Sure. I looked it all up. You wouldn't believe how many books of photographs of Venice there are. Well, you would now you've seen it, and this town's famous for looking pretty. But all the photos have captions about how such-and-such a palazzo or the Casa-de-that was refurbished in the eighteenth century. So I figured it'd all look more-different-than it did in the pictures, and all."

"Oh," said Ron. Frank's younger brother was trying very hard not to stare at the rump of the chambermaid who was bending down to sort their linen into drawers. Frank sympathized with his struggle. She was the only maid left in the room, since the others had left in a swirl of giggles-and easily the best-looking.

"Whoah!" Gerry called out, "Not that one!" He stepped smartly across the room to where the maid was about to try to lift his bag of tricks. The one that clanked when he moved it.