The Bavarian ate soup with his hands. It was all Cardinal-Inquisitor could be made to focus upon, then he realized the barbaric display was being done on purpose to shock him and was able to banish the unseemly sight from his mind. His good brother (and fellow cardinal) Antonio had more trouble with accepting with what was before him. His pale lips trembled and from time to time he had pinched the tips of his ears, a sure sign of displeasure. As for brother Taddeo, he was, after all these years, used to oafish ways of wayward souls that found themselves into the abyss of soldiery and was able to converse with the Bavarian with little trouble. Though there was very little trouble to be had in understanding the barbarian, for his questions devolved to two things: how much and how many? How much gold could the family Barberini offer and how many of his troops would have need to come down to Italies.
"Good Captain-General Barberini, pray tell how many German troops would be necessary to cow the North."
"Uh, 15,000 should do it, Lord Cardinal-Inquisitor. On top of the local ones we have now and will get."
"Captain Miller?"
"Pay good gold and I get you 15,000 Bavarians in here by Michaelmas, ya lordship."
Antonio Barberini shot his best smile, rested his forearms on the table and steepled his fingers.
"And if we were to pay in luoghi di monte, my good Captain?"
"My boys ain't what you'd call 'sophisticated,' yer Excellency. They won't understand none about these fancy collateralized debt obligations of yours. I'll need gold coin. Things they can touch and feel. Yes?"
"Naturally," interceded Cardinal-Inquisitor to relief of his brother Taddeo and annoyance of Antonio.
Later, when the details were hammered out, goodbyes made, bows done and rings kissed, with the barbarian gone, little brother Antonio lashed out at his elder.
"You call that negotiating?"
"Brother, we are dealing with beer swilling savages from the forest. One does not negotiate with those who are bereft of all civilized discourse by the awful nature of their country of birth and station in life."
"You do realize that creature will go back to his fellows and say we are marks, yes?"
"Let him. And when they come, they will not find us as such. We need 15,000 men. We shall get them."
"Dear me. 15,000, not 14,000, or 16,000. Exactly 15,000, yes, Taddeo?" dash near hissed Antonio.
Taddeo opened his mouth, but the oldest brother spoke for him.
"Antonio, if you are so smart, how come you did not talk our uncle out of his war?"
Antonio's eyelashes fluttered at that and his delicate hands flew up and his fingers fanned.
"How dare you...? Why must I...? What of you? What about all of you?!"
"What of us? Taddeo was told to prepare for war and was asked how to best use his troops. He was not consulted on whether the thing should be done. Surely you cannot say in any seriousness, dearest brother, that the Captain-General of the Papal Armies argue - yes, yes, argue - with the Pope as to whether those armies should be put to the field? Come now. But you, you are the official Cardinal-Nephew. You govern all foreign affairs of the states comprising our uncle's patrimony. And what affair is more foreign than an invasion of a sovereign polity in the..."
"Now you go too far, brother! Much too far. Castro is a fiefdom, not... The family Farnese are our vassals, not a... They had to be taught a lesson, it is just a lesson has gone too far. Much too far."
"It is the year of Our Lord 1641, brother. To speak of 'vassals' in our age is to not be serious. Farnese were tied by blood and land to the Medici. A blind man should have..."
"Oh and now I am blind as well? You are...!"
"Enough," bellowed Taddeo and pounded his fist on the table. This he had seen done before by an English officer under his command to bring to heel a degenerate table of Scots and the Irish officers of his company. It worked then and it worked now. His civilian brothers were stunned by display.
Emboldened, Taddeo pressed on, "Both are you right and both wrong. This is a bad war and more should have been done to stop it, but it was not stopped, thus it goes and thus we, uh, go with it. But, Francesco, you too have been hasty. Germans? Here? It is bad enough when we have the scum from the Southern Italies here, but now you want those barbarians to bring war to a close? No, no, no. It is much, uh, too much. Too much, say I. I tell you this, I say this as a general, it is easier to find troops than rid yourselves of them. And should Germans come here, they will not leave and then... I am no Suetonius, but it strikes me little good came of German troops being near Rome, yes, yes? And all for what? Because some charlatan black-booker may or may not find an isle no one has seen in ages and the one man who has was never able to get back to it. Are we not being... too fast, much too fast? For all we know, this charlatan will be lost at sea or return a pauper."
"Dearest brother, you speak reason, but were we governed by reason alone, then drums and bright lights would not excite and make us leave our senses. This Englishman does not even have to return with gold for the ill affect of such a thing to take hold in the minds of our foes and give them strength. The merest rumor, repeated without variation in enough taverns and banks would give aid our enemies and hurt us."
"But, but, there may be other options, are there not?"
"Such as?"
Poor Taddeo floundered, but he was too caught in the moment to show weakness and recovered his wits almost admirably:
"Well, this, uh, Grand Duke, he is at the heart of this, uh, rebellious League, is he not?"
Cardinal-Inquisitor deigned to give a nod.
"If we, uh, end him, then do we not end the, uh, rebellion?"
Antonio gave a sigh. Cardinal-Inquisitor shot a smile.
"Dearest brother, the worst thing to our cause would be for that half-sodomite half-wit to expire. Should the Grand Duke die, his much more able brother Mattias would take over, a man known for his skill upon the field of battle, experienced in ways of war and a beloved governor, or if we are lucky it may be his other brother Gian Carlo, who knows not the art of city-politics of Florence or Sienna, but is called by nearly all to be the finest mind for seafaring combat in the North."
Then silence held lease.
In the relative comfort of his office, the Cardinal-Inquisitor went over the affairs of state he neglected for the sake of dining with a German savage. The topmost pressing report was actually more than one, it was a bundle, put together by his fourth secretary on the strange affairs now going on in England, where the unhappy king of that cold desolate place decided to reaffirm his kingship at the expense of his people, who were less than pleased with him and spoke with a voice of tempered, but firm, rejection. Two of the agents presaged armed conflict between king and his subjects, while the other four spoke of a settled mediation once men of cool and more deliberate heads took charge.
Cardinal-Inquisitor set aside that bundle with a small note to have the information passed to his brother Antonio, but with the reports rewritten by a secretary to disguise the hand of his agents and, needless to say, their names stripped. There was a word for men in the world of spies who did not take care to protect their intelligencers: fools.
The second bundle concerned hysteric notes from Jesuits in Paris and a no less hysterical letter from Bishop Mazarini concerning the appearance and the spread of yet another crypto-Protestant sect in the lands of the Eldest Daughter of the Holy Mother Church. Cardinal-Inquisitor set the report aside. He did not have the carriage of mind to deal with Mazarini now, before he had his wine and hot food.
He rang his fifth small bronze bell.
***
Lord Bishop Mazarini had indeed written a letter to papal authorities in Rome that mayhap in retrospect read more strident than it should have been. But we must not judge the man too harshly. The bulwark of the life's work of Cardinal Richelieu was the expulsion of the plague known as Huguenots from the borders of France. Town by town, province by province, these foul Protestants were driven out, and so any appearance under a different animal skin in the French kingdom alarmed both the Cardinal and his presumptive heir. And for this reason, the latter had called upon a valued agent to give to him report in person of the various aristocratic women suspected to be in the thrall of his dangerous cult of Jansenism.
Boniface, who today was called Jean-Paul, stood before the Bishop and duly answered his questions.
When his lordship was satisfied and more put at ease, for no princess of royal blood were at this time suspected of being involved, Jean-Paul assayed a query:
"Has my lord the Bishop heard any news regarding the warlock and his expedition to the far end of the world?"
"Nothing of note. But pray tell me, why do you...?"
"I feel the affair is not finished, my lord."
"No doubt you are right, good Jean-Paul. But for the moment it is at an impasse. The last report I had on this so-called warlock, had him victualing his ships at an African port."
***
The Bishop was not ill informed, but it must be remembered that information in those days traveled slower than in ours, and Sir Augustin of St. Ives and the three ships of his fleet were in fact at this moment docked in a cove in South America, having braved the first leg of the journey over the Atlantic with relative calm. The cove was in Essequibo, then colony of the Dutch, who by their force of arms and sheer bloody mindedness carved out colonies from the Portuguese and Spanish empires. And the three-ship fleet of the "Female Bastard," "Damsel" and "Fortune" was received handsomely by the Dutchmen once they satisfied themselves they were dealing with private mercantile concerns of some family back in Genoa and not formal Spanish, nor Portuguese, interests.
Having found themselves once more on dry land after crossing the rough sea, the crews of the three ships behaved rather badly and more than a few bones were broken, some natives assaulted and three dozen fresh knife scars marked up sailors and the locals combined. Still, there were no deaths, no one got left behind to face local justice and Captain Kelly gave appropriate compensation to the white skinned injured parties.
As for Sir Augustin, he and his familiar Lady Olympia, somehow managed to impose upon the senior most Dutch West Indian Company clerk present in the colony to write out a good letter of introduction to the governor of the New Holland colony in Brazil at Mauritsstad.
Once the three ships set sail from their now more reluctant Dutch hosts, Captain Kelly paid his compliments to Sir Augustin, but was stunned to learn:
"I have no intention of going to Mauritsstad, Captain. The letter was just to throw off the scent. I suggest we make our landfall much further South, preferably some place that is ruled neither by the Dutch, nor Spanish, nor Portuguese."
Captain Kelly gave a nod, not wholly trusting his mouth at the moment. He had underestimated the warlock again and had no wish for the strange man to know of it.
The strange man, having delivered his message, shambled off to his cabin, where his familiar reposed. He found a chair and sat, looking more than a little ill. His familiar stood up without word, walked up behind him and hugged him.
"I am at peace, Olympia. Truly."
"I know how much you had your heart set on seeing the observatory and, uh, those other learned places in Mauritsstad."
"You explained to me why we cannot sail there. We will not. Let us draw a veil."
Olympia released her prey from her hands, but not her eyes.
"Let us not. Let us speak to it."
"We spoke on it, before."
"No. I spoke and you listened. Now I would have you speak."
"I did as you asked, is that not enough?"
His peevish tone startled him, and the Englishman made an effort to sit up more straight and give a smile.
"Forgive me, that was churlish."
"You are no churl."
"Hence my apology."
"I have no wish for an apology, beloved. But to... Let us speak on it. Truly. Please."
"This ship has ears."
"Then let us speak on it in a berth."
Sir Augustin nearly blushed, but did as he was bidden. And the two climbed in bed, in parallel, on their sides, so that one's back was to the other and one's mouth was over the other's ear. This strange and intimate arrangement guaranteed privacy, but only allowed one party to speak. And so after the speaker would come to an end of their statement, they would roll onto their other side and the listener they previously faced would shift 180 degrees to now face the turned speaker's back and find their mouth pressed to their ear and thus become speaker themselves while the previous speaker became listener. It made a conversation cumbersome and much longer than it should have been, but the two have had much practice at such an arrangement at sea and so long as they did not argue, it served them well. For as you can well imagine, if one person turned to speak and the other person was not prepared to stop talking themselves, they would merely find themselves face to face and have their words travel.
"Speak, please," said Olympia and then turned. And Sir Augustin turned with her and found his mouth pressed to her delicate ear.
"I really am satisfied that going to Mauritsstad was too risky and think it was not worth it. All's well."
At this Sir Augustin turned and it was now Olympia's turn.
"But I know how much you wanted to see it."
She turned to let Sir Augustin speak, but he hesitated before making the revolution to match his body position with hers.
"Olympia, I am quite unsure what you desire of me at this time. We have spoken on this topic before. I agreed with you then. I agree with you now. What more can I say?"
Sir Augustin now shifted. Olympia turned and her hot mouth pressed to his ear.
"What is in your heart on this matter?"
They shifted not quite in unison.
"My heart is in total agreement with your assessment."
Sir Augustin went to shift, but was stopped by Olympia's hand. She then rolled to face him, their heads touching.
"Truly?"
"Truly."
And this earned Sir Augustin a kiss.