Grantville Gazette, Volume 66 Read online

  "I see this is where we are expected to work," Johanna remarked behind them.

  "That seems pretty obvious," Julia agreed dryly.

  "Looks like Burgmann Schenk has seen to it we have everything we need." Lies smiled at Frau Schenk who smiled back and opened the next door.

  The girls, led by Johanna, filed through into another large room. This one was dominated by a tall four-poster bed all hung with multicolored tapestry.

  "Who's going to sleep in here?" Sherri asked brightly. The princesses all looked at her like she was crazy.

  "Nobody," Johanna answered. "This is just for show. The real bedrooms are on the third floor."

  A twisty staircase tucked behind the bed took them up to a much more reasonably-sized room hung with red curtains on bed and windows. Green tapestries covered the walls and open doors on either side showed a row of similar rooms all connected. "You see?" asked Johanna. "Which room would you like? Take your pick."

  ****

  Rooms were picked, and Johanna led her guests back downstairs to the first room of the suite for the midday meal, leaving the unpacking to the maids.

  The long table was now spread with white linen and set with majolica ware and silver plate. Johanna seated herself at the head of the table and gave Mikayla the place of honor at her right hand. She had spent the last year or more pouring out her every thought and opinion to her Americaness pen-pal so why was she finding it so very hard to talk to Mikayla to her face? She'd always known how old her correspondent was, but somehow she'd never imagined her so young.

  "Mikayla, what is a 'slumber party'?" Johanna asked abruptly, breaking the awkward silence between them.

  Mikayla seemed considerably taken aback by the question. "What?"

  "Frau Nelson wished me pleasure of my 'slumber party' when we left Quedlinburg," Johanna explained, "I have been wondering what she meant ever since."

  "Well, it's a girl thing, a twentieth-century girl thing I mean," Mikayla began a little uncertainly. "You invite some friends over to your house to spend the night—"

  "If it's just one or two it's a 'sleep-over'," Sherri interrupted. "It's only a slumber party if there a lot of you."

  Mikayla nodded, "Yeah, that's true. A real slumber party won't fit into your bedroom. You have to spread sleeping bags in the living room or somewhere."

  "But what pleasure is there in sleeping on the floor?" Anna Sophia asked puzzled. All three up-time girls laughed.

  "Oh you don't sleep at a slumber party," Mikayla said. "You sit up and eat snacks and watch movies—"

  "And talk about school and boys and stuff," Jessie added, "I guess you don't do any of that."

  It was the down-time girls' turn to laugh. "Oh yes we do," said Johanna. "We are always sneaking into each other's rooms to share good things to eat and talk about our teachers, classes, and boys."

  "But there are no boys at your school," Jessie pointed out.

  "All the more reason to talk about them!" said Lies with a grin.

  They all laughed, and the atmosphere became more relaxed and friendly.

  "What else do you do at 'slumber parties'?" Anna Sophia asked Sherri across the table.

  "Well, since the main idea is to keep awake we tell each other scary ghost stories," she answered.

  "I thought up-timers didn't believe in ghosts?" Julia said in surprise.

  "Depends on the up-timer," Mikayla said and looked at Jessie.

  "I don't believe in ghosts. I am interested in parapsychology," she answered primly. Mikayla and Sherri both rolled their eyes, and Jessie went on defensively, "Hey, we're sitting in a castle in the seventeenth century having lunch with girls who died three hundred years before we were born!"

  Johanna joined the rest of the older girls in a disapproving frown. "The Ring of Fire was a miracle of God," Lies pointed out stiffly.

  "I know it's on a whole different level," Jessie backtracked hastily. "What I mean is we're not in a position to make absolute statements on what's possible and what's not anymore."

  The older girls looked at each other. "That's true," Lies conceded.

  "I know what psychology means," Julia said, "but what is 'para' psychology?"

  "It's the scientific study of things like ghosts, premonitions, and other stuff that doesn't fit in with the standard scientific view of the world," Jessie answered. "According to parapsychology all those things are really perfectly natural—just rare and governed by rules we don't understand yet."

  Julia looked dubious.

  "Does your castle have ghosts?" Mikayla asked Johanna.

  "Not that I've ever seen or heard," she replied, "but the park is supposed to be haunted by a ghostly nun."

  "Who hasn't been seen in living memory because nobody dares to go into the park at night." Lies added dryly.

  "Must be some ghost," said Mikayla.

  ****

  After the meal Johanna took her friends on a tour of Schloss Plötzkau. The three little up-timers were rather flatteringly impressed by everything, starting with the stiff two-dimensional paintings of Johanna's medieval ancestors hanging above the wainscoting of the corridor.

  "Oh, gosh, look at these," Sherri gushed.

  Johanna did and they still looked flat and old-fashioned to her. The American girls were even more impressed with the dark-paneled council chamber and all but overwhelmed by the chamber of estate.

  "Oh, Go - gosh! an honest to goodness throne room!" Mikayla was practically jumping up and down, and the other two looked just as excited.

  Johanna exchanged a bemused look with Lies. The room in fact wasn't particularly impressive as such chambers went; it had a rather nice parquet floor and a geometrically coffered ceiling painted with armorial motifs. The walls were covered with red and yellow damask, and the chair of state on the dais had no canopy as these days it was the seat of a deputy, not the prince himself.

  Mikayla saw and correctly interpreted their looks. "Royalty and thrones are things from books back in our time," she explained. "That's why it's so exciting to see it real."

  Johanna smiled at her pen-pal. "Come and see the Furstensaal."

  "Oh, wow, just—wow," Sherri breathed as they came through the door. The other two Americanesses seemed incapable of saying anything at all. Even Julia and Anna Sophia were impressed, and the looks Johanna and Lies traded were smug.

  Prince Bernhard had imported craftsmen from Italy to paint the white plaster walls with the grotesque designs and classical medallions fashionable in those days, and unlike the medieval painted panels these decorations had aged well. The coffered ceiling was also decorated with classical scenes and the whole room dominated by a massive heavily carved stone fireplace.

  "Is it the ballroom?" Sherri asked in awe.

  "Well, if we'd ever had a ball, this is where we'd have held it," Johanna answered. Looking at the little Americanesses' respectful faces she gave way to a sudden impish impulse. "Let me show you what we did do in here!" She pulled off her shoes and in her stockings skated smoothly forward on the well-waxed parquet floor.

  "Seriously?" Mikayla gaped as Johanna made a creditable figure eight in front of her.

  "Seriously!" she called over her shoulder skimming towards the far end of the hall and the fireplace.

  Lies laughed, kicked off her own shoes and joined her cousin.

  "We did the exact same thing in our Knight's Hall," Anna Sophia said as she shed her shoes.

  "We used the marble floor of the old Romish chapel," Julia added catching Anna Sophia by the hand and spiraling round and round with her.

  "You guys are nuts!" Mikayla kicked off her sneakers and made a spectacular running slide. "Wheee!"

  "You're all going to break your heads," Jessie told them. "Wait for me!"

  "And me!" cried Sherri.

  ****

  Some considerable time later the seven girls were exploring a low-ceilinged and dark-paneled corridor running between the state apartments and the kitchen quarters inch by inch.


  "I can see why they weren't all that careful about matching the paneling in this light," Mikayla remarked, nose inches from the walls as she searched for the hidden door.

  "The light is bad," Johanna conceded. "Give up?"

  "Yes," said Mikayla.

  "Yeah," said Sherri

  "Yes" and "Yes," said Julia and Anna Sophia.

  "No!" said Jessie.

  "Shut up, Jessie," said Mikayla and Sherri in rough unison.

  Johanna laughed. "I'm sorry, Jessie, you are outvoted." She opened the shutter of the dark lantern she'd been holding flashing the light onto a section of the paneling near the door to kitchen lobby. "See?" The outline of the door was very obvious—even the paneling was a different color and grain.

  "Wow, talk about obvious!" said Jessie

  "When you can see it," finished Julia.

  Lies pressed an invisible spring and the door clicked open. "See—it's double thickness just like the one in The Hidden Staircase."

  The downward slanting tunnel was very low and disappeared into darkness. "So what's this oubliette thing you got down there?" Sherri asked.

  "An oubliette is a sort of dungeon—" Jessie began.

  Sherri glared at her, "I was asking the princesses, thank you."

  "It's the sort of dungeon where you throw people and leave them to die," Lies said.

  "My nurse told me they took hundreds of bones out of it when Prince Bernhard remodeled the castle," Johanna added.

  "Ewwww!" Mikayla made a face. "And you say this place isn't haunted?"

  "Nope," said Johanna.

  The next stop was the sub-cellar of the keep and the rather better-concealed entrance to the castle's escape tunnel.

  "Where does it go?" Jessie asked as the girls peered into the stone-vaulted darkness of the narrow tunnel.

  "We're not quite sure," Johanna admitted. "There's a roof-fall about fifty feet down blocking the way but it seems to be heading towards the river."

  "That would make sense," Anna Sophia said. "There were probably boats hidden at the other end for a quick escape down-river."

  Jessie looked at her with interest. "Does your castle have a tunnel too?"

  "All properly-constructed castles have escape tunnels," Julia answered for Anna Sophia. The three up-timers looked very impressed.

  Johanna led her friends back towards their quarters detouring into the council chamber to show them the secret room. She didn't make them hunt for the door this time because the intricately carved paneling made it literally impossible to see. But it also made it very easy to remember exactly where the spring to open the door was located. She pressed the knob concealed in a spiral of gilt scrollwork and the door popped. Lies hauled it all the way open, and all peered inside.

  "Wow, this is big." Sherri sounded impressed.

  It was in fact a fair-sized room, wedge-shaped with stained plaster walls and lit by a long slit window. It was large enough to hold all seven of them and a pair of iron-bound chests that stood on the floor under a set of shelves against the short outer wall.

  "The oubliette was to get rid of people you didn't like. The tunnel in the keep was for escape. So what was this for?" Mikayla asked.

  "Papa used it as an archive for important papers and a treasury," Johanna answered, "but it had another use too." She ran her fingers along the rough plaster wall on the council chamber side until she found a raised edge. She pried open a hinged oval of wall revealing a pair of peep holes at eye level for a man of average height.

  "Ooh, do they look out the eyes of a portrait?" Sherri asked eagerly.

  Johanna laughed. "No, they're in the shadow of the chimneypiece. You'd never see them if you didn't know just where to look."

  "So the prince could spy on his council?" Jessie asked. "Isn't that kind of paranoid?"

  "A paranoid prince stays a prince," Julia answered dryly.

  "How very Machiavellian," Jessie said.

  A second door led from the secret chamber to a withdrawing room adjoining the prince's private apartments. From there they got back to the hall lined with medieval paintings leading to the Princess's apartments

  "Mikayla," Johanna asked, "do you think Mama's state bedroom is big enough for a slumber party?"

  ****

  Seven girls, three dressed in colorful twentieth-century pajamas and four in voluminous white linen nightgowns and close-fitting nightcaps sprawled on mattresses and pillows spread over nearly every inch of floor of the Princess of Plötzkau's state bedroom.

  Mikayla lay on her stomach eating sugared almonds from a bowl. Her attention, like that of the other girls, was focused on Johanna leaning against the heavily carved footboard of the bed as she told the legend of the Plötzkau ghost: "Eventually the Count received an offer of marriage that was too good to refuse so he sent his mistress to a convent to get her out of the way—"

  "Bastard," Sherri muttered through a mouthful of kuchen, then blushed, "Sorry."

  Johanna shrugged, "I don't disagree, but the girl should have expected nothing else. Counts don't marry peasant girls outside of fairy tales. To continue: the mistress was locked in a cell by the nuns but escaped—how the legend does not say—and was shot by a jäger in the park as she made her way to the castle to disrupt her lover's wedding. She was buried there in unconsecrated ground, and ever since her ghost has haunted the park at night in the form of a veiled woman in white still trying to reach the castle and her lost love."

  "The poor sap," muttered Jessie.

  "That doesn't sound so scary," said Mikayla, scooping up another handful of almonds.

  "Supposedly she jumps on the back of any living man who crosses her path and tries to ride him to the castle though she always vanishes when he reaches the gates." Johanna explained.

  "If he reaches the gates," added Lies "In other stories she rides her victim to death round and round the walls."

  "Okay, that's scary. No wonder nobody will risk meeting her," said Mikayla.

  "Has anybody—" Jessie began. "What was that?"

  That was a resounding hollow booming rolling down the halls like someone was dribbling an iron basketball. Mikayla could see the walls quiver. A long rattling noise like a chain-link snake slithering on a wooden floor followed.

  Without a word Lies rolled over and grabbed a shawl from the pile of dressing gowns and bathrobes in the corner, snatched a candle from the stand, and hurtled out the door. Johanna was right behind her, followed by the rest of the girls.

  Mikayla stumbled along in Lies' wake. The princess's rapidly-moving candle sent shadows soaring and swooping over the medieval paintings rattling on the wall as knocks and raps boomed behind them.

  Light flooded out of an abruptly opened door ahead, and Mikayla almost collided with Anna Sophia as the girl gang slid to a sudden stop. Burgmann Schenk stood outlined in the light which also showed his dismayed, going on horrified, expression as he caught sight of them.

  "Burgmann Schenk," Johanna asked regally, "what is going on here?"

  His face crumpled and for an awful moment Mikayla thought she was about to see a grown man cry. "Your Grace," he all but wailed, "I don't know!"

  The whole story poured out of poor Burgmann Schenk with great force and speed, making it a little difficult for Mikayla, Jessie, and Sherri to follow his German as they all sat around the table in the council chamber. His account was punctuated by the continual racket inside the walls and overhead which didn't contribute to its clarity. Eventually Johanna succeeded in stemming the flow and tersely summed up the few facts:

  "In short this chaos has descended every night for the past two months and repeated searches of the entire castle have failed to reveal the cause?"

  Schenk heaved a huge, relieved sigh. "Yes, your Grace. The disturbances seem to center around the state apartments, I had hoped that the princess's quarters would be distant enough to allow you and your guests to be undisturbed—" he was interrupted by explosive noises overhead. All winced.

  "Poltergeist," said Je
ssie

  "It certainly is," Johanna agreed.

  "When did the trouble begin in town?" Lies asked.

  "About two months ago—" Burgmann Schenk answered automatically then blinked in surprise. "Surely your Grace doesn't think there is any connection?"

  "How could this—" Julia waved vaguely at the noisy walls, "benefit either the burghers or UMWA?"

  "If this was a Nancy Drew mystery one of them would turn out to be behind it," said Sherri.

  "Hello," said Mikayla, "Real World to Sherri: this isn't a book!"

  "The correlation in timing strikes me as suspicious," said Lies. Everybody looked at her. She looked at Johanna. "It seems we are going to have to get involved in Plötzkau's troubles after all."

  ****

  When the girls entered the chamber of estate the next morning, Mikayla saw right off that a canopy had been erected over the throne. Johanna seated herself in the big chair looking exactly like a princess should. Burgmann Schenk took up position just below the dais on her left hand and Lies went to stand next to the throne on her right. The rest of the girls settled themselves on a velvet-covered bench farther to the right and below the dais.

  Jessie nudged Mikayla. "I feel like one of Queen Amidala's handmaidens."

  It was kind of like that. There were even five of them. "All we need are the hoods," Mikayla whispered back.

  Burgmann Schenk stamped the long white staff in his hand on the parquet floor, making a satisfying booming sound. One of the guards flanking the anteroom doors reached over and opened the left-hand side door. Schenk's staff boomed again:

  "Mayor Friedland and Union Master Weintraub, your Grace!"

  Mayor Friedland turned out to be chain guy from the riot on the wharf. Mikayla didn't recognize the younger man in down-time jeans and a UMWA t-shirt but assumed he'd been there, too. Both men were looking defensive—like they were expecting a dressing-down. Johanna had a surprise for them.

  "I have no mandate to deal with your dispute," she began. "That is a matter for the Prince and the Estates. I would however remind you, Friedland, that unions have the Prince's favor, and you, Weintraub, that there are laws against slander and libel."